Prudence in Protest

Last spring, Harvard undergraduates staged a hunger strike to protest the wages of University security guards. One of their number, striker Kelly L. Lee ’07. told the Crimson she often wondered: “Am I doing the right thing? Is this the most effective strategy?” Good questions. Unfortunately, she evidently arrived at the wrong conclusion.

The severity of the hunger strike as a tool of political protest cannot be overstated; It ought to only be employed in matters of proportional gravity. By this criterion, the 10-day strike initiated by Columbia undergraduates, which ended on Friday night, was misguided in its methods, if not its professed aims.

Seven students and one professor participated in the strike which, according to their blog, came about in response to the appearance of a noose on the door of an African-American Columbia professor, the University’s plan to expand into East Harlem and the ongoing racial controversy in Jena, La. The strike called for “a more systematic response to hate crimes from Public Safety, a more collaborative expansion effort from the administration, a revision of the Core that encourages critical engagement with issues of racism and colonialism” and increased funding to various campus multicultural groups.

To be sure, these problems are troubling and the group’s solutions are worthy of consideration, but neither seems to accord with the special significance of the hunger strike as a form of extra-democratic activism. Increased discussion with Columbia administrators, collective student pressure upon the Committee on the Core Curriculum (upon which three current undergraduates sit), even sit-ins and picket lines would seem to be more appropriate forms of encouraging progress. Especially in the forum of a higher educational institution, discourse and weight of argument should be relied on to advocate and cajole. Desperation tactics such as the hunger strike should only be resorted to in the direst of circumstances. And even then, protesters risk sensationalism overshadowing their intended message.

The multifarious nature of the strike’s inciting incidents seems to belie another essential problem with the strike and its ambitions: the vagary and breadth of the problems it was attempting to confront. The virulent brand of racism that incites someone to threaten or dehumanize another is an endemic societal disaster; Columbia’s plan to branch out into a sensitive neighborhood is a limited point of contention for community discussion. Furthermore, the proposed alterations to university policy would rectify neither of these problems entirely. This puzzling disconnect between the strike’s causes and effects further undermined it.

It may have been these issues of legitimacy that limited the strike’s success. Last Friday, the Coalition to Preserve Community, a Harlem community group that opposed Columbia’s expansion, asked the strikers to break their fast in the interest of their health. The university, for its part, committed to changing its Major Cultures course to a seminar and to involving students in the process for hiring Ethnicity and Race professors.

Nevertheless, the issues of expansion and increased hate-crime enforcement seem unresolved as ever. The strikers claim that they will continue their dissent in other forms. To starve oneself for a cause involves a great deal of resolve, conviction and (possibly misplaced) ardor. In the interest of protest’s legitimacy and its success, we hope that this amount of passion goes into less severe and lurid means of effecting change before protesters put their health on the line.