8:17 Questions begin. So I have been holding my tongue for a while, but this is the part of the debate that entirely ticks me off. “Harvard is for the students and faculty first”? “If we were the only university we could save jobs, but we need to compete with Georgetown”? Seriously?
First of all: it is not at all about faculty vs. workers. The problem is that workers at Harvard are losing their jobs, that faculty are not being hired, and that administrators are not receiving salary cuts at all. And it absolutely disgusts me that the Republicn side is advocating that, on the first hand, our money “must go to the endowment,” and that, secondly, “prospective students must be sold” on our current use of money: they are saying, essentially, that students choose a university on the size of its endowment.
The attack on unions that continues in this debate — Peyton’s “unions are fundamentally opposed to meritocracy in the workplace,” for example — eventually boils down to an attitude that does, in Dylan’s words, “treat workers as commodities.” They can be cut now so that others can be hired later — they are interchangeable. Their jobs are “produced” — they are not seen as “producers” of a valuable community and services to Harvard sutdents and faculty. More on this later.