Five students at Columbia University are staging a hunger strike to protest what they say is a Eurocentric core curriculum and a growing climate of racism on campus. They are also protesting the university's Harlem expansion plan, calling it disruptive.
Two sophomores at Barnard College and three Columbia students last ate Tuesday evening and said they would not break their fast until the school committed to a core curriculum that includes a seminar addressing issues of "racialization and colonialism," among their other demands.
I'm already hungry," a senior at Columbia, Bryan Mercer, 22, said yesterday, less than 24 hours into the strike. Mr. Mercer, who is majoring in anthropology and comparative ethnic studies, said he has been scaling back his diet for weeks in preparation for the strike. His said his last meal was a sparse helping of fruit and bread...The strikers said they would stop attending classes when they felt too weak to concentrate.
I wonder the outrage the progenitors of these cub Marxists feel after shelling out $45,095 (tuition and fees for this year alone) to learn their precious ones have stopped eating, stopped going to class and ditched their expensive dorms to encamp al fresco on the steps of Low Library; especially when they read their inchoate babblings to the press. On the other hand, these parents are boomers (like me), quite possibly of the socialist millionaire class (assuredly not like me) and perhaps feel nostalgia and a vicarious thrill as their little ones form ad-hoc coalitions and compose their very own "hey, hey, ho, ho" chants; the same jejune behavior Mommy and Daddy sported in when they were undergraduates.
Meanwhile, the reaction from the Columbia administration is depressingly familiar:
"Columbia encourages students to express their points of view and supports their right of public protest," a spokeswoman for Columbia, LaVerna Fountain, said in a statement. Administrators are planning to meet with striking students this week, and the health center will be monitoring students' vital signs.
We need to face up to the fact America's leading colleges and universities, public and private, are lost to the Marxists. While football is still played, beer is still slogged and the halls still ivy-covered, it is all a facade; they are utterly transformed within. Poll after poll reveals the overwhelming leftist slant of most college faculties and administrations. Opinions even slightly contrary to the leftist canon are ruthlessly suppressed while at the same time dreary noisome protests for every leftist cause, no matter how inane, are openly or tacitly encouraged.
One fine day, maybe, many more parents in this country not embarrassed to call themselves Americans (in other words the vast majority of them) will realize superb educations can be had at the numerous small, often religiously affiliated, non-name brand liberal (in the true sense of the word) arts colleges throughout our land: institutions they can confidently send their kids to knowing they will not come home Christmas break as brainwashed Marxist automatons. Let us pray that day comes and the oligopolistic Marxist factories like Yale, Harvard, Columbia et al. will be driven out of business; by forces of the market, no less.
Oh well, it's fun to imagine.
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