Cheapskate Dartmouth Doesn't Pay On-Campus Student Workers "A Living Wage" - Granite Grok

Cheapskate Dartmouth Doesn’t Pay On-Campus Student Workers “A Living Wage”

Dartmouth CollegeWould it surprise you to learn that students who work at jobs on campus at Dartmouth College are not starting at $15.00 an hour? In most instances, students employed by the Ivy League college don’t even earn $10.00 an hour.

$7.75 is the lowest hourly wage rate that the College recommends for its employees, following a rubric that analyzes the skills required for a job and the amount of responsibility it entails, among other factors.

Wait just one damn minute. Where does Dartmouth get off making decisions about the value of any given hour of labor based on skills or responsibilities?

Don’t worry. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Student Tour Guides recently ‘expressed dissatisfaction’ with the pay scale.

Members of the admissions office met with tour guides on July 12 to discuss issues that guides have raised with the office’s policies for their jobs, including payment, tour scheduling and inauthenticity in the tour script.

One issue that came up during the meeting was payment. Multiple tour guides have expressed dissatisfaction with their pay scale, particularly because of how it compares with other jobs on campus. The entry-level salary for new tour guides is $7.75 an hour, which increases to $8 an hour after 10 tours. After 35 tours, the rate is $9 an hour, and after 70 tours it is $10 an hour.

There is a plan to raise the wages when the fall semester begins, after the summer tour season–the busiest according to the tour guides.

The tour guides have other concerns as well.

Another issue that came up during the meeting was the tour guide script. Multiple students complained that they feel they cannot express their true feelings about campus. Kesler, for example, said she often feels tokenized to speak about her experiences as a Native American student on campus. She also said that the admissions office has pressured tour guides to say that they feel safe on campus, even though she and other women of color often do not.

Last spring, Kesler, Michael Harteveldt ’19 and Anisha Ariff ’19, who are also tour guides, helped to rewrite a portion of the script that discussed Dartmouth’s history with Native American students. The previous script had not adequately discussed Dartmouth’s history of attempting to religiously convert Native Americans, and the racial undertones of the “education,” Harteveldt said. Kesler added that it was misleading in how it portrayed the situation for Native American students today. For example, it claimed that the College has a Native American department, when in fact it only has a Native American program, she said.

So, Tour guides want more money, and they want to tell prospective students that the campus is not safe and it has a history of cultural and religious bigotry.

The overwhelmingly politically Marxist progressive white tower social justice inclusive overseers should feel an obligation to share the diversity cult’s laundry list of white privilege indiscretions with prospective customers. You know, get it off their collective chests. Let the snowflakes and their parents know what they are in for up front.

But they will then have to explain how Dartmouth sets wages based on “skills required for a job and the amount of responsibility it entails, among other factors,” which–if we’re honest–is an 180-degree shift from the whole diversity cult dogma.

Social Justice degrees provide no productive value to any operation and may, and I say “may” to be polite because I mean must, have a negative impact on the productivity of others.

Not that Dartmouth cares. They get paid either way, which brings us back to the tour guides. The college says it is planning to change the wages.

It will be interesting to see what that means.`

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