Columbia Capitulates to Hunger Strikers

A weeklong hunger strike staged by five students at Columbia University could cost the institution $50 million.

Columbia officials said Wednesday night that, after a faculty committee grants approval, the university would spend the funds to pay for an expansion of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and a restructuring of Columbia College's core curriculum that would add faculty for courses on non-European civilizations.

The strikers are declaring the concessions by the Columbia administration as a partial victory, the fulfillment of a portion of their demands. But some other students say they are troubled by the amount of money extracted from the administration by a small faction of protesters.

"The strikers have forced the university to commit a lot of funds that Columbia clearly does not have an abundance of," a junior at Columbia, Aga Sablinska, 20, said. "That funding may have been spent elsewhere, maybe on financial aid."

Last week, five students started a water-and-Gatorade diet with a litany of demands on the administration. They asked for changes to what they said was a Eurocentric core curriculum, increased staff and funding for "ethnic studies" programs and more support on campus for minority students. The students said they are also protesting the university's Harlem expansion plan, and a climate of "institutionalized racism" on campus.

In recent years, Columbia has amended its core curriculum to include a "Major Cultures" component, which requires students to take courses on Asian, African, and Latin American civilizations. The strikers said the courses, which are held in lecture format, were marginalized because of the large class sizes, and that Major Cultures courses should be held in the same small seminar-style meetings awarded to courses on European history.

Calling the negotiations a victory for their cause, two of the strikers, a senior at Columbia, Bryan Mercer, 22, and a junior at Columbia, Emilie Rosenblatt, 22, yesterday ended their fast when health services threatened to place them on involuntary medical leave. Two of the original strikers, who have been joined by a Barnard professor of political science, Dennis Dalton, and two more students said they would continue fasting until the university also made concessions on its Harlem expansion plans.

One of the original strikers, a Barnard sophomore, Victoria Choi, 19, ended her fast earlier this week after fainting in the library.

Last night, a group of students called We Do Not Support the Hunger Strikers gathered for a rally on the steps of Low Library. "A lot of us are upset about that the university has committed to some of the demands," a junior at Columbia and a co-founder of the group, Joshua Mathew, 20, said.

Columbia officials yesterday downplayed the concessions to the strikers, and said the university has for more than a year been planning big changes in the curriculum that overlapped with some of the strikers' demands.

A task force on undergraduate education has been reviewing the core curriculum, officials said. The university, which is in the middle of a $4 billion capital campaign, has already earmarked $865 million to improve the undergraduate experience. Spending $50 million on more faculty and resources for courses in "Major Cultures" was already accounted for in that fundraising goal, officials said.

In 2004, Columbia also created the post of vice provost for diversity initiatives, to increase traditionally underrepresented groups on the faculty and in the senior levels of the administration.

Over the past three years, Columbia has also hired 17 new minority and female scholars in the arts and sciences through a $15 million fund to increase faculty diversity. With 21% of full-time faculty at Columbia College made up of blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, American Indians, and non-resident aliens, the university has the most diverse faculty of any Ivy League school, it says.