Last week we looked at the situation at Harvard, where the lords and masters of the wokest of the woke were looking decidedly unenlightened after they laid off all of their hourly subcontractors working in the dining halls. Of course, all of the tenured professors and administrators were getting their salaries and benefits whether they were on campus or not. It was also noted at the time that Harvard has the largest endowment of any university in the country, valued in the tens of billions of dollars. They couldn’t afford to keep a relatively small force of people making 18 bucks an hour on the payroll for a while during the lockdown? Particularly when they lecture the rest of the nation about the need to take care of those on the losing end of the whole income inequality thing?

Apparently, the public pressure was a bit too much and the optics were awful. It turns out that Harvard has reconsidered their decision and will now continue to keep the paychecks flowing to the little people… at least for a while. (Free Beacon)

Facing pressure and protests from employment rights advocates on and off campus, Harvard University on Friday agreed to pay its contract dining hall employees and other workers through the end of the semester.

Student groups launched a call-in campaign last Friday aimed at administrators after the university said it planned to pay its direct-hire dining employees for just 30 days after their jobs were eliminated and did not extend the paid leave to contract workers…

Jason Newton, a spokesman for the university, told the Washington Free Beacon that Harvard had agreed to provide “pay and benefits to direct-hire and contract workers through May 28, and also financial relief to keep the childcare centers on Harvard’s campus open through June 30, ensuring pay and benefits for their 180 employees.”

Well, that was nice of them I suppose. Of course, it probably would have been nicer if they hadn’t needed to be publicly shamed into doing it before making the call. If you’re going to talk the talk you need to walk the walk, as the saying goes.

But was this even the right thing to do to begin with? If their school wasn’t always indoctrinating its students on subjects of social justice and income inequality all the time, I’d have been more understanding of the fact that Harvard is a private university. While they are eligible to receive certain federal funding available to all institutions of higher education, they primarily rely on their tuition and donations to run their operation, much like a private business.

When you think of it in those terms, all of the cafeteria workers should have been eligible for the newly expanded unemployment programs funded by the stimulus bill. That would have left them temporarily out of a job, but collecting the equivalent of 25 bucks per hour. I get the feeling that most of them weren’t making that kind of money working in the dining hall, so it’s not as if they’d have been shoved into the poor house.

Also, we’re seeing yet another case of students who are ostensibly supposed to be in one of the highest-rated universities in the world to get an education spending their time ginning up phone drives and protests and being able to influence the administration of the school to change their policies. This has happened over more subjects than you can count, from Black Lives Matter to canceling appearances by conservative speakers.

As long as the administrators of colleges and universities continue to allow the inmates to run the asylum, they’re pretty much getting what they deserve. And they’re the ones filling the students’ heads with all this wokeness to begin with, so administrators are truly just reaping what they’ve sown.