In an opinion piece in The New York Times on Monday, a worker named Rosa Ines Rivera said that she’d passed up on an appointment to get a spot on her lung checked for cancer to limit co-pays after a doctor said her daughter might need surgery.

Rivera, who wrote that she’d been employed by the school for 17 years, added:

Harvard is the richest university in the nation, with a $35 billion endowment. But I can’t live on what Harvard pays me. I take home between $430 and $480 a week, and this August, I fell behind on my $1,150 rent and lost my apartment. Now my two kids and I are staying with my mother in public housing, with all four of us sharing a single bedroom. I grew up in the projects and on welfare. I want my 8-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son to climb out of the cycle of poverty. But for most of my time at Harvard it’s been hard.

During the weeks of dialogue, in which students walked out of classes in support of workers and staged sit-ins in administrative buildings, the university and its supporters countered that workers were making about $22 an hour, higher than most local food-service workers. The school also pointed out that it had asked all union workers, not just those in dining, to pay more for insurance coverage, and that insurance costs are rising. (The Obama administration announced this week that premiums for Obamacare insurance plans were up 25 percent.)

But the headlines (such as “Harvard Has Billions, So Why Won’t It Pay Workers a Living Wage?”) and the general sentiment among Harvard students and some faculty members were largely sympathetic to the workers, asking why the richest school in the country and the birthplace of some of the nation’s most progressive policies couldn’t part with a few million dollars and significantly improve quality of life for the workers who help keep the university and its students running.

“Time for the school to show some moral leadership and set an example for the rest of higher ed,” Emil Guillermo, a self-identified working-class kid who attended the school on scholarship in the 1970s, wrote in Diverse Issues in Higher Education. “Harvard can do that easily by taking care of the people who never graduate but choose to give their lives to make Harvard work.”

While it is true that endowment funds are sometimes earmarked for specific uses, and that the school's endowment reported a disappointing 2 percent loss this year, the school announced last month that it had raised north of $7 billion in a capital campaign.

Clint Smith, a graduate student at the university, said he hoped the strike and other conversations on campus about whether graduate students should unionize would spark a broader dialogue about representation and whether people on campus are afforded compensation and opportunities “commensurate with what they contribute.”