Most good liberals will agree that the Occupy Wall Street movement that has swept across America is a great thing. And of course, Brandeis students, being from this great pinnacle of social justice, are champing at the bit to get involved.

Unfortunately, it's disheartening to see that the Brandeis students who have gotten involved haven't been using the movement to think critically and raise questions about the institutional practices of our university. Rather, they seem to have just jumped on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon because they think that this is what social justice is all about.

The fact of the matter is that we would be making a lot more of a difference if we stayed on campus and examined some of our own institutional practices as a university instead of getting arrested for holding a few inflammatory signs.

There are a multitude of things that happen at our university that are extremely contradictory to our well-known mission of social justice.

Yet one never sees people taking a long, critical look at the practices of this university before they bus themselves into Boston to stand in solidarity. I don't have the space or time to discuss everything that's wrong with Brandeis, but I can point to something that affects all of us every day—the food we eat, or more specifically, the corporation that provides that food.

While most people feel pretty good about the fact that Dining Services agreed to serve exclusively cage-free eggs this year, how many students were aware that Goldman Sachs, one of the corporate giants that Occupy Wall Street is protesting, owns 20 percent of Aramark?

It's a little unsettling to think that even if we all closed our accounts at Bank of America today, the thousands of dollars we pay for meal plans still ultimately end up in the hands of a corporate giant.

Then there are the practices of Aramark itself. If you take the time to Google the company, the glowing reports of Aramark's efforts to build community are peppered with articles about some of Aramark's more unsavory practices, especially when it comes to their workers.

According to the Courthouse News Service, at the beginning of this month, Aramark was implicated in the exploitation and defraudment of 38 immigrants who were legally brought to the United States to fill temporary jobs.

In October, the Philadelphia Weekly reported that concession workers at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia protested Aramark's refusal to negotiate a better, more just contract. In addition to refusing to give the Citizens Park workers pay parity with the higher paid workers in Fenway Park, the corporation has been purposely overstaffing the ballpark so that employees work fewer hours, make less money and are not eligible to receive health benefits.

Aramark's blatant disregard for the rights of its workers is a bit difficult to stomach. Yet, somehow, even their attempt at the beginning of this year to cut the health benefits of the workers on our own campus wasn't enough to make us start questioning Aramark's practices.

Where do we draw the line?

Shouldn't we care that some of the cost of our exorbitantly expensive meal plans ends up profiting a corporate giant like Goldman Sachs? Shouldn't we care that Aramark has a string of labor complaints following the company around the country, including on our own campus? If we're so gung ho about social justice, why have we allowed Brandeis to repeatedly contract with a multinational, multibillion dollar corporation that seems to care so little about its workers?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Jeanette Lerman '69, the wife of Aramark's CEO Joseph Neubauer, sits on the Brandeis Board of Trustees.

True, that piece of information means little on its own, but it does make you wonder if Aramark has ever even had any competition as Brandeis' food provider, or if we just blindly recontract them every time, no questions asked.

Lerman is a huge donor to the University, and contracting with her husband's corporation is a major conflict of interest that we shouldn't be tolerating.

So let's get back to the Occupy Wall Street movement for a minute.

I know it's really tempting to get out there with your signs because it feels like you're fighting injustice and getting your voice heard.

But the truth remains that we've got a lot of work to do on this campus if we really want to live up to our legacy of social justice.

We would do much better to question the practices of the corporation that provides food for our university and the judgment of our University for contracting them than we are currently doing with camping in the street and holding signs.