No Layoffs at Harvard

I sort of hesitate to blog on a parochial Harvard issue, but I think this is important and implicates some broader questions in society, so let me quote Dylan Matthews on the basic situation:

A good case study of this class consciousness at work is the debate on layoffs at Harvard. For the normal people reading this, allow me to explain the situation. Harvard has tens of billions of dollars. How many tens of billions they won’t say, but its in that ballpark. However, because they’re slightly less obscenely wealthy than they were before the economy went to hell, the Harvard administration has started laying people off without cause. Some students, like the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) and its supporters (like me and Perspective), think that this is uncalled for. We think that Harvard should be more forthcoming about its financial situation, so that students and other members of the community can evaluate whether we really need to lay off workers to weather the recession. And until Harvard releases the information that would allow such a debate to take place, it should stop cutting jobs and find other ways to make up the shortfall. After all, if they’re going to cut the jobs of valued members of our community, we have a right to know why that’s happening, and how necessary or unnecessary that is. I, for one, kind of doubt that a university that can pay for massive concerts/carnivals can’t cough up the cash necessary to pay its workers.

There’s a petition that students, alumni, and parents can (and should!) sign here and here’s a video those inclined can watch:

Back when I was in school, we were the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) and had a worse acronym. The main issue in our day was the campaign to ensure that Harvard workers could earn a living wage that was adequate to raise their families in the local area in a non-impoverished manner.

In both cases one counterargument you here is that the university will do the most good if it sticks to its core function. I think you can construct a defensible version of this claim, namely that paying workers an above-market wage (or eschewing layoffs) is not the cosmically optimal use of funds for a well-endowed university. But it’s crucial to realize that what well-endowed universities are actually doing doesn’t meet the standard of optimizing social welfare either. Instead, our system is organized in a backward way such that the 18-22 year-olds who are least in need of help with their education are given the most resources, while the least resources are devoted to those students who are in the most need. Clearly, though, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League and sundry similar elite private colleges and universities have no intention of giving up the mission of elite education.

Given that constraint, there’s no good reason why they shouldn’t also strive to be good citizens and good members of their community and treat all stakeholders fairly.

A larger issue here is that the collapse of the coercive, command-and-control, dictatorial economies of the Soviet Bloc has tended to lead to an unworthy valorization of greed and profit-maximization. This extends to the idea that a non-profit organization like Harvard ought to ape the behavior patterns of a profit-maximing firm rather than do the right thing. But there’s no need for individuals or non-commercial institutions to behave in that manner.