the guy by the door …

4:40 PM Littauer Library, North Yard. “There’s a
fire.” A woman patron pointed toward Johnston Gate where there was a
ferocious blaze with flames a few feet high and clouds of smoke 20 or
30 feet into the air. The Cambridge Fire Department was already on the
scene. By the time I got outside and found a camera angle clear of the
trees CFD had already knocked down the flames. Twenty minutes later,
after we closed the library, this was the scene:

Cause: Believed to be equipment malfunction.
Injuries: [Thankfully] none.

Update:  Sunday May 1, 5:45 PM. Michael Feldman,
who publishes Dowbrigade news, and is also a member of the Berkman
Thursday Blogger Group has pictures and description earlier in the event. Michael is an actual journalist - fully trained and he teaches journalism at BU.

One more picture from Ezra Ball.

Update II: Wed May 3

Felicia, a student based in Cambridge, and a friend saw the beginning of the fire. Her blog has a dramatic picture [taken by Andrew Fong] and an eyewitness account including:

“…when we first saw it from near the body shop, it was just smoldering,
but by the time we went inside the yard and were checking out the john
harvard statue, the limo had become a massive ball of flames.”

The event was also reported in the Monday, May 2 issue of The Harvard Crimson, including a picture by Jonathon Tsao from a similar angle to Fong’s picture, but somewhat closer.

Opinion:  This first hand account seems to rule out
the theory of an explosion. It does, however, confirm that the fire was
fast moving. Jonathon Tsao’s  and Andrew Fong’s pictures confirm
that the event was as dramatic as eyewitnesses [including me]
said.  Questions about the origin were not unreasonable. They are
still worth a follow up. If there was no accelerant of any kind, we
ought to look at whether the upholstery materials used are adequately
fire retardant.

In May of 2001, about 50 students occupied Massachusetts Hall. Many more gathered outside.

It was the high point of the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, spokesman for the administration, Joe Wrinn claimed that there were “only seven” workers at Harvard who made less a living wage. One of the cooks turned to me and asked, “They’d let all this happen to avoid paying 7 people?”

The sit-in led to a temporary slowing down of what was then a 30 year long campaign to outsource labor. [It started with the painters in the early seventies.] N. Gregory Mankiw has been heard to characterize outsourcing of jobs as “importing service”. This is clearly not the case when Harvard outsources jobs like painters, janitors, cooks, and security guards. These jobs cannot be phoned in from Bangelore. I suppose you could clean a toilet with a remote controlled robotic arm, but I guess that’s not ready for market yet. Administration’s outsourcing is replacing employees with a living wage and benefits with contract workers who are paid less and have little if any benefits.

Also resulting from the sit-in was the formation of what was informally known as the Katz Committee to study low wage workers on the Harvard Campus. There were public hearings and meetings for a full year. The Committee was curiously able to find about 993 workers making less than the living wage that Joe Wrinn didn’t know about. That’s an error of … oh … about 14185%, but who’s counting.

In March of 2003, the chair of the committee, Professor Lawrence Katz gave a talk with slides [graphs] at the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy in which he reviewed the results obtained by the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies. Dean David Ellwood pointed out that, “administration was totally transparent about labor practices.” I objected that Joe Wrinn had said “only seven” workers below the living wage and HCECP found 1000. Somewhat testily, Dean Ellwood corrected me. I said, “administration was totally transparent DURING THE WORK OF HCECP.” It is well he take no responsibility for the “transparency” of administration during the “casual” era. This was an era almost as long as the history of HUCTW culminating in there being 2000 unbenefitted, untenured casuals filling 1000 FTE positions. There were 3000 union members at the time. One fourth of the bargaining unit jobs were filled by contingent workers. And as of the time of Dean Ellwood’s remarks, Sally Zeckhauser had caused the HCECP website to be removed after an appropriate “problem solved” posting. When I asked Professor Katz for a copy of his paper [and the graphs], he informed me that it was, “A talk, not a paper.”. It seems that the laws of economics [and supporting evidence for them] are eternal except when the application is what Harvard actually does.

The late Polly Price once remarked at the Arco Forum that Harvard is the largest [by quite a bit] employer in Cambridge and the fifth largest employer in the state. It is reasonable to ask if Harvard can reasonably be assumed to be a price taker in the local labor market. LWC presented evidence that Harvard is clearly not. Yet administration continues to justify it’s policies on the claim that it is. The HCECP claim of the necessity of retaining “market discipline” is a subtler, but equivalent claim. That was true from the moment its recommendations appeared. A separate question is the adherence to or erosion from the recommendations since then.

Jack Trumpbour writes so beautifully that it would make Hemingway cry. Hemingway once said, “I’ve never yet known a good writer that was also a good talker.” That’s Jack. But if you read his book,
“How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire,” you’ll probably want to talk to him. Only once has he disappointed me and I think it’s repairable. He said something like every time we get a victory they take it back later. You’re surprised by this? Administrators spend all their time excercising and trying to extend their power. The rest of us have better things to do. We express our power when we feel we have no other choice. As long as administration and the Fellows operate like a black hole for information, there will be constant recidivism. We must recharter the University.

So what is the status now of low wage workers at Harvard?

It’s a nice day out. Why don’t y’all go for a walk in the yard late afternoon.

-r

http://home.earthlink.net/~randy.f/

[Update: Jehane came to the screening. Her documentarian’s sense of ethics and accuracy was inspiring. My subtitle {below} is a bit unfair and my memory of the scene mentioned a bit flawed. In the interest, of open discussion. I will leave this post otherwise alone for the record. I will create a new post with full correction. But Jehane liked the idea of me being proud of her and I am.]

http://www.controlroommovie.com/site/01.html

With all due respect to artists who covered this song, the original by Edwin Starr has an intensity unmatched. And yes the orginal was about “War” generally not specifically “World War Four”. I apologize for being unable to resist the additional alliteration.

What happend to World War III?

Is it a good thing to talk about WW IV [link to appear]

What is it good for? A lot folks think absolutely nothing. Scott Ritter thinks bombing of Iran will commence this summer. He was right about Iraq’s nuclear program. Can the DoD wage a war with Iran without a draft? I don’t think so. Where will they go first? Not Harvard. Roxbury. And people know it. Some folks gathered there to talk about what to do.

Roxbury Community College - a center for learning in a not so affluent neighborhood.	The best pedagogy possible. It can happen anywhere. It takes time. A living wage helps. Three jobs doesn’t.
Academics in bloom.	Activists empaneled.