So if you didn’t get it from the liveblog below, Elise and I went to a debate between Harvard Republicans and Harvard Democrats about various labour questions: Lily Ledbetter, card check, Harvard layoffs. In debate terms it was pretty standard fare. The Democrats argue that card check is necessary to protect against management intimidation, the Republicans argue that union intimidation is more potent that management ever could be. Lily Ledbetter, depending on your political orientation, is either proof that employers are ruthless Scrooge-like villans who exploit women for fun, or a new era of fees for trial lawyers.
I guess I found the most intresting part of the debate the last thirty minutes, when the issue of Harvard layoffs came up. The essential Democratic position is that the university has a moral obligation to its employees, the Republican, that the university must preserve its future commitments to its student and faculties. It’s a bit of an incongruous question: I don’t think any Democrat plans to work for the union after graduation, nor that any Republican plans to be at the university for the legnth of time it would take the endowment to recover. So it’s an abstract debate between to sets of moral agencies.
In debate terms, I thought the sides were pretty well matched, though the debate did quiteseem to evolve on formulaic lines–I could have written out the Republican or Democratic position beforehand just based on the traffic on various liservs.
It’s pretty unsurprising then that I come out of the debate with relatively the same positions I can in on. It seems to me that Harvard University exists as an education institution, and that its resources derive thereof. Put in more plain english, Harvard doesn’t have an endowment because it employs, but it because it educates. It seems to me the essential point that both sides fail to grasp. When I give a dollar to the class fund, I don’t do so because I think that it’s important to provide high paying jobs to the Cambridge community; I do so because I appreciate what I learned at Harvard and wish others to have the opportunity to do the same. It seems to me quite a misuse of Harvard’s resources to attribute them to any other purpose but the spirit in which they were given. After all, if one desired to provide employment, there are certainly organizations which offer work relief. Such a thing is well and good. But we should be clear–money given to Harvard is given to the highest calling—to advance the knowledge of the human race.
