My adviser is on hunger strike.
Orange juice and water. He's sixty-nine and I'm always afraid when I knock on his office door and he doesn't reply, he has died. He's joining the other students - four, now, I believe - who are on strike at Columbia, demanding various things in response to the Manhattanville expansion, various hatecrimes that seem to feed off each other, and a Core dominated by Western philosophy. It's impossible to tell what the students are thinking because the comments are so divided. A bunch of them seem angry with the strikers for being snotty, spoiled liberal brats who are ungrateful for their Ivy League education - "if you don't like the Core, then leave", and that goes along with the people who readily say they do not want to learn about non-Western concepts and resent being forced to learn it (which is what the Columbia Spectator surprisingly advocates in an editorial). And in response to my adviser's joining the strike, there's the people who think it's a disgrace that a professor would sink to that level (and he is thus obviously not an "educator"), and there's the people who hate that he's a Barnard professor and think it just proves that the strikers don't speak for Columbia - "go back to your side of the street". Comments like that alienate me, suffice it to say. I sometimes feel like, fine, maybe I don't care what Columbia does, if we're not part of them and they're not part of us, let them deal with their own mess. If only anyone who sees my future diploma won't associate me with Columbia. They actually sort of prove one of the things the strikers say about the climate of Columbia: marginalization. Does this surprise me? No.
I'm not an activist and I know that. But I agree with the people on strike. But I don't think their fasting will change anything, partly because the bulk of Columbia, it does seem, is against them, because apparently no one cares and they don't want the Core to change. One reasonable editorial argue that striking creates an all-or-nothing climate that forbids reasoned dialogue - and I see that point, but the author also based it off writing by Edmund Burke, who is a *expletive* elitist on the side of the French government during the French revolution, and my least favorite political theorist. I highly doubt that the commenters who criticize the strikers come from working class families themselves.
I would have learned nothing at all if I didn't think students could affect change. They can, especially in third world countries under authoritarian governments. They will usually have to pay for it dearly, in deaths and disappearances, but they can sometimes be the tipping point. That's what got Suharto out of office - the riots that began after the police shot several student protesters dead in Jakarta (before then they were disappeared on the down-low, or just clubbed or given tear gas). Part of the reason I really love Akira is its depiction of various layers of political involvement of youth in New Tokyo. But the thing is, New York City is not a third world country, and Columbia has money. That and nobody cares - by which I mean, nobody is emotionally invested. They're vastly different circumstances. The system here is democratic-bureaucratic, with all our nerve endings burned off. The system there was authoritarian-chaotic, with all their nerve endings exposed.
In other news, biological entities have
tendencies to swarm, leading scientists to try to program swarming into robots: "If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally."
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