Ginsberg Center E-Newsletter
February 2009
Moral Compass
Student Activist Ken Srdjak witnesses globalization in India and finds what direction to take closer to home
When University of Michigan senior Ken Srdjak took time off from college to volunteer at a school for poor rural children in India two years ago, it changed his life. But not in the expected way.
While the idea of educating poor rural children was sound, it was also very Western, Srdjak said. It just didn't feel right. "It was about ingesting Western culture. I didn't like telling students who were good in art to forget about it and learn math instead," he said. "It was like a Western boarding school."
That was the beginning of Srdjak's drive to combat the negative forces of globalization. While he decided to leave the Indian school six months early, moved to a civilian ashram, attended a meditation retreat, and traveled throughout India, Srdjak returned to campus with a new direction: to address the negative consequences of globalization, from sweatshop labor to the United States role in training Latin American insurgents.
He wanted, he said, to follow the words of Gandhi: "Become the change you want to see."
While pursuing his self-styled degree in Personal, Social, and Global Change in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Srdjak has become active with organizations across campus that address sweatshop conditions in developing nations, fair trade, U.S. involvement in Latin America, and the promotion of locally grown food.
"There's no shortage of things that need attention," he said.
A work-study student at the Ginsberg Center, Srdjak also is active with the Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality, formed to promote fair trade and sweatshop-free university apparel. The idea is to reach out to the administration to insure that apparel carrying the M logo is made in fair-trade factories and to raise awareness among students, he said.
He's also a member of the Michigan Student Assembly's Peace and Justice Committee, which last November attended an anti-military rally at Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the School of the Americas, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a tax-funded training school for Latin American soldiers. Srdjak was on the bus of protesters who made the trip and was part of a vigil at the gates of the school. "It was a solemn vigil, like a long funeral procession, where the names of people victimized by the school's graduates were read," Srdjak said. He hopes to bring Hector Aristizabal, a Columbia torture victim, and a practitioner of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, an international training program that combats oppression and promotes peace.
Srdjak is also involved with the Fair Tees Project, a student organization that encourages other university groups such as sororities and fraternities to purchase T-shirts from a fair trade cooperative. While fair trade coffee is relatively easy to find, Srdjak said, Fair Tees hopes to build up a network of fair trade products that will make buying T-shirts just as easy. "We want to get the word out there that this is an easy thing you can do to change things in the world."
And he helped organize the Michigan Sustainable Initiative this semester to encourage university food service to purchase locally grown food, at least during the growing season. He's hoping the university will buy all its tomatoes from local growers next year.
Srdjak isn't sure what he wants to do when he graduates in the spring. "I'm comfortable with where life will put me," he said. "I want to do something that will maximize having a positive impact."