The New Student Movement:
Protests Rock The Corporate University
by Liza Featherstone
The Nation magazine, May 15, 2000
"We have the university by the balls," said Nati
Passow, a University of Pennsylvania junior, in a meeting with
his fellow anti-sweatshop protesters. "Whatever way we twist
them is going to hurt." Passow was one of thirteen Penn students--the
group later grew to include forty--occupying the university president's
office around the clock in early February to protest the sweatshop
conditions under which clothing bearing the U-Penn logo is made.
The Penn students, along with hundreds of other members of United
Students Against Sweatshops nationwide, were demanding that their
university withdraw from the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an
industry-backed monitoring group, and instead join the Worker
Rights Consortium (WRC), an organization independent of industry
influence, founded by students in close cooperation with scholars,
activists and workers'-rights organizations in the global South.
At first the administration met the students with barely polite
condescension. In one meeting, President Judith Rodin was accompanied
by U- Penn professor Larry Gross, an earring- wearing baby boomer
well-known on campus for his left-wing views, who urged the protesters
to have more faith in the administration and mocked the sit-in
strategy, claiming he'd "been there, done that." President
Rodin assured them that a task force would review the problem
by February 29, and there was no way she could speed up its decision.
She admonished them to "respect the process."
Watching the Penn students negotiate with their university's
president, it was clear they didn't believe any of her assurances.
They knew there was no reason to trust that the administration
would meet one more arbitrary deadline after missing so many others--so
they stayed in the office. After eight days of torture by folk-singing,
acoustic guitar, recorders, tambourines and ringing cell phones,
as well as a flurry of international news coverage, Judith Rodin
met the protesters halfway by withdrawing from the FLA. (To students'
frustration, the task force decided in early April to postpone
a decision about WRC membership until later this spring.)
The most remarkable thing about the Penn students' action
was that it wasn't an isolated or spontaneous burst of idealism.
Penn's was just the first anti-sweatshop sit- in of the year;
by mid-April students at the universities of Michigan, Wisconsin,
Oregon, Iowa and Kentucky, as well as SUNY-Albany, Tulane, Purdue
and Macalester, had followed suit. And the sit-in wasn't the protesters'
only tactic: Purdue students held an eleven- day hunger strike.
Other students chose less somber gestures of dissent. In late
February the University of North Carolina's anti-sweatshop group,
Students for Economic Justice, held a nude-optional party titled
"I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Sweatshop Clothes." In
late March, in an exuberant expression of the same principle,
twelve Syracuse students biked across campus nude. The protests
were a coordinated effort; members of United Students Against
Sweatshops (USAS), which was founded three years ago and now has
chapters at more than 200 schools, work closely with one another,
a process made easier by the many listservs and websites that
the students use to publicize actions, distribute information
and help fuel turnout.
Though the largest, most successful--and before Seattle, the
most visible--thread of the movement has focused on improving
work conditions in the $2.5 billion collegiate apparel industry,
university licensing policies have not been the only targets of
recent anti-corporate agitation on campus. This year, from UC-Davis
to the University of Vermont, students have held globalization
teach-ins, planned civil disobedience for the April IMF/World
Bank meetings, protested labor policies at the Gap and launched
vigorous campaigns to drive Starbucks out of university dining
services. In snowy January, at the conservative Virginia Commonwealth
University, twenty students slept outside the vice president's
office for two nights to protest the university's contract with
McDonald's (the school promised the fast-food behemoth a twenty-year
monopoly over the Student Commons). Students at Johns Hopkins
and at Wesleyan held sit-ins demanding better wages for university
workers. And at the end of March hundreds of students, many bearing
hideously deformed papier-mache' puppets to illustrate the potential
horrors of biotechnology, joined Boston's carnivalesque protest
against genetic engineering.
With a joie de vivre that the American economic left has probably
lacked since before WWI, college students are increasingly engaged
in well-organized, thoughtful and morally outraged resistance
to corporate power. These activists, more than any student radicals
in years, passionately denounce the wealth gap, globally and in
the United States, as well as the lack of democratic accountability
in a world dominated by corporations. While some attend traditionally
political schools like Evergreen, Michigan and Wisconsin, this
movement does not revolve around usual suspects; some of this
winter's most dramatic actions took place at campuses that have
always been conservative, like the University of Pennsylvania,
Virginia Commonwealth and Johns Hopkins. At this article's writing
in late April, students were staging several significant anti-corporate
protests every week. It is neither too soon, nor too naively optimistic,
to call it a movement.
