Graduation is six weeks away. We were all hoping for an entertaining and inspiring speaker. Do these past choices get you excited for this year’s commencement: Joe Biden, Billy Joel, Kurt Vonnegut, Phylicia Rashad (aka Clair Huxtable), Walter Cronkite? Well, they shouldn’t. This year the administration selected Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Maybe you already know of the well-established partnership between Syracuse University and JPMorgan Chase. Our university is becoming an appendage of these corporations. Who is to say their interests will not influence university policies or classroom activities? In fact, they already have! You may say that this alliance opens up new job opportunities and inserts Syracuse’s name into the business world. But when does the university stop becoming a university and start becoming a corporate training program? The administration’s high-held motto ‘Insights Incite Change’ seems somewhat meaningless as we embrace, not challenge, the status quo.  

Maybe you recognize Dimon’s name from an article regarding the Wall Street bailout or the multi-million dollar bonuses Wall Street executives still receive. While we know JPMorgan Chase was forced to accept bailout money and repaid it in full, the bank and its officials still represent a system that is failing the American people. Although Dimon humored us by adopting a $1 salary, he also took about $17 million in bonuses for 2009.

Wall Street bonuses jumped about 17 percent, while unemployment hovers around 10 percent. Homelessness increased 34 percent in New York City in 2009, reported The New York Times, though the world’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by 50 percent, according to the BBC.

We write to all of you as concerned students. Concerned about the shrinking job market and the growing disparity between the extremely wealthy and the unjustifiably impoverished. We are wary of the close ties our government, and now our schools, have with corporate machines. We will inherit this world and, like every generation’s duty and right, we seek to change it as we see fit. We are the young intelligentsias. We are the bearers of the fruit to come and we need to decide what that fruit will be and how it will be produced. Will it sprout from humanity, compassion and love? Will we put our neighbor’s goodwill in front of our own? Or will this fruit be born from a tree that reeks of age, one that repeats mistakes over and over again?  

We demand of this university a real change — one that does not welcome with open arms crooks of the old age who value personal gain above a collective prosperity. We require that this administration rise to an ethical stature that does not connote a digression into comfort, only to sacrifice visionary goals. Political ambivalence, on any scale, puts to shame revolutionaries like King, Cady Stanton, and Mario Savio. Acquiescence in the face of adversity results in tyranny.   

We call upon all students, faculty and staff to resist and organize against this administration, to revoke the invitation of Jamie Dimon to speak at commencement and to select a speaker everyone will benefit from hearing. We will have a meeting on Thursday night (April 1) at 8 p.m. in Panasci Lounge, and we invite all outraged individuals who seek to create their own future.

Ashley Owen
Senior in the College of Arts and Sciences

Mariel Fiedler
Senior in the College of Arts and Sciences

Ryan Hickey
Senior in the College of Arts and Sciences

Published on March 31, 2010 at 12:00 pm