Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Campus Governance and Student Activism

Perhaps the most obvious challenge students face in influencing decision-making on campus is the highly authoritarian, anti-democratic nature of campus governance, where power is centered in the hands of administrators who are not formally accountable to students. Traditionally, however, because administrators were mostly former faculty members, there was a good deal of accountability on the part of administrators to the faculty. As the campus becomes corporatized though, this limited accountability has also growing weaker, as school administrators become increasingly accountable mainly to the nation’s business elite (Waugh 2003). The boards of trustees of private schools and the boards of regents of public schools--the people who gel to appoint school administrators-- are not composed primarily of those with the most obvious connection to higher education--“educators, alumni, and local community stakeholders" (Kniffin 2000a). Instead, they are--and long have been--dominated by corporate executives. College and university presidents themselves frequently sit on corporate boards; when they do not do so in order to avoid any semblance of impropriety, less visible administrators may sit on corporate boards instead. School presidents may also form ties with the corporate world by acting as consultants and sitting on the boards of non-profits alongside corporate executives (Kniffin 2000a; Rhoades and Slaughter 1997).
Corporatization has produced significant changes in the structure and culture of school administrations. An increasing number of school administrators come nor from within the ranks of the faculty, as is traditional, but from outside academia, often the business world. As a result, they have lime understanding of academic values or culture, imposing in their place the technocratic norms of the business world--norms that such administrators tend to see as value-neutral, not an ideology in their own right. Such administrators, in addition to applying for-profit standards to academic work--valuing departments based on how much revenue they bring in, for instance--but also have little patience with faculty’s expectation that they should get to participate in school governance. The norms of the business world are, after all, even more authoritarian than those of higher education, with administrators from business backgrounds used to imposing their decisions from the top-down and having lime patience for opposition (Steck 2003; Waugh 2003). And, if such administrators have little patience with faculty’s traditional prerogative to play a role in campus decision-making, one may imagine they have even less patience for students’ demands for such a role. In other words, as schools


community, no matter how corporatized their campus. As Rutter (interview, 2007) put it, “A campus is a closed environment and it's easy to get access to the press, at least the campus press. There's also an enclosed decision-making process. As students, you have access to the college president, the person who makes the decisions, something a lot of other groups don't have." There are three things at work here. One is the simple question of scale--the college or university as a quasi-polity is so small that this in and of itself gives activists influence they might not have in another setting. The second is that the organizing space for students on campus is wide open; student groups with a fair amount of autonomy are one of the norms of campus life and administrators would be hard- pressed to justify restricting them. The third factor is that, while formal decision-making power may be monopolized by the administration, the discursive arena of college campuses is wide open. Most schools have at least one student newspaper, as well as other student publications; students can organize a wide variety of their own events; sympathetic professors can speak out in their support. This gives student activists multiple venues to make their case to the wider student body and build up their legitimacy. As Steven Lukes (2005) argues, while there is power in controlling the levers of decision-making, there is also power in being able to set the public agenda. And student activists can sei the public agenda at their schools, forcing administrators to deal with questions like sweatshops they might prefer to ignore. Getting something on the public agenda and getting the decisions about that issue made the way you want are certainly two different things, but even putting the issue of sweatshops on the agenda in the first place changes the nature of the playing field.


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