Though the Coca-Cola Company is coming under increasing pressure from universities across the country due to alleged mistreatment of workers and environmental abuses, Tufts is not participating in the ban.
On Dec. 29 the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (U-M) joined schools such as New York University (NYU) and Rutgers University in banning the sale of Coca-Cola products on campus.
A commission headed by U-M - upon whose campus Coca-Cola sold $1.4 million worth of product in the 2005 fiscal year - is calling for Coca-Cola to organize an independent, third-party investigation into its labor practices in Colombia and its environmental practices in India. The commission also includes six other universities.
According to a statement by Coca-Cola, the company hired Los Angeles-based Cal Safety Compliance Corporation in 2005 to conduct an assessment of its Colombian bottling plants. Cal Safety Compliance Corporation found no problems with worker conditions.
The actions of U-M followed an extensive investigation by U-M Procurement and Logistic Services in response to a formal complaint lodged in November of 2004 by a group called Students Organized for Labor and Economic Equality.
The group cited inappropriate waste disposal, use of pesticides and excessive removal of groundwater as the company's major offenses in India, in addition to concerns about labor relations in Colombia.
On Jan. 19 Coca-Cola posted a company statement on its Web site addressed to the University of Michigan Board of Regents. The statement called for a "partnership" between the two bodies that Coca-Cola said "could do much more to protect human rights and raise environmental standards than a continued focus on the past."
According to Julie Peterson, Associate Vice President for Media Relations at U-M, the university has not responded to Coca-Cola's statement and can not predict at this time when it will resume selling Coca-Cola's products.
Recent Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate legislation concerning national issues is a relative rarity. According to Senate president and senior Jeff Katzin, this is because many national issues fall outside of the body's jurisdiction.
"The job of the Senate is to represent the needs of the students to the administration to improve student life," Katzin said. "We are not elected directly based on our political beliefs or agendas."
Katzin said that different universities' governing bodies vary in the extent to which they support activist resolutions that bring a student government opinion to bear on national issues.
The TCU Senate's recent aversion to acting on national concerns was highlighted by former TCU president Chike Aguh (LA '05), TCU Senate president in the 2003-2004 academic year.
Aguh refused to allow a motion from the Tufts Academic Freedom Project to be heard by the senate because it was based on a national model.
"We've kind of all been in the same mindset for a couple years," Katzin said, referring to himself, Aguh and senior Dave Baumwoll, last year's Senate president.
The Senate has not always taken this stance, however. In 1996, it passed a resolution recommending a boycott of PepsiCo products in response to irregularities in operations in Burma.
The recommendation was never acted on by the University, however.
"I think that in terms of activism...it works in waves, in the sense that during a certain period of time the campus is more politically active," Katzin said.
Various advocacy groups have also been working to influence Coca-Cola's national policies, most notably KillerCoke.org and Corporate Accountability International (CAI).
Killer Coke has accused Coca-Cola of being in some way complicit with paramilitary groups that intimidate - in some cases violently - leaders of Colombian workers' unions.
Killer Coke's Web site lists eight union leaders that have supposedly been murdered since 1989 by paramilitary groups who were allegedly "often working closely with [Coca-Cola] plant managements."
In an effort to explore such allegations, a BusinessWeek reporter traveled to Columbia in late January.
The resulting BusinessWeek article did not contain proof either for or against Coca-Cola's involvement, but it did contain interviews with individuals who had been involved.
"If, when the first of our colleagues was killed, Coca-Cola had issued a statement condemning the paramilitaries or the criminals and demanding that they stay out of worker-employer relations, we would definitely say that the company had distanced itself from what happened," Edgar Paez, international relations director of the Columbian worker-rights union SINALTRAINAL, told BusinessWeek.
CAI, formerly known as InFact, is one of the leading groups opposing Coca-Cola's actions in India. It is calling for the company to close one of its water-bottling plants located in the city of Mehdiganj.
The plant has been accused of depriving surrounding villages of an adequate water supply.
Some individuals and universities, however, don't believe that Coca-Cola's actions have been satisfactorily proven "dangerous."
An editorial in the Harvard Crimson, for example, said, "We can't help but express skepticism about the logic used by Michigan to end its contract with Coke. Both its process and its weighting of the burden of proof appear suspect."
According to the Michigan Review, the Crimson also faulted U-M for "disregarding Coca Cola's continual reassurances that it was acting in good faith."
Coca-Cola is currently working on a global workplace-rights policy that it aims to implement as the first quarter of 2006 draws to a close.
