Vince Hampton’s Wednesday article, “Univ.’s low wage above its peers,” misses the point that living wage advocates have advanced. Rather than ask how the University compares to other institutions, we feel that members of the University should ask how they can create the best institution possible – one that raises the bar rather than retreats to it.

Do we want a university that has rendered Athens-Clarke County one of the poorest communities in the nation? A university that apes the contemptible behavior of others? An administration that needs a public relations campaign to justify the scant wages that it pays employees?

The article serves as tacit recognition that the University has done wrong. It admits that we treat staff shamefully – just not as shamefully as do some at other institutions.

More to the point: Hampton neglected to cite the breathtaking salaries that administrators continue to draw from the ramshackle budget. He chose not to discuss the resources that we squander on unneeded amenities.

He neglected, more importantly, to mention the 2,500 or so temporary workers employed by the University who earn less than $10.06 per hour, receive no benefits and enjoy minimal job security. Nor does he note that Tucson, College Park and Gainesville have poverty rates that far exceed the national average. Surely we can find better role models.

The University is a public institution; it is not a business. The only business in which it should be engaged is enhancing the lives of Georgia residents – especially members of our community.

We appreciate the budget difficulties the University faces.

However, we reprove administrators for using them to justify the exploitation of workers and for shirking their moral duty to afford them dignity through a living wage. The University paid poverty wages before the budget crisis, and it will continue to do so after the crisis unless we demand something more just.

We do not want to underplay the meaning of the fiscal problems that we must confront. They are severe. But maintaining the grievous wage rates of low-earning workers is not the answer to them. We should not charge the most disenfranchised members of the University with the task of absorbing all of state’s economic fallout.

Instead, we might ask why – if we face such difficulties – the University continues to lavish exorbitant salaries and perks upon administrators. Or why we continue to aggrandize our campus with cushy leather chairs, new parking decks and prodigious student centers during a time of unprecedented hardship.

The answer is not difficult to understand. The amount of funding required to lift workers out of poverty amounts to less than 1 percent of the University’s operating budget. Implementing a living wage thus would have little impact on it.

But instead of doing so, we have chosen to subsidize the extravagant salaries of administrators and the fancy chairs that we sit in by reducing thousands of people to squalor. Their plushness comes at the expense of the dignity of countless people.

Do we want a University that sacrifices the welfare of many for the privilege of a few? Or one that trades justice and morality for the sham of prestige?

We maintain that the University – that we, as students, staff, faculty, administrators, as moral agents and citizens – can do better than that.

- Philip Lewin is a sociology Ph.D. student from Athens.