Treat Our Workers Right

At Vanderbilt we talk a lot about “fostering community.” An important part of fostering community is respecting those people who make this university run, whether they mow the lawn, swipe our card in the lunch line at Rand or vacuum the hallways of our dorm. I thought it was reasonable to assume that those people with the power at our university always treated their employees with respect and decency. Turns out I was wrong.

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A Victim Treats his Mugger Right

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm." The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'" Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome. ...Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?" "Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said. Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says. The teen couldn't answer Diaz — or he didn't want to... "I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

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Changing the World

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. The tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference. It can start with just a few small steps. It’s a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that’s how you change the world.

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A Lesson of Somali Pirate Attacks

Somalia is like Afghanistan in that we had a great deal of interest in the place during the Cold War and more or less forgot about it afterward. But two decades later we continue to deal with the consequences of our abrupt exit from both countries. Our intense and highly selective outrage began when the Somalis started targeting commercial vehicles. Faced with this response it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Western consumer products, carried by these ships are more valuable than Somali lives. In light of this incident we should recognize there are two sets of victims here: innocent workers taken hostage by pirates and those people living along the poisoned and depleted Somali coast who may well see these pirates as heroes. We should also know that part of combating terrorism means addressing the conditions in which it flourishes.

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America's Shame

Reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty throughout the world is clearly one of the great moral challenges of our time. Although the issue is by no means absent from what we study and teach, as educators in the United States we appear to be falling short in the task of ensuring that our students are adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced. Is it possible that some of the reluctance to deal with the topic stems from the fact that it may have uncomfortable conclusions for our own lives?

If we take seriously the idea that the value of a human life does not diminish when we cross national boundaries, then we ought to be giving a much higher priority to reducing world poverty. I have in mind a broad re-envisioning of what we teach.

We should not limit so important a topic to specialized courses on international development (valuable as they are). The issue should be prominent in anthropology, cultural studies, economics, ethics and sociology.

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