Students Say Loyola University Chicago Admins Punishing Participants in On-Campus Worker Protest

[marmar]

(In These Times) The “Jesuit Education” provided to students by Chicago’s Loyola University has five characteristics. One, the school’s website proudly states, is a “values-based leadership” that focuses on “personal integrity, ethical behavior in business and in all professions, and the appropriate balance between justice and fairness.”

Yet four of the university’s students say they are being punished for trying to push Loyola to live up to this credo. In recent months, Loyola students and workers have been waging a campaign for campus workers to receive a living wage, and for the administration to roll back what student activists say is a draconian demonstration policy, which requires students to request and receive approval from the Office of the Dean of Students for any on-campus protest not being held on the campus’s Damen North Lawn three days prior. (A moratorium on several sections of that policy was recently declared by the university, though it isn't clear .)

The four students—along with their student government, a sponsoring organization of the protest—are being charged with harassment of a staff member and disrupting the operations of a facility after participating in a protest with on-campus food service workers. Officially handed down on December 18, the charges were preceded by a lengthy period of limbo where the students were threatened with charges, but not officially charged, two of the student organizers of the protests told In These Times. If found guilty, they could be put on probation.

The charges relate to a November 20 demonstration where around 60 protesters marched into the university’s student center and confronted Bill Langlois, the campus representative for Aramark, the foodservice contractor to which Loyola’s workers belong. The protesters read him a list of demands before dispersing. ..................(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18714/Loyola_Aramark_campus_protest