Candace Mitchell

Of all the criticism lobbed at hunger strikers and their supporters these past few weeks, most troubling is the charge that strikers were myopically and hyperbolically obsessed about a few faculty hires and texts in light of the real world issues like the presidential campaign or the war in Iraq or the human rights violations in Burma.

In planting themselves at the heart of our University on South Lawn, the hunger strikers serve as a jarring reminder of our urgent need to self-reflect and re-envision ourselves as a community.

In the past weeks’ furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from students and faculty, Columbia has had to defend and confront its legacy of diversity and inclusion more so now than ever before.

Wednesday had that eerie, out-of-this world feeling that can only be the stuff of protests.

Those of us who were even semi-awake last fall remember the last time Jim Gilchrist and the Minuteman Project came to campus. Promised the kind of provocative conservative voice that would enhance on-campus debate and intellectual inquiry about immigration, we got instead a brawl that pitted student activists against the Minutemen and stirred a media blitz that had every news outlet from Fox News to New York Times decrying Columbia University as intolerant and hostile to ideological diversity.

Those of us who were even semi-awake last fall remember the last time Jim Gilchrist and the Minuteman Project came to campus.