The Columbia University Hunger Strike, which lasted more than a week, and won three of the striker's four major demands, is over, though organizing continues. I've never been a huge fan of hunger strikes as a student organizing tactic because they can be incredibly disempowering, they don't necessarily create a sustained palpable disruption, and they can block further organizing if they fail. The folks at Columbia seem to have done everything right - using the hunger strike as a means to attract attention to and create an urgency for their demands, while engaging in broad based coalitional politics and organizing work, to create a mass movement on campus and bring the administration to the table. The one plank they didn't win - shifting the course of the university's expansion into West Harlem, was arguably the most ambitious, the most direct challenge to the university's power and plans for neoliberal 'growth.' To say this, however, is not to discount the substantial core curricular reforms and support for Ethnic Studies that the strikers did secure - victories which i know i and many others find inspiring and full of implications for our work on our own campuses. This is not so much a congratulations - because the strikers would likely tell us that the struggle is not yet won - as a statement of solidarity with and admiration for their work.

As the Equal Rights and Access Committee of GESO put it,

As the Equal Rights and Access Standing Committee of the graduate teachers union at Yale University, we support your struggle to hold Columbia accountable to the principles of equality and respect for all people inside and outside the institution. We, like you, wonder whether universities (must) perpetuate the systems of oppression that they claim to challenge. You challenge Columbia to confront their role in, as you put it, "a world in which racist, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies dominate the way power flows." Your demands for curricular and thus intellectual change articulate the way in which the knowledge produced in and by universities enables these harmful actions. We draw inspiration from your willingness to take direct
action to institute greater democracy on your campus.

Your struggle also speaks to other universities. Like you, we face a university that plays an increasingly dominant political and economic role in its host community and seeks to reshape it in its own image. This manifests in the forms of escalating gentrification and policing. Our administration, like yours has disregarded the voice of students, workers, community members, and faculty, and has failed to address the systemic discrimination that exists on our campus....