A Truly Multicultural Affair

Many members of the queer community have worked closely with the support team and the hunger strikers since the strike began. This is because we support their commitment to disrupt business as usual and to challenge the general level of comfort on campus. Even before the first queer organization was founded here in 1967, we had long constituted a part of the economy of marginalization at Columbia. The legacy of the founding activist members of the Columbia Queer Alliance (CQA) and their history of queer activism against institutional injustice insists that decisive action with regards to the recent demands of student leaders must be taken.

We too demand administrative reform (with regards to LGBT resources in particular, but also multicultural resources in general), a comprehensively diverse Core Curriculum (which is necessarily linked to autonomy and sustainable funding for ethnic studies), and finally an ethical and just expansion. The call for ethics and justice shouldn’t go without saying; it should be insisted upon and demanded.

Feuerbach once said, “Der Mensch ist was er isst” (You are what you eat.). The strikers and their supporters are a crucial embodiment of a visceral response to the institutional deprivation that we are all suffering from. It is a strategy that is effective—and queer—because it cleverly contrasts and uncovers Columbia’s institutional practices of consumption, capitalism, and excess. Such a rupture was actually already around long before the tents were raised—the strikers are only giving a visual form to the pain and unease that everyone else who isn’t privileged feels. Ultimately, this rupture can only make Columbia more luminous, more reflective, and most importantly, more inclusive to diverse opinions. This goal is often spoken of but rarely practiced, especially by self-styled enlightened latte-liberals who have precluded themselves from doing so by enclosing their complacency within a thousand qualifications and transparent excuses instead of joining in the struggle.

Vice President Dirks and Dean Quigley’s statement borders on tragic self-parody that is out of place in a global university. Their patronizing response on behalf of the administration, which was not immediately released to Barnard College, the School of General Studies, or the graduate schools, offers only an illusion of institutional competence. Through selective aggregation of initiatives that were already publicly known and completely eliding the crucial issue of expansion, they inevitably reinforce the strikers’ criticisms—and now those of faculty members—that the administration is stagnant, fragmented and insular.

Many of my friends claim that the majority of the Columbia community does not agree with the demands and tactics of the hunger strikers, and my response is that popular opinion should never be used as a barometer of justice. Too many times in history has the burden of popular opinion been used as a noose upon the inalienable rights of vulnerable members of society—interracial and same-sex marriage, as well as voting and civil rights are compelling examples of the fact that justice is seldom created with the interests of power and populace in mind.

And so I say to all the members of Columbia: Your willingness to listen seriously to others and to scrutinize your own taken-for-granted understandings firmly situates you in history either as a person of conscience and justice or a person of comfort and convenience. I emphatically urge you to muster the courage to define yourselves against the imagination of an institution that believes it knows exactly who you are and what you want. It is this very act that defines either your humanity or your willingness to accept and reproduce the institutional machine.