University Police officers stopped students from the Living Wage Campaign from distributing information packets outside Norris University Center to the Board of Trustees on Friday, citing the university’s policy against solicitation.
The Board of Trustees was leaving a meeting in the McCormick Auditorium at 5 p.m.
The Living Wage Campaign co-chair, Weinberg senior Adam Yalowitz, said the group mailed out the same packets to trustees following last winter’s rally. The group printed out copies of their packets after learning of the meeting, just hours before it ended, hoping they could reach more of the trustees than in their previous attempts.
Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Eugene Sunshine offered to distribute the packets to the trustees after the meeting. Yalowitz agreed to the plan, although he was unsure of how the administration would present the information.
“We can’t in good faith believe that they are going to deliver our message to the board of trustees without misconstruing it,” Yalowitz said.
The Living Wage Campaign began November 2009, when Yalowitz and other students began circulating a petition calling for Northwestern Univeristy to mandate a minimum $13.23 hourly wage for food service and janitorial workers. Since then, the petition has grown to more than 1450 signatures, including 90 faculty, though freshman signees have not yet been added to the list.
University President Morton Schapiro has not met with the campaign since last December, although Sunshine meets with the campaign more frequently.
Yalowitz said that he did not fault the Board of Trustees directly for the university’s refusal over the past year to meet campaign demands.
”We don’t think the Board of Trustees is the problem,” Yalowitz said. “We think that when the Board of Trustees comes to campus, the administration puts blinders on them.”