The College of Wooster promotes itself as a bastion of social justice: a school that, according to our graduate qualities, “actively promotes equity and inclusion, demonstrates ethical judgment and work towards a just society, exhibits a commitment to community, civic engagement and serving others, and employs knowledge and insight to solve real-world problems.” I believed that when I first came here, but I don’t anymore.
As a first year, it was in the classrooms of Wooster’s halls that I learned to grasp and analyze what economic inequality is in American society: the scope of its impact and who it hits the hardest. I gained the vocabulary to talk about generational poverty, about how income inequality compounds the disadvantages of the marginalized identities with which it intersects. I learned to concisely articulate how the 1% who have money hold on to it at others’ expense, and I learned the stats to back it up. Ironically, it was in these same spaces at different hours that I learned how little we embody these values we profess — over talks with the low-wage workers who run and maintain them.
This school pays poverty wages. For too many amazing individuals who are the foundation of this institution, the College doesn’t pay enough to account for even basic living necessities. It is an outrage that any employee of this college should have to work two, three, even four jobs just to make ends meet — yet many do.
Our campus doesn’t exist in a vacuum — rather, it falls neatly into the nationwide archetype of income inequality it taught me to care about. In 2013, The Wooster Voice reported that the former president of the College Grant Cornwell brought in $633,430 in the 2010-11 school year. On the same campus, employees such as custodians and dining workers are paid a base wage of $11 an hour: less than $23,000 annually. This makes for a nearly 27-to-1 differential between The College of Wooster’s highest- and lowest-paid employees.
The message I constantly hear from the school is that we need to focus on making students more respectful. And that’s absolutely true: too many students treat hourly workers like they’re invisible, like they’re servants — and that is unacceptable. But what about the institutional respect of being compensated enough to live in safety and dignity without having to work more than one full-time job? Do we really believe that the people who make our campus function are 27 times less valuable than administrators? How can a college that doesn’t pay enough to support lives be a college that changes lives?
Not paying livable wages to our staff is an act of hypocrisy in the face of every ideal we purportedly stand for. As one custodian phrased it to me: “This school has all these big goals and ideas, but they don’t realize that it’s happening right here. It’s happening right under their feet.” In the classrooms that overworked custodians clean every night, we teach our students concepts that enforce the morality of a living wage by day. And don’t be fooled — this school has the ability to do it today.
At the very meeting the Living Wage Campaign will be protesting in one week, the Trustees will be celebrating the successful fundraising of $150 million — a number that absolutely dwarfs the roughly $500,000 that would be required yearly to raise all employees to a living wage at moderate compression. We once raised $40 million in a single day. An endowment made from an effort even half that size could fund living wages every year in the future on interest alone. The problem is priorities. Any argument that says we’d have to cut funding for student services or raise tuition is a false narrative that pits students and staff against each other when we could instead stand united.
I want Wooster to be the place I thought it was when I first pulled onto Beall Ave., and I believe that, with a great deal of work and dedication to the requests and imaginations of the people who live and breathe here every day, it can be. But Wooster will never be that beacon of justice we sell to wide-eyed admitted students as long as we turn a blind eye to the injustices we ourselves create. I want to see a Wooster where that rosy first day vision of Wooster lasts, untainted by the cynicism that hypocrisy breeds.
Robyn Newcomb, a Viewpoints Editor for the Voice, can be reached for comment at RNewcomb20@wooster.edu.