Pigs and Paupers
an open letter to my students in Science for Humane Survival
this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Greed/PigsAndPaupers.htm
March 15, 1998
Dear Christine, [Christine Armett-Kibel]
Last spring when I wrote "Greed 102, Screwing the Students and Part-Time Faculty" I had no thought that by Fall '97 I would be teaching Science for Humane Survival II* as a post-retirement part-timer. But I did, and until Mar 6th I hadn't been paid a nickel of the niggardly $9,999.91 you offered, while you continue to gobble up more than $100,000/year (plus all your benefits)! You and other administrators fatten at the trough while exploiting part-time faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, the contract cleaning crew, whomever you can squeeze to gain a bloody dime.
*[Science for Humane Survvival II, with almost 150 students enrolled, and 6 faculty contact hours, counts as teaching a double course.]
Students are being pushed to the wall, and not a few forced to take on harsh debts or to leave UMB, by the ever-increasing student fees (the small decrease announced for next year notwithstanding).
The economic savagery of the UMB administration is not fundamentally different from that of the wealthy landowners in Chiapas, Mexico who hire paramilitary thugs to massacre impoverished campesinos. Greed, unadulterated and free of compassion for other human beings, is the common motivation. You want more for yourselves, and because that requires a "third world" part of what chancellor Penney calls "our university", that's your preference.
Consider one of the more than 350 part-time faculty members, Bryan Williams, age 37, of the CAS Academic Support Program. This academic campesino and his wife struggle to make a subsistence living. Neither has medical coverage; their young child is on Medicaid. True paupers. The working poor! Bryan is not alone. I hope you read the union materials being prepared, and take them to heart.
My invitation to you has several parts. First, I want you to pay me not only the $9,999.91, but the additional $2,573.89 I asked for, which I will contribute to sending emergency food, medicines and blankets to the thousands of displaced desperate campesinos in Chiapas ($500 gets one ton of corn.)
Second, I invite you to match my contribution, not a major difficulty for you, given your pay. Together we can thereby provide 10 tons of corn (or equivalent aid) for these terrorized Tzotzil Indians, victims of the greed of big New York bankers and of the U.S. and Mexican governments who train and supply the paramilitary terrorists to insure a "secure climate for foreign investments."
Third, I invite you to initiate a review of all expenditures within the sciences, an open, democratic, and completely transparent study of precisely where the money goes. The purpose of the study is to set the basis for insuring that each person employed here, at least in the sciences initially, is treated humanely and with dignity--that no one is made to suffer debasing exploitation while others grow fat.
In my 11/13/97 letter to you, I tried to make clear that I was not contesting you for personal enrichment, that in 1996 I had contributed about $20,000 to a wide variety of groups working for significant social change, and that in 1997 I intended to contribute about $25,000 (which I did). Just a month after that letter, on December 22nd, came the horrific massacre in Acteal of 45 Tzotzil Mayan Indians, already terrified refugees within their own state of Chiapas.
In the last month I contributed $2,000 to help these desperate human beings survive. Though you and Penney and others behave as though you don't realize it, there's more to life than money. The reason for sharing "our" wealth is not "mere" compassionate sentimentality.
The link between, on the one hand, the amassing of wealth by the world's rich, and on the other hand, the immiseration of the so-called third world and the galloping ecological destruction engulfing us, is indisputable. We, the human race, if we are to survive, must end the dominant culture of greed. We must end the institutionalization of greed. Survival of the ecosphere depends on it. So I invite you to start here. As they say, act locally, and think globally.
--George Salzman, Physics Dept, March 15, 1998
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