Tech recruiters were once welcomed on campus. Now they face protests
Liza Mamedov-Turchinsky was beginning her junior year at UC Berkeley when she heard the data-mining company Palantir was coming to campus for a recruiting event. She wasn't happy about it.
Palantir is among 43 companies that pay the school $20,000 each year for "unique access" to electrical engineering and computer science students for recruiting purposes. The company provides software to the U.S. military, law enforcement agencies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which it uses to screen migrants and conduct workplace raids.
On Sept. 5, she texted a handful of friends who shared her views on the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy and the tech companies whose software ICE relied on to implement it. With Palantir coming to campus on Sept. 24, she wrote, "let's organize to get them to drop it or disrupt?"
Because the event catered to honors students within the department, few others had heard about it. As word got around, the number of people in the group chat ballooned. Soon, it had spawned a new club, Cal Bears Against ICE, which publicized the event and planned a protest.
One by one, under pressure from activists, student groups sponsoring the event withdrew their participation. The day before the scheduled session, Palantir canceled it.
Fall is recruiting season for tech companies at colleges, where students flock to booths at career fairs for lucrative positions at the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google. The biggest companies spend hundreds of millions each year to hire people
