Ethnic Studies

The problem that we Barnard students face today is two-fold and contradictory. There is far too much breadth in the Nine Ways of Knowing, and at the same time, there is not enough.

The Barnard administration, led by the Committee on Instruction, should make certain that sustained student interest in an ethnic studies program and adequate institutional resources form the backing for any eventual course of study.

After a semester filled with discussion of issues of diversity and education, Barnard College is grappling with how best to address race and ethnicity in an academic context.

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.

During the much-covered hunger strike, the New York Post printed an article about the end of one striker’s fast that was both factually inaccurate and telling in its treatment of the issues at hand. As someone who dealt with press during the strike, I was appalled (although I should not have been surprised) to see that the two reporters, John Mazor and Cynthia R. Fagen, had honed in on the striker’s previous struggle with anorexia.

Ethnic studies strives for praxis, the Aristotelian marriage of theory and action.

Student strikers sleeping in tents outside Butler. Rallies at the Sundial. Demands debated in articles and conversations. Conservatives joking about pizza and barbecues. In short, it’s 1996 all over again. Except that it isn’t.

Yesterday, five students began a hunger strike, depriving their bodies as the worst aspects of Columbia University have deprived all of our minds, hearts, and spirits.

In the past weeks’ furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from students and faculty, Columbia has had to defend and confront its legacy of diversity and inclusion more so now than ever before.

*In what is lately becoming an increasingly fragile climate in which to talk about race relations, the debate about Ethnic Studies at Columbia is one of the most obviously delicate components of this discussion.