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Three weeks ago, we reported that the University of Wisconsin had cut ties with clothing manufacturer Russell Athletic over findings that RA had violated workers’ rights at a Honduras factory. Since then Duke, the University of Washington, Purdue, Columbia, Penn State, Cornell, and Michigan have all followed suit, bringing to twelve Russell’s total university disaffiliations since the end of January.
This evening, United Students Against Sweatshops announced on its twitter feed that the University of Minnesota has become the latest institution to end its contract with Russell.
The New York Times took notice of the wave of disaffiliations yesterday, quoting the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium as saying that RA had “over a period of two years … engaged in the systematic abuse of the associational rights of its workers in Honduras, thereby gravely and repeatedly violating the universities’ codes of conduct.”
The disaffiliations have come in response to tremendous local student pressure on each campus, and that pressure is continuing to build. Check out the USAS blog Rein In Russell to follow the story as it develops.
March 2 update: The total is up to nineteen.
March 5 update: Now it’s twenty.
Second March 5 update: Hello USAS twitterers! Our feed is here.
March 19 Update: Here are some highlights of the last two weeks’ organizing.
The folks behind the Take Back NYU protests have come in for a lot of abuse in the last week, and though some of it has been on-target, quite a bit has fallen wide of the mark. I’ll be posting my own take on the occupation itself soon, but before I do that I want to explore a few of the critics’ more telling errors and misstatements.
After the jump, excerpts from President Obama’s address to Congress last night on the subject of higher education.
“I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
–WEB DuBois, whose 141st birthday was yesterday.
Rushing out the door right now, but here’s a roundup of all TWENTY-SEVEN recent British university occupations, and links to two UK articles about that wave of protests.
studentactivism.net 
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