Few of these students resemble--either in appearance or tactics--the
hooded anarchist kids who famously threw rocks through Starbucks
windows in Seattle last November. They look as if they shop at
the Gap (and most of them do). Yet the movement does have an anti-hierarchical
spirit; the Penn anti-sweat group, for example, made all decisions
by consensus. Unlike their anarchist cohort, however, the student
anti-corporatists have leaders and spokespeople--and most of them
agree that if the movement is to maintain momentum, they will
need many more. Fortunately, each major action seems to draw more
people in, and new leaders are emerging fast--some students who
were on the periphery of the Penn group when I visited the sit-in
in early February, for example, have already assumed official
leadership positions within the organization.
Much of the struggle concerns the corporatization of higher
education. Universities are run increasingly like private firms,
and have ever-more intimate relations with private industry [see
David L. Kirp, "The New U," April 17]. During one anti-sweat
occupation in mid-April, for example, student activists at the
University of Oregon led a campus tour of sites that illustrated
the institution's numerous ties to corporations (one stop was
the Phil Knight Library, named after Nike's president and CEO).
A nationwide student group called 180/Movement for Democracy and
Education, based at the University of Wisconsin, articulates this
problem, and its connection to other issues, more consistently
than any other group, even leading teach-ins on how World Trade
Organization policies affect higher education. But almost all
of the current student struggles--whether over tuition increases,
apparel licenses, socially responsible investing, McDonald's in
the student union, the rights of university laundry workers, a
dining-hall contractor's investment in private prisons or solidarity
with the striking students in Mexico--focus on the reality of
the university as corporate actor.
Battle lines are now being drawn on a number of campuses,
including Penn and Wisconsin, over whether universities will give
in to student demands and agree to join the Worker Rights Consortium.
WRC members require their apparel licensees to comply with a strict
code of conduct--guaranteeing workers a living wage and the right
to organize unions- -and mandate full public disclosure of wages,
factory locations and working conditions. By denying industry
any role in its governance and giving power instead to a board
composed of administrators, students and human rights scholars
and activists, the WRC provides a nascent model for the kind of
university decision-making the students would like to see: a process
free of corporate influence. It is also a model in which, so far,
student activists have set the terms of discussion. No wonder
so many university administrators, many of whom now like to be
called "CEOs," have resisted it so savagely, even, in
several cases, permitting quite forceful police treatment of peaceful
protesters.
Yet many universities that once rebuffed the students' entreaties
have since backed down, a testament to the skill and energy of
the student organizers. The wave of sit-ins this spring was deliberately
timed to precede the WRC's early April founding conference. Before
the Penn sit-in, only a handful of institutions, none of which
had substantial apparel-licensing contracts, belonged to the new
organization; now forty-seven institutions belong, and the WRC
founding meeting was attended by students or administrators from
forty schools. The night before the meeting, the entire ten-school
University of California system joined the organization and sent
a representative to New York for the event. Some institutions
joined without any building takeovers, choosing to avert bad publicity
through graceful capitulation. "A lot of them joined without
a sit-in because they thought there would be a sit-in the next
day," says Maria Roeper, an anti-sweat activist taking a
semester off from Haverford to coordinate the WRC.
Indeed, student activists have managed to put administrators
on the defensive. On April 7 student anti-sweat protesters wearing
duct tape over their mouths--to protest the fact that students
have no say in campus decisions--met the University of Oregon
president at the airport, frightening him so badly he left the
baggage claim and hid in the bathroom. Even more striking, that
same day, was the sight of dozens of suited university administrators
at the WRC conference scurrying to "organize" among
themselves. Many were pressured into WRC membership and worry
that they won't have as much influence as they want over the new
monitoring organization. Administrators were supposed to elect
their representatives to the governing board at the founding meeting,
but instead they asked for more time; they are now expected to
do so later this spring, after holding their own meeting in Chicago.
"It's only natural that they should want to do that,"
says Roeper. "The student group [USAS] did have a lot of
power."
Industry, too, is getting nervous. Top officials of the Fair
Labor Association, founded in 1996 by the Clinton Administration
along with business representatives and some human rights groups,
have been touring campuses, trying to convince students of their
organization's good intentions. (Unlike the WRC, the FLA allows
industry to choose its own monitors and doesn't include provisions
for a living wage.) A week before the consortium's founding conference,
Nike, which supports the FLA, canceled its contract with Brown
University, objecting to the university's WRC membership. Nike
has repeatedly denounced the WRC, calling it a "gotcha"
monitoring system. "Nike is using Brown to threaten other
schools," said Brown anti-sweat activist Nicholas Reville
at the conference. More recently, Nike's Phil Knight, who had
pledged $30 million to the University of Oregon for its sports
stadium, indignantly withdrew the offer after the school announced
its membership in the WRC.
