Yesterday twenty members of the Yale Undergraduate Organizing Committee led a four-hour sit in in the university's investments office to protest - and to try to get a meeting with David Swensen about - Yale's endowment investments in the abusive hotel corporation HEI. The YDN article is priceless, complete with a snippy dismissal from Tom Conroy and the supposition that Swensen came up to the floor at one point, saw the students, closed the elevator without leaving it, and fled.

But, in the end, the students did not meet with anyone in the office. At 1:45 p.m., Landino had to leave to catch a flight back to California so he could report to work at 5 a.m. on Wednesday. As Landino left, the student protesters applauded him and then packed up their belongings. All 16 students crammed into one elevator for the trip downstairs chanting, “We’ll be back.”

Though no meeting materialized, the students and Landino said they still considered the event a success.

“We did not speak with him but we left a very clear message,” Landino said through a translator. “Like farmers we’ve planted something that is going to grow and we will reap the rewards.”

Before they left, the students wrote a note for Swensen on a yellow legal pad, which concluded, “We are firmly resolved to see this matter through to the end.”

Targeting university endowment investments is one of the most powerful and important ways activists and workers can fight to make universities more just places. It challenges the university's circuits of capital accumulation, exposes the ways in which universities participate in, and affect a broad swathe of economic activities and command the labor of diverse and deterritorialized groups of workers, and it hits the university's neoliberal foundations on multiple fronts and from many sites, making possible a truly global struggle against the "global (network) university."



For more on Unite-HERE's campaign against HEI, go here, here, here, and here