It must be quite an experience to be in Bascom Hall without any students, looking out onto an empty campus. Newspaper racks with two-week-old newspapers, hallways with out-of-date flyers; it must be very lonely over winter break. And as you sit in there in a studentless university, Chancellor Wiley, feel free to take your time deciding the Nike licensing contracts that caused such a fervor among your students.
We empathize with your lonesome job over the next month. The work of a great university continues through vacations. Surely Nike, the great American machine of industry, never takes breaks for holidays. Do not worry. As lonely as your office is now, both you and the office will be there when students return in a month. Great institutions are built in the off-season. And as the students are off for the season, you will no doubt be working to make ours better. The ink on the contracts you sign late December will be dry by the time we return. If one of those is the Nike contract, most students will not even know for a month and a half.
Regardless of what you do over break, we will return from the month hiatus as if nothing happened. The university-affiliated advisory group, the Labor Licensing Policies Committee, will return expecting to restart a debate that has already taken a semester. With Nike offering a licensing deal, the LLPC sees an opportunity to fight unfair labor practices. The university has the power to force Nike to publish the wages of the employees who work in their contracted factories. These factories would then be forced to allow employees the contractual minimal standards of living UW helped pioneer. \Wage disclosure"" is now on your desk.
We are a political group of kids, Chancellor Wiley, jaded, bratty and loud. In 2000 and then again in 2001, students clashing with the university over sweatshops resulted in sit-ins in the office of then-Chancellor Ward. It is your office now.
Protests are messy. The 2001 sit-in definitely was, resulting in numerous arrests. But students deserve an opportunity to respond, even if it is to respond poorly. You are entitled to take your time to decide on wage disclosure. But as vacation nears, a few of us have a nagging fear you are waiting for students to be out of earshot to relay information students do not want to hear: The university will side with a lucrative contract over the students who oppose sweatshop labor.
And nobody feels comfortable saying that, because we, as students, trust you. Nobody wholeheartedly believes you would be afraid to announce decisions you believe in face-to-face with students. But we are afraid nonetheless.
Please do not bar us from the discussion. Do not keep us from reacting to choices that affect us all. Do not prevent students from seeing your decision on the news or reading it in the paper. Do not hide behind the media blackout of vacation.
We are a political group of kids, the kind who protest a decision we cannot condone by our silence. Messy, yes. But miles ahead of the apathetic student body you would create trying to avoid us like obstacles.
This is not a message of distrust, Chancellor Wiley. Years of education at the honorable institution you lead taught us the value of skeptical trust, and a continually reevaluated faith in humanity. History and political science, philosophy and international relations have taught us to mediate trust with enough doubt to never be caught off guard.
Do not catch us off guard. Do not decide wage disclosure while we are away. Do not assume timing can squelch protests or negative opinion. We as a paper and we as a student body will not let a decision against wage disclosure go quietly, whenever it is made. You will not stop a protest by merely delaying it.
Your office will be there when students return, Chancellor Wiley.
