• I always found it hard to detest the Progressive Student Labor Movement quite as much as I felt I should. However much contempt one might harbor for their sitins and “teach-ins,” their smug sanctimony and overblown rhetoric, it was difficult to shake the sense that they held something close to the moral high ground in their struggle with the Harvard administration. True, the idea of a “living wage” is an ultimately arbitrary notion, but there was still something to be said for a fantastically rich university acknowledging the wage standards set by the community in which it exists, and paying all its poorer employees ten bucks (or later, $10.66) an hour, as the city of Cambridge encouraged us to do. With this in mind, my fantasy outcome for last year’s embarrassing and tedious sit-in was to have Neil Rudenstine proclaim the implementation of a living wage policy — and then announce the expulsion of everyone associated with the occupation of Massachusetts Hall. The actual outcome, by contrast, can only be regarded as a victory for the PSLM, since the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP) that was organized in the wake of the sit-in produced a report recommending that Harvard pay its workers in the range of $10.83 to $11.30 an hour — numbers that seemed to validate the PSLM’s contention that the university was behaving in a miserly fashion. Then, in the first major contract negotiation of the post-sit-in era, Harvard’s janitors saw their wages rise to $11.35 an hour, well above both the “living wage” and the HCECP recommendations. One would think that these developments would at least take some of the edge off the PSLM’s strident rhetoric. But nothing of the sort has happened. In fact, the janitorial negotiations were punctuated by a PSLM-sponsored “act of civil disobedience,” in which a collection of students, various “activists,” and janitors blocked traffic on Mass. Ave until the Cambridge cops hauled them away. (The logic of committing civil disobedience against a municipality that supports your cause is somewhat murky, admittedly, but everyone involved sure seemed to be having a good time!) Then, once the janitors’ union voted 270–8 to accept the new pay scale, the PSLM immediately announced that not only was $11.35 unsatisfactory, but nothing short of fourteen dollars an hour would be acceptable to them. If this seems mystifying, it shouldn’t, as a remarkably honest Crimson op-ed by PSLM-er Daniel DiMaggio ’03 makes clear. Writes DiMaggio, “as the living wage campaign has progressed, it has become increasingly apparent through conversations with workers that the Cambridge wage figure is inadequate ... it was meant to serve only as a base from which to move up.” In other words, the PSLM is committed not to a “living wage,” but simply to higher wages, with no ceiling in sight. And in any event, DiMaggio goes on, the “PSLM has never just been about achieving a living wage,” for it “is an organization dedicated to the principle of solidarity between workers and students as we struggle for a more just and democratic University and society.” This struggle will, necessarily, require the existence of “an independent militant organization of students and workers,” which will be constantly on the offensive against any undemocratic or unjust practices that the administration should happen to undertake. What this means, stripped of cant, is that the PSLM intends to continue disrupting the life of this university (and this city) until Harvard agrees to allow student “input” into its decision-making process. As for whose “input” the PSLM wants Harvard to consider ... well, it sure isn’t the editorial board of the Salient, or even the Crimson or the Undergraduate Council. After all, the fact that most undergrads opposed last year’s sitin never fazed the PSLM-ers — they just assumed that their fellow students needed more “education,” as DiMaggio felicitously puts it. So let us be frank, and say that what the PSLM is after is not democracy, really, but power: the power to shape and alter and even veto university policy to suit an agenda drawn from the granola-munching, Naderite fringe of American politics. That they are pursuing this power through dishonest rhetoric, constantly shifting objectives and strong-arm tactics, while wrapping themselves in the banner of the civil rights struggle, is sad but hardly surprising. It does, however, make them easier to detest. • “Rights,” declares my fellow Crimson columnist Kevin Hartnett, “are often what we use to justify about other people, be it as businessmen, journalists or private citizens. At times they are the assertion of personal entitlement over humane consideration.” He has in mind the treatment that accused embezzlers Suzanne Pomey and Randy Gomes received at the hands of the Harvard media’s nattering nabobs (like me!), who roasted them over an open fire of sordid revelations. While we did have the technical “right” to carry out such “aggressive journalism,” Hartnett admits, “in this situation I think that our right to skewer and expose Pomey and Gomes is better left shelved ... If we need to chronicle the history of Pomey’s ethical difficulties and Gomes’ personal problems in order to understand the crime they may have committed, frankly I think it’s better that we don’t. I just don’t think it’s that important that I know why they did it.” |
