These are the breaks

The Columbia winter holiday break controversy rages unabated. Tempers are flaring and tensions are high. Academia is now like a volatile tinderbox, ready to burst at any minute. Presently the fuse burns at the point of determining whether the fall semester should begin before Labor Day to afford more time between final exams and winter break. Several arguments have been made for and against this idea, but there has not been much talk of the Labor Day holiday itself.

Students and professors here lead a demanding academic life. Those who want to excel must be prepared to endure a lot of stress, including but not limited to spending late nights in the office or at Butler Library, researching and preparing for exams while navigating inner New York, and staying well fed and healthy in a cramped and smoggy city. But let’s talk a little bit about labor.
Most Ivy Leaguers may or may not be familiar with an actual life of labor and the unique stress that it brings. I’m not talking about the steely psychic endurance that it takes to memorize long documents but the physical willpower and fortitude necessary to wake up before dawn every morning and get showered and ready to go mow lawns, turn wrenches, mop floors, stock shelves, count change, or patrol sidewalks, for hours on end, days on end, months, years. That’s labor.

We’d all like to think we live in solidarity with the working person. Many heavy volumes exist on the state of labor, with much of the important research undoubtedly coming from within these very walls. All of us, students and faculty, surely do chores at home or do volunteer work involving thankless, menial tasks. We’re all good folks. And at some point someone at the top even gave the working stiffs their own holiday, Labor Day. And when it comes to that day and a break from our own duties, we all stand in serious, immutable solidarity with the noble laborer.

But Columbia students are not laborers. Neither are Columbia professors. Most of us hope we never will be, or that we will never have to be. Nobody ever worries about being forced into the life of an academic in order to put food on the table. Because whether you credit your presence here to your own hard work, heredity, the name of your high school, or the gullibility of the admissions or tenure committee, there are many others who had the same attributes who, for whatever reason, never made it. Whether student or professor, whether looking for babysitters before Labor Day or sleeping at LaGuardia on Christmas Eve, you are lucky to be here. I am lucky. We are all very lucky.

The brotherhood of man is a wondrous thing. But one look at the demographic difference between the staff and employees of Columbia and the student body puts the lie to the idea that we all have equal obligations and stresses in this life. But priority remains on the holiday. Here’s an idea: rather than leaving Columbia’s campus a ghost town on Labor Day, with everybody gone (or everybody here), why not give the actual employees the day off while the students and faculty hold classes without them for one day? Ever wonder what a day at Columbia would be like without the guy who wipes the tables at Ferris Booth Commons or without the trash cans on campus being emptied as students stand around and discuss Foucault or which bars and restaurants they’ll be frequenting tonight?

Obviously nobody is paying tens of thousands of dollars per semester to empty trash cans. And I’m not suggesting we go that far, especially since I probably come pre-loaded with more experience than most in that field. And yes, I’ve had to scrub toilets in order to buy food before, and not just to avoid being grounded or to put diversity of experience on my law school résumé. I’m happy to leave my nose in a book for now, and I’ll stay fascinated by Foucault for as long as it keeps me from having to punch a clock for sheer survival.
But how about one day (Labor-less Day?) of no service or labor at all on campus to see what it’s like? And it might even help with that whole winter holiday break thing in the meantime, somehow.

The author is a student in the School of General Studies majoring in classical studies.