Protests Pop Up on Campuses

Students at three universities went on strike this week to advocate for a variety of causes­—including increasing curricular diversity, reducing student fees, and halting environmentally-unsound campus construction.

Protests at Columbia University, the University of California­­-Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts­-Amherst echo events at Harvard last May, when members of Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) fasted to influence university security guards’ contract negotiations.

But while students across the country lobby for different changes and interests, most are met with little or slow change.

According to the Daily Californian, several students at UC­-Berkeley have been living in an oak grove since Dec. 2 to prevent the construction of an athletic center and the subsequent felling of 26 trees.

Last Sunday, one of the protestors, Nathaniel Hill, 24, injured himself falling from one of the trees while trying to climb down to meet his father.

At Columbia University, hunger strikers met with university officials Monday, but failed to see any real changes after a week of protest. The protesters want Columbia to diversify its Core Curriculum and improve ethnic studies and multicultural resources, according to a report by the Columbia Spectator.

Finally, starting today, students at UMass-Amherst plan to stage a two-day strike to push for decreased student fees and a relaxation of aggressive police patrols of dormitories.

The university’s administration met with strikers on Tuesday, but “agreed to disagree,” said spokesman Ed F. Blaguszewski. “It is very unlikely that, given the pressing needs of the university, we will roll back student fees.” He added that the university will be “open for business as usual” during the protests.

Jeff J. Napolitano, president of UMass-Amherst Graduate Student Senate, said that these problems existed prior to his arrival on campus as an undergraduate several years ago.

This reflects the “administration’s refusal to really deal with these problems,” Napolitano said, adding that calling the effort a strike gives it a certain “militancy.”

“This is the degree to which we are fed up and frustrated,” he said. The increase in college protests reflects trends across the country, he added.

SLAM members spent nine days protesting at Harvard last year before the security guards won any changes for their contracts.

Hunger strike organizer Jamila R. Martin ’07 noted the importance of student protests, saying that “most of the time you’re sitting down in a classroom, being taught at... So standing up and saying, I disagree, and having an active voice, instead of being told what the answers are, is really important.”