UW-Madison ranked 10th in Mother Jones magazine's annual Top 10 Activist Campuses list.
The magazine cited UW-Madison students' commitment to Ecopledge, an organization that aims to persuade corporations to be more environmentally conscious, as the primary factor for the ranking. Nine thousand UW-Madison students, more than one-fifth of the student body, signed the pledge, vowing to not work for or purchase from certain companies whose environmental records they did not agree with.
Other Big Ten universities in the list included Penn State University at No. 3 and the University of Michigan at No. 6.
At Penn State, where African Americans make up 4 percent of the student body'and a number of African Americans on campus received death threats'placed third after students took over the student union and demanded the administration address the climate of racial intolerance.
Michigan made the top 10 when students pressured Nike Corp. to push one of its factories in Mexico to improve working conditions and rehire workers they had fired after they had gone on strike.
Yale University placed first.
