Self-Righteous Dieting. (I changed the name, you assholes.)

I would like to draw our readers' attention to something monumental happening currently at Columbia. In response to the recent instances of hate-based vandalism around campus as well as the University's imminent gentrification of Manhattanville, students have formed an "anti-racist coalition." This coalition, upon its founding, produced a rather massive list of demands. The full list can be found on Bwog, but for convenience I will summarize many of them here.

The coalition demands:
- Columbia must hire more advisers for students of color and LGBTQ students
- Columbia Public Safety must report hate-crimes as they happen and compile an annual report of said crimes.
- Columbia must immediately begin hiring 2 full-time professors every year in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. This hiring will continue until each department has 12 new full-time professors.
- Columbia must create a [section of a?] department devoted to Queer Studies and Native American Studies
- CSER and IRAAS must be given complete autonomy over their hiring decisions. Something entirely unprecedented not just at Columbia, but at any university in this country.
- Columbia must completely renegotiate its expansion plan to meet more the community's demands
- Columbia must create a core class in seminar format which deals entirely with racialization and colonization.

In an attempt to force the administration to meet these demands, nine students have begun a hunger strike. They are camped out in the middle of the quad and, well, not eating. The administration has yet to issue a response.

Now, I was recently alerted to another strike. This one is at UMass. The UMass students support a much more reasonable list of demands, which include the following:
- Student fee rollback
- Funding and accountability for diversity
- Cops out of the dorms
- Student control over student space

The students at UMass are organizing a general student strike, in which students will not attend classes on November 15th and 16th.

Which strike will be more effective? Don't bother thinking about that question for too long, because I'm about to tell you. And as always, I'm right. It's UMass'.

The first flaw in Columbia's strike is the list of demands. Namely, it's absolutely ridiculous. They aren't just talking creating new classes, they're talking creating new departments. Hiring 24 new professors alone is a massive amount of money. Not to mention the fact that such a massive hiring would require a huge increase in office space. Columbia, unfortunately does not have office space because the entire campus is bounded by 114th, 120th, Amsterdam and Broadway.

An increase in office space would require some sort of expansion. If only there were one planned. Oh wait, there is one planned. It's the expansion that's going to kick all the black people out of "SoHa" as it were. Well this is tough because the coalition is also anti-expansion. This stops their demands short before we even get to ask the question "Is it better to teach people about oppression of minorities or actually stop oppression of minorities?" How is the administration supposed to respond to the coalition's demands when they contradict each other? How many hundreds of millions of dollars is the administration supposed to spend on the demands of a few students?

There is also the issue of creating a new core class. The core already takes up a huge percentage of a Columbia student's schedule, making it harder to complete a major here than at any other school. But creating a seminar-style class requires the university to create more than 50 new sections of an entirely new class and subsequently find people to teach these sections. Seeing as two classes of this sort are already required, there is a legitimate question of whether or not this will have a severe negative impact on students trying to complete majors.

The primary reason for the strike's approaching failure, however, is not the demands, but the method. The strike started off with 9 participants. After one day it is down to 5. If nearly half the participants in the strikes could not make it a single day, how is anyone supposed to take the strike's intentions seriously?

The remaining 5 are under strict medical observance. They have made it clear that should any of them drop below a dangerous weight that they will drop out of the strike. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the point of a hunger strike has typically been to convince the people in power that unless your demands are met you will die. Gandhi, for example, had to be talked down from each of his strikes because he was quite literally teetering on the brink of death.

When the strikers make it clear that they are not willing to take the protest to this level, they are changing the nature of the hunger strike. Instead of generating worry for their lives, they are simply making themselves useless to the institution. This technique is effective, but only on a massive scale. 5 students not attending classes will not cause the administration to blink an eye. 1000 students not attending class will.

This brings us back to the UMass strike. It is a simple general student strike with four simple demands. The advantage to it is that it has the possibility of inspiring thousands of students to skip class. Now, since we've already established that the only thing the Columbia strike is doing is causing five students to skip class, we can make a judgment on which is more effective. Last I checked, any number of thousand is more than five.

And which demands are more likely to be met? The Columbia students have a list of 13 demands. If the administration were to meet them it would require hundreds of millions in funding and the destruction of an entire black neighborhood in the name of "Ethnic Studies", a step which would inherently contradict another one of the coalition's demands. The UMass strike, however, has a list of 4 demands. The administration could easily meet all of them with relatively little spending.

So this raises an underlying question. Why are students at a public school notorious for its apathy so much more effective at organizing a strike than students at an ivy league school notorious for its political activism? I've been pondering this question for nearly 2 days now, and I think, thanks to a discussion with my friend Ruthie, that I have finally come to a conclusion.

Protesting at Columbia means nothing because it is overdone. Every single day there are a few students on the Steps waving banners and screaming into megaphones. How are we supposed to focus on a cause when instead of one large movement we create hundreds of small ones? How is anyone supposed to take us seriously when the most powerful protest we have had all year consists of five people sitting in tents and not eating?

My advice to the students camping outside right now: Go inside, grab a sandwich, rework your demands and organize the rest of campus to boycott classes for the next week. Maybe then you'll elicit an actual response from someone with power.