Political activism has returned to many college campuses.  Though less sweeping and hardly as disruptive as the anti-war politics of the late sixties, today's student movements offer significant prospects of educational and economic reform.  Their efforts have addressed both internal academic governance and relations with the outside world.  In this column I will focus on relations between the academy and the larger economic order, and I will consider internal governance in a subsequent column.

This generation of students may show little interest in building a "participatory democracy" or in radically transforming America's military role in the world.  Nonetheless, many do insist that the schools they attend practice the humane values those colleges profess.  Last year, students at such elite institutions as Duke University demanded that clothing bearing the college insignia not be produced by child labor or in low wage, sweat shop conditions.  These campaigns have contributed to a significant social struggle and afforded many students a greater understanding of the challenges posed by corporate globalism and the role of organized labor in resisting corporate exploitation.

Here  in Maine, students at College of the Atlantic became the first in the nation to pass a policy requiring the purchase of coffee stamped with the ''fair trade'' seal of approval.
Students insisted that coffee purchased by the college come from firms that ensured their
workers received a living wage, regardless of the price paid by the college.  Rob Fish, a
senior at the College, argued that "The college has a responsibility to use its purchasing
power to further the human ecological ideas it espouses,''
(Bangor Daily News, March 18, 2000).

Most recently, students from all over the country, including six Maine colleges,  assembled in Washington to protest the role the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund play in buttressing corporate globalism.  Both institutions have diverted taxpayer money to corporate megaprojects and financier bailouts while imposing harsh wage standards and restrictive government spending limits on developing nations. In the process, wages and public capital formation world wide are driven down. The short term interests of multinational firms and currency speculators are served, but the race to the bottom in  wages, social services, and environmental standards depresses consumer demand and long term economic development.

Students at several colleges and universities have also forced multinational clothing
manufacturers to disclose the location of their plants and to make those facilities open
to inspections.  Other students have worked with union activists in campaigns to unite
workers across borders in efforts both to organize factories and to expose violations of
domestic labor and environmental laws.  L. A Kauffman, a historian of the New Left,
commented recently in AlterNet that this generation of student activists "are finding
new common ground, from the increasingly multiethnic and multi-generational campaigns
against police brutality and the prison industrial complex, to the new collaborations
between organized labor and immigrant groups to secure amnesty for the
undocumented."

Student efforts to reform corporate labor practices and the international financial system
are both politically and educationally significant.  Students gain an understanding of the
dynamics of corporate globalism and the practical problems involved in building cross
border coalitions.  They are also contributing to a process that can reduce tensions and
suspicions between labor in the "developing world" and workers in the industrialized
West.  During the protests late last year in Seattle, mainstream media endlessly argued
that workers in developing nations rejected the idea of international labor standards as
one more protectionist ploy labor by well paid workers in the West.

Suspicions certainly abound, and U. S. industrial unions do have a long history of
protectionism.  Nonetheless, claims that all workers in developing nations reject any form
of labor standards were made without attempting to speak directly to those workers,
whose interests are often poorly represented by their own governments. Students
especially have an interest in gaining direct information regarding such topics.  Both
students and workers everywhere clearly do share an interest in 1) the right to
organize and 2) access to information about plant locations, potentially dangerous
technologies, and productivity levels.

Students interested in gaining a greater understanding of the dynamics of the global
economy can naturally contribute both to pressure for greater access to information and
to the process of building common frameworks for cross border labor cooperation.
Ultimately, when workers everywhere share certain basic information and enjoy the
right to organize, flexible wage standards reflecting each nation's productive capacity
can be enacted and enforced.  A student movement that contributes to such a process
not only enhances its educational experience, it also helps build a more enduring
democratic politics.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor.
Readers wishing to contact him may email comments to jbuell@acadia.net.
Article submitted to U. Machias Online by the author upon request.