In the recent history of student activism, the new emphasis
on economics represents quite a shift. Ten years ago, there was
plenty of student organizing, but it was fragmentary and sporadic,
and most of it focused on what some, mostly its detractors, liked
to call "identity politics," fighting the oppression
of racial and sexual minorities, and of women. Admirable as they
were--and effective in improving social relations on many campuses--there
was little sense of solidarity among these groups, and they often
seemed insular, bearing little relation to life outside the university.
That political moment is over, partly because in the larger
world, organized feminism is in a lull and the mainstream gay
movement now focuses on issues like inclusion in the military,
gay marriage and hate-crimes legislation--moderate goals that
don't speak to student idealism. By contrast, the economic left--especially
the labor movement, and the burgeoning resistance to global capital--is
enjoying a resurgence, both in numbers and in vision. The new
student anti-corporatists are building strong relationships with
unions, which are, in turn, showing remarkable dedication to the
new generation. During February's Penn sit- in, a different union
local brought the students dinner almost every night. "Seattle
helped the unions see that the students were serious," explains
Simon Greer, Jobs With Justice's Workers' Rights board director.
When the University of Wisconsin sent in the cops to drag away
fifty-four peaceful anti-sweat protesters, George Becker, president
of the United Steelworkers, issued a statement denouncing the
administration's "oppressive actions."
The early-nineties struggles haven't vanished without a trace;
indeed, it sometimes seems as if, through the anti-corporate movement,
they have returned to their early-seventies roots as movements
for radical liberation. Many of the leaders are women, and feminist
analysis informs the movement's focus; the anti-sweat activists,
for instance, frequently point out that most sweatshop workers
are women. And although the struggle against homophobia has largely
disappeared from the student progressive agenda, the tactics--
militant, theatrical and often campy direct action--of early-nineties
groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation have clearly influenced the
new crew of student activists.
Anti-corporatism also has the potential to be a movement for
racial justice. Farah Mongeau, a University of Michigan law student
and member of U-M's Students of Color Coalition (SCC), points
out, "[Sweatshop labor] obviously affects people of color.
People of color are the ones who work in the sweatshops."
Yet, although many core organizers are South Asian, the anti-sweatshop
movement is mostly white. Organizing by students of color is on
the upswing, but its relationship to the anti-corporate groups
can be uneasy. Some students of color say this is partly because
white activists receive better treatment from those in power.
At Michigan in February, SCC members protesting a racist secret
society held a sit-in at the same time as the anti-sweat organization
and resented the fact that while they were ignored for weeks,
the predominantly white group got a meeting with the president
immediately. Likewise, Justin Higgins, sophomore class president
at North Carolina Central University, a historically black and
working- class college, who in February had just joined the regional
student anti-WTO/IMF coalition, said he wasn't planning to go
to Washington, DC, and wasn't sorry to have missed Seattle. "If
there had been black students [in Seattle]," Higgins said,
"there would have been real bullets, not rubber bullets."
On the other hand, some less visible economic-justice campaigns
on campus have been more racially mixed: those fighting university
tuition hikes, for instance. And the student movement's relationship
with labor may help break down its whiteness. In its early stages,
very few black students were involved in the Johns Hopkins action
demanding higher wages for university workers, for example, though
the low-wage workers at the school are predominantly people of
color. But when local unions got involved in the sit-in, they
were able to recruit members of the black student group. On other
campuses, multiracial alliances between anti-corporate and prison
activists are beginning to emerge (see "Hip-Hop Politics
on Campus," page 16, on the role of hip-hop music in this
coalition). In early April students at ten campuses launched a
boycott campaign against Sodexho-Marriott, which operates more
than 500 campus dining halls, is the largest investor in US private
prisons and is also currently facing censure from the National
Labor Relations Board. In an April sit-in at SUNY-Albany, activists,
in addition to sweatshop-related demands, insisted that the university
drop Sodexho- Marriott if the company did not divest from private
prisons and improve its labor practices.
