The presidential campaign is mercifully complete. Whether or not it was your side that won, it is time to bring our focus back to making this place better.
Princeton University is home to some of the world's greatest thinkers, poring over issues of war and peace and of poverty and prosperity. It is also a place where social injustices still exist.
While Princeton furthers its commitment to racial and socioeconomic diversity, one critical but overlooked area remains: despite hundreds of millions of dollars in construction spending, it is nearly impossible to find a minority construction worker on campus. Why? The University requests, but does not require, that subcontractors follow the hiring guidelines applicable to all other employment at Princeton, according to Vice President for Administration Mark Burstein and Vice President for Facilities Mike McKay.
Burstein, McKay and others made clear that they recognize the current problem and want to solve it. But I am convinced the University could do much more to increase the diversity of its construction workforce.
To complete high quality projects at the lowest price, the University seeks the broadest possible pool of bids from construction firms. The pool is at first narrowed so that unionized and non-unionized firms aren't working together. Mixing the two would be an invitation to work stoppages and picketing by union members. As it turns out, nonunion firms usually can't compete with union firms on quality, so the status quo is that Princeton is an all-union campus.
Acting on our ascribed values would mean that the pool would next be narrowed down to those firms that could agree to conform to the University's affirmative action hiring principles. In reality, because of the racial uniformity of construction unions, this requirement would nearly dry the pool up.
The historical basis of racial exclusivity by unions is well documented, and having worked in and around union-dependent Democratic Party election campaigns, I'm convinced that things have not changed much. Unions are still, despite some face-saving and small-scale outreach efforts, almost exclusively white. As a result, the construction crews on campus turn out to be as diverse as the crowd at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.
The administration is aware of this particular gap between our own diversity rhetoric and the reality of union membership policies. "And in the long term, encouraging unions to open up their membership is one major way in which we can make a difference," Burstein told me. But for the time being, he said, "we are somewhat constrained in our hiring by the racial makeup of the unions."
In a period when the University is spending hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a campus for the 21st century, accepting homogenous construction crews is a body blow to the efforts of advocates and legislators striving to reduce income inequalities between the races. No amount of progressive legislation on the issues relating to these inequalities — including taxes, housing, and education — will make much of a difference if major employers like Princeton fail to demand that the opportunity to work be extended to all.
It is time to fully realize the good aspirations of this institution. Where we have stood up and defended the value of diversity — such as in last year's Supreme Court case on affirmative action policies in undergraduate admissions, Gratz v. Bollinger — we must now take one step further, and move into alignment our ascribed values and our hiring and economic decisions.
It is not enough to request and encourage construction firms to diversify the crews they bring to campus. Judging by the racial homogeneity of the construction workers on campus, this technique is either not working or working too slowly to be justified.
Burstein and the administration underestimate the power of the purse, and the ability of the free market to satisfy any demand on diversity that Princeton could make. It is probably true that making such a demand on construction firms and unions would be costly. The stakes — for the working-class minority communities of central New Jersey, and for Princeton's institutional integrity — are even higher.
Our chosen schedule of relentless planning and building leaves little time for reflection, but this issue is too important not to think about. The University should gather a group to address and find a solution to it soon. Let us build a legacy of our commitment to diversity into the walls of Whitman College and the other structures now rising across campus. Thomas Bohnett is a sophomore from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.
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