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.