Steps in the right direction
For some time now I have been following your campaign for a living wage at the University. I am a professor of American history at the University of Texas in Austin and an alumnus of the University of Virginia where I was an English major in the late sixties. I am writing to you today to express my solidarity with you as you continue to exert pressure on the administration and the Board of Visitors to make it possible for the least privileged members of the University community to live in dignity. The commitment of the Living Wage Campaign, now in its 14th year, is a testimony to the values and concerns essential to creating a community which recognizes the worth of all its members. When Thomas Jefferson established his Academical Village in 1819, he sought to create nonsectarian space for the education of our nation's future leaders. He did not have in mind workers, which for him would have been the slaves who labored at Monticello, or the yeoman farmers and their families in the surrounding countryside who would benefit from the leadership of those privileged graduates of the University.