FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 1, 2015

Contact: Caitlin Lee, 713-504-6866, caitlinlee11@gmail.com

Statement from Students Against Peabody in Response to Washington University Board Vote Today

Today, the Washington University Board of Trustees met and voted to re-elect Peabody Chairman Greg Boyce to the Board of Trustees. In response, Washington University Students Against Peabody released the following statement:

One year ago, 7 Washington University students were arrested while trying to speak to our Board of Trustees about its connection with Peabody Energy CEO Greg Boyce. This year, we watched our university work with the St. Louis police to again bring in riot gear to protect the Board of Trustees meeting from its own students.

We are disgusted with our University’s continued relationship with Peabody Coal. We have been to Rocky Branch, Illinois and seen the devastation that Peabody’s strip mines are causing to local farming communities. We have heard first hand from Dineh (Navajo) resistors on Black Mesa about Peabody’s depletion of the aquifers and Peabody’s continued forced relocation of thousands of indigenous people. We have seen how the tax breaks Peabody takes from the City of St. Louis hurt the St. Louis Public Schools, how the asthma rates in St. Louis are some of the worst in the country from coal being burnt in the region.

Last night, we worked with Decarcerate St. Louis to plan #ShameAndChampagne where we confronted the Washington University Board of Trustees at their cocktail hour at the Ritz-Carlton. We demanded Greg Boyce not be reelected and that Andrew Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise and director of the Keefe Group (which profits off of private prisons), resign.

This school needs to recognize its fundamentally unethical behavior as it continues to uphold corporations such as Peabody and Keefe Group. These corporations regularly disregard the health, homes and livelihoods of average people and continue to build their empires by profiting from this oppression. The violent apathy of Washington University to the very real struggles for survival by these communities is embarrassing and shameful. WashU has the opportunity to be a leader in the project for justice within higher education; it is deeply troubling that they do not see this as imperative.

Just today the St. Louis Post-Dispatch released an editorial that said, “Change cannot happen until civic communities get beyond their division and defensiveness, until all of America recognizes its deficiencies and commits to a process that elevates the civil rights and economic opportunity of a class of American citizens that for too long has been left with little hope for a better future.”

Our question is simple. How will Washington University as a civic institution stand for justice in St. Louis? How will the elite of St. Louis, many of whom are members of the WashU Board of Trustees – Peabody Chairman Greg Boyce, Enterprise CEO Andrew Taylor, Barnes Jewish CEO Steven Lipstein, Build-a-Bear CEO Maxine Clark – stand for justice?

If they chose to do so, Washington University will truly paint a new picture of what a university-city relationship can be like. If they don’t, well, we as students plan to hold them accountable.

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