The three-foot-six bundle of energy bounds up the hill of rubber, shoe parts and scrap materials, searching for her brother through the smoldering haze of smoke. Hidden amongst the rubble, a black emblem resembling a check mark rests innocently, undermining the destruction its presence has wrought in the country.

At lunch time, a large bite of beans and rice should crowd this seven-year-old girl’s mouth as she animatedly discusses the hottest topic at the school cafeteria table. Instead, as her mother and father slave through another 13 hour shift at the Nike sweatshop factory in Tangerang, Indonesia, a large gulp of toxic smoke fills her lungs as she plays, ensuring the chest infection that will result her future confinement to a hospital bed.
AMP invited the founder and captain of Team Sweat, Jim Keady, to speak in the Commonwealth Auditorium Oct. 26 about the unjust, inhumane treatment of workers in Nike sweatshops and his goal to guarantee a living wage for their survival.

“I had no plans for becoming a full-time social justice activist,” Keady said.

As a graduate student in theology and a soccer coach at St. John’s University, Keady uncovered the abuses committed by this top sports equipment company through a class assignment. Then the St. John’s athletic department began to discuss a $3.5 million dollar endorsement deal with Nike. Keady was forced to decide between his job, which would require him to become a walking advertisement for Nike, or his convictions about the low wages and severe working conditions experienced by its workers.

“I felt the university was compromising what they stood for as a Catholic institution, and I knew it was time for me, as someone who had been going to Catholic school for 18 years, to put my money where my mouth was in terms of what I claimed to believe,” Keady said.

Instead of merely researching and organizing a fund for sweatshop workers, Keady traveled to Tangerang for a month to live on the $1.25 per day wages and to witness firsthand the situations about which he had read. Chair of AMP’s Contemporary and Cultural Issues Committee Chelsea Moubarak ’12 described this as the primary reason for inviting Keady to campus.

“In addition to his passion and his interest, he’s had personal experiences that add a certain real-life perspective to what he has to say,” Moubarak said.

Maggie Scott, AMP’s graduate assistant for programming, agreed that Keady’s work had increased due to his experiences with the starving workers who battle harassment, forced overtime and grimy living conditions on a daily basis in order to produce athletic gear for Nike.

“It gives him credibility and brings an extra element to the presentation,” Scott said. “It’s neat to see that he discovered these things about society that completely threw him off of his path.”

Moubarak also pointed out the relevance of the issue for students.

“We need students to know that this issue affects their lives because they’re using these products and they’re playing a role in this system,” Moubarak said.

His time spent living in such close quarters with the families in Tangerang enabled Keady and his team to see that Nike’s decision to maximize profits at any cost to humanity affects not only the workers, but also their families.

“I don’t think it’s a far stretch for these kids to be able to eat healthy food for three meals a day and to have a home that’s free of rats and cockroaches—especially when their parents are producing wealth for the most profitable sportswear company in the world that boasted $2.1 billion in profits last year,” Keady said.
At the same time, Keady explained that there is a culture of fear permeating the country that discourages any kind of change through unionization, protest or public meetings.

“They want to tell you the truth and fight for their rights, but they also want
their children to have a father or mother the next day,” the informational movie said.

While in Indonesia, Keady shared with workers that athletes like LeBron James earn the same for wearing Nike gear in one game as one worker makes through 9.5 years of 13 hour, six-day work-weeks. Keady relayed one specific story that continually drives him to spread awareness.

“As an athlete in particular, I felt so embarrassed to tell [the lady] that athletes don’t care about how [she has] to live to make them products that we all compete in,” Keady said. “But I am fighting to change that.”
By visiting schools across the country, Keady hopes to reach athletes in particular, who wear the Nike swoosh in connection with their athletic programs in particular.

“There was at least one student athlete in the audience tonight,” Keady said. “That’s one more athlete that tomorrow, when he laces up his shoes for practice — at a minimum, he’s going to think about the people who made them.”

