A pro-Palestine protester at Columbia University was made fun of for asking the Ivy League school to give food and “basic humanitarian aid” to students who had taken over a building.
Doctoral student in English and comparative literature Johannah King-Slutzky made a strong case that students who were holding university property without permission could “die of dehydration and starvation” if they were not given food and water.
“Like, could people please have a glass of water?’’ King-Slutzky, 33, told reporters outside Hamilton Hall.
“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for,’’ she added.
A journalist replied: “It seems like you’re sort of saying: ‘We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food and water’.’’
Additionally, the protester said she thought the university had to feed any student occupiers who had paid for a meal plan as part of their fees.
The website for Ms. King-Slutzky has been taken down, but it said that she was a “full-service digital communications expert for progressive and leftist causes.”
The activist also belonged to the student workers’ group. She is from New York. As she and her coworkers went on strike in 2021, she called us “lambs being raised for the slaughter.”
According to her Columbia University profile, which has also been taken down, Ms. King-Slutzky’s university work is mostly about “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.”
The protests began at the university almost two weeks ago and have now spread to more than twenty-two US states.
The US president, Joe Biden, said that the group at Columbia was spewing hate speech and that their occupation was wrong on Tuesday.
Columbia University officials say protestors broke doors and windows and did other bad things.
