By Alexis Thweatt
Towson University students got a lesson in income inequality recently during a showing of the film “Inequality for All” and a nationwide live video broadcast by the film’s maker, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
The Feb. 20 event – which was sponsored by the National Association of Personnel Administrators and hosted locally by the Towson Office of Civic Engagement and Leadership and the Center for Student Diversity – allowed more than 200 universities from around the country to watch the film and then talk to Reich via video chat.
“I really learned a lot — a true eye opener,” said Rachel Babcock, a junior at Towson. “It was kind of scary to think about life after college financially.”
Scott Hackett, the coordinator of Civic Engagement, said he thought this screening would be a great way to introduce students to the topic of economic inequality and get them thinking of what they could do to help.
“We practice the theory of ‘so what’ and ‘now what,’” Hackett said. “We want to introduce students to different problems, really look at the problem, and then find out what we can do to solve it.”
The Office of Civic Engagement and Leadership encourages student involvement in different topics that could use student action. Hackett primarily helps with political engagement, environmental initiatives, collegiate readership and the Tiger pledge.
Hackett was not the only Towson staff that saw the importance of the film.
Towson professor John McTague of the Department of Political Science gave his students extra credit to attend the film and write a reflection piece about it.
“I can see why Reich is a professor at Berkeley,” said Mctague, referring to the University of California at Berkeley. “It would take me a semester to teach what he did in an hour and a half.”
The film’s main theme is that the rich keep getting richer while the country’s poor get poorer. Multimillionaires get major tax cuts while middle class families are paying taxes that could help fund their cost of living, according to the film.
“It’s hard to change the status quo in political power,” McTague said. “Money talks, and the rich can afford to keep the status quo in their favor.”
During the video discussion, Reich said that the country’s minimum wage should be raised to at least $10.40 an hour. Reich said middle class consumers will have the purchasing power needed to drive the economy if they have more income in their pockets.
“Someone working full time should not live in poverty, and their children should not have to live in poverty either,” Reich said in during the webcast.
Reich has written more than 13 books about different strategies that could help make the economy more stable. Raising the minimum wage is only one, he said. He said the government should also provide more financial support to community colleges so that more people could afford higher education.