Student campaigns about "moral concerns"—such as the failed Darfur divestment effort—have gained less traction with NU than protests that focused on students directly.
Photo: Licensed under Creative Commons from The Bright and Morning Star.
On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in April 2007, about 200 students met at the Rock with signs, shirts, and 1,801 postcards from students addressed to then-NU President Henry Bienen. They sought to end Northwestern’s investments in foreign oil and energy companies that do business with Sudan, whose Arab government was funneling money to militias waging war against the black minority in Darfur. The killings had reached as high as 400,000 by 2005, according to the Coalition for International Justice. Activists believed that cutting off investments would cripple the Sudanese government’s ability to fund the warfare. As they assembled for the rally, they shouted, “Hey, Bienen, we’ve got pride, let us stop the genocide!”
Alyssa Huff, then a Weinberg sophomore, watched from the head of the rally. As the coordinator of the Northwestern University Darfur Action Coalition (NUDAC), she had put the work in to publicizing and organizing this day. NUDAC had spent winter quarter passing out buttons, sitting by the Rock with postcards and pens, and bringing experts and natives of Darfur to speak on-campus. They had successfully lobbied ASG to pass a resolution in February of that year in support of divestment. “Everyone knew about what was going on,” Huff says now. “After negotiating, there wasn’t a substantial enough contingent at Northwestern interested in pushing full divestment to create a movement. The rally was meant to build up momentum.”
This rally was the result of a year’s worth of failed negotiations with Northwestern administration. According to Huff, “It was only at the point in the meetings when they had stalled, that we decided to organize the petition and the rally.”
Huff led the march to Bienen’s office. The energy and excitement was high. From the Rock they pounded down the sidewalk under the Arch. They crossed Sheridan Road, passed Allison Hall, and carried their message right to Bienen’s offices in the Rebecca Crown Center.
Bienen didn’t come out, but Eugene Sunshine, current Senior Vice President of Business and Finance—and, now, NU’s point person on the Living Wage campaign—met them at the Crown Center’s doors. “Four of us went up and delivered over 2,000 postcards from people asking him to divest,” Huff says.
Their job done, the protestors disbanded and headed home to await the administration’s reaction. One week later, the Board of Trustees Investment Committee made no decisions regarding NUDAC, the rally, or divestment in general. “There was some discussion about the issue at the meeting, but there was no definitive decision,” Sunshine told North by Northwestern after the meeting. (Sunshine would not go on the record for this story.) At this point, the university was content with keeping quiet.
Successful campaigns involved drastic measures, including a 12-day hunger strike for Asian American studies in 1995. When issues with “moral concerns” have been raised by students, the University has in the past been, as Huff puts it, “reluctant.”
It’s hard to determine what makes social justice campaign succeed. There’s hardly ever any documentation of how much work was put in to it. Historians tend to wax lyrical about the highlights of campaigns: the speeches, the rallys, the marches, the moments where change is realized. But the tactics that drive the campaign forward—phoneathons, late-night meetings, behind-closed-doors deal-making—are hardly mentioned, and are often just as important.
The push for divestment at Northwestern was certainly one of NU’s larger issue-based campaigns. Much like the Living Wage campaign, NUDAC worked independently of student groups, based off examples of successful divestment at other institutions. The campaign garnered more than 800 signatures on a circulating petition—this was before Facebook addiction made it easy to pummel students with sign-the-petition messages—organized the April rally, and blanketed campus with fliers, posters, and buttons.
Yet even with a strong showing of support from the student body, NUDAC’s campaign did not achieve its goals. By the end of the campaign, two years of negotiations had passed. The University sent an email to the student body stating that it was only divesting from two of the companies it had holdings in, one of which wasn’t even doing business with Sudan anymore. (NU’s investments in Darfur were largely indirect—through mutual funds which frequently change the makeup of their portfolios—complicating the feasibility of total divestment.)
“They didn’t give us what I would have liked to see, or what we asked for,” Huff says. “Their plan to divest didn’t really have any effect.”
The problems with the divestment movement were twofold. “The university is reluctant to make itself open to students,” Huff says. “The fear is that it could lead to criticism about the university. It could lead to this idea that universities are institutions that should be politically responsible, should be politically aware and in tune with crises going on in the world and at home.”
