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On Wednesday we reported that thirteen campuses had cancelled contracts with clothing maker Russell Athletic in response to labor abuses at the company. As of today, that number has risen to nineteen.
When we passed on word that the University of Minnesota had dropped RA, we were under the impression that the action had been taken by Minnesota’s flagship Twin Cities campus alone. As it turns out, the entire U of M system — Twin Cities, Duluth, Morris, Crookston, and Rochester — have disaffiliated, and shortly after Minnesota acted, Harvard followed suit.
Finally, on Friday, NYU became the nineteenth campus to drop RA.
NYU’s decision, in the works since early February, would seem to represent a missed opportunity for the activist group Take Back NYU. Had they called for a break with RA as part of their sit-in demands last week, they would have linked their action to a student-led campus movement that is gaining momentum across the United States, and — as it turns out — have been able to point to Friday’s decision as a victory of sorts.
March 19 Update: The total now stands at 21 campuses, and you can find an update on recent organizing here.
May 1 Update: FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow!
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.
Another news story from Britain on the rise of student activism there. Here’s how this one starts:
They are the iPod generation of students: politically apathetic, absorbed by selfish consumerism, dedicated to a few years of hedonism before they land a lucrative job in the City. Not any more. A seismic change is taking place in British universities.
Around the UK, thousands of students have occupied lecture theatres, offices and other buildings at more than 20 universities in sit-down protests. It seems that the spirit of 1968 has returned to the campus.
While it was the situation in Gaza that triggered this mass protest, the beginnings of political enthusiasm have already spread to other issues.
John Rose, one of the original London School of Economics (LSE) students to mount the barricades alongside Tariq Ali in 1968, spent last week giving lectures on the situation in Gaza at 12 of the occupations.
“This is something different to anything we’ve seen for a long time,” he said. “There is genuine fury at what Israel did.
“I think it’s highly likely that this year will see more student action. What’s interesting is the nervousness of vice chancellors and their willingness to concede demands; it indicates this is something that could well turn into [another] ’68.”
Coverage continues from here. Additional updates can be found on our twitter feed. For a discussion of the protesters’ demands, see this post.
At 10 PM on Wednesday, more than sixty students from NYU and various other colleges barricaded themselves into a dining area on the third floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center on Washington Square South. On Thursday afternoon they forced a door and gained access to a balcony overlooking the park, while supporters twice evaded campus security to add more numbers to the protest’s ranks.
On Thursday evening NYU administrators threatened students who remained in Kimmel after the building’s scheduled 1 AM closing time with arrest and expulsion, but 1 o’clock came and went with no movement from inside. Supporters of the protest on the street below clashedwith police a few minutes after 1 AM, but when the dust cleared from those scuffles students were still occupying the third floor.
There was only one arrest last night, of an NYU student who tried to climb a No Parking sign on Washington Square South. I’ve seen no reports of serious injuries to protesters, police, or bystanders during the one o’clock clash, and no update on the condition of the NYU security guard who was taken away in an ambulance earlier in the evening. About twenty protesters remain on the third floor of Kimmel, having rejected a late-night “safe harbor” offer that would have suspended disciplinary action against them as long as they stayed out of trouble for the remainder of their time on campus.
The protesters who remain have been given no assurances about how they will be treated going forward. No word on how many, if any, of them are non-NYU.
A liveblogger from the website NYULocal was in Kimmel from the start of the occupation, but he left the building late last night, and is not expected to be allowed to re-enter. The Washington Square News, a student newspaper, is providing ongoing online coverage of events. Take Back NYU!, the group that organized the protest, is providing regular updates on its website and twitter feed. In their first twitter update of the morning, however, they announced that NYU has cut off internet access to the occupied building.
That’s where things stand as of 9:30 this morning.
11:30 am Update: Yesterday, NYU kept most of the Kimmel building open, using security to (ineffectively) control access to the occupied third floor. Today they’ve shut the whole building down. Also, TBNYU is reporting that NYU has cut off not just internet access, but also power flow to electrical outlets in the occupied space. If the report is accurate, and NYU maintains this policy, the protesters will lose all ability to communicate with the outside world other than by megaphone as soon as their batteries run down.
TBNYU has another rally planned for the front of the building at noon today.
12:30 pm Update: NYU is shutting down the Kimmel occupation. Most of the news on the ground is coming via Twitter at this point, so it’s fragmentary. We’re not going to post moment-by-moment updates — we’ll wait for the situation to shake out, and provide a full report when we can.
Look for follow-up analysis from us in the hours and days to come, as well. It seems clear that the NYU administration’s approach to this sit-in was, like the sit-in itself, influenced by an awareness of its relationship to a broader student movement. How that played out, and what it means for students on other campuses, is going to be something worth exploring going forward.
1:15 pm Update: NYULocal reported at 12:50 that all protesters had left Kimmel except for four who remained on the balcony. According to the Take Back NYU twitter feed, at least ten NYU students have been suspended, and an unspecified number have been escorted to their dorms to collect their belongings. There are conflicting reports on the fate of the non-NYU protesters who left the building in the last hour.
3:00 pm Update: The building has been cleared.
studentactivism.net 
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