The panelists' encouragement of dialogue represents the latest initiative of Students Stand with Staff a campus group that advocated against layoffs during the past year's budget cuts according to the group's co-founder Phoebe Gardener '11, who spoke at the panel. Gardener said that such dialogue will focus on instilling a values system in students that includes concern for the College's workers.
There was an "inconsistency" between College President Jim Yong Kim's rhetoric regarding public health and his actions towards employees following the recent reduction in health care benefits, Gardener said.
"How can you present yourself as a public health leader and tap a center for public health research and be cutting the health care of your own workers?" Gardener said.
President of Service Employees International Union Local 560 Earl Sweet, who also spoke at the panel, said the College's spending on new projects such as the Center for Health Care Delivery Science and the renovation of the Main Hall of Baker-Berry Library suggested that the administration was neglecting human needs by making health care reductions and staff layoffs.
Sweet compared the College's spending decisions to those that might be made at a Fortune 500 company unconcerned with the wellbeing of its staff.
"It seems to me that if you're in a crisis, how can you spend this kind of money?" Sweet said.
Robert Polanco '11, another panelist, said students focus excessively on their own individual needs.
"There's a corporate mentality," Polanco said. "People think they're going to rule the world. They're going to be [Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner '83], they're going to be [former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson '68]."
Participants at the forum said they were concerned that the College's policy regarding staff was indicative of a broader campus culture characterized by conformity and aversion to dissent.
"Here the biggest challenge we faced was finding a way to have students see the problem as one that wasn't a mutually exclusive question of benefits and consequences between students and staff," Eric Schildge '10, co-founder of Students Stand with Staff, said. "The response we heard from students was, I don't want to stand up for this issue because if staff get benefits, we get higher tuition, if staff keep their jobs, we suffer as students.'"
The struggle for workers' rights needs to include all groups on campus committed to social justice, Gardener said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"We want to say that a fight for workers' rights is not just for people dedicated to the labor cause," she said. "Fighting for a just world for workers fights for a world against oppression in general."
Universities represent a "contradiction" by perpetuating uneven social relations while presenting students with the opportunity to work towards overcoming issues of social justice, history professor Russell Rickford, who attended the forum, said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"Higher education represents ultimate privilege and ultimate opportunity to challenge social disparity inherent to privilege," Rickford said. "That internal struggle can create some of the greatest contributions to social equality."
There has been decreasing willingness among staff to speak out against the College's policies, Sweet said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"Thirty years ago there was more of a family atmosphere," he said. "Within your family you talk more."
The College has evolved into a "dysfunctional family," Sweet said.
Staff who have been laid off are reluctant to join Students Stand With Staff out of fear that doing so would damage their prospects of getting their jobs back, according to Sweet.
