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A STUDENT'S VIEW: INVEST IN PEOPLE, NOT BUILDINGS-THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, MAY 9TH, 2008

Posted: Wednesday May 7, 2008

A Student’s View: Invest in People, Not Buildings

By HONOR JONES

Everywhere I hear the sound of dump trucks. It’s my fourth year at the University of Virginia, and they haven’t stopped building since I got here. A new commerce school, a new theater. If UVa is any example of the state of public education in general, we need to re-evaluate our priorities before another brick gets bought. Public universities have responsibilities to their employees and neighbors — the public — that aren’t being fulfilled. Instead of spending millions on beautifying campuses, universities should pay a living wage that covers at the very least basic survival costs like food and transportation. They should increase investment in scholarship programs and employee education. Universities and students have an obligation and ability to address the inequalities in their own hallways, on their own campuses — as well as on the streets outside those campuses.

UVa, for example, is making some attempts to face up to those inequalities, but it still has a way to go. It remains one of the richest public universities in the nation, while only a small number — just under 8 percent — of its undergraduate students are from low-income families. AccessUVa, started in 2004, aims to open doors for those with the “brains but not the bucks,” by providing $20-million a year for need-based grants to undergraduates whose family incomes are below about $40,000 a year. In February, President John T. Casteen III of UVa said that “we are pretty close at this point in seeing AccessUVa at full implementation,” but the program does not seem to be expanding. In the Class of 2009, the first to benefit from the program, about 200 students were awarded full scholarships and 787 received some amount of aid. In the Class of 2011, 180 students received full scholarships, with 848 receiving smaller aid packages.

The 2011 class is the most diverse in the university’s history and is appreciated as such. But sadly, some sectors of UVa remain reactionary. In response to “U.Va. Ranks First for Black Enrollment,” an article in the student-run newspaper, an undergraduate wrote, “My first response is, who cares?” In an article called “The Unimportance of Skin Color,” the writer asked: “If all men are truly created equal, then why do we care about the number of blacks who enroll?” Last fall an undergraduate columnist wrote a piece called “Over-AccessUVa,” arguing that “financial aid encourages people who have no business being in college to attend.” Students whose parents can’t afford to pay their tuition would take out loans if they valued their educations highly enough, he wrote.

And then there is a living wage, an issue that continues to divide the UVa community. The university pays many of its employees only $9.37 an hour, despite the fact that the local county’s Board of Supervisors considers $11.07 the minimum wage for the region. That figure does include health care, which UVa employees receive as benefits, but the discrepancy is still considerable, especially since the city of Charlottesville is far more expensive than surrounding areas within the county. Some UVa students organized a sit-in in 2006 to try to persuade the university to raise its pay from $9.37 to $10.72 an hour, but the administration dismissed the students’ demands.

As an academic institution, the university has made some nods toward worker education, which it calls a “benefit,” despite its limited application. If housing or facilities-management employees want to take GED or ESL courses, the university will compensate them for class time, although until last year the housing and facilities-management divisions, which originally pushed for the program, had to pay employees’ compensation out of their own budgets. Only recently has the university agreed to take on the costs. UVa also publicizes the offer of a free university class per semester for full-time workers, although they are charged for the class if they get a C- or lower. Contracted workers — employees hired through private companies to work in the dining halls — are not eligible, even if they work 40 hours a week at the university.

Despite the program, the university’s attitude toward employee education is evident in the rhetoric of a UVa employee-benefits brochure, which claims that “97 percent of the population doesn’t set goals.” The cause of that questionable statistic? “Fear … that the goal will not be reached oftentimes keep people from achieving what they desire out of life. It is up to you.” Thus the responsibility for success or failure is shifted completely from institution to individual, a view that bleeds into the university’s relationship with the less-affluent neighborhoods surrounding it.