“I’d like to think that there’s power in the student body, I think that they do hold a lot of power,” Huff says. “I also think that the student body isn’t—for as stubborn as the university is, the student body is not willing to take radical enough action to force any kind of change.”
Not all student campaigns have failed. In the past, the university has acquiesced to demands for African-American, Latin-American, and Asian-American studies departments, creating programs and concentrations and hiring on full-time faculty to direct them. But these campaigns advocated a change that would benefit students in the form of classes and majors. In contrast, the Living Wage Campaign asks for benefits which would go directly to contract workers, notably Sodexo employees in dining halls and at Norris. And those successful campaigns involved drastic measures. Students joined together in a 12-day hunger strike for Asian American studies in 1995. More than 100 students locked themselves in Northwestern’s Bursar office in 1968 for 38 hours to advocate for an African-American Studies Department. When issues regarded as “moral concerns” have been raised by students, the university has in the past been, as Huff puts it, “reluctant.”
The second problem with the Divestment campaign concerned the student body itself. “I’d like to think that there’s power in the student body, I think that they do hold a lot of power,” Huff says. “I also think that the student body isn’t—for as stubborn as the university is, the student body is not willing to take radical enough action to force any kind of change.”
Northwestern’s student body, according to Huff, tends to be reluctant to support controversial issues—either because individuals are not concerned or they’re far too busy with school and extracurricular activities to join in. “It’s a fairly politically moderate school where students are cautious to get involved,” she argues. “People are prone to being good at organizing things like conferences that are much less radical, that everyone can kind of agree on. Issues that make you feel good, that aren’t a challenge.”
“I don’t know how receptive the new president Morty Schapiro will be. I know with Bienen it was, ‘I’m willing to listen to you, but this is where I stop.’”
The student body’s supposed cautiousness is reflected in the numbers. In a school of around 8,000 undergraduates, about 800 signed the Divestment petition. So far, about an eighth of undergraduates have signed the Living Wage petition. For both movements, signatures alone weren’t enough to convince Northwestern to enact change. And even if a large segment of the campus is in support of a movement, do they have the weight to affect Northwestern policies, or does the power lie solely with the administration?
“The problem is students don’t vote on the universities policies,” Huff says. “They don’t have a place on the Board of Trustees. They don’t have a vote in what the university decides to do financially. I don’t know how receptive the new president Morty Schapiro will be. I know with Bienen it was, ‘I’m willing to listen to you, but this is where I stop.’”
Schapiro has pulled himself out of talks with Living Wage organizers. Much like with NUDAC, the university has offered only a fraction of what student activists have asked for, and with Yalowitz, that isn’t good enough.
The change in NU’s top leadership is just one factor differentiating NUDAC’s failure from the Living Wage movement’s ongoing efforts—changes that the wage campaign’s organizers believe will tip the balance in their favor. Still, similarities abound: Neither movement was entirely sure what it wanted would cost. NU does not make public its budget or its investments. Living Wage organizers don’t know how much Sodexo employees are paid—just that it’s not much more than minimum wage—and estimate that a living wage would cost $2-$5 million each year. (The organizers want the wage indexed to the consumer-price index; currently, it’s about $13.23 an hour.) And uch like the April 2007 rally for the Divestment campaign, today’s Living Wage rally is in response to the administration’s adverse response to the wage message.
“We are disappointed at the slow pace that the administration is taking,” says Living Wage coordinator Adam Yalowitz, “and the sense that it doesn’t seem to be a real priority. There’s this gap between their rhetoric and what they’re actually doing.”
Weeks ago, in closed door meetings with Living Wage organizers, Sunshine drafted up a policy NU would agree to and presented it. “It didn’t actually include anything like a living wage per year, or access to community resources or stronger accountability,” Yalowitz says. (Those are the organizers’ three core demands; they say the campaign will not end until all are achieved.) Much like with NUDAC, the university has offered only a fraction of what student activists have asked for, and with Yalowitz, that isn’t good enough.
