We’re astonished. After years of work, nights of planning and, for a few dedicated students, over a week of starvation, the University has an acceptable living wage policy. It’s worth taking a few words to commemorate the hard work of the Living Wage Coalition and the Georgetown Solidarity Committee, the lack of grace displayed by the administration and the impact the campaign for worker justice will have on future campus activism and policy making-the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good news is that the University has done the right thing by any measure, whether the standard is our Catholic identity, the American dream or plain human decency. University workers will now receive a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. It’s not hard to admire the courage of the LWC members who gave up food for nine days and forced the University into action, and even harder for our lazy collegiate minds to fathom working month after month through official and unofficial channels alike to achieve their goals. The University deserves credit for finding a way to fit the huge expenditures of a living wage into an already tight budget.
Unfortunately, this is also a time to remember the sheer stubbornness and disingenuity of the University’s approach to this issue. Even now the administration refuses to publicly acknowledge the work of the LWC or its hunger strike. In the e-mail sent to students announcing the living wage, University President John DeGoia made a fool of himself by recognizing that “the passionate engagement of students over the past two years has helped us to achieve the goals this policy addresses,” while failing to acknowledge that the bulk of the work on this project has come directly from students and, even more specifically, that this announcement is the direct result of the hunger strike. We’re not sure who DeGoia thinks he’s fooling, but we hope it isn’t the student body.
The ugly results of this strange cognitive dissonance-an engaged student body and a disconnected administration-will be seen again the next time a group of students agitates for change. If the administration continues to treat students as bothersome whiners instead of equal members in the University community, the multi-year, continuous conflict style of policymaking will continue to be our standard. To paraphrase the LWC, our Georgetown is better than that.
Now that a clean classroom doesn’t necessarily mean an empty stomach, we can take renewed pride in our University’s commitment to social justice and in our peers who fought so hard to make these important changes. Georgetown became better last week, and we shouldn’t forget it.
