The universities will retain a consultant and a monitoring organization to report directly to them on conditions in factories and advise on what actions they can take to address concerns, expressed by students and others, that clothing bearing the names of universities not be manufactured in "sweatshop" conditions. The project is expected to take one year.

"Many universities have accepted the responsibility of taking action to see that clothing bearing our names is made under safe and humane conditions," said Allan A. Ryan Jr., university attorney in Harvard's Office of the General Counsel. "This initiative is designed to give us accurate, firsthand information and to allow us to formulate effective and credible anti-sweatshop policies. Each of the participating universities will decide for itself what its policies should be."

William P. Hoye, associate vice president and counsel to the University of Notre Dame, said, "We are very excited about working with our colleagues at other colleges and universities to help eradicate sweatshop conditions in the manufacture of collegiate-licensed products. We are also very pleased that Harvard, the University of California, and The Ohio State University are interested in hiring an independent monitor, as we have done, to help ensure compliance with their codes of conduct. We can learn a great deal from one another, and we will all benefit from pooling our resources to monitor our common licensees and manufacturing facilities."

The universities' initiative is independent of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), which is now being organized in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Labor. "We are mindful of the many aspects of FLA that have yet to be worked out," Ryan said. "A year from now, as a result of this project, we hope to have more and better information than we do now about how universities can play a constructive role in the process."

The consultant for the project is Business for Social Responsibility, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that advises business on social issues. Additional consultants with ties to the labor and human rights communities will be named shortly. The monitoring organization is PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has extensive experience in the monitoring of clothing factories throughout the world and was retained by Notre Dame earlier this year.

"We will be seeking the cooperation of our licensees in this initiative, and we expect that they will see that careful fact-gathering and thoughtful analysis of how universities, licensees, and manufacturers can work together is in everyone's interests," Ryan said. "We are firm in our resolve not to tolerate sweatshops. What we need to do now is determine how we can translate this resolve into action."