As a student currently studying the Silent Vigil of 1968, a protest whose theme was the improvement of wages and work conditions for the University's predominantly black non-academic staff, I was eager to read the editorial in the Apr. 6 edition of The Chronicle on "Keeping King alive." The editorial asks that we remember what Martin Luther King's assassination "meant here" since many at the University do not know the history of the event. Although The Chronicle calls on the University to take pride in the vigil, an editorial exactly a week before, in the Mar. 30 edition, lauding privatization of Dining Services establishments, clearly illustrates the contradiction in this newspaper's message and perhaps among much of the student body.
The Mar. 30 editorial encouraged the administration to use next year as a means for testing the privatization of the currently unionized work force. This is the same newspaper that called on the University to take pride in a vigil, which in the spirit of King's support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, was organized to place pressure on the administration to meet the demands of the then-unrecognized Local 77 Union.
The Chronicle glorifies the founding of a black workers' union at the University 30 years ago, yet then puts on a second face in support of fast-food labor-poorly paid, part-time workers without benefits. It is of grave concern that The Chronicle views the events of the '60s with sympathy and awe but fails to recognize that the same issues the University community struggled with after King's death are part of the very dream that privatization and cheap labor threaten to shatter today.
Erik Ludwig
Trinity '98
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