Part of the problem with early-to-mid- nineties student "identity
politics" was an obsession with representation--only queers
could talk about homophobia, only people of color could talk about
racism--which seriously limited its constituency. Such first-person
politics also restricted diverse activists' ability to work together
and find common ground. Yet its premise--drawn from seventies
feminism--that the personal is political laid the foundation for
one of the core assumptions of the current anti-corporate movement,
which is that because we are consumers, we are personally implicated
in the depredations of capital. In the anti-sweat movement, students
initially got involved because they were horrified to find out
about the exploitation behind products that were a part of their
everyday lives. Says Penn sophomore and USAS member Roopa Gona,
"We're talking about our clothes." Student public- education
campaigns about Starbucks--which, in mid-April, was pressured
into buying Fair Trade Coffee--and genetically modified food also
focus on buying power. The consumer experience is one that everyone
has in common, rather than one that emphasizes power differences
among students.
Exposing the sweatshop horror behind ubiquitous logos is subversive,
especially in a culture completely hypnotized by them. The whole
purpose of logos and brands is commodity fetishism; we are supposed
to crave them but not question the conditions under which they
were made. But, as Naomi Klein observes in her new book, No Logo:
Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, companies trafficking in image
are particularly vulnerable when those images are tarnished. Obscure
information-technology companies can quietly outsource their data-entry
work to Mexican sweatshops, but companies like Disney, Starbucks
and the Gap are different: Their prominence in consumers' hearts
and minds makes it far easier for activists to publicize their
wrongdoings. Like other contemporary anti-corporatists--those
vandalizing and protesting under Golden Arches worldwide, for
instance--students have expertly used big capital's catchy logos
against it. And just like the Nike swoosh, "we can think
of the university itself as a brand, a logo, that students consume,"
says veteran anti-sweat activist and University of North Carolina
junior Todd Pugatch. Universities, especially prestigious ones
or those with high-profile sports teams, depend on image, too.
The recognizability of the University of Michigan's big yellow
M, like that of McDonald's, can backfire if the logo comes to
symbolize exploitation and corporate greed.
Still, brand targeting has limits. One of the ways in which
contemporary capitalism maintains its hold on us is by defining
everyone as consumers--rather than, say, citizens, workers or
activists. A crucial problem for the anti-corporate movement is
how to appeal to a wider public without reducing politics to shopping.
And students are realizing that simply as indignant shoppers,
they can't be very effective. Boycotts in the apparel industry
are futile because all major clothing companies use sweatshop
labor, explains Laurie Eichenbaum, a Penn senior and USAS organizer
who was wearing a red Old Navy fleece when I met her: "There
is no good alternative." Saurav Sarkar, of Yale Students
Against Sweatshops, says, "That's the most common misperception
about us. People say, 'Oh, I don't want to stop buying clothes
at the Gap.'" Crucial to the anti-corporate movement's gradual
evolution beyond consumer consciousness and toward labor solidarity
and broad structural change, as UNC's Pugatch observes, will be
its relationship with workers, in the US labor movement as well
as in the global South. If the WRC develops as the students hope,
it will help give workers and unions a stronger voice in the apparel
industry, rather than simply conferring a Good Housekeeping-style
seal of approval on "sweat-free" brands.
Despite this emerging vision, not all students come to anti-corporate
activism with a radical outlook. "People are drawn in by
the horror stories," says Maria Roeper, but then they start
seeing how the whole system works. Students are also radicalized
by their university's intransigence and by the realization that
institutions only change when they're forced to do so. David Corson-
Knowles, a Yale freshman and spokesperson for the Student Alliance
to Reform Corporations (STARC), a national group founded at Yale,
says he thinks his group will eventually convince the Yale Corporation--which
has the CEO of Procter & Gamble on its board--to invest responsibly
"because we're right." But in a group discussion in
a coffee shop near campus, it's clear that students from the Student/Labor
Action Coalition (SLAC) and the Yale chapter of United Students
Against Sweatshops--older groups that have been struggling with
the administration for longer and use more confrontational tactics--beg
to differ. Yale SLAC activist Laurie Kimmington, a senior, says
of the university's administrators, "They want to do nothing,
as much as possible." Danielle Linzer, a Penn sophomore and
STARC leader, admitted this might be the case. STARC, she acknowledged,
had a "more conservative approach to reform" than United
Students Against Sweatshops, but, she said, "we're a newer
group, so we haven't yet been stalled the way they have."
All in all, it's impossible not to feel at least cautiously
optimistic about this new movement. "We are training an entire
generation to think differently about"-- pause--"capitalism,"
says Kimmington. She glances at my notebook and at the STARC activists
across the cafe table and giggles cheerfully. "Oops, maybe
I shouldn't say that."
Liza Featherstone is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn.
This article is part of the Haywood Burns Community Activist Journalism
series.
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