Recognize Student Boycotts

MANY MONTHS AFTER students asked the University to support consumer student boycotts of J.P. Stevens and Nestle Inc. products officially, the Faculty Council last week ruled that the University should in no case recognize a student boycott even if a majority voted for a boycott in a referendum. The Council claims a University sanction of a boycott would violate the University's academic freedom. If President Bok and the Corporation go along with the ruling, the University will once again have succeeded in dodging a moral issue, as it has in the past in its policies on investments and gifts.

By refusing to back a consumer boycott, the Council guarantees that student boycotts will have little impact. In the case of J.P. Stevens sheets used in the University Health Services' infirmary, students have no way of boycotting without University support.

The Council falsely claims that University support of a consumer boycott would endanger the right of the minority to use the product. In the first place, any student could still use the product privately. And second, refusal to recognize a majority referendum supporting a boycott effectively denies the majority's right not to use the produce: when a student goes to UHS, he has no choice but to sleep on J.P. Stevens sheets, even after the student body has voted to boycott that company.

President Bok, in his May letter on consumer boycotts, maintained that the University should not consider the ethical implications of each purchase because the process would impose a "heavy administrative burden." This is an evasion of the issue--the student body's right to make responsible choices about what it consumes. It is, after all, students, not administrators, who use the health services and dining halls.

If a majority of students show by direct boycott or ballot that they find use of a product morally repugnant, then a boycott should take place. By denying students this right, the University does worse than take a morally neutral position; it prevents students from acting on their moral beliefs. Bok and the Corporation should flatly reject the Council's ethically empty policy.