Students Take Activism to the Boardroom

Mike Stier dressed to the nines for his meeting with the Ford Motor Co.--flowery Hawaiian shirt, sandals, swimming goggles strapped to his forehead.

He plopped himself down front and center in a classroom at the University of Pennsylvania and propped his feet on a chair.

Ford’s recruiters tried to ignore Stier as they delivered their spiel to about a dozen business students who had gathered to hear what the company had to offer in the way of employment. Then they asked if there were any questions.

Stier slid his feet off the chair.

“How many people here like summer?” he said, turning to the audience.

Silence.

“Well, I love summer,” Stier continued. “I want to work for Ford because its products generate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and that means hotter, longer summers.”

Stier went on to say that as a member of an industry lobbying group called the Global Climate Coalition, Ford wanted to convince Congress and the public that global warming has no scientific basis and poses little threat to society--a position that environmentalists consider irresponsible and dangerous.

“They really didn’t get that angry,” recalls Stier, a freshman at the Ivy League school. “The guy who had been fielding questions said we should stick with the issues.”

But after a few employment-type questions, another student raised his hand and asked, “What’s the Global Climate Coalition?”

As Earth Day turns 30 Saturday, environmental activism is visible on America’s campuses, but the earlier generation of activists who protested the Vietnam War and helped found the environmental movement would barely recognize it.

It isn’t just the shorter hair, or the piercings and tattoos that have replaced love beads and iron-on patches. It isn’t even the Internet.

The difference is the tactics and the target. If you want to change the world now, activists say, you don’t just march on Washington the way they did in the ‘60s. You don’t start a “Ride Your Bike to Work Day” as they did in the ‘80s, or buy a copy of “101 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Planet.”

If you want to change the world in the year 2000, they say, you proceed directly to the nearest corporate headquarters and try to scare the pants off the guys in the suits.

“We’re going to meet the companies at their level. If they want to talk economics, we’ll talk economics. If they want to talk social problems, we’ll talk social problems. If they want to talk politics, we’ll talk politics,” says Andrea Avolio, a Columbia University senior.

In this age of record profits, mega-mergers and dot-com riches, student activists say they consider corporations far more significant--and malleable--than governments.

“We don’t see this as a passing fad,” said Terry Bresnihan, a Ford spokesman. Smart companies, he said, will try to address the concerns raised by the students.

Students say their approach has already gotten results. As an example, they point to Ford’s withdrawal from the Global Climate Coalition a few weeks after Stier’s stunt last fall at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, Daimler-Chrysler, GM, Texaco and the Southern Corp. have all canceled their memberships in the coalition, a favorite target of the activists.

Today’s student activists grew up in a prosperous world saturated by mass media. They understand the importance of protecting brand names, satisfying stockholders and controlling costs.

In class, they learn that half of the world’s 100 biggest economies are corporations, if you equate a company’s total sales with a nation’s gross domestic product. By that measure, Ford is about the size of Norway. Retail giant Wal-Mart rivals Saudi Arabia. GM is almost as big as Turkey.

Activists figure that, in some ways, giant corporations are as powerful as national governments. So human rights activists concerned about places like Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Tibet put pressure on companies that do business there. Labor activists angry about working conditions in Indonesian clothing factories take their concerns to companies that assemble products there.

This is the coalition that brought 50,000 people to the streets of Seattle last year to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization, and tens of thousands to Washington, D.C., last weekend for a joint meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

It would be one thing if these were a bunch of philosophy majors who wouldn’t go to work for big corporations anyway. But when Yale student Glenn Hurowitz staged a demonstration at BP Amoco’s New York offices last month, he says, he gave the company’s public relations officer a stack of resumes from business and engineering students who had pledged not to work for the company until it promises not to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“It was definitely the kind of people that could get a job at BP Amoco,” Hurowitz says.

Thomas Koch, the public relations executive who accepted the resumes, said he wouldn’t know, because he passed them on to BP Amoco’s London headquarters without examining them.

Many such protests are coordinated by an Internet-based group called Ecopledge.com. Founded last year, the group asks students to vow not to take jobs with companies they have deemed environmentally irresponsible. In today’s tight labor market, she says, that sends a powerful message.

“Unemployment is the lowest that it’s been in 30 years,” says Beka Economopoulos, an organizer for the group. “Corporations are vying for America’s best and brightest, and this is an Achilles heel for them.”

Ecopledge.com organizers say they are collecting signatures on 150 campuses, but they don’t know yet how many students have signed the pledge. Student leaders at Columbia University say they’ve collected 1,000 signatures. Harvard students, who joined the campaign in March, say they collected more than 200 signatures in their first few hours.

“That’s huge for us,” Economopoulos says. “That some of the best brains in this country, like the people who could go on and really do amazing things, know that corporate America’s vision is not theirs.”