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Hoping to Change the Core, Ruiz Joins Strike
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 8, 2007
Victoria Ruiz, CC ’09, never imagined that two years after coming to Columbia, she would be hunger striking in protest of her University’s policies.
“I’m not being beaten, I’m not being force-fed, and I’m not being interrogated, in the physical sense,” she said. “The fact that there have been five public hate crimes in the past month, that’s a form of imprisonment. The fact that the Core Curriculum is so difficult to reform so we can use it for the power to change, that’s force-feeding us something that we need to reform and change.”
Ruiz said she believed Columbia had room to improve. “If anything, the students are advocating for the school,” she said. Ruiz plans to attend classes until she is no longer physically able. “Part of hunger striking is being a student here and part of being a student here is going to class.”
Ruiz hopes to affect curricular reform by striking. “When it comes to the Core Curriculum, I love it, it’s something that could be wonderful,” she said. “So why not use something so powerful to inspire change so we don’t have five hate crimes in a month, so we don’t have this fear of over 5,000 members of our community holding their bags at our gates because they’ve been evicted?”
“Reforming the Core is holding up its values,” she added. “Part of the reason for the Core is to foster intellectual citizens. How can you have intellectual citizens without reform?”
Ruiz added that her family’s investment in the University influenced her decision. “My family has worked so hard to put me in school,” she said. “That students and community members can feel such oppression in my university, ... it’s so contradictory to what I feel about education and why I’m here.”
Laura Schreiber can be reached at laura.schreiber@columbiaspectator.com.
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After a hard day seeing sick patients I am very thankful that my alma mater never fails to provide comic relief.
think of all the advances that the non-western world has contributed to. the tv , radio, computer, car, plane, antibiotics, vaccines, physics, chemistry, the printing press, refrigeration, wait a minute am I wrong????
The core doesn't acknowledge non-western traditions, and, as such, it is limited and limiting. We can't think "global" if our cultural and intellectual orientation is eurocentric.
Since you have been so limited, how do you know what it means to think global? Can you be sure that you are not already doing this?
Mummy and Dad must be beaming with pride at their little Ivy Leaguer!
Her proposals for reform would be more interesting if they were stated!
She should move to a muslim country and see what real oppression is like.
....Just transfer out and you prove your point. No need to go on a hunger strike unless u want the publicity and still remain a columbia student.
Did she really never imagine it? I mean, she's kind of the activist type. Gets easily worked up by all sorts of things. It's perfectly feasible that she would go to extremes to get attention.
Exactly. Not only that, these students are ill prepared for the real world. I feel bad for their future employers. These are the types that will whine and demand everything, yet produce nothing.
can any of these people explain how the core curriculum is responsible for the "hate crimes" that have been occurring? They keep claiming it but seem unable to prove it...as usual.
“That students and community members can feel such oppression in my university, ... it’s so contradictory to what I feel about education and why I’m here.”
Oh my god...yes...so opressed...3 meals a day...ipods...cellphones..attending an ivy league university....dont have to work a job...it's like Soviet Russia all over again.
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