We're the ones who pay tuition, and we're the ones who live on campus, so we feel that it is our university.

When Michael Levinson was a freshman at Georgetown University, he heard a Honduran factory worker near his own age speak on campus.

"She was 20 years old, she was a single mother with two kids, and her wages were not enough for her to even provide food and shelter and clothes for them," Levinson, now a junior, recalls.

Moved by her story, Levinson and another student organized an interfaith prayer service, asking students from different faith traditions to speak about what their tradition taught on labor rights. He was soon drawn into the Georgetown Solidarity Committee, the anti-sweatshop group which had sponsored the Honduran woman's visit.

As a business school student majoring in finance and international business, Levinson says he is unique among his fellow activists. With a minor in theology, he is unique in the business school as well. But the combination has served Levinson well in the students' campaign to address the forces that exploit workers who produce Georgetown logo apparel.

The campaign began with an investigation into the factory code of conduct required by the Collegiate Licensing Committee (CLC), which handles licensing for Georgetown and other universities.

"There was nothing about a living wage, nothing about women's rights, and the document said that the companies only had to abide by the laws of the country where the factories were located -- or whatever the prevailing industry standard was," Levinson says. "The other thing which was not in the CLC was full public disclosure of factory locations, and that was considered key by us and by the larger student movement. So we tried to get meetings with our administration, to ask them to sign off the CLC and require full public disclosure."

When their request went unheeded, the Solidarity Committee began educating and organizing on campus.

"We did a fashion show, having students dressed up in Georgetown sweatshirts strutting around, and someone with a bullhorn saying, 'This student is sporting the new Georgetown sweatshirt, only $12.99 at the Georgetown book store, made by 13-year-old girls in Honduras who make 56 cents an hour.' We were trying to connect the two worlds -- what the students know, with what the actual conditions were."

After collecting 1,000 student signatures on a petition, representatives from the Solidarity Committee met with the dean of students. They were told that they could not ask companies for full disclosure, because it would force them to reveal trade secrets.

"That was not true," Levinson says, "because often one factory will subcontract with several different corporations, so you have Nike, Reebok and Jansport items being made side by side in the same factory. Also, there's a difference between developing super-computers and t-shirts -- it's not exactly rocket science."

They were also told that, since Georgetown had over 200 licensees -- producing everything from sweatshirts to Barbie dolls -- and Georgetown contracts were insignificant within each company's budget, the students' demand was unrealistic.

In January of 1999, the Solidarity Committee organized a forum at which an ethicist, an economist and a labor rights expert from the Georgetown faculty all endorsed the students' position. When the administration still failed to respond, the students held a sit-in in the office of Georgetown president Leo O'Donovan.

"Thirty-two of us committed to participate in civil disobedience," Levinson says. "We figured out some very specific goals. At this point, we knew that we couldn't just ask them to drop the CLC, because Georgetown does not have the capacity to handle our own licensing. But we knew the CLC could ask companies to give us full public disclosure and abide by a code of conduct that Georgetown would develop on its own. So we went in the office on a Thursday and sat down and, after a little tense negotiation, the administration allowed us to be there without calling the police. We also had people on the outside organizing rallies and a prayer vigil."

On Tuesday afternoon, 85 hours into the sit-in, the administration agreed to the students' demands.

"They agreed to require full public disclosure, to adopt a code of conduct that we had developed in negotiations, and to give students a decision-making voice in the process," Levinson says. Levinson was one of four students elected to a new Licensing Implementation Committee.

"Once I got on the Committee, I started learning about all the business aspects of implementing real-world activist policies," he says. "We sent out a letter to all of our licensees saying that we would require them to publicly disclose, and we set up a deadline six months later -- which was this past January. As of now, 70 percent of our licensees have complied. We have a big stack of papers and we're trying to put on the Internet thousands of factory locations where Georgetown stuff is made."

The next step -- a plan for monitoring the factories -- was complicated by the emergence of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an industry-based monitoring organization, in May of 1999.