Tetsuya O’Hara, Director of Advanced Research and Development at Patagonia, visited the Mason School of Business Wednesday, chronicling his rise to prominence and explaining the factors behind Patagonia’s recent success.

The event, which was co-sponsored by the Luxury and Retail club and Net Impact, a business sustainability club at Mason, was scheduled in order to provide a perspective on the growing trend of sustainability in business. Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company based in Ventura, Calif., has been recognized as one of the top environmentally-conscious companies, and founder Yvon Chouinard is considered by some to be a sustainability visionary.

“It was a whole new way to look at engagement, and it appealed to a huge crowd of people,” Student Assembly President and Net Impact Creative Director Kaveh Sadeghian ’12 said. “Students from every background were there. It was a testimony to how inclusive and progressive this is.”

Luxury and Retail Club president Edmund Amoye MBA ’12 met O’Hara at an event at Harvard, maintained the friendship and encouraged O’Hara to visit the College. Net Impact worked closely with the Luxury and Retail Club to get the word out to the student body.

“I wanted people to take a look at a company that doesn’t want to grow big but really wants to take a look at the environment,” Amoye said. “The way they market their product makes it seem like a luxury product, [and] I thought there was a lot to be taken away from him coming here to talk.”

O’Hara began by discussing his childhood in Japan, and how the simplicity and functionality of Japanese culture continues to influence him. After years of success at Teijin Limited in Japan, O’Hara was recruited by Dimension Polyant Sailcloth, a sports materials manager in Putnam, Conn. In 2003, he was recruited by Patagonia and rose through the ranks to his current position.

“He talked about the culture of Patagonia, how, for example, the company is 100 percent owned by its founder,” Amoye said. “There is a strong connection to sticking to the mission of the company.”

O’Hara also detailed Patagonia’s revolutionary business practices, and outlined the company’s five green principles, the main theme of which is that companies must do their part to help protect the environment.

“From a business perspective, everything he was saying was counterintuitive…his company doesn’t want to grow more than 5 or 7 percent a year, they believe they can’t mitigate the negative environmental effects of selling too much product if they grow more than that,” Amoye said.

O’Hara praised Chouinard’s business model and believes the company succeeds with its unconventional business plan because of the latter’s charisma. O’Hara said Patagonia’s efforts at being green were earnest.
“When I am out of this [business] world, I don’t have to wear a suit or have a contingency plan, I just wear a t-shirt and shorts and travel for two months. It makes sense there,” Sadeghian ’12 said. “What is so amazing about Patagonia is that they have managed to take that spirit and translate it into the business world.”

Patagonia has an unorthodox upcoming advertising campaign to encourage its customers not to buy its products in an effort to preserve the environment. One ad appearing in The New York Times will feature a Patagonia jacket under the words, “Do Not Buy This Jacket.”

“They try to convince customers to consume responsibly. One way of doing that is telling their costumers not to buy their products,” Amoye said. “From the perspective of our club, that, in essence, puts the product in more demand. The costumer feels like you are telling them they are not good enough for the product because you are telling them they can’t have it so they want it more and more.”

Sadeghian said it was refreshing to see a successful business that has sustainable practices.

“They have created an incredible culture and perspective to business right now that is completely aligned to the millennial generation interest,” he said. “It is exactly what our generation is leaning toward.”

As a result of the College of William and Mary’s current undergraduate curriculum review, the Society for the College hosted a panel to discuss curriculum standards at the College Thursday.

The society is a nonprofit corporation founded in 2008 to “help the College of William and Mary be the best public university in the country” by promoting good school governance, preserving its history and traditions, and maintaining excellence in its liberal arts education.

College Provost Michael Halleran moderated the discussion. Participants included faculty representatives from the Curriculum Review Steering Committee, a representative from American Council of Trustees, other College faculty and an ACTA summer fellow from George Washington University.

