Students organize opposition: Group plans protest, petition against JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon
The Syracuse Daily Orange reports that students have begun to organize to oppose upcoming commencement speaker Jamie Dimon. The paper states:
About 30 students gathered in Schine Student Center’s Panasci Lounge on Wednesday to form a plan of action to remove JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon as the 2010 commencement speaker.
“When we feel wronged, we have the idea that we can raise up,” said Ashley Owen, one of the meeting’s leaders and a senior magazine journalism and geography major, before the meeting. “We need to be shown that there’s a vehicle with which to do so.”
Suggestions for how to change the commencement speaker included staging a protest, contacting media outlets such as The New York Times for national publicity, writing a letter to Dimon asking him to step down, and contacting faculty and staff members who are also angry with the commencement speaker choice. The students broke into groups to work on each plan.
Since the March 25 announcement of Dimon as Syracuse University and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s commencement speaker, a student-generated petition and a Facebook group titled “Take Back Commencement” have been created. The petition was created on April 2 and had 703 signatures as of Wednesday, and the group had 760 members.