Remarks—Service of Compassion
Daniel F. Sullivan—September 14, 2005

We are here as a St. Lawrence community to express together, in solidarity, our compassion for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. When such devastation befalls brothers and sisters, we can do no other than share our deepest sympathy, our complete support.

And truly heartening has been the outpouring of support from all over the nation, but in no greater measure anywhere than from this community. Groups and individuals all over the campus and in our community have organized benefits to raise money, individuals are donating to relief funds administered nationally—a larger total of funds given than for any previous disaster—and the University too has found ways to help, most notably by enrolling a number of students who were attending or about to attend universities in the affected area but who found that impossible all of the sudden, in many cases after losing their belongings and records and having to evacuate with great courage in the face of the storm’s destruction.

For all of this we must be very grateful. These are expressions of the best Americans have to offer brothers and sisters in need, examples of the kind of generosity of spirit of which we can all be very proud.

At the same time this storm revealed in an almost unique way a larger set of issues America has yet to confront successfully—issues that are deeply rooted in the growing inequality of wealth and income in this country, and issues having to do with the residual effects of the racial divide that still haunts us as a nation. When I was a student at St. Lawrence in the 1960’s, America ranked something like 34th among industrial nations in the extent to which wealth and income were distributed unequally—or, to say it the other way around, in the extent that wealth and income were highly concentrated at the top of the social class structure. Today I believe we rank first—that is, no industrial country in the world has a more unequal distribution of wealth and income than America. We have seen enormous gains in the wealth and income of the top 5% of the distribution, and no gains and even declines in wealth and income for those below the middle. The rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. To paraphrase the Gospel According to St. Matthew: “To him that hath will be given, and from him that hath not will be taken, even that which he hath.” Those are expressions of what the economists call the principle of cumulative advantage.

There are many reasons for this that I won’t seek to disentangle for you in this setting. The relevance for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is that the invulnerability of those with high wealth and income has grown, and the vulnerability of those with the least wealth and income has grown. Someone said that the wealth and income of the inhabitants of New Orleans are almost completely correlated with how much above or below sea level their homes were. The same is roughly true of the institutions of higher education in the area in and around New Orleans: the larger the institution’s endowment and the older it is, the higher the ground on which its campus stood, and the less the damage from Hurricane Katrina.

We know too that race and social class are still highly correlated in America. Almost anything that has a disproportionate impact on low income people also has a disproportionate impact on non-white Americans. The impact of Hurricane Katrina is a true national disaster. Understanding its aftermath reveals the ongoing national disaster of our increasingly stratified and rigid class structure—there is less upward mobility in America today; new generations are increasingly stuck in the social class positions of their parents—and it reveals the continuing impact of a racial divide that should be embarrassing to us all.

So as we lend our hands and our resources to mitigate the disaster that has befallen our neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi—and this we must do with equal commitment to all affected by the storm, my previous comments notwithstanding—we must at the same time resolve to restore our commitment to creating an America where upward mobility is the realistic hope for all, an America where the commitment by those at the bottom of the class structure to the democratic institutions that are our signature as a nation is not eroded beyond redemption by cynicism bred in their understanding of how the principle of cumulative advantage may relegate them and their children to the bottom of our system forever.

Our compassion for the victims of Hurricane Katrina must expand into an ongoing compassion for those negatively affected by the dynamic of growing income and wealth inequality in America as a whole. We can choose, through our political activism, to get America to a better place on this, and we can choose, as a University, to continue the fight for diversity to which we have long been committed. My heart goes out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina; I am inspired by your compassion and activism on their behalf!