Last spring, we saw a great deal of activity around the question of joining one monitoring group rather than another to make sure that apparel carrying our school’s name is made under humane conditions.
In the months since then, I have spoken with many, many students — students whose views range on all sides of the issue. I carefully considered every major issue raised in the spring, as did a Senate review committee, in light of recent progress made by the Fair Labor Association.
One important point should not be overlooked. Through many months last year a university committee (students comprised half the members) developed a Licensing Code of Conduct that outlines the University’s expectations of companies that use our name and logo on products. This code is what is being monitored. This important piece of work can be found on the Web at http://comm.uoregon.edu/licensing/coc.html.
During the past year, I have listened to the views of many people: students, faculty members, hundreds of alumni, trustees, friends and critics of the University. I have heard and studied more about this issue than any other during my time as president. I even attended a founding meeting of one monitoring organization, the Worker Rights Consortium.
And I learned something valuable: Right now, neither the WRC nor the FLA are perfect organizations. Both might make great strides during the next academic year. Ultimately, we should hope for development of an effective “one code, one monitoring system” approach.
But for now, I opted for common sense. I decided to join both.
I think it’s a good decision that will help us enforce our Code of Conduct as effectively as possible. I encourage you to educate yourself on the issues, if you are interested, and make up your own mind. You can find a starting set of information and links on the web at http://comm.uoregon.edu/licensing/.
I hope that our campus can now move on to more important issues. We face many important challenges this year, and we need student energy and voices involved in many of them.
On one of the most important fronts, I commend our student government’s ongoing dedication to voter registration. We are known nationally as a campus that gets out the student vote. It is especially important to do that again this year. We are facing some November ballot measures in Oregon that could drastically cut public funding for public higher education. We are going to need every student voter involved if we are to protect our university.
This year’s ASUO president and I are strongly committed to getting out the biggest student vote in University history this fall. The threat to higher education is real; the stakes are high. If you want to learn more, or if you want to help, please contact the ASUO office.
It is time to pull together to deal with the real challenges, like this fall’s vote, diversity issues, and many others, that will directly affect the quality of education here now and for future students.
I look forward to working with you this year. Please send me any thoughts you have on this issue or any other issue at [email protected].