"I learned this morning that your group suggested to Ms. Lampkin that we provide a proposal to resolve the current impasse. I am concerned about your well-being, and about the prospect that the inconvenience to you and to various persons who have not been able to conduct business owing to your occupancy of the lobby may be counter-productive for everyone at this point. Persons now unable to conduct normal business in Madison Hall have the right to resume normal operations.

From what I have seen, you have attracted good local support for certain aspects of your cause (i.e., higher wages for persons employed in jobs that pay less than they should), but also that you have lost ground with regard to the claim that the University (or I) can unilaterally address the matters found by the Attorney General to be beyond our lawful scope.

The suggestions that follow in the later portion of this paper are based on these beliefs:

1. That you have made the point that wages for the lowest-paid jobs are too low.
2. That all of us have reasons to get beyond this stage of the discussion. Legislators assume that you want actions that you know I cannot take.
3. That the AG’s letter, however much one may like or dislike it, is almost certainly dispositive unless you can succeed in a suit to overturn it. That is, it makes it unlikely that any public entity in Virginia will expose itself to the litigation and claims against public officials that can follow on open defiance of this opinion. I am not a lawyer, but I am told that your chance of gaining standing to sue is poor even before the court might hear the merits of your argument, and that no evident constitutional claim can be made for your position. That is, nothing in the Constitution deals with poor wages, and no one is required to work for any specified wage.
4. That too few understand the living wage methodology. As you know, I think the computation needs work, but I think also that the methodology needs understanding. If put forward in a rational and thoughtful way to the proper officials, the methodology seems salable to me. I think that together we can get the relevant officials to understand it.
5. That you have probably accomplished what you can by being here now, and that we have enough common ground to justify moving the issue out of the front office and into forums where people with lawful authority can actually do what you want to see done.

Those things said, I understand that one purpose of civil disobedience is to suffer, and I remember that some members of your group talked earlier about wanting to be arrested. So I want to put additional cards on the table. Your parents and others clearly don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want you to suffer. I also don’t want you to be arrested, to fail courses, or to pay any of the other prices that Thoreau or Dr. King in different eras with regard to different issues saw as justifying suffering.

Working in the 1980s and the 1970s with the Legal Defense Fund and with others who actually accomplished the changes of which Dr. King dreamed, I was impressed by their capacity to build coalitions to gain results. Particularly in this state, you need coalition support. I am willing to help you find that support if you are willing to learn to make a compelling argument to people who know law, economics, and Virginia.

So what do we do? I think, and I have said publicly, that much of what you want ought to happen. You know and I know that I do not have the authority to do what you have demanded. I have come to think as I have worked with it this week, that the proposed living wage methodology may stand alone when the arithmetic and localization issues are resolved. Or it may improve that part of the generally accepted computation methodology that applies to the lowest wage categories.

I talked today with one labor economist who rejects the methodology as it applies to all workers, but suggests that in some localities it may provide a more realistic assessment of living costs at the bottom of the wage scale. That makes sense to me as I play with models to see the methodologies’ possible effects in various wage strata. As one moves upward from whatever poverty line one posits, the living wage methodology tells little, but at the lower end, it may tell a good deal. This clarification of the concept may well help you achieve what you want.

My suggestions, contingent on your leaving Madison Hall tonight and either going back to your studies or resuming your protest in some area that does not impede transactions and normal business for persons not involved in your protest:

* That we make a joint commitment to develop solid analysis that will include comparability studies to demonstrate the effects of substituting the proposed living wage computation methodology for the standard methodologies now used, and also of merging the methodologies.

* That we state together that long-term underfunding of the public payroll that supports classified workers is a major impediment to fair wages for these employees. We would mention specifically the two years of the last five in which the appropriated base increase was 0%, and also the phenomenon that the state did not make up these losses in subsequent years, and that appropriations and authorizations for classified wage increases ought to include Cost of Living Adjustment increases, in addition to merit and career-progress factors.

* That I commit to recruiting qualified faculty of various political persuasions to participate with you in the analysis to support a serious campaign with the General Assembly, and you commit to learning what you will need to know to deal effectively with the Assembly. At the same time, I will commit to provide introductions for you, to request hearings in Richmond and elsewhere for you, and to appear at those hearings to explain and introduce your issues.

John T. Casteen III, President
University of Virginia" (University of Virginia Press Release, April 14, 2006)