On Mondays I tutor GED students in an environment that feels impossibly far from UVa, although it is only about a four-minute drive away. Students in my class are from about 18 to 60 years old, and every one of them is African-American. To me, that’s jarring proof that the educational system has been failing an entire sector of the population. I am naïvely horrified that this has happened in a college town. At the beginning of classes, everyone had to fill out a questionnaire explaining why they had not finished high school. The reasons differed — mostly financial, family, or academic troubles. I could have just as easily filled out a questionnaire explaining why I did graduate — thanks to a system designed to work in my favor.

I think of all this in class — “Public Life in Latin America” — back on the campus. “How much is a gallon of milk?,” the professor asks. Not a single hand goes up. We’re learning about Latin American revolutions, about students protesting in plazas. I know in the abstract that the cost of a gallon of milk can mean the difference between being able to afford to buy it or not. “If you don’t know how much it costs,” our professor says, “you’re disconnected from society.” Class ends, and we walk out into the sunlight in a sheen of ponytails and backpack zippers. We move to the syncopated percussion of cellphones vibrating and flip-flops slapping the ground.

In November, to witness UVa in action, I went to a meeting of its recently formed Commission on the Future of the University. Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia had just announced budget cuts in higher education, and rankings like U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges 2008” were looming. UVa’s ambitious capital campaign was about halfway to its $3-billion goal, raising almost a million dollars a day. Walking into the auditorium, I nearly collided with a man distributing handouts. I glanced over the sheet while someone behind me joked about its advertisement of UVa’s gender, racial, and intellectual diversity. “Intellectual diversity?” he asked. “Are we letting dumb people in now, too?”

Leonard W. Sandridge Jr., the university’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, began by saying that UVa was doing well financially. “We can afford to make adjustments. We can afford to take some risks.” He went on to say that “we have a responsibility to serve the public,” which is “expecting more from us than we’ve ever seen before.” Surprised by how few students showed up, I was relieved when two undergraduate-looking girls asked about community engagement and the promised increases in diversity at UVa. “When should we expect certain things to happen in terms of improvement?” one asked. The grown-ups seemed to shake their heads in amused exasperation. Tim Garson, executive vice president and provost, said he understood she wanted to “see the numbers,” although he didn’t mention any.

In response to other audience members’ specific questions about the university’s responsibility to the public, he said UVa should certainly be involved in what he called the “Thomas Jefferson district.” Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder — often referred to as TJ or Mr. Jefferson — is worshiped as something of a university deity. To refer to Charlottesville as the “Thomas Jefferson district” demonstrates a particularly egocentric view of the city. We needed to think “more globally,” Garson said, speaking about students studying abroad. He was talking about visiting places like Valencia and Bath, I realized, not about facing the reality around us. Unfortunately, Mr. Sandridge’s talk of public responsibility was confined to the introductory speech and not revisited.

I spent that afternoon in the library reading Leibniz. Ours is the best possible world, more perfect every day, he says. Like me, and anyone reading this article, I doubt Leibniz ever went without milk. While I read, I could hear the library’s florescent lights emitting an efficient buzz and the mechanical drone of printers and AC units. Dimly, under the other sounds, I could hear the construction going on outside. Despite all the machinery that keeps universities functioning from day to day, it is the people who show up to work there who make our education possible. Instead of spending billions of dollars on fancy buildings — Jeffersonian jungle gyms — we should be investing in programs and people to inhabit those buildings, even if donors can’t nail their immortality to a scholarship program or a professor’s forehead.

Public colleges and universities need to work harder at recruiting, enrolling, and retaining low-income students; paying better wages to employees; and supporting employee education. We should foster an inclusive academic debate that goes beyond theory to explore the inequalities right in front of us. If we do that, then maybe someday UVa will serve as an example to praise instead of criticize.

Honor Jones is a senior at the University of Virginia. She is a double major in poetry writing and history.

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A STUDENT'S VIEW: INVEST IN PEOPLE, NOT BUILDINGS-THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, MAY 9TH, 2008

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