Students to Begin Hunger Strike Wednesday

Six students will begin a hunger strike at noon tomorrow which they plan to continue until the University responds to several demands, including stronger administrative responses to bias incidents, alterations of the proposed Manhattanville expansion plan, and increased resources for ethnic studies.

Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nick Dirks has offered a cluster hiring of three senior professors for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in response to the demands of the strikers and will discuss the issue further tomorrow morning with students.

"We strike because student input on these issues in meetings, through protests, and through other avenues of vocalization have been ignored or patronized," one striker who declined to be identified said in a statement.

The strikers, who are members of a newly formed ad hoc coalition which released these demands last week in a statement, plan to set up tents somewhere on campus tomorrow evening to facilitate the protest.

University spokeswoman LaVerna Fountain wrote in a statement that Columbia's foremost concern regarding the protest was the health of the students involved. "As you know, Columbia supports the right of public protest by students but has a concern first and foremost for their health and safety, as well as a responsibility to their families...so our health services will closely monitor the situation," she wrote.

Other reforms the strikers aim for include changes to the Core Curriculum and expansion of the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

"The Ad-Hoc committee of students … releases these demands while acknowledging that they are nothing new, as meeting after meeting [with administrators] without significant change has verified," the coalition wrote in a statement. "Columbia students demand more than meetings. They demand action to feed the hunger for a better and more inclusive learning environment."

The announcement follows a string of bias incidents that have occurred on campus this semester, including the hanging of a noose on the door of a black Teacher's College professor, the spray-painting of a swastika on a Jewish TC professor's door, and the discovery of anti-Semitic, racist, and Islamophobic graffiti in Columbia restrooms.

The strikers emphasized that they do not view the recent bias incidents as isolated episodes, but as part of a pattern that relates to a pervasive climate of racism and insensitivity on campus.

A racist cartoon published in the Fed and a bake-sale held against affirmative action by the Columbia College Conservative Club in 2004 prompted students to wear black clothing and signs reading "I am being silenced" for a week. In 2005, two Columbia students scrawled racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic epithets on a Ruggles suite. Students responded with the Stop Hate on Columbia Campus demonstrations in 2006.

The attitude behind such incidents, some students in the coalition argue, arises in part from a Eurocentric core curriculum that lacks academic exploration of non-Western traditions and critical analysis of the place of race in society.

Students have also claimed that Columbia's proposed expansion into Manhattanville represents an attitude that places little importance on the concerns of minority communities of West Harlem.

Michelle Diamond, CC '08 and President of the Columbia College Student Council, says that the council will not take a stance on the situation as of yet.

"We strike because we want the administration to understand that these needs are as fundamental to students' intellectual lives as food is to the human body," another striker who also declined to be identified, said in a statement.