[943] in peace2
[african-physics-students-network] Top 10 Activist Campuses (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John S Reed)
Tue Sep 11 15:39:20 2001
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Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 15:39:15 -0400
From: John S Reed <jreed@MIT.EDU>
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> Top 10 Activist Campuses
>
> Giving it the old college outcry
>
> by Jack Brown
>
> September/October 2001
>
>
> Since students at the University of Wisconsin protested the
> presence of napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical on their campus in 1967,
> college students have been fighting the corporate world's creep into the
> academy. During the last school year, activists on many campuses sought to
> put their university's academic mission ahead of corporate partnerships.
> The flawed presidential election, campus race relations, and poverty wages
> for university employees also raised student ire. Here, our 2001 ranking
> of the best of student activism.
> 1. Yale University Student protesters forced Yale and its business
> partner Bristol-Meyers Squibb (BMS) to relax the patent on Zerit, an AIDS
> drug developed by Yale scientists that brought BMS $618 million in profits
> last year. The students collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in an
> attempt to shame the university into making the drug cheaply available in
> Africa. It worked: Yale and BMS announced in March that they would allow
> companies to produce a generic version of the drug, royalty-free.
> 2. Pitzer College When the seven-college Claremont consortium in
> California announced it wanted to build a new biotech campus -- promising
> industry backers broad influence over the curriculum -- students at Pitzer
> took to the streets. They spent the summer of 2000 collecting thousands of
> signatures to force a public referendum on the plan. University officials
> shelved the proposal temporarily, but protests continued throughout the
> school year. At a March sit-in, students chained themselves to garbage
> cans filled with concrete; 10 were arrested and removed -- with the aid of
> forklifts.
> 3. Pennsylvania State University Race relations at Penn State, where
> African Americans make up only 4 percent of the student body, were
> stretched to a breaking point by a series of anonymous death threats aimed
> at black students. In April, hundreds of protesters took over the student
> union to demand that the administration address the climate of racial
> intolerance. The sit-in ended 10 days later when the school's president
> promised to establish an Africana Studies Research Center and create
> $350,000 in new minority scholarships.
> 4. Harvard University The 46 students who staged a three-week
> occupation of the president's office in May succeeded in training a
> national spotlight on the low wages the nation's wealthiest university
> pays its custodial and food-service workers. The protest -- which stirred
> debate about the living-wage movement in media as diverse as Fox News,
> Business Week, and The Nation -- ended when Harvard promised to pay
> food-service workers at least $10.32 an hour, although other employees
> will continue to make considerably less.
> 5. Howard University After fellow student Prince Jones Jr. was shot
> five times and killed last fall by an undercover officer from Prince
> George's County, Maryland, in a case of mistaken identity, more than 200
> Howard students marched on the U.S. Department of Justice. Their outcry
> caught the attention of Vice President Al Gore -- who interrupted a
> campaign speech at Howard to speak out against Jones' killing -- and
> prompted a federal investigation of the use of lethal force by the Prince
> George's police department.
> 6. University of Michigan As we reported last year, Michigan joined
> the Worker Rights Consortium, which polices the labor practices of
> university apparel licensees. The move initially prompted Nike to pull out
> of licensing negotiations with the school, but in January of this year,
> Nike agreed to reforms and signed a seven-year pact. Just weeks later,
> however, a consortium audit found Nike was continuing to do business with
> a Mexican factory that had fired striking workers. Thanks to student
> pressure, Nike agreed in February to push the factory owners to improve
> working conditions and reinstate the workers.
> 7. Florida A&M University Students at this predominantly
> African-American school in Tallahassee were outraged at the
> disproportionate number of black voters disenfranchised in the 2000
> presidential election. On November 10, one day into the recount, some 800
> Aggies occupied three floors of the state capitol, demanding, and later
> winning, a meeting with Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
> 8. Oberlin College Last November, 110 Oberlin students journeyed 818
> miles from their Ohio campus to Fort Benning, Georgia, to demand that the
> Army close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The
> Institute, known until last year as the School of the Americas, has a dark
> history, having trained many Latin American military officers later tied
> to human-rights atrocities.
> 9. University of California at Los Angeles In March, 1,000 UCLA
> students rallied to demand that the UC system reinstate affirmative
> action, which has been banned since 1996. The students stormed Royce Hall
> and forced the cancellation of a televised debate among L.A. mayoral
> candidates, several of whom stayed to join the protest.
> 10. University of Wisconsin The Badgers stand out for their
> commitment to Ecopledge, an organization that attempts to persuade
> corporations to be more environmentally conscious. The 9,000 UW Ecopledge
> signers -- more than a fifth of the student body -- have vowed not to work
> for, or purchase from, the likes of Boise Cascade, Disney, or
> DaimlerChrysler until they improve their environmental records.
>
> Read the article online:
>
> http://www.motherjones.com/magazine/SO01/top10.html
>
> Check out the latest from Mother Jones at:
>
> http://motherjones.com
>
>
>
>
>
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