Well, bully for you, sir! It’s nice to know that there’s at least one Harvard student who remains focused only on higher things, untouched by the grubby concerns that fill the minds of lesser mortals. For the rest of us, though, who enjoy trawling in the gutters for interesting tidbits, it might be suggested that the purpose of journalism is to “skewer and expose” wrongdoing and corruption and all-around wickedness wherever it may lurk. One can be sanctimonious about this purpose and say that the world of “Suzanne and Randy” is our world, too, and that in exploring their sins we can learn something about our own (hopefully lesser) failings, and those of the social milieu that we inhabit. But while this is true, it is also beside the point. Journalists expose truth — that’s our job. Sometimes, that truth is personal and painful and people get hurt. But a journalist who agonizes over the fact that what he writes will be “door-dropped daily in front of Suzanne and Randy’s rooms” is probably in the wrong profession. Yep, it’s rough for the allegedly larcenous duo that “they’re both still on campus,” and so “when they wake up in the morning they have the unfortunate privilege of knowing what the rest of us can only speculate about: exactly what their peers think of them.” But hey, maybe they shouldn’t be on campus. (I know I wouldn’t be.) And the “Suzanne and Randy” story is hardly the tip of an iceberg of cruel exposes: FM isn’t running around revealing the terrible truth about Kevin Hartnett’s ethical lapses, or (thankfully) the sordid details of my private life. Why? Say it with me, kids — because we didn’t embezzle a hundred grand from the Hasty Pudding. Kevin Hartnett can pity Suzanne and Randy all he wants, but I sure don’t. If you want compassion from the press, my fellow Harvardians, don’t commit grand larceny.
• Allow me to put in a brief good word for Bert Vaux, the assistant professor of linguistics who was recently denied tenure on the grounds that his sub-field (phonetics — don’t ask) didn’t merit having a full professorship attached to it. Professor Vaux has fought back, mustering student support for his cause, and insisting that no one on the tenure committee was qualified to judge his work, but these efforts will doubtless be in vain. When it comes to tenure decisions, you can’t fight University Hall. Still, it’s worth saying that Professor Vaux is exactly the sort of man Harvard ought to be tenuring. I took his Core class, “Knowledge of Language,” and hated nearly every minute — but my hatred had everything to do with the subject matter (morphology and phonology; the IPA and the difference between a dialect and a language — again, don’t ask), and nothing to do with the professor. Bert Vaux was passionate (in a dry way, admittedly), he was friendly, he learned almost everyone’s name (in a massive Core class, no less), and he generally did a marvelous job of teaching us the general outline of modern linguistic theory. I hated the material, but I learned it, and if I were running things around here, I would tenure Bert Vaux in a heartbeat — because however much I hated his field, I respected the way he taught it. Then again, if I were running things around here, the linguistics department’s tenure policy wouldn’t be the only thing to be changed ... • Here is a fascinating paragraph, plucked from a magnificently specious Crimson op-ed with the Orwellian title “Right to Abortion is Right to Life.” Writes one Ian MacKenzie, class of ’04, “for many who bemoan the evils of abortion ... a common tactic to elicit sympathy for their cause is employing harrowing imagery of the abortion itself. They talk, for instance, of sharp hooks ladling the fetus out of the womb. Such an image tugs on any reader’s heartstrings; no one wants to see a baby impaled on a sharp hook. The problem is, however, that this picture is a gross misrepresentation of reality: the majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester with a vacuum-like device — and no hooks.” Ah. So they’re killing them with “a vacuum-like device — and no hooks.” Well, that’s all right then. • It has now been six months (and a week, once this goes to press) since September 11. Watching the CBS documentary last Sunday night, I was struck again by the persistent unreality of it all. This time, thanks to the French documentary team who happened to be filming at a Manhattan firehouse, we were actually with the fire-fighters inside the World Trade Center before it fell. We saw not only images of burning buildings, but scenes of the chaos inside, of falling glass and bodies, and of the faces of firemen who would be dead within minutes. We were even there when the buildings fell, and dust and darkness filled the world. Yet still, I felt not only detached — as one always does watching events on television — but still disbelieving, still not quite able to accept that yes, this really happened. It may sound blasphemous to those who were there, those who lived through it and those whose friends and relatives died, but I wish that I had been in Manhattan that day, and seen it not in documentary footage, but with my own eyes. Only then, perhaps, could I truly understand the horror of it all — and only then could I remember it as it deserves to be remembered. RGD |