DePaul University joins Coca-Cola Boycott!

Short anatomy of the recent events of a victory

After a more than four year campaign led by the Activist Student Union at DePaul University, I am pleased to be the first to announce that DePaul has joined the Coke Boycott!

The decision may have been made as early as July, though no official public statement had been made. Last week, though, the coke vending machines began disappearing according to some of the activists. Congradulations to the broad campaign, which included the school's DePaul Students Against the War, Concerned Black Students, Black Student Union, DePaul Alliance for Latino Empowerment, United Muslims Moving Ahead, feminists in action!, DePaul Community Service Association, and many other student groups across the campus.

In short, the campaign was part of an international one that is at its biggest on college campuses in English-speaking countries, called for by Colombia's progressive union SINALTRAINAL after too many (I think it is at 11 dead as of this summer?) of its members and organizers had been executed by death squads in collusion with their employers at sub-contracted Coca-Cola bottling facilities. Luis Adolfo Cardona, an officially designated refugee living in Chicago, was tortured and had his young family threatened with death, and so he became a central resource to the DePaul student activists.

Bureaucrats who were supposed to be on our side

The bureaucrats at the campus played an underhanded game. The Fair Business Practices Committee was formed a long time ago because of the struggles of earlier generations of the ASU is made up of student, staff, and faculty representatives. Their most recent meeting, in which the big decision was to made on their reccomendation to the administration regarding Coke, went on without members who are delegated to attend from such central student groups as ASU and DALE. The FBPC did this despite these student representatives' explanations that the meeting time was impossible for them to attend.

The University had successfully stalled the campaign until its huge exclusive contract with Coca-Cola ended this summer. During most of the campaign, a cornerstone of the ASU's activities was providing alternative beverages to a large number of groups and events, including many that were not official sponsors of the campaign, and most of this was done at ASU's expense. They brought in everything from progressive options to Jones Soda, to local drink makers to RC Cola, showing a very wide variety of alternatives.

This is important. The Coke contract prevented other beverages from being bought or sold on campus, so ASU had to fundraise heavily and carry the entire project out on its own. Simultaneously, the administration and others attempted to hinder the campaign by suggesting that it would be impossible to take out Coke without viable alternatives, which the university could not play with because of the high level of exclusivity of the contract. ASU's very quick, longterm, popular, and successful alternative beverages program was a great (preemptive) means of taking out one of the central potential attacks on the campaign.

Despite all this high-profile hard work, the Fair Business Practices Committee either failed to give an intelligent alternative or failed to make a strong enough argument for it, and the DePaul University beverages contract has gone over to Pepsi and Gatorade, companies that the campaign was specifically opposed to contracting with. The university bureaucrats who managed the FBPC cannot plead ignorance on this, and should be taken to task for their manipulation and impotence.

How will DePaul acknowledge this?

DePaul University has two options regarding its public relations of the decision to not renew the contract. The first one is to take the principled stance that the nation's largest Catholic university is joining the international boycott of Coke, one of the largest businesses in the world. This is the truth, as any of the activists who worked on the campaign for the past few years would tell you, Coke gave some sweet concessions to obtain its exclusive contract, so it can't be a business-based decision. DePaul should be proud of another victory that student activists won in the name of Vincentian (the Catholic tendency of the school) values.

The other option is to sell-out and try to help Coke save face after the break-up. This can either be done by DePaul publically distancing itself from the boycott, or by not acknowledging the decision at all. In other words, the decision to not renew the contract could officially become entirely independent of the Coke boycott. Let's hope DePaul takes the principled route and states its decision as a political one.

How could the FBPC manage to distance DePaul from the boycott? Their official position in the middle of last school year was support for the boycott, which was quickly rolled back. The school's Student Government Association did the same under the presidency of arch-villain Campus Democrats leader Wes Thompson. So now, with inadequate or possibly a total lack of student voice, the FBPC endorses a faux International Labor Organization investigation by a body that includes former corporate officials from Coca-Cola, another 'investigation' (which is not actually called an investigation by the ILO) requested by Coke.

But this is VICTORY

But this is victory, and the ASU and the campaign's organizers have every right to celebrate. Possibly more on this later.