You might want to work for democracy on campus. You can demand that elected students get voting seats on your board of trustees, oppose the commercialization of education (corporate sponsorship of research, faculty chairs, sports teams, buildings, programs of study, etc), oppose the diversion of money away from teaching into corporate-sponsored research, and support students’ right to protest, petition and organize! To achieve some of these goals, you might want to follow the example of students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who formed a coalition of progressive, ethnic, queer, and women’s’ groups and won control of their student government allowing them to use it to achieve progressive goals.
Health Care Without Harm
Most college and university campuses generate medical wastes through campus health centers, hospitals and animal testing. This waste is either steam sterilized and put in autoclaves, or incinerated. Sometimes this is done on-site at your campus, but other times it is dumped on a people of color and / or a poor community. Incineration should be opposed because it produces dioxins and releases toxic heavy metals like mercury. Large commercial autoclaves are not always safely run either. At a public school, your administration must tell you where their waste goes, and at a private school you can ask the waste management department and hopefully they will give tell you. You can get the local hospital to phase out buying medical supplies that contain polyvinylchloride (PVC) or mercury and you can make sure that any medical waste is treated on-site with a non-burn technology.
