Ever since students at the University of Wisconsin protested the presence of napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical on their campus in 1967, college students have been fighting the corporate world’s creep into the academy. During the 2000–01 school year, activists on many campuses sought to put their university’s academic mission ahead of corporate partnerships. The flawed presidential election, campus race relations, and poverty wages for university employees also raised student ire. Following is Mother Jones magazine’s 2001 ranking of the best of student activism. (It was completed before the terrorist attacks of September 11. John Nichols in The Nation magazine, however, points to Wesleyan College as leading U.S. campuses in challenging our military assault on the Afghan people.)

1. Yale University
Student protesters forced Yale and its business partner Bristol-Meyers Squibb (BMS) to relax the patent on Zerit, an AIDS drug developed by Yale scientists that brought BMS $618 million in profits in 2000. The students collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in an attempt to shame the university into making the drug cheaply available in Africa. It worked: Yale and BMS agreed to allow production of a generic version of the drug, royalty-free.

2. Pitzer College
When the seven-college Claremont consortium in California announced that it wanted to build a new biotech campus—promising industry backers broad influence over the curriculum—students at Pitzer took to the streets. They spent the summer of 2000
collecting thousands of signatures to force a public referendum on the plan. University officials shelved the proposal temporarily, but protests continued throughout the school year. At a March 2001 sit-in, students chained themselves to garbage cans filled with concrete; 10 were arrested and removed—with the aid of forklifts.

3. Pennsylvania State University
Race relations at Penn State, where African Americans make up only 4 percent of the student body, were stretched to the breaking point by a series of anonymous death threats aimed at black students. Hundreds of protesters took over the student union to demand that the administration address the climate of racial intolerance. The sit-in ended 10 days later when the school’s president promised to establish an Africana Studies Research Center and create $350,000 in new minority scholarships.