“Given the fact that the College is reviewing its curriculum, the timing is important for this panel discussion,” society President Andrew McRoberts ’87 said. “The Society is hosting a year-long discussion which will continue into the spring when the faculty committee is expected to make its recommendations.”

The College’s General Education Requirements were a key topic of discussion. In its recent project entitled “What Will They Learn?” the ACTA graded universities in the United States based on the comprehensiveness of their core curriculums. The College received a C.

“An ACTA grade does not pretend to be a grade of overall institutional quality or even overall academic quality. It is a grade of General Education Requirements,” ACTA Vice President of Policy Michael Poliakoff said. “But I want to note the general education statement here. William and Mary says to students there’s a lot of flexibility in how you choose to mix and match your general education courses. This is a good chance to stretch your comfort zone and experience academic fields you’re less familiar with or explore what you know and like from a different perspective.”

Although all of the College’s requirements were discussed in some detail, many participants stressed the importance of writing proficiency.

“Now here’s what business leaders have to say,” Poliakoff said, citing a survey of 450 business leaders. “26.2 percent said that they found the writing skills of newly-hired, four-year college graduates to be deficient. That’s an alarming statistic.”

Philosophy professor Paul Davies agreed that students lack necessary writing skills. “I teach freshman seminar a lot, and if I say this in public, maybe this will be the last time I teach it. I also teach advanced seminars a lot, and if I were to give the attention that those students need to improve their writing, I would end up teaching very little substance.”

Meanwhile, George Washington student and ACTA fellow Greg Lewin offered a student’s perspective.

“The broader a core requirement, the more it allows empty and facile content to undermine its value. In this way, requirements slip from educational priorities to bureaucratic obstacles, which students will circumvent as best we can,” Lewin said, referring to the common practice among students of fulfilling requirements with the easiest courses they can find. “If the school doesn’t care about the fundamentals of general education, neither will we.”

The College will continue to review the undergraduate curriculum throughout the academic year and will present the new curriculum in the spring.

The College of William and Mary Faculty Assembly debated controversial questions of salary increase and retirement transparency at its October meeting Wednesday.

Starting Nov. 25, a modest salary increase will go into effect, with the potential to become more substantial over the next two years, according to the provost’s report. Even so, the College faculty is frustrated about the salary situation, which causes a multitude of problems. The primary financial concern for the College is the need to decrease costs and increase revenues.

“That’s what’s at the root of this [situation],” physics professor Todd Averett said. Averett is the assembly’s parliamentarian.

Currently, a retiring professor may choose to receive an 8 percent and 7 percent raise in his or her penultimate and final years of employment, respectively. The matter of transparency becomes relevant when less-accomplished academics get the best deals for retirement, an aspect that is inevitable with a system like the College’s.

“The current program should be phased out,” Debbie Bebout, chemistry professor and chair of the assembly’s Faculty Affairs Committee, said.

“We need a retirement incentive in place to encourage people to retire,” English professor Suzanne Raitt, the assembly’s secretary, said.

But when there is no money for increases in salary, where does this funding for retirement come from?
The answer is straightforward: hiring new faculty decreases expenses, since they are not as experienced and therefore do not earn as much as money as their predecessors. This is not entirely efficient in covering costs though, which is why some feel a new plan is necessary.

“Everyone should know what they are entitled to,” physics professor Gina Hoatson said, in defense of transparency.

After much discussion, the motion to endorse the four specific recommendations for the retirement program achieved the simple majority necessary to pass.

Additionally, various other motions were put to vote. Among them was the proposal to make the chair of the Committee on Planning and Resources (COPAR) also the chair of the Faculty University Priorities committee (FUPC), which passed unanimously.

Looking towards the future, the assembly chose to defer addressing the idea of “creative adaptation and productivity” until its next meeting.

“The assembly is widely representative of the College of Arts and Sciences, in addition to the four professional schools,” Provost Michael Halleran said.

According to Halleran, the purpose of the assembly is to ensure that it is the “fundamental prerogative of the faculty” to decide major issues.