Activists Hold Hunger Strike, Protest Iraq War

In a year whose first enduring image was of the frenzied protests surrounding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s September visit to Columbia, student activism has played a large and multifaceted role. From marches to campaign trips and from division to unity, students’ “extracurricular activities” set the tone for a whole campus.

A student body already stirred up by Ahmadinejad’s visit—and by the rising outcry against what many said was the unfair and racially-motivated prosecution of six teenagers in Jena, La.—was shocked to hear of the Sept. 26 discovery of racist graffiti on an International Affairs Building bathroom wall. The profane message—the perpetrator of which was never identified—espoused anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments.

A broad coalition of student groups, including the Black Students Organization, the Muslim Students Association, the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters, and the Asian American Alliance, responded on Oct. 1 with a walkout and march roughly 120 strong, designed to protest both the graffiti and the treatment of the Jena Six.

Anxiety was exacerbated by the Oct. 9 appearance of a noose on the door of Teachers College professor Madonna Constantine.

Nov. 7 saw the beginning of what would be a 10-day student hunger strike. The controversial protest, which originally included five participants, eventually expanded to include several more students and Barnard political science professor Dennis Dalton. Strikers consumed only liquids such as water and Gatorade.

“We strike because we feel the urgency of a student voice that is continually being marginalized,” the strikers wrote in a joint statement posted on their Web site on Nov. 6. “We strike because student input on these issues in meetings, through protests, and through other avenues of vocalization has been ignored or patronized, and the response to our demands for change has been woefully insufficient. ... We strike because these are not matters that will, nor can, wait.”

The strikers’ demands, which were criticized by some for being too wide in scope, called for reform of the Major Cultures portion of the Core Curriculum, greater devotion of administrative resources to the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the issues that fall under its purview, increased funding of and support for ethnic studies and related departments, and major revisions to Columbia’s planned expansion into Manhattanville. Through sometimes tense negotiations with top administrators, strikers accomplished the majority of their aims, including firm University commitments to greater funding for the OMA and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

One set of goals that remained unaddressed was that surrounding the expansion, an issue that has primarily been the province of Columbia’s Student Coalition on Expansion & Gentrification. Active for the past several years, SCEG and its allies suffered a major setback this year as the New York City Council passed the University’s 197-c expansion plan at the end of the fall semester.

But SCEG’s Victoria Ruiz, CC ’09 and one of the hunger strikers, said she didn’t necessarily see the move as a setback.

“Before December, we had to give so much of our time to the process, even though we knew it wasn’t a transparent process,” Ruiz said. That time is now free, she explained, for other things—including SCEG’s fall plans to campaign against donations to the expansion, continue networking with likeminded area residents, and reach out more extensively for trustee support.

“A lot of plans have been approved,” Ruiz said. “The gym thing [proposed by the University in 1968 and canceled due to student protests], whose 40th anniversary we just finished celebrating—that was an approved plan.”

This academic year also saw a rise of student interest in national politics as the longest presidential campaign ever swung into gear. In the early days of the primaries, Columbians coalesced into a wide gaggle of “Students For” groups ranging from the optimistic Students for Hillary to the quixotic Students for Ron Paul. Members phone-banked, distributed fliers, traveled to primary states to organize voters, and in many cases held internships downtown at their candidates’ New York offices.

As was the case on campuses across the nation, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama was particularly successful in rousing many formerly apathetic students into action—87 students, according to Students for Obama president Mary McDonald, CC ’10, volunteered for his campaign in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.
Now, with the Republican nominee, John McCain, locked in and the Democratic primary entering its final days, the more enthusiastic politicos are lined up to organize for their candidates through the summer and into the fall.

“We’ll really be pushing voter registration for the first few weeks of school,” McDonald said. “I think there will be a lot more excitement because it will be the presidential election rather than the primaries. ... I think, if anything, the campus will be galvanized.”

mary.kohlmann@columbiaspectator.com