Campus groups broaden consumer choices

Acacia O'Connor Life Editor

In America’s consumer-driven culture, brand names and products are so ubiquitous that they are almost unnoticed. Familiar advertisements, logos and sales pitches have long since been sublimated into the background noise of our lives.

The influence of a corporate world does not disappear when students step through Main Gate. However, student activists, in conjunction with Vassar College and its faculty, are thinking more about consumption and responsible investments.

Coca-Cola and Starbucks, both currently the focus of conscious consumer movements on campus, are just two of the many brands and corporations that are present, though not necessarily obvious, on Vassar’s campus. The College Bookstore is a Barnes & Noble Bookstore and the Computer Store is an Apple Store. HSBC is Vassar’s resident banking service, with an ATM in the Retreat and a branch office on Raymond Avenue. Campus Dining Services are run by international food service supplier Aramark.

Quenching thirst and conscience
This month, the student initiative Just Coffee succeeding in establishing a firm location for what they refer to as “fair trade plus” coffee grounds. Just Coffee was first served in the Kiosk, which is a Starbucks vendor, but is now served in the Retreat.

“I think it’s important to be conscious of how [coffee is] a commodity we take for granted and [to] considerwhere that coffee comes from and who made it and what their lives are like,” said Just Coffee representative Krystian Boreyko ’08.

The impetus to bring Just Coffee to Vassar came from the Spring 2006 course “The U.S.-Mexico Border,” taught by Associate Director of Geography and Geology Joseph Nevins and Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Sam Speers. As part of that class, students travelled to Chiapas, Mexico and met the farmers who grow Just Coffee. From that interaction grew a desire to help the farmers as well as to promote social and environmental conscientiousness back at Vassar.

“There have been past attempts to get fair trade coffee that have failed,” said representative Dylan Cate ’08. “We were a smaller group of people who were on this trip together and it gave us this energy and organization.”

Just Coffee (which the group calls “Caffeine with a Conscience”) is the fourth fair trade coffee option offered by Campus Dining Services. The term “fair trade” indicates that a product has met standards for social and environmental responsibilty, and paid a set minimum price to farmers. “Free trade” companies may employ local exporters to exploit workers.

“I feel that Just Coffee is better than fair trade because we’re establishing a relationship with the growers,” said Cate. “All the profits are kept within this single cooperative. The supply line is shorter.”

Concern for the individuals involved in production is also at the heart of the Vassar branch of the Kick Coke campaign. The student-led movement is pushing to remove Coca-Cola from Vassar’s campus. The campaign hopes to instead replace Coke with more socially conscionable local juices and sodas.

“Once you get to a smaller scale, you see a better relationship between a company and its workers,” said Kick Coke representative Reed Dunlea ’09. “I don’t think companies [such as Coke] are paying the right amount of attention to their workers.”

According to KillerCoke.org, the national campaign against the corporation began in protest of the “gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings and torture of SINALTRAINAL (National Union of Food Industry Workers) union leaders and organizers” in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia.

Last spring Kick Coke met with the Campus Investor Responsibility Committee (CIRC) and President Catharine Bond Hill to discuss cutting the College’s ties with the company. On Nov. 3, the group submitted a 28-page proposal outlining what position Vassar should take regarding Coca-Cola. This proposal is one of two items CIRC will be reviewing this year.

Kick Coke will hold a rally on Nov. 8 in Main Circle from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to promote its mission. Amnesty International, The Vassar Greens, MEChA, Student Activists Union and the Vassar Green Party are also supporting the event.

Other colleges and universities have already taken the leap and removed Coca-Cola from their campuses, including Bard College, Wesleyan University and, most significantly, Rutgers University. After their contract with Coca-Cola expired in 2005, Rutgers chose not to renew the $1.5 million contract, but instead switched to Pepsi-Cola.

“People say, ‘Oh it’s just Vassar, so what?’ But you have to look at the broader concept about it,” Dunlea said. “We think we can help by taking away a little of their business.”

Outsourcing to businesses
The outsourcing of tasks and labor denotes a general trend among instituations such as Vassar, said Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Urban Studies Program Leonard Nevarez. Nevarez taught a Sociology seminar entitled “Corporate Power” in the Spring 2007.

“It’s a larger trend—certainly in colleges and universities and across organizations. And the trend is to focus on core competencies and outsource all the rest of the work,” said Nevarez. “That’s the primary reason why you see colleges outsourcing a lot of their business to corporations.”

Nevarez, who served on the Bookstore Advisory Committee in the early 2000s, pointed to the Bookstore as an example of this idea. Because Vassar wanted to upgrade the Bookstore’s offerings and felt it could not succeed in doing so on its own, it outsourced the store to Barnes & Noble, which now controls the store’s inventory and management.

Bookstore Manager Cathy Black-Benson (who is a Barnes & Noble employee) agreed that there are advantages to having the store run by the chain.

“Barnes & Noble has been doing this for 150 years and has the resources that an independent bookstore maybe doesn’t,” she said. “I like to stress the fact that we give money back to the school, and we support local authors and on-campus events.”

Barnes & Noble guarantees the College five to seven percent of its sales and a minimum of between $100,000 to $500,000, according to the 2002 Bookstore Research Report by the Bookstore Advisory Committee. All Barnes & Noble vendors also sign a contract stating that they are 100 percent sweatshop-free, Black-Benson said.

“We try to support the mission and contribute to the College,” she said.
When students looking to broaden their consumer options have taken steps to make conscientious consumer choices available, they have been met with support from the College, the President and other campus groups.

Boreyko, the Just Coffee representative, said that when Just Coffee was being proposed to the Kiosk, they needed to replace the existent brewing equipment that belongs to Starbucks. After speaking with the students, Hill offered them a donation to cover the cost of that equipment.

“I think [the College is] really receptive,” said Cate. “But I think they are sensitive to making these changes that students aren’t going to like. They are really sensitive to their role as customer service.”

Campus Dining Service representatives reiterated that desire to accomodate students’ requests.

“It’s an open door. Basically if people want something, we’ll try to do it,”
said Director of Marketing and Sustainability Ken Oldehoff. “We’re mostly about choice.”

Socially smarter investments
CIRC, a joint committee of faculty and students, has worked in past years to ensure that Vassar’s investments and investors also align with the College’s mission to promote social and environmental accountability.

“We’ve become the umbrella committee for all socially responsibile product initiatives on campus,” said CIRC student representative Adam Greenberg ’09. “Endowment and investment issues as well as other issues the community might be concerned about—like Kick Coke, for example.”

Last year CIRC, working in conjuction with the Trustee Investor Responsibility Committee, recommended a divestment resolution that prohibited direct investment in companies owned by the Sudanese government. That resolution was adopted by the Vassar Board of Trustees on Oct. 14, 2006.

“The Board definitely cares about Vassar being a responsible investor,” said Greenberg. “At the end of the day Vassar needs the endowment to keep the College going, but we can’t support things that have a negative impact in the broader picture.”

Still, with groups such as Just Coffee and Kick Coke, it is students who are forming the personal, emotional connections to anti-corporate causes and following through to see them implemented.

“A lot of the resistance to this kind of corporate management comes from students who are skeptical and aren’t willing to give corporations the blank check that college administrators are,” said Nevarez. “Economists say markets work best when there’s good market information—this is customers, college students, demanding more inforation. That’s all to the good.”

—Additional reporting by Sarah Siegel, Life Editor