Blog Archive » 2007 » April

A new study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) comes just in time for graduation season and the new jobs our graduates are lining-up. On Pay Equity Day last Tuesday (April 24), the AAUW study revealed this outrageous statistic: within one year of graduation, women college graduates are earning 20 percent less than their male counterparts! This is a stunner. In spite of generations of women's advocacy to narrow the pay equity gap (in general, women earn about 77% of men's pay for the same work), the gap remains even among highly educated women compared to men with the same education in the same lines of work.

Among other findings, the AAUW study indicates that part of the problem may be found in the reluctance of many women to negotiate salaries. Of course, that sounds like blaming the victim — if the conditions for such blatant discrimination already exist, women's ability to ask for fair pay may well be compromised by a workplace environment that sends a subtle (or not so) message that she should just be grateful for what she gets. Another factor that's not discussed in the study is the fact that a large number of the women graduating from college today are already in the workforce — adult women account for a large part of the female majority in higher education today — and so they are likely to be starting from positions of considerable inequality from the outset. These are women who return to college often to leverage the lifelong process of improving their economic condition. Gains do not come overnight, particularly for women who are also raising families along, supporting elder parents, and coping with other life challenges.

Explanations of the data aside, the study is a call to action. Trinity Women, of course, are never shy — and are likely to be in the vanguard of advocates for improvements in the conditions of women in all of the workplaces they inhabit. So, to all of Trinity's new graduates, heed the call: don't be shy about money when that offer comes for your new/next job! Learn the facts about the pay grades for the position, and what men in comparable positions in the company are paid. Be firm about what you are worth — and if you are reasonable, your new employer will respect your self-confidence. If not, would you really want to work there? In the Washington region in particular, the demand for educated workers is so great that you will surely get other offers. Don't accept discrimination as a necessary condition of life — the economic condition of women and families will only improve if all of us raise our voices at every opportunity.

See equal pay, pay equity, gender gap

Yesterday, April 22, was Earth Day. Only one day? Just like Mother's Day, shouldn't we honor Mother Earth every day? In this time of growing acceptance of the plain fact of the environmental crisis already underway, we need more than one day and some earnest words. Yes, global climate change and industrial pollution are massive, complex challenges that require large solutions. But every person who takes up some space on this planet can make a contribution.

Earlier this year I was out at Great Falls taking photos. I was using a long lens, and as I began to focus on the rocks, I was stunned to see huge piles of trash trapped on top of the great crags, or bobbing up and down beneath the falls — see the photos at the top of this blog. Those green soda bottles, white plastic milk containers, and other plastic debris will likely sit on top of those rocks for many years, until a great storm sweeps them back into the river, where they will find their way to the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean. How did those bottles get there? Some human being somewhere started the chain reaction, throwing a bottle out of a car window where it washed down a culvert and into a Potomac tributary, or leaving trash at a picnic site near the river — or dumping trash deliberately in the dark of night.

In the summer I like to put my kayak into the Potomac above Great Falls, at Edwards Ferry. Each year, I am increasingly dismayed by the obvious debris along the river banks — those green bottles again, blue plastic barrels, old tires, even old appliances. Great blue herons pick their way across the trash on the riverbanks.

Yes, there are some bright signs amid the trash: last Sunday, driving into the city along Route 50, as I crossed the bridge at the Anacostia River I was surprised to see an eagle perched serenely on a branch a few yards upriver. Eagles have returned to many habitats in this area, and the restoration of bald eagles nationally has been one of the triumphs of conservation.

But I found myself worrying about that eagle, so out of place on the trash-strewn Anacostia. As Earth Day volunteers recounted to the Washington Post, the amount of trash along that river is disgusting, and the Anacostia River remains one of the nation's most endangered waterways.

What can any one of us do about this? Reducing each person's "carbon footprint" is an increasingly prominent part of environmental discussions. From the cars we drive to the disposition of that soda bottle, we have choices about the contributions we can make to the health of the planet. We should be advocates, certainly, for more serious public policy attention paid to global warming, deforestation, emission controls, fossil fuels, green buildings, and the many other issues in environmental protection. But starting with the smallest things we can control — where to put that empty soda bottle — we can demonstrate our environmental stewardship for the generations who will inherit this earth from us.

See earth day

Today is Founders Day at Trinity. After the endless waves of bad news about higher education in recent weeks, let's step back to reflect and remember the grander visions and loftier purposes that made our lives at Trinity today possible.

