Scholar: Low-wage workers optimistic about the system

As a university community, it can be easy to lose sight of what is going on outside of the campus borders. But at Tuesday's Urban Studies public lecture, speaker Katherine Newman seemed to conquer both worlds, spending her teaching life at Harvard University and her research time on the streets of Harlem studying low-income wage earners. In a talk entitled "Winning, Losing, Treading Water," Newman -- an urban studies professor in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a prolific author -- spoke primarily about her 1999 book No Shame In My Game and the research that led up to it. Starting in 1993, she spent 18 months living in Harlem and conducting an intensive study of 10 low-income workers chosen from an initial group of 400. Four years later, Newman came back to see how they were doing and if their lives had significantly changed. Time, she said, had treated them well. Although she expected "real disaster," over half of the workers had increased their salaries by taking union jobs or moving up within their own workforces. To a crowd of about 100 -- most of whom were Urban Studies majors -- Newman explained the keys to the improvement of her underprivileged research subjects. Although 18 percent of the population of Harlem was unemployed and 41 percent was below the poverty level when she visited, the people there generally had a positive attitude about life, Newman said. They were critical of long-term welfare recipients and quick to condemn those that didn't have jobs. Newman researched the reasons why many of them could not find work and found that it was often due to their age, race or place of residence. But they remained believers in the system, she said. Most of them saw there were racial, social and economic barriers, but their attitude was just to "get over it" and get a job. As one subject said, "If you have a job, you have a little bit of something." As a social scientist, Newman was quick to blame the seemingly unfair factors, and was surprised that in their position the people she studies didn't simply make the same excuses. Newman gave an impassioned answer to a question about the effectiveness of social science research. "I'm sick to death of hearing people tell me that what we do doesn't matter," she said. "Most responsible social scientists conclude their studies by talking about what they think ought to be done," she added. "That is a sacred responsibility. We get out there and try to get the message out." Drawing cheers from the audience, she expressed her criticism of social scientists who come to her with trivial problems. She advises her students to "come to me with something that matters and you write a book that's going to change the way the world thinks about a problem. That's what you do." Urban Studies majors Ariel Bierbaum and Debra Kurshan, both College seniors, were on the committee who asked Newman to come speak. "Her approach is very applicable to our research," Kurshan said. "In the past [the speakers were] highly theoretical," Bierbaum said. "She offers a very different and grounded perspective about it. We want to get out there and do things, and here is someone who is doing research and is in academia but is affecting change in a very concrete way."