Yalowitz also sees the lack of representation of students in the administration as a fault in how Northwestern is run. “We’re not just fighting for living wages, we’re also fighting for the right to fight for living wages,” says Yalowitz, laughing. “A lot of this is about making student voices heard. On college campuses—it’s funny—it’s not a democratic institution by any means. There’s a President and there’s a Board of Trustees, and then there are students, workers, faculty, staff and grad students, who have not much say in what actually goes on.”
Just like Bienen four years ago with the Darfur Divestment campaign, Schapiro has pulled himself out of talks with Living Wage organizers. “We met with President Schapiro in December, and since then we’ve just been meeting with Vice President Sunshine,” says Yalowitz. “We would just like President Schapiro to get back in to those direct meetings so he can hear directly from us and not through other administrators.” Yalowitz says he hopes that the rally will show Schapiro how strong student support is for the movement.
Wednesday’s rally could represent a shift in how the University deals with student movements. Negotiations may once again open up, and the University may take real action to address student concerns. But even if this doesn’t occur, Yalowitz and the Living Wage campaigners will continue to force the issue.
“None of us think that a couple hundred students are going to turn up to a rally, and that that’s going to completely change the minds of the university administration. But it’s a step,” Yalowitz says. “This is something that students of all ages care about and are going to continue organizing and rallying around until it’s won.”
At other universities, campaigns for a living wage took up to five years before succeeding, says Yalowitz. With that in mind, Living Wage organizers have gotten a lot of underclassmen involved. “We wanted to make sure that there are freshman and sophomores taking leadership in the campaign so that when juniors and seniors graduate, they will still be around to hold the administration accountable,” says Yalowitz.
Medill freshman Elena Schneider is one of the underclassmen pegged to take up the mantle of the movement. Schneider first came in to contact with Yalowitz as a participant in Freshman Urban Progam, a pre-Wildcat Welcome introduction to Northwestern for freshman. He was her counselor and told her about Northwestern Community Development Corps (NCDC), the organization behind the Living Wage Movement. “I was inspired to be a part of something that he was so inspired to be a part of,” Schneider says.
“Respect, empower, include,” Yalowitz says. “Instead of signing people up to volunteer for something and telling them what to do, it’s the idea of really building a relationship with people based on shared values and empowering people to take a large leadership role.”
During the Activity Fair in Norris Student Center, before Living Wages even became an issue on campus, Schneider signed up to be a part of NCDC. Since then, she’s become a leader of her own team for the Living Wage movement, and is now one of the main organizers of the campaign. “As an organizer, I have my team of people who I took through organizer training,” Schneider says. “They in turn had people sign petitions, performed one-on-one talks with students. And I had a few of them bring in people of their own. You train them to become organizers of their own team, so that it just keeps going on.”
Schneider’s education in community organizing reflects the process several leaders of the campaign went through when working for President Barack Obama’s grassroots campaign. Like her, other freshman learn the skills of community organizing from the leaders of the campaign. Three of the main organizers, including Yalowitz, took off Fall Quarter of 2008 to community organize for Obama in different regions across America—Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio, Georgia. As such, the organizing model is based on Obama’s campaign.
“It’s based on a really simple mantra,” explains Yalowitz. “Respect, empower, include. As opposed to simply signing people up to volunteer for something and telling them what to do, it’s the idea of really building a relationship with people based on shared values and empowering people to take a large leadership role.”
Schneider retains high hopes for the rally. “I think it’s going to be really pivotal, and the response that we get from the administration is really pivotal,” she says. “But if we need to stick around, then we’ll stick around. We’re talking about human lives. The administration needs to understand that it’s a moral responsibility to pay their workers a living wage.”
Living Wage organizers have spent the last two weeks mustering what they hope will be a large turnout for the rally. They’ve arranged phone-banks made up of supporters calling up over 1,000 individuals, reminding them to make an appearance. They’ve spread through the halls of dorms, slipping fliers under doors and going into study lounges to educate students on the movement. If this will be enough to convince the traditionally stubborn heads of NU is yet to be seen. But if the dark recesses of history tells us anything, it’s that when it comes to social movements regarding morality, university leaders are hard to sway.
Maybe if they dressed their kids up in SS uniforms they could save Dafaar.