Commentary–

    Students Are Still Our Conscience

By William A. Collins

Bless those students,

What a throng!

Help us fathom,

Right from wrong.

Having both served in the legislature and attended university, I’ve gained a passing admiration for pomposity. There is nothing quite like those great stone buildings, those reserved parking spaces, and those honorable letters, either before or after one’s name. They fill one with a glow of special merit. The pay may not be great, but the prestige and self-importance are awesome.

In both legislation and higher learning, however, there are annoyances. For lawmakers it’s the voters; for universities, the students. Both share that vexing habit of raising embarrassing moral questions at inconvenient times. Worse, they often do it in a way that rankles one’s far more crucial constituents, the donors. These sticky issues include discrimination, sweatshops, pollution, war, and economic justice.

Whether it’s a rally on the steps of the Capitol, or sitting in at the university president’s office, such a dispute is likely to make prosperous contributors edgy.

This year’s top moral question was the “living wage.” Protesters felt that employers ought, in fairness, to pay one – especially employers who flaunt the special moral regalia of governments and universities. Governments and universities, though, learned long ago that they can get a lot more bang for their tax-deductible buck by turning some basic operations over to less morally vulnerable subcontractors.

Subcontractors, after all, reflect many of America’s most cherished values: competitiveness, capitalism, entrepreneurial initiative, thrift, survival of the fittest, and exploitation of immigrants. Thus, while ostensibly working for hallowed institutions, toiling janitors, cafeteria workers, nursing home aides, security guards, and other low-skill laborers often are actually employed by hard-nosed, low-wage bottom-feeders.

This allows them to live lives of exalted poverty and to enjoy the ennobling experience of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Not to be outdone, universities themselves learned early on to severely underpay their own graduate assistants and adjunct professors.

The most dramatic action so far in 2001 has been the student sit-in at UConn, on behalf of subcontracted janitors. Those luckless workers were being paid $6.50-7.50/hr without benefits. Duly splattered with shame, UConn eventually raised their wages.

The General Assembly, however, again proved itself resistant to such shame. While moral majorities existed in both houses for various humane reforms, somehow they never quite got to vote. The Hartford Courant reported, rather, that the big winner at the legislature again this year was big business. Squadrons of lobbyists managed to squelch any bills that seemed to favor workers.

Their most famous success was House Speaker Moira Lyons’ refusal to allow a vote on the Living Wage Act. It would have required companies receiving state grants to pay a wage that a scrimping worker might actually have been able to live on. No fan of workers itself, though, the Courant went on to urge the City of Middletown to kill its own similar proposal. What a compassionate state we live in!

So maybe Connecticut needs a bit more shame. Bigger sit-ins, a couple self-immolations, dumping loads of manure here and there, disrupted traffic, the works. With the disgraceful level of poverty and suffering that abound in our state today, we ought not to leave it just to students to do all the heavy moral lifting.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)