By Jakob Evans
It’s not uncommon to walk onto a college campus today and see Amazon lockers in a student union building or exclusive Nike merchandise in a campus bookstore. Since the 1980s, neoliberal policy makers have slashed public funding to colleges and universities, forcing these public institutions to fundraise money through other means, such as corporate partnerships. These multi-billion dollar corporations contract with universities, promising large sums of money in exchange for exclusive marketing to college students. While this may seem like a fair trade, these corporate partnerships limit student’s economic freedoms and tie universities to corporations that perpetuate the racial and environmental injustices that are inherent to capitalism. Today’s public universities function like businesses, meeting their budget demands by signing contracts with dubious corporations. UC Berkeley is no exception. In fall of 2019, UC Berkeley undergraduate students formed “Pour Out Pepsi,” (POP) a campaign dedicated to breaking UC Berkeley’s corporate partnership with PepsiCo, Inc. As UC Berkeley votes to renew their contract with PepsiCo, POP is showing the campus that when universities function like businesses, they betray their commitments to their students.
Since 2010, UC Berkeley has partnered with PepsiCo through a “pouring rights” contract that supplies the corporation’s food and beverages to vendors on campus. According to Leonela Leon and Selena Melgoza, the POP campaign co-directors, the 2010 pouring rights contract stipulated that PepsiCo provide a $1.3 million dollar annual sponsorship for the campus in exchange for 80% of shelf space in campus stores. In other words, for ten years, PepsiCo has given money to the university every year in exchange for a near monopoly of what campus stores, like the Golden Bear Cafe, can sell. If you’re looking for a snack on campus, you’ll likely be choosing between PepsiCo products. And while $1.3 million dollars seems like a large sum of money, Melgoza shared that it only makes up 0.0004 percent of the campus’ $3 billion dollar 2019-2020 budget.
The POP campaign argues that this multinational corporation’s racist and destructive operations do not align with UC Berkeley’s values, making campus administration appear hypocritical at a minimum. UC Berkeley has chosen to align themselves with a corporation that does not align with the university’s self-proclaimed core values of sustainability and transparency. According to POP’s research report, they have found PepsiCo to be problematic in several ways; From supporting the American Beverage Association’s multi-million dollar disinformation campaign against soda taxes, targeting Black and Hispanic teens in their advertising, using farming practices in developing countries that promote water scarcity, and being the third largest producer of plastic in the world, creating over 2.3 million metric tons of plastic each year. And Leon laments that this “hardly scratches the surface of PepsiCo’s legacy of unethical business practices.”
PepsiCo’s commitment to inequality and environmental injustice is reflected in how the funding is distributed across programs at UC Berkeley. Leon shared that of the $1.3 million dollars that the campus received annually over the last 10 years, 37 percent went to athletic programs, 27 percent went to student government, 29 percent went to residential programs, but only $15,000 dollars, or 0.1 percent of the money, was used to fund sustainability efforts on campus (specifically the buying of recycling bins).
The contract between UC Berkeley and PepsiCo was up for renewal this year and the POP campaign has worked hard to sway the minds of university decision makers. POP began their movement by speaking at the 2019 September Climate Strike and amassing over 1,300 signatures on a petition to demand that the University Partnership Program (UPP) Beverage Working Group decline to renew the pouring rights contract with PepsiCo. Last semester, they received over 350 signatures on a support letter and this, combined with their year of organizing, created so much pressure on the UPP Beverage Working Group that they postponed their vote to renew the contract until January 2021.
However, despite all of the organizing that POP has accomplished over the past two years, the UPP Beverage Working Group voted to renew their pouring rights contract with PepsiCo for two additional years. Although this contract is much shorter than the one UC Berkeley had agreed to a decade ago, the university has further abandoned their values by continuing this partnership. By ignoring this betrayal to the university’s mission and values, the university takes one step closer to operating like a business and less like the font of wisdom and morals that they pretend to be.
Even though the UPP decided to renew the contract, POP’s work is not finished. The group will continue to advocate for the creation of a more just and healthy campus dining experience. Melgoza suggested that without this contract, “UC Berkeley has the opportunity to create a beverage relationship that supports health, equity, and sustainability,” and pointed out that, “[since] several other universities have parted ways with Big Soda, the number one public university in the nation is capable of doing the same.” POP would like the university to replace PepsiCo’s presence on campus with partnerships to local businesses, on-campus food prep areas, and an investment in healthy and sustainable food and drinks for on-campus dining locations. Over the next two years, they will maintain pressure on campus administrators in hopes of making this year’s contract extension the university’s last.
By signing onto another pouring rights contract with PepsiCo, UC Berkeley has bound their campus’ morals to this corporation’s and turned their backs on students, staff, and the Berkeley community. Pour Out Pepsi organized to voice student demands for equitable and sustainable campus partnerships and while they may not have succeeded yet, their fight is not over. Now, POP is using the resources they have gained and the lessons they have learned in their fight against PepsiCo to uplift student voices to decision-making tables across campus. With Pour Out Pepsi’s continued presence on campus, the days of campus elites governing UC Berkeley like a business are numbered.