Hunger Strike

blahIn 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.

This semester, we as students have felt many things—anger, joy, determination, even, at times, despair—but I am proud to say that complacency was not one of them.

With reforms to the Core Curriculum’s Major Cultures requirement in the offing, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese—which less than three semesters ago transformed Columbia’s Spanish-language-focused major—is once again expressing an interest in amending the department’s course offerings to complement whatever new requirements emerge.

Students, administrators, and faculty were studying how to reform the Major Cultures component of the Core Curriculum last semester, well before hunger strikers struck an agreement with administrators last month.

If you’re a liberal arts student, chances are you should probably stop reading this column and get back to writing the papers that should, by all rights, be the bread, butter, and unrelenting curse of your education thus far.

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 the wake of the student hunger strike, students have expressed mixed opinions about the methods employed by the campus activists.

The vast majority of Columbia students consider hate crimes and bias incidents reprehensible, regardless of whether we express these views in a public forum. But by creating an artificial division between students who choose to participate and those who choose not to, the Day Out Against Hate obscures the broad consensus against hate that already exists on campus.

In the twilight hours of Nov. 15, I was one of five Columbia students who helped organize that night’s rally against the hunger strike. Contrary to faulty Spectator coverage, over 80 concerned students, who were opposed to the strike but also interested in dialogue, gathered around the outstretched arms of Alma Mater and discussed their various reasons for enduring the cold.

The critics of the recent hunger strike are quick to decry the privilege of the strikers and their supporters. This privilege is represented in various ways, ranging from an absurdly inaccurate portrayal of the strikers as rich and spoiled to an important recognition of their position as students at an elite American university. I write to contest the argument that the privileges of the students and the University delegitimize the past and future actions of students at Columbia.