"Then it was only a charter, and we didn't really know what was going on," Levinson says. "I remember poring through an 80-page document, spending hours upon hours analyzing it."

When it became apparent that the FLA would offer no significant challenge to industry practices, the students tried to prevent Georgetown from signing on. They were unsuccessful, since they were unable to propose an alternative. So, along with student activists throughout the country, they set about creating one.

"Students, in conjunction with workers, in conjunction with nonprofit groups and labor groups and religious groups, began to develop the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC)," Levinson says. "This was an alternative monitoring plan that would be worker-friendly, and would work with worker groups in the producing regions, to provide the space for workers to organize for themselves. And the WRC would be a means by which they would have access to millions of dollars of licensing leverage here in the U.S."

In December of 1999, the Licensing Implementation Committee formally recommended that Georgetown withdraw from the FLA. The request was turned down.

"At this point we realized that there were several levels of inertia we would have to work through," Levinson says. "Besides being the bureaucracy that the university is, which is hard to move, most universities have corporate ties. At Georgetown, Fr. O'Donovan is on Disney's board of directors -- which happens to be one of our licensees. The CEO of Levi Straus is on our board of directors. It was never that Fr. O'Donovan said, 'My good buddy Philip Merino, who's the CEO of Levi Strauss, told me that if we signed off the FLA there would be hell to pay.' But there have been blocks that should not have been there."

While Levinson reports "amazing support" from the Georgetown faculty and Jesuit community, he believes that, in university policy, corporate influence has often outweighed spiritual values.

"Georgetown is traditionally a Catholic university, and there's a strong tradition within Catholicism for a living wage, for just working conditions, for a preferential option for the poor and oppressed," he says. "But Georgetown was profiting off the labor of the poor and oppressed and not doing anything about it."

His contacts with student groups elsewhere have convinced him that "in terms of accomplishing goals, the religious orientation of the university matters less than its size and the amount of revenue it receives from licensees, and the depth of the economic ties it has with corporations."

As the WRC took shape, the Solidarity Committee focused on increasing student support, enlisting a wide array of student organizations to lobby the administration. They also made it known that they were planning a second sit-in. On April 4, the week before the sit-in was to take place, the university agreed to pull out of the FLA and join the WRC.

The following week Levinson, along with another student and the dean of students, traveled to New York to attend the WRC founding conference, which included representatives from 45 universities, advisory council members, human rights groups and representatives from several of the producing regions.

"We started to hash out the structure of the organization," Levinson says. "It's not a group of idealistic students talking about things that they don't know. It's being done very intelligently and very thoroughly, with all of the voices that need to be heard at the table."

Despite the major commitment he has made to this effort, Levinson finds time to play in Georgetown's jazz band, give trumpet lessons to children at the YMCA, and volunteer weekly at a soup kitchen. He also leads music at a Catholic Mass (his own tradition) and sings with the African-American Protestant Gospel Choir.

This year, he hopes to start an organization focusing on business and social responsibility. "Within the business school you have a vocabulary that you learn, and a mode of thinking that you enter into, and within that vocabulary there is no place for human rights," he says. "We have a course on social responsibility that we are required to take, but most of it deals with ethical accounting issues and such, not really justice issues."

Levinson says his experience with the anti-sweatshop movement has opened his eyes to larger issues of corporate influence at Georgetown.

"Student voice has been amazingly limited," he says. "If you look at any real decision-making process, there are no students represented. And if you look at the 15 most active directors on our board, 10 of those are CEOs of corporations. We're a Coca-Cola campus, we've signed a lease that says only Coca-Cola can be sold. We just lost our post office and postal workers were fired because of a contract with Mailboxes, Etc. Slowly, our university is being compromised. But so far, we've been able to put student pressure, because students are the primary stakeholders within a university. We're the ones who pay tuition, and we're the ones who live on campus, so we feel that it is our university. And if you can organize and mobilize that student voice, then you can accomplish change."

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness.