Knowledge in the service of society is our mission.
That’s what administrators and professors told us Duke University is all about. The acquisition and development of knowledge for the purpose of serving society. Knowledge, not meant to sit in an ivory tower or wielded for self promotion, but for the benefit broadly of the world we all share.
The past week of protest and focus on the workers of Duke has laid bare the hypocrisy of the statement. Duke, as a community, believes in intellectual exploration and serving as a catalyst for positive change in society. Duke, as a business, opts for the expedient and the profit margin over the values of its academic ambition. The two, business and university community, are inextricably linked and feed off each other. They are the foundation of the hypocrisy that we find ourselves in.
That hypocrisy is deafening silence and selective application of mission. It is a conscious or subconscious decision to say our values are negotiable and that knowledge used in the service of society only applies when “society” is somewhere else or within the status quo.
It is a choice to do or say nothing because we have the ability to.
When the Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity sit-in began more than a week ago, few people paid attention to the issues they supported. A week later, our campus has at least partially recognized that the backs this university is built upon and supported by are underpaid, overworked and unappreciated.
This to me is what the movement for better labor practices is about. Whether we value our community and its people enough to say that working poverty, unjust labor practices and racist systems are unacceptable whether we allow a wealth of resources and information to corrupt our sense of what is normatively right and what is in our capacity to do when we have the power to begin to reverse it.
It’s about the heart and soul of this university and its role in the community and the world.
It’s about all of us individually recognizing the moral obligation of our education, this community and how we continue to fail the people we share this university with by staying silent. Too many students are more eager to criticize their peers, the protest and the methodology than to do something that benefits the lives of the members of our community who labor in our dining halls, clean our bathrooms, construct our buildings and plant the flowers when Blue Devil Days come around.
It begs the question for me, and it’s one I’m struggling to answer. If I can tutor children whose families can’t afford basic necessities because the university I attend fails to pay their parents adequate wages (and my education costs around $250,000) but refuse to stand up and tell the administrators I know that they should do something about it, why am I even here learning knowledge I’m supposed to one day use to serve society? How can I love with one hand and neglect with the other?
We need to get this right, right here and right now.
We forget what Martin Luther King, Jr. was doing in Memphis, TN, when he was assassinated. Increasingly a pariah of the establishment, King joined a sanitation worker strike in Memphis as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, as part of a pivot to economic and racial justice. Merely weeks before his death he stood in front of a gathering of strikers and their supporters and broadly declared that “all labor has dignity.” With the end of legal segregation in the rearview mirror, he declared, “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.”
This message was not popular in 1968. King was vilified toward the end of his life as the imperfect, at times radical, social justice warrior prevailed over the sanitized figure we remember each January. He sounds like the people I have talked to over the past week in Abele-Ville, and I question how much has changed when those same messages fall on a silent majority who would rather criticize methods than support fair wages and fighting the economic injustice in our community.
Our university seems more interested in projecting an image of compassionate elitism, one that is fully aware yet fully complicit in economic and racial injustice, than it is to act when such injustice presents itself on our campus because it requires a shift in the status quo. We are an example for this city and this state as Durham’s largest employer. We should be setting an example, not dragging our feet to catch up with local restaurants and city government.
To my peers, consider this a call to take action in whatever form that may take for you. Email or talk to an administrator, spend some time in A-Ville, talk to your housekeeper about their life and let them know you value them or do as the protestors have done and engage in civil disobedience. If your question is “What can I do?”, there are myriad options.
If your question is “Why should I do that?”, I offer the following response. It does not matter what political party, candidate or economic philosophy you support. I think we can all get on board with supporting hard-working people in our community who struggle to survive because they are not paid enough to live above the poverty line. We can grasp how systems intersect with each other, how the amount of income a family has and the work environment of employees impacts specific health, education and future economic outcomes.
The question we are faced is one of consistency of word and deed. Our values cannot be negotiable or selectively applied. Silence is a decision built on the ability to choose when our values apply and when they do not. The issues of workers at Duke and the injustices—economic, racial or political—of our community must not be the ones where we choose to remain silent.
Jay Sullivan is a Trinity senior. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.