Hoxby's Critics Should Check Their Logic

To the editors:

The Op-Ed by Professor Brad S. Epps, Preceptor Tom Jehn and Lecturer Timothy Patrick McCarthy, “Why Hoxby is Wrong,” (Oct. 25) seems to have a problem with numbers. They quote Hoxby as saying, “It contains several people who have an explicit pro-living wage agenda and it contains no one with an opposing agenda” and point to the fact that Hoxby has one herself. That is something of a strange assertion, given that she has never associated herself with any of the counter movements, while at least two of the students on the committee were members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM). Even so, if Hoxby is the opposing voice on the Katz Committee, she stands as only one against many.

The writers assert, “The sit-in was a strategy in line with the rich and long tradition of principled, non-violent protest actions that have forced the powerful to listen to the dispossessed.” The last time I checked, a group of students forcibly entering the confines of the administrative offices at a private university, demanding that it give up its right to decide how its endowment will be spent, was not “non-violence” but, rather, criminal theft.

Epps, Jehn and McCarthy suggest that it is hard for anyone to make a “positive case against the reality that the world’s richest University can and must pay more than poverty wages to all its workers.” Except that this is basically the same rationale behind a mugger picking out the wealthiest-looking candidate on a street to rob, of course. Harvard University is not a charity, nor is it an arm of the federal government. It contracts with all of its employees to pay a certain wage. If the employee finds that wage unacceptable, he or she is free to seek other employment.

Harvard is not holding a gun to anyone’s head and demanding that he accept $7.50 an hour. To suggest that somehow Harvard has an obligation to pay workers more is to say that Epps or McCarthy or anyone else has an obligation to throw money in a homeless man’s cup. The PSLM is merely the mugger’s gun to the figurative heads of Harvard administrators. That members of our esteemed Faculty should support coercive seizure of property is disappointing, at best, but sickening at its very heart.

Shannon F. Ringvelski ’04

Oct. 25, 2001