Ubermensch Morality

IT SEEMS ODD that Yale's administration has not upped its offer to the striking clerical and technical workers there a cent since the two-month old strike began. The Yale corporation faces great and growing pressure from the thousands of faculty and students who bear that brunt of the strike but are nonetheless without a voice in settling the dispute. The union's case has received wide-spread coverage in the media, and the case they've made is a very strong one. Yet despite' forceful criticisms, Yale seems intent on starting down the public outrage.

Students and professors, needless to say, are frustrated. Because of the strike, teachers cannot conduct research in a reasonable environment; students cannot learn and are deprived of staples of social life such as their dining halls. Whatever their views of the union, they all want a settlement. But Yale's repeated rebuffs of the academic comnmunity's pleas for compromise have alienated even staunch conservatives. The school's callous attitude during this last round of negotiations has squelched the hopes of the students who led the three-day boycott of classes to pressure the university back to the table. In those talks, the union demand dropped from a $40 million cumulative raise over the next three years to $30 million, according to university estimates: Yale's counteroffer leapt from $18 million right up to $18 million.

And the Yale administration has proved no more forthcoming on the central controversy over comparable worth, the principle that equivalent work merits comparable pay. Yale has yet to successfully counter the evidence of substantial salary discrimination by race and sex provided by neutral Yale economics professor Ray C. Fair. According to the union, white male white collar support staff members make, on average, $14,324. Black women in the same types of jobs make $12,603, despite an average of 1.4 years greater experience at Yale. The university's own figures show no such discrimination, but also fool no one at the university or elsewhere. Fair, after all, played a key role in the original development of the statistical techniques Yale says he isn't using correctly.

Yale says it offers a reasonable wage. In point of fact, many of its employees are near the poverty level. And the university's excuses have prove as unshakeable as its moldy final offer. "Our position hasn't changed," a spokesman said recently, "Yale's offer already exceeds its capacity." It's sad, they say, but there just doesn't seem to be enough money. Coming from an institution that, in the last fiscal year to be assessed, turned a tidy $35 million surplus and spent $4 million alone on a union-busting law firm, this is rather hard to swallow. Moreover, Yale has certainly felt the strike's effects: admissions applications and alumni donations are both down. So why doesn't Yale settle, or at least make a legitimate compromise offer?

ONE EXPLANATION union leaders offer points to the potential fallout of a Yale compromise. Even if it is in Yale's immediate interests, a settlement would be a serious blow to the long-term interests of Harvard and Columbia. They Ivy league corporations, though they don't care to discuss the matter, have apparently been pressuring Yale to stand firm for the good of all, in the good old Ivy tradition. Harvard and Columbia have union organizing drives on their own campuses, and a victory for Yale's employees might encourage secretarial and technical support staff here and in New York to join or vote for a union. Because Harvard and Columbia would lose money if their workers won the right to bargain collectively. Yale must crush its own union's fight for comparable worth.

Needless to say, all of this raises two rather interesting questions. In the first place, why would Yale be willing to suffer so much, in an immediate and financial sense, for the good of its football rivals? It must be because Yale knows universities as a whole have to stick together to fight the emerging unionization movements at schools up and down the coast and across the country.

The other, more pressing question, is where the line should be drawn between the interests of a university, nominally in hot persuit of veritas, and the interests of down-to-earth social justice. If Harvard loses money because its workers unionize or Yale loses money because it has to pay its Black and white or its male and female workers equally, we are the ones that may pay the costs through higher tuition and fees. This puts us in an unpleasant position. Lost money means lost or foregone educational opportunities for students and lost research resources for professors. We face two competing allegiances one from out sense of justice and one from our concern with college costs. The issue is the same whether it stems from computer operators in New Haven or Craigie Arms tenants in Cambridge.

Fortunately, the question is not an overly difficult one. Academics must not be considered a haven from the system, mystically exempt from the forces of politics, economics and society. Harvard is a shiny cog, but it is a cog nonetheless. If it acts unjustly, it is hypocritical and foolish to defend it on grounds of some superior, ubermensch morality.

Professors here are paid by Harvard, wherever it get its money, to look for truth, but not to do anything about it. Typical is the attitude of Deborah L. Rhode, a visiting professor at the Law School who also happens to belong to Yale's corporation. She teaches a course on sex discrimination, but she hasn't done anything to impede its practice at Yale, despite the splendid opportunity the strike and her position grant her. The pursuit of truth is not a license for the abandonment of social conscience. As Marx once wrote, "philosophers contemplate the world. The point, however, is to change it."

We must force ourselves to see beyond the slick Ivy League exterior of these corporations united against the cause of justice. Hopefully the strike will help expose some of the half-buried hypocrisies abounding in the capitals of higher learning, to wit New Haven, New York and Cambridge.