We are disgusted. And student activists at other campuses are linking with outside activists in the AIDS cause.
Student protests are as old as formal education.
What gives the AIDS protests extra leverage is that a few universities hold patents on key AIDS medications. Other schools' endowments hold stock in companies making AIDS drugs. The current wave of indignation, students say, comes from the sheer scope of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, where 25 million people are infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, and from the disparity of treatment between rich and poor, black and white. Seeds of the protest at the University of Minnesota were sown in October 1999, when the school won the largest settlement of a patent-infringement case of any U.S. university. Minnesota argued that Ziagen was among several related drugs first patented in the 1980s by Robert Vince, a professor at the university's college of pharmacy, and then licensed to Glaxo.