Sweatshops and the Corporatization of the University

In the spring of 2000, student activists mobilized an anti-sweatshop campaign at the university where I teach. They joined student activists at campuses across the USA and Canada who, since 1997, have been protesting the sweatshop conditions under which much athletic wear bearing university logos is produced (Featherstone, 2000). Their activism has placed them in direct con ict with the university’s corporate partnerships and therefore also in con ict with the priorities of many campus administrators whose jobs require them to protect corporate contracts (Mandle, 2000). In this context, my research on Indonesian factory working women took on a heightened sense of urgency. As I found myself talking across the heated worlds of campus activists, university administrators, and Indonesian factory workers, I had to negotiate Ž ercely competing agendas. Not least among these was the internal tension I felt between my commitment to workers’ rights and the unspoken pressure on me to censor my opposition to sweated labor. In what follows, I examine this internal tension, and pay particular attention to the ways in which the corporatism of the university contributed to it. In addition, I discuss some of the ways that recent critiques of this corporatism can strengthen critical feminist approaches to understanding the sweatshop issue, as well as other similar global economic issues. Geographers have argued recently that the relationships between corporations and universities, while not new, have grown substantially cozier (Mitchell, 1999, 2000; Castree & Sparke, 2000). They point out that the increasing Ž nancial dependence of universities on corporations affects the quality of higher education, the priorities of research institutions, and the personal and professional lives of faculty and graduate students. Here, I add to their discussion with an analysis of the effects of corporatization on my sense of freedom of speech. I am especially interested in using this re exive analysis to identify alliances that can be built among students, faculty, and staff at the university, as well as with factory workers here and abroad. As Katharyne Mitchell (2000, p. 1713; italics in original) has argued, ‘[I]t is public recognition of the sameness of the transformations and experiences, as well as some of their differences across space, that will allow us as a wider community to resist many of the negative ramiŽ cations of structural changes [both] in the academy’ and beyond. In this commentary, I highlight the common pressures affecting the differently positioned groups involved in the campus sweatshop debates. I situate this discussion within the broader debates in contemporary feminist studies. There is pronounced anxiety among some feminist scholars about how to reconstruct the