Feeling Undervalued?

It was a triumph of conscience and common sense. On Sunday, the Undergraduate Council (UC) voted overwhelmingly in favor of the “Resolution in Support of Workers at Harvard,” backing better wages for our janitors and holding the University to its own promises.

Of course, within hours, fingers were wagging, knees were jerking, and letters of condemnation came forth from the usual suspects. Now dissent of any kind, in spite of the crickets it may inspire in this instance, is always welcomed by those of us who value discussion.

Yet the outrageous premise underlying these arguments needs to be refuted once and for all. It is the premise that our institutions here at Harvard can ever be truly “values-free.” It is the illusion that they can go merrily about their business without ever taking a stance on issues that matter to the people they affect.

The reality is that our institutions are always taking a stance one way or another. When they refuse to do so explicitly, their silence takes a stance for them in favor of the status quo.

Another reality is that Harvard’s institutions have always been built on certain values. Too often, they have placed material values over the human values of students, workers, and the rest of the world. At least when those values are out in the open, we can freely debate what we think about them. We can choose to accept them or we can choose to contest them.

The UC’s pro-worker vote is a case in point of how student institutions can reflect and articulate the values so many students already hold close to them. The bill affirms the value of Harvard as a community, one that includes workers and their families.

By extending the UC’s support beyond student services, the resolution recognizes that our community ultimately has a responsibility to those who serve it, and thus lends its support to basic measures of dignity, honesty, and respect for these people.

If we did not talk about our values, if we did not grapple with them and make resolutions, they could easily lose their meaning. This bill—along with a separate campaign led by the Student Labor Action Movement and the janitors themselves all semester—has sparked countless conversations over what our values actually mean to us. Conversations like these are exactly what this University needs.

On the other hand, when Harvard’s institutions embody values we do not share, powerful people claim that these institutions are “values-free.” Preferred values are masked as inevitable facts, and many students are led to accept these values blindly, no questions asked.

Harvard puts up a mighty pretense of moral neutrality as the Corporation allots its billions, and the Harvard Management Company makes its millions for what are supposed to be the “best interests” of the University. Somehow, ethical values and human values got left out of these best interests. They have come to mean little more than material values, with no other measure than the maximization of profit for the Corporation and its endowment.

Surely, then, it must be best for the University—one which wishes, according to the Curricular Review report, to “help students develop their capacities…for responsible judgment”—to invest in the arms trade, in ecological disaster, in the terrorizing of workers in Colombia, in the military dictatorship in Burma, or until last spring, in genocide in Darfur.

So too it must be best to trade in the valued rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual students for federal grant money. Best to deny the student body the infrastructure that would cultivate our values of community—student center, anyone?—because a commitment to human values is deemed too expensive and unimportant by the University.

Such is the twisted hierarchy we are expected to accept, lowly students that we are. And we are expected to accept it under the false pretense that these decisions can actually be made devoid of values and human assumptions. That they are therefore best left to the experts on high, unencumbered by the moral commitments which plague the rest of us.

Yet many students see through the illusion of a “values-free” Harvard and have refused to acquiesce in the dehumanizing logic of the corporate university. Many in the Harvard community have woken up to the reality that in a time of injustice, the inaction of our institutions can make them altogether complicit in that injustice.

Those institutions that break the silence and actually show they care about our values, on the contrary, deserve our resounding applause. And the sorry supremacy of monetary values over human values in this university deserves a resounding defeat.


Michael Gould-Wartofsky ’07 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.