Why do universities exist? Why does ours exist? Yes, there are many answers, but high among them must be the one that says they exist so that the ideals born of our better selves may help to guide our country toward the fulfillment of its dream of being, what Lincoln once prayed it would be, a nation in which government would be “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

My friend and colleague Merrill Peterson, speaking from these very steps forty-one years ago, daring to link our university’s mission to the civil rights movement, said that the university is, or ought to be, an intellectual force at the nerve center of society. “Its mission is incomplete,” he said, “unless it cultivates in its young men and women the sense of responsibility to the values imparted by instruction.” And he reminded his audience of rebels, as I will remind this audience of rebels, of Mr. Jefferson’s conviction that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing.”

Mr. Jefferson also declared to his Board of Visitors that “Everyone is bound to bear witness, where wrong has been done.” Bearing witness where wrong has been done is what this Living Wage campaign is all about. It is what a university should be all about. It is certainly about seeing to it that the one thing a university should not be is a mirror image of the worst features of our nation. It should not be an example of what is wrong with our country.

And yet, in deeply disturbing ways, that is exactly what our university is—what, in fact, most universities are. How so?

We are the world’s richest nation, the richest in human history, and yet nearly forty million of our fellow citizens live in poverty. The gap between rich and poor widens. We claim to be the best at everything—and yes, we are first in wealth, first in military expenditures; first in millionaires; first in billionaires; and, I believe, first in boasting of being first—but, among the world’s major industrial nations we fall way behind. A higher percentage of our people live in poverty; a higher percentage of our poor people live in prisons; and a higher percentage of them live bereft of the hope and optimism that is meant to be an American hallmark. With such a record, we can hardly expect really to have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Not with what we have done to “the people.”

Our university does not replicate all of these features. But—as this Living Wage report makes all too clear—it replicates some of the worst of them. To me, the stark realities of our condition are, first, that hundreds of the university’s employees are paid poverty wages; second, that the gap between the highest and lowest paid in the entire university community is wider than it has ever been; and, third, that these realities are not acknowledged for what they are.

Poverty, the widening rich-poor gap, denial: national disaster, local shame.

These are the wrongs our Living Wage movement aims to right. The movement is one for better wages, adequate groceries on the table, decent shelter, and health care assurance, but it is ultimately about whether all members of the university community are respected for their contribution to fulfilling the university’s educational mission, or whether poverty and inequality will continue to exist side-by-side with lessons in ethics and citizenship.

It raises questions about the meaning of fairness and community; it brings into relief the persistent claims to privilege and power; it highlights the divisions of race, class, and gender that plague us; it challenges the exploitative dimensions of the market economy; it helps us to think more clearly about the structure and mission of the university; and it urges us all to reexamine the assumptions of our lives and institutions.

You often read or hear that there was a kind of moral clarity in the civil rights movement that made it ultimately irresistible, even easy to support or join. Segregation and disfranchisement were clearly wrong: wrong morally, wrong constitutionally. Then you read or hear that today’s movements for social justice are much more complex, much less clear cut. They lack the easy moral dividing lines of the 1960s. That nonsense has to be dispelled. There may be no Fourteenth Amendment for the poor but this Living Wage movement is endowed with every bit as much moral clarity as that which infused the 1960s civil rights movement.

As an artifact of that movement, I am honored to be among you and I am inspired by your presence – inspired to believe that, once again, the great wrongs of our great university may be revealed, opposed, and righted. And, once again, with students in the forefront.

Carry it on. (Rotunda, University of Virginia, February 21, 2006)