SWARTHMORE, Pa., Jan. 13 (AScribe Newswire) -- Two Swarthmore College students are leading an effort to mobilize the public against genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Their effort to raise funds for an international peacekeeping force is the latest in a series of wide-ranging social change initiatives recently undertaken by students at Swarthmore, a Quaker-founded college with a long tradition of activism and civic engagement.
Senior Mark Hanis and junior Andrew Sniderman, both political science majors, are creating a Genocide Intervention Fund to privately finance the UN-mandated African Union mission. In what is believed to be the first effort of its type by a citizen group, Hanis and Sniderman are creating the fund with the long-term goal that it become a permanent institution poised to respond to future genocides. For more information, visit http://www.GenocideInterventionFund.org.
The work by Hanis and Sniderman follows the recent success of juniors Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith in resisting efforts by Diebold, Inc., to suppress documents detailing problems with the company's electronic voting machines. In what was hailed as a victory for free speech, Pavlosky and Smith this past fall won a lawsuit against Diebold to halt the company's efforts to shut down any website that hosted or linked to the memos. In the fall of 2003, Smith and Pavlosky published the leaked documents on the Internet, prompting cease-and-desist orders from Ohio-based Diebold. (More information on the Diebold matter is available at http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/releases/03/diebold3.html.) In addition to challenging Diebold, Pavlosky and Smith have started an international student movement called FreeCulture.org dedicated to fighting coercive copyright practices and other threats to the free flow of information.
Also in 2004, at the behest of students on the college's Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, Swarthmore successfully pressured two Fortune 500 companies to broaden their equal opportunity polices to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. After receiving notice of the college's intent to file shareholder resolutions, both companies - Dover Corp. of New York and Masco Corp. of Michigan - changed their policies. The development mirrored the committee's successful action in 2003 with Lockheed Martin, which agreed to add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policies after the college filed a shareholder resolution - the first in the country solely initiated by a college or university since the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college whose mission combines academic rigor with social responsibility. Swarthmore, with an enrollment of 1,450, is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country. The college's various civic engagement programs and activities were consolidated and strengthened in 2003 with the establishment on the Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.
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CONTACT: Alisa Giardinelli, 610-690-5717, agiardi1@swarthmore.edu
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