Leveling the field in student employment

Doing it wrong: Questioning the morality of LASO’s date auction

Last weekend, the Latin American Student Organization (LASO) hosted a Valentine’s Day Auction, during which, according to the student Digest, LASO would “auction off dates with more than 15 lovely Bowdoin students.” LASO is to be applauded for its effort to raise money for a very deserving organization, Safe Passage. Nevertheless, I think there is something inherently immoral about a date auction in general. This isn’t an attack specifically geared towards LASO. It is a critique of the date auction.
What does the term “date” invoke? Most people associate a date with free time, a fun experience, an activity over which one has autonomy. Now think of the word “auction.” What comes to mind? Sadly, because of this country’s history, we are often reminded of phenomena such as slavery and prostitution when we hear the word “auction.” We also think of objects. In an auction, the idea of obligation is involved. After an item is bought at an auction, it is required to be given to the highest bidder. Already, there is a contradiction in this term. A date that is sold in the context of a date auction is not really a date, because there is an element of obligation involved. There are definitely social pressures at play, as with all sorts of agreements. A date resulting from a date auction is more like a debt than a date.
At a date auction, people are bid on in exchange for money. When you buy a certain amount of time with someone, you are effectively putting monetary value on them. In a date auction, you are not only paying for a date, you are payng for a specific person. If you were just paying for a date, then the auction would be anonymous.

Doing it wrong

Leveling the field in student employment

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

January 31, 2014

The different types of student employment trouble me. For many students at Bowdoin, working here is their first job experience. So when the College places an inexperienced student at a desk job so undemanding that they are able to study the entire time—what is Bowdoin teaching that student about work? We are—truthfully—still at a quite impressionable age; the jobs that students are placed in should attempt to reflect the reality of work life.

There are students who work and there are those who do not work. For some students, real life budget problems creep into the bubble of campus life. And while it is false to assume that everyone who works is busier than everyone who doesn’t, and that everyone who works is low income and vice versa, it is true that those who do not work are separated from a reality of life. Here’s a shocker: when people ask you what you want to do for a living in the future, they are referring to your job, because you need to work to live.

Students who do not work are privileged in not having to realize that reality until they graduate, and divisive privileges are not something we need more of at this school, or in this world in general. However, avoiding a job until graduation is not solely advantageous. Students who graduate from Bowdoin without having been employed are missing out on valuable work experience, time management improvement and development of essential life skills.
There is not only a distinction between the unemployed and the employed at Bowdoin; there is also a distinction between students with busy, sometimes strenuous jobs and these with conspicuously relaxed jobs.

It is a problem that some students have jobs serving in the dining hall—a consistently demanding job—and others who have desk jobs where they mainly occupy a seat waiting for the rare chance that someone has a question. This set of differences creates a hierarchy of labor within the College and subsequently breeds different ideologies of labor and laborers.

Additionally, because there is so much variation regarding the intensity of different jobs on campus, students often vie for these cushy jobs and cast aside the more demanding ones. Besides creating disparate opportunities for students already strained for studying time, this variation further extends the notion that service and labor jobs are undesirable and should be seen as a last resort.

I recently talked to one of my friends who works for Dining Service, and she expressed that she often feels ignored by her peers while on the job. Disregarding workers in uniform—and in turn dehumanizing them—is a deplorable trait of the upper class that we must work to undo. If more students worked in Dining or in similar service jobs across campus, this would help create an atmosphere of added respect for service employees that is not necessarily present in all students.

I don’t think that all students should have the same job, but I think that all jobs should be realistic. It is arguably unethical for two students to be paid the same amount of money when one student has a very demanding job and the other does not. A job should not be a paid form of study hall.

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