Hey Harvard, Don’t be a Veritass
By: Jared A. Walker
Tags: Economics, Poverty, Education, Minimum Wage, Racism

Workers and student supporters chant, “Hey Harvard you can’t hide; we can see your greedy side,” as they march through Harvard Square. — Photo Credit: ANNIE E. SCHUGART, Harvard Crimson

In rare, non-election related news, let’s talk about Harvard for a second.

Harvard just got a $10 million grant to study black poverty in the Boston area. Now, let me first say that studies like this are an important service that educational institutions provide to the general public and our body of knowledge. They should be well-funded.

BUT. At this very moment, Harvard’s dining staff are on strike for living wages. That staff is — surprise, surprise — overwhelmingly people of color. In addition to this latest study, Harvard academics have published a large amount of work in past years about the generational wealth gap between whites and communities of color. They are not alone.

Maybe, just maybe, one of the things they might have learned in all those studies was that being paid a living wage, with quality benefits and a decent 401k for retirement might have something to do with lifting people and communities out of poverty.

Perhaps, having learned this at great expense, they could offer workers these things to improve the quality of life of real-life people of color in their community. Now according to Harvard(which has the largest academic endowment in the world at $36 billion), their “hourly wage is the highest among cafeteria workers and university service workers in Boston”. “Workers make an average of $21.89 an hour, earning about $33,000 a year for 38 weeks of work’’, according to the university’s administration.

Offering more than that would be unreasonable, right? The problem with that logic is that the cost of living in Boston, like many other major metropolises on planet Earth, is absurdly high.

The annual before-tax income required for a (single) adult to provide a quality standard of living for themselves and only one child in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton area is approximately $55,895 a year or $26.87 an hour. Add another dependent? $64,000. Another dependent? $78,000.

Now to be fair, this data doesn’t come from Harvard researchers — it comes from a mile up the road at a world-renowned clown college called MIT. I know they’re not an Ivy, but I think we can probably trust their numbers.

Lots of “well-meaning” liberals who went to fancy schools like I did often wonder why there is such a persistent culture of distrust in elites and elite institutions in some populations. There have been entire forests of newsprint spent agonizing over why rust-belt or Appalachian whites don’t trust pointy-headed East Coast elites. Or why people of colour, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, still don’t trust various “liberal” candidates who “have their best interests at heart”. Or why Americans’ trust in key US institutions is so low.

The answer to these questions is obviously complex. There are countless variables at play here. But part of this distrust has to be because of bold-faced, absurd disconnects like this.

The wealthiest university in the world, which has extensively studied racialized poverty, will not pay its Black and Latino (or white) dining staff a living wage. They know what a living wage is. They know that is important. They certainly have the money to pay it, without any long-term concerns about solvency. But rather than do what is simultaneously right, reasonable and possible, Harvard’s administration would rather rely on employee “volunteers” to work in their dining halls, which they must now operate on a skeleton schedule, while offering severely reduced options and boxed lunches to their students. All of this while still charging the aforementioned students in excess of $43,000 a year for tuition and in excess of $15,000 for room and board.

This is why people find it so difficult to trust elite institutions. They talk about excellence, but seem prepared to cut off their noses to spite their faces. They talk about pursuing knowledge and truth, but then they work iniquity.

Besides being amoral, this behavior is also incredibly embarrassing. We all know y’all are too smart to act this dumb.

For cryin’ out loud, Harvard. Stop being such a fucking veritass.