The day-to-day occurrences in the life of a university president sometimes resemble a triage unit. Numerous issues find their way to my office daily. Some require immediate care. Others get transferred to another unit.
Some are admitted for long-term evaluation and treatment. These latter are the cases that require thoughtful study, and this past week, two of them landed on my desk. The first was a United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) request to terminate contracts with VF Corporation products, whose products include VF Imagewear and Jansport.
The concerns regarded labor conditions for workers in Bangladesh. The second was an Israel divestment campaign, as described by Leila Abdul Razzaq, president of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in last week’s DePaulia. Both issues are being debated nationally.
Both have arrived at DePaul’s doorstep, and I hope we will engage them seriously. Many of the world’s issues that find their way to a university, however, are often less simple and clear-cut than they first appear.
Rather than addressing these matters as a prosecutor creating a summation argument, a university is a place for looking at issues from multiple perspectives, assembling all of the relevant facts and coming to a reasoned conclusion. Passionate argument alone, without careful listening and a mutual search for truth, does not always lead to understanding.
DePaul has a proud history of protecting the rights and safety of workers around the globe. In the 1990s, in response to anti-sweatshop movements that spread across university campuses, we established strict policies for vendors to maintain fair and safe work environments. In recent years, DePaul invited representatives of Coca Cola to campus to explain and defend concerns relative to its Dasani water brand.
Just this past year, thanks to the efforts of our dedicated students, DePaul recently earned a designation as a Fair Trade University from Fair Trade Campaigns. The Israel divestment campaign has arisen at several universities across the country. Student governing bodies at UCLA, University of New Mexico, University of Michigan, and most recently Loyola University, all initiated referendums asking their universities not to invest in Israeli products or services. All of these student referendums failed to pass.
At DePaul, the Fair Business Practices Committee consisting of faculty, staff and students was established in 2000 to study these kinds of matters and make recommendations to the university. The USAS request has already been forwarded to the chair for initial study. Should that committee be called upon to look at the Israel divestment issue, I know they will carefully consider these issues from all sides, just as they have done with every other matter that has landed on their desk for deliberation and recommendation.
First, however, SJP students have exercised their right to attempt to bring a referendum before the student body. This is their right, and I will watch with interest as it plays out. I must explain, however, that I will not be able to honor it one way or the other without first being satisfied that the university community has explored all the matters at issue, and come to a thoughtful, informed recommendation.
For now, I encourage passionate and utterly respectful debate, and I have the utmost confidence in the DePaul community to do just that.