110 years ago, Sister Mary Euphrasia Taylor, the "woman on the scene" in Washington in 1897, did not have email. Nor did she have a telephone. But she was a prolific communicator. She wrote many passionate letters about the absolute need to have a Catholic college for women in Washington that would rival the great men's universities of that day, including the then-new Catholic University that was refusing to admit women. Sr. Euphrasia wrote this about her vision and determination to establish Trinity: "The project is so grand…the incentives so great…we shall succeed!"

Sister Julia McGroarty, the provincial superior in Massachusetts, did not have an automobile. She never saw an airplane. But she made it back and forth to Washington to direct Sister Mary Euphrasia in the work of founding Trinity. She was not daunted by severe criticism that arose from the Catholic right-wing protesting against the idea of higher education for women. She persisted in her belief, rooted in the work of St. Julie Billiart who founded the Sisters of Notre Dame, that women had every right to be educated to the highest level they could attain intellectually, and that such an education would reap many spiritual benefits as well.

These courageous and visionary women, and their sisters, had nothing that we would recognize as modern tools to organize and launch an entirely new institution. Euphrasia borrowed a horse and buggy to ride up North Capitol Street (she lived in the convent at the then-Academy of Notre Dame on K Street, where Gonzaga High School is today) to see the property she wanted to buy — a parcel on the east side of Glenwood Cemetery. North Capitol Street stopped at "boundary line" then, what we know as Florida Avenue today, and the road through Glenwood continued as Lincoln Road to Fourth Street.

Sister Julia was not quite happy with the reports about this parcel of land. She was skeptical of buying land that had so many hills and a ravine down through the middle. But Sister Euphrasia convinced her that this was a good deal, and the purchase went through.

On August 20, 1897, Sr. Euphrasia and four of her sisters went to the governmental office responsible for establishing corporations in the District, and they signed the first Articles of Incorporation establishing Trinity College. Their secular as well as religious names are captured forever on the charter: "Ella Taylor, Margaret Callahan, Mary O'Shea, Margaret Dempsey, Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, and Mary McHugh, known in the above-named Religious Order under and by the names,respectively, of Sister Euphrasia, Sister Teresa of the Sacred Heart, Sister Saint Agnes, Sister Gertrude of the Blessed Sacrament, Sister Cornelia and Sister Ignatius Marie, have associated, and do hereby associate ourselves together the purpose of establishing an institution of learning in the District of Columbia for the higher education of young women;" This was revolutionary, the establishment of the very first Catholic college for women in the nation that was founded specifically as a college, not a high school.

Three years later, on November 6, 1900, Trinity welcomed her first students and classes began.

We all experience times in our daily lives at Trinity when things seem hard, when we wonder if we can really do all that we are called to do to fulfill our various responsibilities in education. Whenever I'm having one of those moments — yes, I do have moments when I wonder if I can get it all done! — I think of those incredible women of 1897. The great visionaries who also knew how to take a grand idea and put it into practice. The leaders who did not need email, voicemail, telephones, airplanes or automobiles to do the very hard job of creating a brand new institution of higher education. All they needed was their faith, their courage, and their willingness to work very, very hard to make it real — and their ability to persuade others to invest in this grand cause.

Today, the Trinity community can shout it out to Sr. Julia McGroarty and Sr. Mary Euphrasia Taylor and all of the Sisters of Notre Dame: you did succeed! The project called Trinity is even grander, the incentives ever greater, and we will continue to succeed with their inspiration. All of us who share Trinity in common owe a huge debt of gratitude to those women who made our education and work here possible.

Let us give thanks to our Founders today, and let us honor them by renewing our resolve to continue the unfinished work of building Trinity for future generations.

How to make sense of it?

How to make sense of the fact… that 32 students and faculty of Virginia Tech woke up yesterday morning to begin another day of teaching and learning, but they lay dead in their classrooms and dorm rooms before lunchtime.

How to make sense of the fact… that families who yesterday morning were eagerly anticipating commencement or summer adventures are now planning funerals.

How to make sense of the fact… that a university, dedicated to advancing the highest expressions of human intellect, is devastated by the basest human impulse to violence.

How to make sense of the fact… that a madman can purchase guns freely in this society, and yet, so many voices are raised on blogs and public commentaries advocating more guns, saying that if more people were armed the shooter would have been stopped.

How to make sense of the fact… that this keeps happening, that the most advanced civilization in the history of the human race is also the most violent, victimizing its own children in the places of learning where they should be safest.

