For the past month or so, an ongoing debate has been played out in the pages of both The Chronicle and The Duke Review, and in this, my final column of the year, I feel the need to put in my two-cents worth. I'm frustrated by the position held by many University students with regards to University employees. Recent Chronicle letters have supported the idea that the University's employees are to be pitied, due to the disrespect shown them by an over-privileged bunch of snot-nosed punks (read: University students).
One letter to the editor printed in The Chronicle earlier this month exemplified this erroneous line of thinking. The author of the letter, Trinity senior Jaclyn Bova, suggested that University students are immature and selfish, as the mess that they left after a Saturday night party forced University employees to work picking up trash on Easter Sunday.
Although the sentiment here is certainly nice, it characterizes perfectly the type of argument that I call "warm and fuzzy." The sole point of this type of argumentation is to make people feel bad for not being more sensitive toward some group or another without providing any sort of concrete reasons to support the position. In this particular case, those in the Bova camp take an innocuous premise, such as "people should treat one another with respect" and employ that premise to support a position that, in reality, has nothing to do with the original premise.
Have you ever tried to respond to a "warm and fuzzy" argument? It is futile. Since they are based on emotions rather than rationality, they completely break down, devolving into a scenario in which the only response to a sound point is to say that "it just isn't right" or accuse those on the opposing side of the issue of being callous and heartless.
Well, I'm neither callous nor heartless; I simply find the argument that we should feel guilty about people having to do their jobs spurious and far-removed from any semblance of the real world. Let's try to abstract from the emotion here and examine the facts.
First, University employees were not forced to work on Easter Sunday. The days of slave labor ended in this country over 100 years ago. Actually, in a great example of the free market in action, these fellows chose to work, and guess what, they even received actual money for their efforts! Secondly, the wages of University employees far exceed those paid to the same kind of workers elsewhere in the market. Thirdly, no matter how disrespectful University students may be, those who think that working at the University represents hell on earth need a reality check. There are a lot of jobs around where people risk their lives and health everyday. University workers, on the other hand, work in one of the safest environments imaginable.
The crux of the matter is this: Do all working people deserve to be treated with respect? Certainly. But do University employees deserve special treatment and sympathy, simply because they happen to be surrounded by an exceptionally privileged portion of the population? Most certainly not.
Do you think that McDonald's workers love their jobs? The fact of the matter is that many people who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year hate their jobs. That is why it is called work; it's not supposed to be fun. The argument that University employees are somehow victims of an unjust system simply holds less water than a sieve.
You see, the beauty of the free market is that people are paid whatever their job is worth to society (this is not to say that teachers are less important than baseball players, but rather that their talents are more in demand by society). If a University employee quit, and no replacement could be found, the argument that the workers here are maltreated would hold water. But we all know that there are literally millions of people in this country who dream of jobs such as these.
This fact leads me to take the viewpoints of those like Bova as not only an affront to logic but also as an affront to those in this country who have much more to complain about than an occasional dirty look from an obnoxious student.
Parker Stanberry is a Trinity sophomore.
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