A lesson in respect and pragmatism

On Thursday, Sept. 8 in Main Circle and in front of the library, there was a student rally in support of the service employees here at Vassar. At the time, contractual negotiations were going on between the Service Worker’s Union (SEIU) and the College. The rally, specifically hoping to persuade the College to increase retiree medical coverage, attracted some attention, although probably not as much as the organizers would have liked. I myself happened to walk by the demonstration once or twice, and, I must be honest, was quite disgusted. I found it to be just one more example of the egocentrism and short-sightedness of the student body here at Vassar. Now, when I say student body, obviously I do not mean all 2,400 enrolled students. Nonetheless, when issues of good and just administration arise, you can always count on a segment of the student body to simplistically and misleadingly express an unthoughtful and impractical course of action.

Take, for instance, the labor negotiations presently being discussed. If you talked to any of the demonstrators (I spoke with a few), you would get the impression that the adminstrators were the archetypal corporate big-wigs, lining their pockets while the workers of Vassar College slaved away in the sweatshops of ACDC and The Retreat. Well, this is not the reality. The money that it would cost to increase benefits for the service workers of Vassar (yes, it costs money) is not being blown by the Dean of the College JJ Jackson and the Associate Dean of the College Ray Parker on new cars and lavish homes. It goes to pay for scholarships for underpriviliged students, professors’ salaries, and campus maintanance. Which of those are you willing to cut to insure retiree medical coverage for Vassar’s service workers (a benefit, may I add, that pretty much all grade school teachers, and even many professionals don’t have and fight hard to get)? Or, maybe the school can tap external sources of capital by, say, raising tuition. No matter what the socio-economic status of your family may be, the $40,000-plus a year it costs to attend Vassar is a number none of us wants to see go up, most especially the students from less priviliged socio-economic backgrounds. Or maybe the campus could fire non-essential workers, “trim the fat” as they say. Well, at the end of last year, when the administration tried to restructure, in true egocentric and short-sighted form there was a massive outcry from the student body, not because students were concerned about how to best govern this institution, but because a couple of bureaucrats they were buddies with were going be out of a job. Maybe the money saved from eliminating non-essential administrative departments could have been used to increase worker benefits, a suggestion I brought up last spring, but one that some students (including many I saw protesting on Thursday) did not have the thoughtfulness to see the merit in.

This lack of pragmatism, which in all honesty I see little hope of ever subsiding, goes hand in hand with a characteristic which I see fewer and fewer Vassar students emulating, and that is respect. I don’t know if you realize it, but the administrators of Vassar could be making a lot more money somewhere else, but they work here at Vassar partially out of the goodness of their heart. They believe in education and its importance to society. And they make tough decisions, like the decisions being made at the labor negotiations, not out of selfishness or ambition, but out of concern for the College and for the student body. You can be sure of this because they certainly don’t get the salary or the respect which would otherwise compel a person to take up such responsibility.

In all fairness, the administration makes mistakes, and when these happen it doesn’t encourage the student body to respect them. Nonetheless the Vassar community could be reminded that the administration is not out to get us, but is in fact looking out for us.

For my last point I would like to go back to Thursday’s rally, and make a deeper observation about the political culture of Vassar. We are a small community here, made up of only a few thousand people. There is no need for manichean power struggles or over-simplified rhetoric. Our national political culture, because of its size and irresponsiveness, is prone to divisiveness and populism, as this last presidential election perfectly showed. There is no reason we need to emulate that here at Vassar.

A student once told me the reason he came to Vassar was that he wanted to be in a truly radical environment, and my conservative presence here on campus disturbed him. Well, I also wish to be in a radical environment, and I have a truly radical proposal to make: a true democracy need not be about competing wills, being forced to choose a side. In a true democracy, there is time for civility and debate and for people with opposing interests to become of one mind about something. There is no need for coercion, which at the end of the day is what the student rally is a form of.

With the hope of embarrassing the College in front of visitors or imposing their own uninformed will onto the will of the older, wiser and more knowledgeable, the student demonstrators undermined one of our greatest blessings here at Vassar: the ability to sit down face to face and talk. In a spirit of arrogance and negativity, the demonstrators created an “us vs. them” mentality, which undermines the subtlety and difficulty of the issues being dealt with, and at the end of the day is only slightly less worse than the “You’re with us or with the terrorists” attitude of our current presidential administration. Here on campus we can create a political culture saturated with information and lively debate, or we can fall prey to the partisan bickering that our political leaders are so often the perpetrators of. I believe that the Vassar student body should be aware, engaged, and critical, but there is a way to go about it with humility and respect rather than pomposity and irreverence.