How to go on… we will walk this new landscape in solidarity with the students, faculty and staff of Virginia Tech in the weeks to come. We pray for them, for the victims, for their families. We will talk about how to prevent the "next time" from occurring. We will review emergency plans, security procedures, install more equipment, hire more guards, conduct more drills, armor our more open inclinations against the evil that shoots into classrooms.

But we know that random acts of madness will occur again, because we cannot possibly know the deep trauma, utter hopelessness that may be driving someone to plan an ultimate public act of despair. We will watch each other more closely for the outward signs, while planning silently for the moment when we may need to take cover.

Today is a very bleak day, not just for Virginia Tech, not just for higher education, but for this nation. We send completely mixed signals to our rising generations here, as well as to the world: we send the army far away to fight terrorism when, in fact, some of the worst terrorism occurs right here at the hands of those we think we know.

We pay lip service to the value of life while advocating the possession of weapons of death and destruction.

We say we are horrified by the bloody scenes from once-idyllic campuses while we have a hard time remembering whether we saw it on the news or in a movie or television show, since what we claim to abhor is also our entertainment.

We try to make sense of it all, when deep down, we know that what we have witnessed makes no sense at all. Recovery can only begin when we acknowledge the disease: responsible citizens need to raise their voices more urgently, loudly and passionately against the prevalence of violence in this culture, against the ready availability of weapons.

Read Valerie Strauss, "Universities are on Alert, Rethinking Own Security" in today's Washington Post.

Other articles from today's Washington Post, and New York Times, The Roanoke Times.

See "virginia tech"

Sixty years ago today, a very brave young man decided to play ball. Jackie Robinson wasn't just any rookie first baseman, taking the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. On that day, he was the first and only Black man every to play with a major league baseball team.

Imagine that, a time when "the national pasttime" was really an exclusively white male clubhouse. African American ballplayers had to play in the Negro League in those radically segregated days. Robinson's courageous first step from the dugout to the baseline came seven years before the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, the legal decision that triggered the end of the "separate but equal" doctrine and culture that had governed race relations after slavery.

Some believe that without Jackie Robinson's decisive step forward, desegregation might have come more slowly. Today Robinson's number — 42 — will appear on the backs of baseball players on every major league team in tribute to this remarkable pioneer.

Robinson died in 1972. The Brooklyn Dodgers now play in Los Angeles. Ebbets Field is gone. But as the sad events of the last few days remind us, racism remains alive and well. In a sense, today's tribute to Jackie Robinson comes just in time — just in time to remember that civil rights cannot be taken for granted; that genuine heroes like Jackie Robinson had to be willing to cross the line, to stand calmly and gracefully in a stadium full of hatred, such as he experienced in Philadelphia and other venues in that first year. The Rutgers Women who presented themselves so calmly and gracefully last week in the aftermath of the Imus incident stood in the shadow of Jackie Robinson, the latest symbols of our culture's protracted struggle with race.

Ironically, this week is also the 40th anniversary of the first woman to run the Boston Marathon — illegally. Katherine Switzer took to the streets on April 19, 2007 and completed all 26.2 miles that day in spite of the attempt of a race official to push her off the course.

Hard to imagine, those times not so long ago when African Americans could not play major league baseball, when women could not run the Boston Marathon.

Then again, considering the Imus episode, perhaps it's not so hard to imagine — in fact, to judge from the blogs and polls after the Imus situation, it seems that we still have a very long way to go to ensure that the hard-won gains of the civil rights pioneers do not dissipate in the "just get over it" prevalent attitude of many people today.

"Just Get Over It" is a code phrase for "it's not important" or "don't make waves." Imagine where we'd be if Jackie Robinson's teammates had adopted the "just get over it" attiude, or Branch Rickey the Dodger's owner, or the Supreme Court in 1954, or Rosa Parks finding a seat on the bus, or James Meredith when he walked into Ole' Miss, or Katherine Switzer lacing her sneakers. Thank goodness for all of the people who will never "get over it."

Thank goodness for Jackie Robinson. His remembrance has come just in time.

Read: Michael Wilbon column in the Washington Post

Read: New York Times articles

Read: "Breaking the Truth Barrier" Oped in the New York Times

Read: Sports Illustrated articles

Read: Katherine Switzer's account of her first Boston Marathon in the New York Times

Jackie Robinson, Negro League, Boston Marathon