Here is an encouraging story about an educator who’s actually doing some educating, “KSU president gives up $90,000 of his salary to boost lowest-paid campus employees.” Merlene Davis of The Lexington Herald reports:
Raymond Burse, interim president of Kentucky State University, has given up more than $90,000 of his salary so university workers earning minimum wage could have their earnings increased to $10.25 an hour.
“My whole thing is I don’t need to work,” Burse said. “This is not a hobby, but in terms of the people who do the hard work and heavy lifting, they are at the lower pay scale.”
Burse’s annual salary had been set at $349,869. He had been KSU’s president from 1982 to 1989 and later became an executive at General Electric Co. for 17 years, including 10 as a senior executive. He retired in 2012 with good benefits, he said.
Burse started talking with members of the KSU Board of Regents about the gesture more than two weeks before the board met to approve his contract on July 25, he said.
Burse asked how many university employees earn less than $10.25 an hour, an amount some say is a living wage. …
The raise in pay for those employees will stay in place even after a new president is selected, he said. It will be the rate for all new hires as well. The change is immediate.
Something like this happened at Eastern University when I was a student there. Custodial work on our campus was done by a subcontractor, but Eastern was that subcontractor’s sole client. And it turned out that workers for that company — the people who swept our floors, took out our trash and cleaned our bathrooms — were not being paid a living wage.
The school was in the middle of a budget crunch and nobody knew where else to find the money to correct that, so initially we came up with something like Raymond Burse’s response — others took voluntary pay cuts so that the underpaid could be paid a little bit more.
At the time, I focused mainly on the pedagogical argument for this raise. Universities are in the business of teaching and learning. Paying less than a living wage to the custodial staff teaches something. And thus everyone within that community learns something about the meaning of pay, of work, of dignity, of value and of values. I’ve sometimes called this the “hidden curriculum” of a campus community — the unspoken lessons taught every day, the effects of which reach deeper and have more influence over what students and professors learn than any spoken lesson or book in the library. Every institution has some form of hidden curriculum.
Talk is cheap. A university can talk all it likes about “values,” but nothing reveals what it truly values more than the blunt numeric value it assigns to different kinds of work. Consider what a university is communicating when it has most of its actual teaching performed by underpaid adjuncts. They may say they “value” teaching, but in actual fact, they evidently don’t.
A university may say it values equality and dignity and all that, but if the “people who do the hard work and heavy lifting” or the people who clean up after others are underpaid, that claim and those values are revealed as hollow. Underpaying such workers communicates that we actually value the creation of trash more than the disposal of it. It communicates that the purpose of education is to make oneself more “valuable,” intrinsically, than those hard-working, underpaid people whose labor enables the educated to enjoy their entitled lifestyle.
It teaches, as E.F. Schumacher put it, that education is a “passport to privilege.” That’s bad — not simply because it is unjust and kind of dickish, but because that injustice and dickitude reshapes the content of education, deforming it.
… if it is taken for granted that education is a passport to privilege, then the content of education will not primarily be something to serve the people, but something to serve ourselves, the educated. The privileged minority will wish to be educated in a manner that sets them apart and will inevitably learn and teach the wrong things, that is to say, things that do set them apart.
College tuition costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. That’s a lot of money to spend to be taught the wrong things. That’s too much money to spend getting miseducated and winding up as more of a dick than before you started classes.
In one very important way, then, the students at Kentucky State University are getting a better education than the students at many more prestigious universities. President Burse has rewritten part of KSU’s hidden curriculum, and in doing so has provided a lesson that reaches far beyond his campus.
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