09/20/07: Students to protest Halliburton visit - UW campus

Students to protest Halliburton visit

College activists oppose company's presence at career fair; oil services firm formerly headed by Cheney says students are misinformed.

September 20 2007: 7:59 AM EDT (CNN Money section on the website - same article as sent out by the Associated Press)

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- A 1967 visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison by a recruiter from Dow Chemical Co., which made napalm, sparked a bloody clash between police and protesting students and galvanized anti-war sentiment on campus.

A new generation of student activists are summoning memories of the 40-year-old demonstration with their vows to demonstrate Thursday against Halliburton (Charts, Fortune 500), another company they see as profiteering from war.

Organizers expected anywhere from dozens to hundreds of students to turn out to protest the company's visit to an engineering career fair. They hope to discourage students from talking to Halliburton representatives.

Some planned to carry signs saying, "Curly, off campus!," a reference to the Dow Chemical (Charts, Fortune 500) representative who visited the school, William "Curly" Hendershot.

"We've decided that any war-profiteering recruiter stands in the tradition of Curly," said Chris Dols, a student and member of the Campus Antiwar Network, which is organizing the protest. "We're explicitly drawing the connection between the two."

The 1967 protest started with a sit-in at a university building where Hendershot was trying to recruit students. When a large crowd of activists refused to leave, police used their clubs on students. Dozens were injured.

The police violence ignited broader anti-war sentiment among the student body, and helped turn Madison into a hub of the anti-war movement. Future protests ended with violence or blasts of tear gas from police. Downtown businesses were vandalized, and National Guard troops were called in.

Among those beaten by police at the Dow protest was Paul Soglin, a graduate student who later became the city's mayor.

"Halliburton is certainly as offensive a company today as Dow was 40 years ago," he said. "It's just wonderful that these students are raising these issues about the ethics of a corporation like that in a university setting."

Students in 1967 demanded the university kick Dow off campus because it had a military contract to produce napalm, a flammable liquid that burns human flesh at extremely high temperatures.

Today's protesters say Halliburton, an oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, should not be allowed on campus because it has profited from the Iraq war with lucrative military contracts.

Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said a former subsidiary, KBR (Charts), handled military contracts and the two became separate companies earlier this year. Halliburton is coming to Madison to look for entry-level employees, she said.

"We've come to expect this type of spectacle, just as we've come to expect that the allegations will yet again be misinformed and incorrect," Norcross said. "We continue to support individuals' right to voice their opinions, even when they have the facts completely wrong."

But the students say Halliburton's split with KBR does not absolve it of charges of unethical practices, which they say include overbilling the government, neglecting troops and bribing foreign officials.

Halliburton denies the allegations. KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, agreed last year to pay $8 million to settle six-year-old claims that it overcharged the Army for construction and other support services in the Balkans.

Halliburton started recruiting at the university in 2003 and is "interested in strengthening a relationship with the college," said Sandra Arnn, an assistant engineering dean.

Protesters haven't targeted the company before, but organizers of Thursday's demonstration say they hope to dissuade their classmates from approaching Halliburton's representatives.

"We're going to have such a presence there. Through our numbers and the wit of our argument, we'll turn people away," said Dols, 24, a part-time civil engineering student. "We want to make it an unpopular thing to approach the Halliburton recruiter."

The university has warned protesters it will not tolerate chanting or intimidation of students. It also says protesters must allow easy access to all of the 100 recruiters expected at the event.

University spokesman John Lucas said students who break the rules could face disciplinary action from the school and arrest by campus police.

"We're hopeful it isn't going to come to that and it's one of these events where people can make their points and not be disruptive in a way that prevents other people from participating," he said.

Zach Heise, a 21-year-old senior, said activists decided they would follow all of the university's rules.

"We want to make it so that if any law enforcement comes in and says you need to disperse, we can say we are following the rules and we are going to stay right here," he said. "But none of us wants to be clubbed in the head with a billy stick."