Walmart’s “Always Low Prices” may soon be coming to universities near you. The University of Arkansas and Arizona State University already have Walmarts, with Georgia Institute of Technology to follow next year. These miniature college versions are not full-sized Walmarts — the one at the University of Arkansas is only 2 percent the size of the average 185,000-square-foot Walmart Supercenter. Given this trend, it would not be surprising if the world’s largest retailer, or other large corporations, infiltrated even more campuses including our very own UCSD. The privatization of public universities seems inevitable, but introducing Walmarts to college campuses will catalyze that process and disturb elements of campus life like student-run organizations and co-ops, all of which are crucial to the university experience.
Walmart’s presence in cities is historically followed by the closure of small businesses that are unable to compete with the big box store’s low prices. New York City’s politicians vehemently oppose having a Walmart in the “Big Apple” for that reason alone. Although Walmart would offer students cheap alternatives for school supplies and basic grocery or personal care items (students would have access to their $4 generic prescription drug program, for instance), these low prices threaten smaller businesses on college campuses. The Walmart at the University of Arkansas, for example, replaced their university-run pharmacy. These low prices would similarly threaten co-ops like UCSD’s General Store or Che Cafe.
Walmart is the archetypical “Big Business,” ranking as the second biggest American corporation in Fortune 500’s 2012 ranking of America’s largest corporations after being ranked first each of the previous two years. Big corporations privatizing universities is problematic because many fear that institutes of higher education will start solely serving corporate interests, instead of those of the students and education systems. Rob Walton, chairman of Walmart, and his family donated $27.5 million dollars from the Walton Family Foundation to ASU, the fourth largest donation in ASU’s history. Walton also donated $300 million to the University of Arkansas, which is the largest donation that any public university in the U.S. has ever received.
The sheer amount of money donated to those two schools alone is impressive, but does not seem to be with no strings attached. The two universities were coincidently chosen by Walmart to boost its “Sustainability Index,” a measure of a company’s “greenness” or impact on the environment, which up to that point had been severely lacking. As Walton also serves as the co-chair of the Board of Directors for Sustainability at ASU, he may have had conflicting interests in regards to the placement of a Walmart on the ASU campus. A Walmart spokeswoman denied to Insider Higher Ed that there had been any connection between the partnership and opening stores on campus, but there is no denying that money has been exchanged, and programs to the benefit of Walmart have been implemented.
The risk is that if all companies follow suit, public universities will become slaves to big businesses. Price Center is already home to Burger King, Subway, Panda Express and other large corporations, which are highly convenient retailers to our student consumers. Yet they too compete with the smaller businesses on campus. Many choose those retailers over The General Store and Food Co-op that our school hosts.
As a relatively liberal campus, UCSD seems to oppose such privatization. Our co-ops provide some of the cheapest supplies on campus. Also, during last year’s campus election, proposed student and tuition fee increases spurred a movement to “Reclaim UCSD,” a collective effort to protect the rights of public education to determine its own interests. The movement was successful in blogging and compiling information on the efforts to stop the privatization of UCSD. Last year’s March 1 walkout was incredibly successful — photographs document many UCSD students’ views against privatization. Students at UCSD are overwhelmingly supportive of public education as just that: public.
Walmart and other corporations are already viewed as unwanted parasites for small businesses across the nation. Although we as a campus tend to oppose privatization, it is easy to overlook those companies, like Subway and Rubio’s, which have already made it through our doors. But the overbearing presence of big name businesses is not what UCSD students want or need.
