13 students at USC took over University President Steven Sample’s office yesterday to protest USC’s alleged sale of licensed apparel made in third world sweatshops. The students were provisioned for a mult-day sit-in, but gave up after six hours because USC told them they would be suspended and that their parents would be called. 1960’s Berkeley this was not!
While erstwhile radical Tom Hayden could only watch, the protesters folded up like a cheap tent at the first threat of discipline. One protester told the LA Times, “We were prepared for arrest, but not suspension." Huh?
I mean, come on. If you’re going to be stage a sit-in in the president’s office, show a little more spine! And how does a temporary suspension carry more weight than arrest and criminal prosecution? A suspension is a brief vacation and a badge of honor; an arrest is a lifelong rap sheet.
Perhaps even more comical than the quick surrender was the plight of two of the protesters who never got the chance to give up—they left the office for a “bathroom break” and were denied reentry!
We can make light of the situation and laugh about the stunt’s bungled execution because, in the end, the students achieved their objective, namely to raise awareness of USC’s use of sweatshop labor. They probably got more media coverage than if they had actually gone through with their plan and, herein lies a lesson that was articulated perfectly recently by InfoUSA’s Vinod Gupta in an article in Forbes.
Talking about his company’s cheesy 30 second spot for its salesgenie.com that aired during the Super Bowl and which was panned as the worst of all the Super Bowl ads, Gupta noted that it’s ok that his commercial was lampooned because people only remember the best commercial and the worst commercial—the guys in the middle they forget all about. (The spot cost $3 million but brought in $5 million in annual contracts.)
So congratulations to the USC activists. They may look like the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” but they got what they wanted.
Posted by: Unregistered on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 - 09:59 AM
