Why Bash Harvard on Wages?

To the Editor:

Pablo Eisenberg’s open letter to the new president of Harvard University disappoints me (“A Low Blow for Low-Wage Workers,” July 26). Mr. Eisenberg embraces the protesters’ side in a complex labor dispute. He especially would know that all labor and wage disputes are complicated, especially with multiple unions and a myriad of subcontractors. Honest and intelligent people can disagree.

Did Mr. Eisenberg seek out Harvard’s side of the disagreement?

Is he aware that:

• Less than 3 percent of Harvard’s regular work force of more than 12,000, all of them unionized, make below $10 an hour in wages; only 194 of that group, all of them part time, make below $10 an hour when total compensation is factored in.
• Though it might have been easier, quicker, and more popular simply to adopt the concept of a specific wage floor, for a number of reasons that solution is not necessarily the best way of setting a general compensation policy, especially when considering health, time off, and other fringe benefits, and the training to improve workers’ career prospects.

Did Mr. Eisenberg compare Harvard’s record with other universities, including his Princeton, rather than comparing a large nonprofit group’s wage policies with that of the municipal government of Cambridge?

What is gained by heaping blame on Harvard simply because it has an enviable endowment resulting from academic excellence, first-class fund raising, and exceptional asset management?

Fisher Howe
Harvard Class of 1935
Lavender/Howe & Associates Management Consultants
Washington

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To the Editor:

I appreciated reading Pablo Eisenberg’s letter to the new president of Harvard. I have a suggestion. Perhaps the large private foundations, which support the impressive work that comes under the heading of “civil society,” should make a livable-wage policy a condition of their grant making to universities with billion-dollar endowments. Perhaps the academics who promote civil society should publicly demand that the institutions for which they work institute a livable-wage policy. These universities benefit from the prestige of these efforts and from the grant money that supports them, but the principles of civil society require responsibilities and costs they are currently unwilling to bear.

If the bureaucrats and executives who run these institutions of higher learning fail to understand higher principles, perhaps they will be more responsive if their irresponsible conduct damages their ability to raise money and is thoroughly condemned in public by their own esteemed faculty. It is the responsibility of the entire philanthropic community, practitioners as well as funders, to help educate the universities in this regard.

Christopher C. Fitz
Salinas, Calif.