Aretha Choi ’06 withstood freezing temperatures and an empty stomach for four days as she protested what she described as Columbia University’s lackluster attention to ethnic studies. After racially charged vandalism – swastikas were drawn and nooses placed around campus – and after the strong reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, students held town hall meetings to determine how the tense atmosphere could be eased. Choi was part of a student-organized hunger strike earlier this month in which she and four other participants, who were later joined by more students and faculty members, demanded four major changes in Columbia’s policy. Strikers called for amendments to the core curriculum in order to incorporate material outside of what they called the school’s Western-centric syllabus and that the Ethnic Studies program be allotted more funds to hire new faculty. The strikers demanded administrative reform, proposing the appointment of a diversity provost who would act as an advocate for diversity issues. The hunger strikers also objected to the Manhattanville project, Columbia’s planned expansion in West Harlem. The university, Choi said, should concentrate on internal improvements upon the school and community, not upon an “unethical expansion” that would displace local residents. For the duration of the fast, the strikers survived only upon donated water, tea and Gatorade. Meanwhile, an anti-strike group, describing “Why We Eat,” mocked the hunger strikers for starving themselves. On Saturday, November 11, Choi was rushed to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital after passing out in Columbia’s Butler Library. She was released the next morning, and said in a statement that she regretted no longer being able to strike. “I felt utterly ashamed and I felt that I had let the four other strikers, the many supporters, and myself down,” Choi said. To take her place, more students volunteered, and a political science professor at Barnard College, Dennis Dalton, joined the strike as well. The strikers continued the protest into its seventh day, when the university agreed to meet the first three of the strikers’ four demands. However, they decided to move forth with the expansion into West Harlem. The New York City Planning Commission approved that plan on Monday. Choi was not always so politically active. Choi, who entered Andover as a new Upper, credited the school for her development as a politically active individual. Choi said that what you do in high school “by no means defines what you’re going to be later,” citing her life experience as an example. Now a sophomore at Barnard, she is politically active because she “refuse[s] to be apolitical in our politicized society.” Choi “looks at the world through a political filter,” she said. When a friend approached her about the pending hunger strike, Choi seized the opportunity to exercise her influence in her school community. She volunteered to be part of the strike, a metaphor for the current administration’s “starving” the university of “safe campus nutrition” and what some students saw as the only way to capture the necessary attention, she said. On their website, the strikers explained why they were resorting to such a dramatic form of protest. “The recent acts of hate on this campus have lent urgency to a long-existing effort to address this university’s climate of marginalization,” the website said. Choi, who experienced an eating disorder during high school, was the subject of an article in the New York Post that tied her passing out to her medical history. The strike was covered extensively in the New York-area media, and the Columbia Spectator, the university’s daily newspaper, devoted several editorials and front-page stories to the strike. Choi said that the sense of solidarity that she gained from students who attended nightly candlelight vigils and the solidarity of the hunger strikers were the only things that ushered her through four days without food.