Reading President Roth’s recent book review in the San Francisco Chronicle, it is clear we have a man in North College with a complex and generally supportive view of the 1960s. At the same time, we don’t think this impressive understanding of this bygone era meshes with his recent comments about the less-than-generous contract the University is offering Physical Plant workers.
With a struggling economy looming large, the administration has offered the Wesleyan’s Physical Plant workers annual raises (2.5 percent) that don’t come close to covering the inflation rate (4 percent). At the same time, they’ve demanded that these workers pay the same dollar amount of insurance costs as much higher-paid professors and administrators in order to make it “fair” for everyone. Now, as the negotiations have hit their tenth month and workers marched through Usdan, Roth has not only questioned the right of union members to vote on their contract, but implied that by participating in rallies with the workers, students are engaging in the exact type of misguided idealism that he defends in his book review.
Roth is right about one thing. There is a whole lot of misguided 1960s-style idealism lingering at this school. As a historian himself, however, Roth may want to take a look back a couple of decades, when, at the turn of the ’90s, the President’s Office was firebombed with Molotov cocktails—barely missing the night-time janitor—by a student drug dealer who was shot in the head by his associates the next summer.
We’ve come a long way from such aberrant misinterpretations of our parents’ generation. To imply that students showing solidarity with Physical Plant workers is “disturbing” (as he wrote on his blog) is ridiculous.
The student body’s discontent with the leadership of the Facilities Department (which has also had a hand in such gems as the planning of Usdan, and Fire Safety fines) is appropriate. You may know more about the ’60s, but that doesn’t mean you get it, Mr. President. You’re not a student anymore. Don’t tell us what to stand for.
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