TO THE EDITOR:
If you walked into Lenoir Dining Hall on Monday, chances are that you saw a group of students protesting Aramark, the company that contracts with the University to run campus dining services.
They were there in support of Lezlie Sumpter, a longtime Carolina Dining Services employee who was terminated this past May.
Nationally, we've spent a lot of time pontificating about so-called "moral values" - but this discussion has given short shrift to core democratic values of fairness and justice.
These include providing a living wage to workers, making health care affordable and accessible to all citizens, spreading the tax burden equitably, protecting choice and other freedoms and using natural resources wisely.
As with the larger use of "moral values" rhetoric, "academic integrity" has also been co-opted by right-wing groups and stripped of its, well, integrity.
Where is the integrity in "nickel and diming" our lowest-paid campus workers by outsourcing their jobs to renegade private firms like Aramark, which are unaccountable for their notoriously hostile working conditions? Where is the integrity in terminating workers who speak out against abuses?
"Moral values" and its variant, "academic integrity," has been hijacked and perverted, yes.
Now is a good time to start dealing with these paradoxes and filling them with better, more authentic ethical meanings.
