Socially Responsible Investing
As stockholders and leading social institutions, colleges and universities are in a powerful position to challenge corporations. Our schools must use their power as shareholders to demand that corporations stop socially and environmentally destructive activities. Our schools should publicly disclose what they invest in, so that they are subject to public scrutiny. They should pressure corporations to reform harmful practices, firstly by shareholder activism (voting on shareholder resolutions), and secondly by divesting from corporations, if needed. Shareholder activism and divestment are good tactics to use as UW Madison students learned when in the spring of 1997 they got their school to divest $239,000 of Texaco stock, and that same year Texaco withdrew from an important oil project in Burma (the oil revenue would have helped fund the brutal SLORC dictatorship)! Ultimately, you want your university to adopt of set of socially responsible principles governing its investments and a democratically chosen committee to enforce them.


Sit-Ins
Sit-ins are a tactic that first gained popularity in the Thirties in the labor movement, then in the Sixties in the Civil Rights movement. They have recently gained notoriety for their successful use by the student anti-sweatshop movement. Occupying (or sitting-in) a building is one of the strongest non-violent forms of action that a group can take. By sitting in your school president’s office, or an important part of the administration building (or the office of a politician or corporation), you exert power over your target by reducing its ability to operate. When you directly attack and challenge an institution’s control system, the result can be anything from confusion, to intense hostility, to capitulation. You risk punishment and arrest, but by acting boldly you will get extensive media coverage and greatly increase the likelihood of negotiations and their success.