Michael J. Smith

I'd like to speak briefly on three themes we all hear a great deal about here: on leadership, on responsibility, and on the idea of trust and the community of trust. Imagine we're answering a hardy perennial in final exam questions, slightly reset: 'compare and contrast the actions of the Living Wage Campaign and the UVa high administration on the issues of leadership, responsibility, and trust, as applied to the case of our lowest-paid employees.

Let's ask first who has exercised leadership on this issue. The students in this Living Wage Campaign have organized a sustained campaign to raise the awareness of the issue among students and the wider community. They have held rallies, meetings, teach-ins, banquets; they have initiated a student referendum endorsing the Living Wage that passed by over 70%; they have produced comprehensive, persuasive background papers (with only a few split infinitivies; they have repeatedly sought meetings with all available administrators and Board members.

These students, then, building on past work here and elsewhere were leaders in addressing a vital issue of justice and equity.

What were the official leaders of the University doing? Well, most of the time, rather as usual, they were invisible to the rest of us. Yes, they did, in March raise the starting wage of our classified employees, but to a level still well below the poverty line. Contract employees were still left untouched. They finally met with students from the campaign on March 30 and were told, now quite famously, that "social justice is not part of the mission of the university" and that moral leadership is not something we do here. And they were told by clearly irritated administrators that there was no point in further dialogue. The students concluded that they had to move to non-violent action to gain the attention of our leaders. Thus the sit in.

After the sit-in began, we on the faculty looked in vain for leadership from within Madison Hall. Many of us wrote to the President, or sought through others to make proposals to him for mediation, or to present ideas for solutions. Our proposals were ignored or rebuffed. Our mysterious and imperious administrators were apparently deep in consultation-but only with one another, and only about whether and when the students should be arrested. It seems to me an extraordinarily isolated leadership that takes over 60 hours to realize that maybe they should actually talk to the students about the reason they are there. Is it impossible to imagine a President ordering pizza in on day one, and sitting down at a table to engage the students on the issues? Why wait until the middle of the third night to do this? We have an administration that seems to know only how to react, belatedly and inadequately, not to propose and engage. And we have leaders who seem to have forgotten how to listen to any voices but those within their closed circle. Our students forced them to hear, but, alas, not yet to listen.

Second let's talk about taking responsibility. Once again our students reminded us all of our collective responsibility to care for the most vulnerable among us, to provide them with the dignity of a wage they can live on, to offer them a way out of a continuing cycle of poverty. They reminded us that all too often we-faculty included- take these people, so vital to our community, for granted. They urged us to fulfill our responsibilities toward these people. And in their own plans, they have acted, on the whole, with admirable responsibility. Certainly they have accepted responsibility for their decisions, and they have tried to keep the focus on the wage campaign, not on themselves.

Contrast this, again, with the actions of our leaders. There's a pattern here, and I've watched it both from afar and from up close. Whenever one approaches our president with a request for leadership on a difficult issue, say benefits for domestic partners or their children, for faculty representation on the Board of Visitors, for priority for academic buildings over new athletic palaces, and, on this far more compelling issue-non-poverty wages for all our workers, one hears something like this: "Unfortunately, there's really nothing much that I can do. It really is not my responsibility. My hands are tied by-now take your pick here-the Board of Visitors, or the State Legislature, the Governor, the Attorney General, the alumni, the wishes of the contributors, the constrained budget, the alignment of the stars ." One is treated to a lesson on the limits of power, with a common theme: "it's not my responsibility." Now if you persist long enough, he will offer, somewhat like your primary care physician, to make you a referral. He might suggest that sometime in the future he will help you advocate somewhere else-as he did in the 1:00 am proposal to the living wage students. But he will not take responsibility himself. Somehow, these hard issues are always the responsibility of someone else. Note that on the living wage issue, our current case, his proposal to help says nothing about the University's own classified workers-workers who are his direct responsibility.

And let's also remember it was the Administration itself that chose to privatize so many of our services. Even when there are good reasons to contract out services, we can't abdicate the responsibility for the consequences of our own prior decision to do so. That's not responsibility-that's willful evasion. And unfortunately that's what we are seeing here.

Finally, let's talk about trust. The students sat in because they felt disrespected and ignored by our leaders. They had lost trust in our leadership. Why did not the President make a genuine offer to help earlier-even before the sit in? Why did he tell them to go to the Board (whose Rector told them to go to the president)? We invoke a community of trust all the time, but apparently our leaders hold this in so little regard that they consulted no one before acting to end the sit-in with arrests. Throughout the process they sent out mixed messages through multiple intermediaries even as many of us were literally peering into the windows of Madison Hall. In short, they behaved more like the chronically mistrustful Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate than like leaders of a university devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. The ultimatum and the abrupt arrests, undertaken, it would seem, out of impatience, fatigue, and annoyance, without any broader consultation with the community, seriously breached the already fragile ties of trust between administration and faculty, between administration and students. Some of colleagues have said that they felt betrayed.

I say this without pleasure and with great sorrow: As a past Faculty Senate chair and as the co-chair of the Commission on Diversity and Equity, I have devoted a great deal of my time and energy to working within the system on issues of governance, diversity, and equity; and, frankly, I must tell you that I feel only a limited sense of any real accomplishment. Still, the Kantian in me demands that I make at least a gesture beyond condemnation and regret. Let's use our collective reason to do better. How can we move to reestablish trust? I challenge our leaders to engage the Living Wage Campaign in serious dialogue at the earliest moment. Let's find a way forward and move beyond mutual recrimination. Let the President invite campaign members to engage in the dialogue his spokesperson says, through the press, that he seeks. Let us see some real action from the administration. In consultation with the campaign, he can appoint a task force with a specific deadline to address the issues surrounding contract employees, and set out a timetable for achieving an indexed living wage for our classified employees. If there are obstacles, legal or otherwise, let us address them together.

The students have challenged us again to think harder about the values we express as an institution in the way we pay and treat the most vulnerable members of the University community. Ultimately the question is simple: Will the University of Virginia be a leader in addressing issues of equity, or will it reluctantly and belatedly do as little as it can get away with?

We, students, faculty, staff, community, acting together will continue to make ourselves heard. We challenge the administration to listen and to act. In the meantime, we aren't going away. Our voices will be heard.