March 29, 1999 Activism Surges at Campuses Nationwide, and Labor Is at Issue <library/national/032999campus-activism.1.jpg.html>Forum <http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?13@@.efd54c9>Join a Discussion on Unions and the Labor Movement By STEVEN GREENHOUSE n the biggest surge in campus activism in nearly two decades, student protests have burst onto the scene with rallies, teach-ins and sit-ins protesting sweatshops and other labor issues. Students at Duke, Georgetown, Yale and 20 other institutions have focused on the sweat shirts and caps emblazoned with college names that are sold in every university shop, demanding that the companies that license college names not use overseas sweatshops. Two weeks ago, University of Michigan students took over the office of the president to make such demands. The week before, 350 Harvard students held a rally to make similar demands, while also calling for raises for many of Harvard's janitors and dining hall workers. The protests are the biggest wave of campus activism since the anti-apartheid movement in the early 1980s, when students called on colleges to sell off stock in companies doing business in South Africa. The surge stems in part from unions' efforts to attract students to labor's cause and to train them to be activists. Over the past three years, unions recruited hundreds of students for summer internships and, upon returning to campus, many of these students were galvanized to continue their battle to help workers in the United States and abroad. The snowballing protests have included sit-ins at Duke, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin and demonstrations at Brown, Cornell and Princeton. Last month, 40 Yale students staged a "knit-in" to highlight sweatshop abuses, while students at Holy Cross and the University of California at Berkeley staged mock fashion shows in which undergraduates walking the runway described the dismal conditions in which many garments were made. While today's protests bring back memories of the raucous '60s and anti-war demonstrations, the current activism is different. It is less vociferous, it has focused on labor issues -- there have also been rallies to defend affirmative action and promote gay rights -- and it often has the sympathy of administrators. The demands are also more modest than, say, the overthrow of capitalism. They include independent monitoring of factories that make college-name apparel, and a living wage for their workers. "We're not asking for a revolution," said Tico Almeida, a Duke senior who led a 31-hour sit-in in the office of Duke's president. "We're just asking for improvement of working conditions. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask for." So far the protests have not involved violence. And in a far cry from decades past, university presidents have not demanded the arrest or ouster of students who occupied their offices. Many officials have even praised the protesters. "They are terrific students," Lee Bollinger, president of the University of Michigan, said of the 30 students who occupied his office and the 200 others who rallied outside. "They're just the kind of students you want on your campus. They were interested in a serious problem, they were knowledgeable about the problem, and they really wanted to do something about it." In addition to recognizing that arrests can increase tensions, many college officials marched themselves when they were undergraduates. "Back in the '60s, I was a student holding a sign," said Allan Ryan, a lawyer in Harvard's general counsel's office who has been the university's chief negotiator with anti-sweatshop students. "Now I look out the window and say, 'Students are protesting. Let's see what's on their minds.' Now we look at student protests as being a normal part of the educational process." With encouragement from the apparel workers' union, Unite, students have seized on the sweatshop issue as a clear-cut subject that hits close to home and that they can make a difference on. With $2.5 billion in college-name merchandise sold nationwide each year, students are confident they can use their moral stature and their universities' financial muscle to bring about changes in manufacturing, even overseas. "This was an issue which really moved a lot of people because, while the workers are making our clothes thousands of miles away, in other ways we're close to it -- we're wearing these clothes every day," said David Tannenbaum, a Princeton junior who helped organize a rally that drew 250 students. Not everyone applauds the protests. Laura Vanderkim, a Princeton sophomore, said, "Who is a well-to-do Princeton student to say what a living wage is in Bangladesh or China? These workers may make above average wages for the area. And arbitrarily raising wages could cause layoffs." Evidenced by protests at Harvard, Fairfield and Johns Hopkins, another issue catching fire is wages for the lowest-paid campus workers, typically janitors and food workers. At the University of Virginia, students have joined with clergy and civil rights groups to argue that amid campus privilege, it is unfair that school employees earn $6.50 an hour and need two jobs to get by. Students with different backgrounds have joined the protests for different reasons. Xochitl Marquez, a University of California at Los Angeles junior, became involved because a Mexican relative had deformed a hand working in sweatshops. At Notre Dame, many protesters were inspired by Roman Catholic teachings that all workers should be treated with respect. Some protesters are "red-diaper grandchildren" or the children of '60s protesters. And many students began organizing protests after participating in Union Summer, a program in which hundreds of students work as union interns, helping to organize low-paid workers. "One of the great untold stories in the '90s is that Union Summer has created from almost nothing activism on campus to a point where labor issues are among the leading issues among students today," said Greg Smith, a Columbia graduate student in sociology. Duke President Nannerl Keohane said the protests grew out of a quiet type of student activism: community service in which students tutored children or worked at soup kitchens. "This generation is one where there's a very strong sense of personal responsibility to make a difference for immediate, real people you can see and touch," Ms. Keohane said, adding, "My own hunch, as a political theorist, is this sweatshop movement is a direct outgrowth of this practical mindset." Pressured by students, many schools have agreed to require monitors and the disclosure of the names and locations of factories, a step that would make monitoring easier but is opposed by many companies because they do not want competitors to know about their factories. Two weeks ago, the University of Michigan agreed to a far-reaching code of conduct for the companies that produce the university-name apparel that called for monitoring and disclosure and said workers at these companies' factories should receive a living wage. But, to the students' chagrin, the university did not commit to a living wage standard because it had not been defined. Students hailed the university's commitments as a victory. "This code of conduct is as strong as it is for one reason: student activism," said Peter Romer-Friedman, a leader of the sit-in.
