The Other Strike
Members of the Writers Guild of America aren’t the only ones striking this month. According to the New York Times, four Columbia University students completed their first week of a hunger strike to protest “an eclectic hodgepodge of two sets of demands.” Armed with laptop computers, lamps, a water heater, music speakers, a Facebook page, text-message updates and shelter at the nearby Malcolm X lounge, these fearless crusaders are demanding that the school move the curriculum “away from a focus on the achievements of dead, white, European men.”
You can visit the hungry students’ website here. One big irony with the whole affair can be found on the cause’s Facebook page (available only to those with accounts). In most Facebook groups the website lists “Related Groups” on the right; the first one listed is “I Picked a Major I Like, and One Day I Will Probably Be Living In a Box“. Looks like “One Day” is sooner rather than later for some.
Update: Zach alerts me to this NRO Corner post which highlights a creative counter-protest called “Why We Act, Why We Eat…” In support of them, I will eat a large chunk of red meat today, and you should do the same.
4 Responses to “The Other Strike”
What silliness. I want to say: look, y’all, if you don’t like the Core Curriculum, then go to Brown or any of a number of other excellent schools up there that give plenty of curricular freedom! No one is making you go to Columbia, where their version of the core has been its pride for a long time.
What I want to know is why don’t they just throw the students out? Surely if a bunch of bums set up camp in the middle of Columbia they would be thrown out. Unless, of course, the bums were protesting for some fashionable cause.
In fact, I’m surprised some enterprising bums haven’t done just that. Perhaps there’s better eating on the streets of New York?
Objecting to studying the achievements of dead people is the least reasonable of their complaints. Most of the living that has taken place in the world was done by people who are now dead, so most of the accomplishments that are worth reading about probably belong to the dead, other than when people who are living now have built and improved upon older accomplishments.
A very similar thing happened at Indiana University about six years ago. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, a bunch of students set up a “Peace Camp” in Dunn Meadow–an area of campus that is designated as a “free speech zone.” The camp was supposed to be a vigil protesting the invasion, but there were problems with non-students taking up residence in the camp. The University never took action against the campers, but eventually it was a one-man show and the last camper agreed to pack it up:
http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=10356&comview=1