US: University President Now on Flip Side of Protests

As a student at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University in
the 1960s, Judith Rodin was caught up in the social activism of the era.
Last week, Penn's president found the tables turned as she negotiated with
students who spent the entire week staging a sit-in in her outer
office.

The students, protesting the possible use of sweatshop labor by companies
that make apparel emblazoned with the university's logo, have vowed to
continue their vigil through tomorrow.

It looked like a class trip waiting Friday for the bus to arrive in
Rodin's outer office. About 30 students had slept on the floor the night
before, and backpacks, pillows and blankets were piled up like a small
mountain range.

A box of low-fat granola stood open on a table, next to a book titled
The Road to Serfdom. A black guitar case stood sentinel, plastered
with bumper stickers that said "Save Snake River Salmon."

The students, amiable and polite, dressed in jeans and cargo pants,
sporting buzz cuts and dreadlocks, want Penn to abandon the Fair Labor
Association, a group of apparel manufacturers, human-rights groups and 131
schools that monitors factories for sweatshop conditions. The students -
and peers at schools across the nation, linked to the national group
United Students Against Sweatshops - argue the FLA is influenced by the
very industry it is supposed to monitor, so its monitoring cannot be
trusted.

By midweek, their tactics had turned slightly more radical. They sang and
chanted slogans, forcing Rodin's secretarial staff to abandon the outer
room for one across the hall.

Political activism on this scale has been rare on college campuses for two
decades. Today's students often prefer working for social change in quiet,
personal ways, through community service, rather than in large political
protests.

Why, has this issue, at this time, sparked such student activism across
the country?

The answer mirrors the reason community-service projects appeal to this
generation. Students say they can have a discernible effect on a concrete
problem.

"We can make a tangible difference through the influence of our university
on these companies," said Miriam Joffe-Block, a Penn senior who wears a
watch sporting Penn's crest. "There's nothing more tangible than
clothing."

Kurt Spiridakis, a Penn sophomore, agreed. "Our tuition dollars go to
these companies through Penn's contracts," he said. "There's a direct
relation to us and the way sweatshop workers are treated."

That's not all. Student leaders have been well-educated on the topic by
U.S. trade unions and human-rights groups, which sponsor student trips to
meet sweatshop workers. In addition, schools such as Penn now routinely
emphasize community service in their curriculum. And the sweatshop issue
serves as a crossroads for students with interest in a wide array of
concerns.

Most sweatshop workers are women, attracting women's-rights advocates.
Melissa Byrne, a junior at St. Joseph's University, said the Roman
Catholic Church's teaching on economic and social justice resonates in
this issue. Anna Roberts, a freshman Penn organizer, said her parents, who
are practicing Quakers, had taught her that every action has consequences,
so she must "live in a morally responsible way." Student environmentalists
say companies that run sweatshops are often the worst polluters in Third
World nations.

Thanks to technology, the activism also feeds on itself. Today's students
know instantly -- via cell phones and e-mail -- what their peers are doing
across the country, boosting morale. When the Penn protest began last
week, sympathizers at Yale University held a rally. Yale student Amanda
Bell said students there had asked Yale's president to contact Rodin in
support of the Penn students.

There's another element at work as well. Today's students are the sons and
daughters of people who attended college in the 1960s and early '70s, some
of whom participated in that era's protests.

As a result, some students drawn to the sweatshop issue have parents whose
own activism serves as a model. Maria Roeper, a Haverford College senior
who helped prod the college to join the fledgling Worker Rights
Consortium, an alternative monitor group to the FLA, said her father
taught a freedom school in 1965 in Jackson, Miss.

Lincoln Ellis, a Penn freshman, was raised by parents involved in protests
when they were college students. They shunned jobs in the corporate world,
choosing instead to work as fruit pickers. "They certainly influenced me,"
said Ellis.

The Penn students not only want their school to abandon the FLA monitor
group. They also want it to join the fledgling Worker Rights Consortium, a
group independent of the apparel industry and one they say will cast a
more critical eye on sweatshop abuses. So far, only four schools have
joined, including Haverford.

Rodin met with the Penn protesters twice last week and told them that she
sympathized with their position. She released to the students a 14-page
list of factories where Penn-related clothing is manufactured -
information Penn itself had demanded from the companies. (The list
includes sites in China, Pakistan, Ireland, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru,
Mexico, Thailand and Malaysia.)

But she said she did not want Penn to abandon the FLA until a campuswide
committee studying the issue weighed in at the end of February.

By week's end, the central foyer of College Hall was wallpapered with
posters from many campus groups that support the anti-sweatshop brigade,
and they didn't shy from pointed jabs at the administration. One small
poster alluded to Rodin's $500,000-plus salary: "President Rodin you made
$1,500 yesterday. A Mexican worker made $4. Geez. Have a heart!"

It's curious that Rodin has grown irritated with the students occupying
her office. She told Penn's student paper that the protesters "have
exceeded the boundaries of what is appropriate at this university with
regard to open expression and are in absolute, complete violation."

While a student at Penn in the 1960s, Rodin was president of a women's
organization and helped raise money to send people to the South for
voter-registration drives. As a graduate student at Columbia University,
she mediated between administrators and students who had taken over the
psychology building to protest plans to raze neighborhood buildings for a
university gym.

Stephen Schutt, Rodin's chief of staff, took part in antiwar and
pro-environment protests while at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., in
the 1970s.

As student chants filtered into his office Friday, Schutt was asked
whether the scene reminded him of his own college days. "Oh yes," he said,
nodding.

• 184 Labor