Arbor Update

Some more details here ...

Not a single student was involved in the decision. Yuck.

“Not a single student was involved in the decision. Yuck.”

Filing CSJ complaints can really be a drain on a student leader’s time.

Boy what a cynic, Dan A! Don’t ask me to file a habeas corpus complaint to free YOUR *ss when they send you to Guantanamo…(heh)

I don’t think I’m being cynical. Dan mentioned that its lametable that students didn’t have a greater role in the decision. I thought, “What a great job for a student leader!” Then I remembered what Michigan’s “student leaders” have been doing for the past month: Running an election like siblings fight over a toy, crying to CSJ as though each didn’t have a hand in creating the mess. What’s next: “MSA VP leaves bag of shit on opponent’s porch, CSJ called in to adjudicate?”

Not a wholly bad point…..then again, the Coke activists may be a slightly different subset of the student body than MSA members/candidates are.

So Coke agrees to an audit by a labor-standards organization that is recognized by the United Nations.

That seems to fit University’s demand following the DRB report: submit to a third-party audit amenable to both sides.

A ILO, which routinely performs such audits under the auspicies of the United Nations, seems like a perfectly reasonable group to conduct a third-party audit of Coke practices.

What is the Coke Coalition mad about? Isn’t this what they wanted? Isn’t an independent third-party audit the most they could have reasonably expected?

Suhael:

With UM activists its generally a bad idea to assume that there is a nexus between a position and a tangible policy outcome. More and more, I’m seeing these sorts of fights to be nothing more than a socially acceptable way for “progressives” to be intolerant and hateful in a politically-correct and progressively-compatible way.

Take the current discussion on GoodspeedUpdate for example. Activists want Gamua to drop its offensive name. Gamua does that and still they’re up in arms. “This organization cannot be allowed to exist.” “This organization has no use on campus.” They could just as easily be talking about Lambda or NOW or the NAACP.

Agreement to an audit is good; however, I kind of wonder about the whole context, including that UM has been off Coke for only a little more than three months—and students were apparently not consulted at all about the return of Coke, after all the work they put in, either. Not that students run, or should run, UM, but the administration’s “you don’t exist” attitude here is hardly to be praised.

Well, that was quick… How soon until a “We’re divesting from Israel… from Easter through finals, but over the summer we’re buying it all back”?