Columbia University’s student protesters added a new item to their list of demands in a Tuesday press briefing: food, which protesters say the university is under obligation to provide.
“It’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students — do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?” Johanna King-Slutzky, a representative for the People’s University, a PhD candidate at Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, and a teacher, said. “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, like, could people please have a glass of water?”
When pressed by a reporter about the seeming hypocrisy of the group’s statement — “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'” — King-Slutzky said that protesters were simply asking the university not to “violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid.” She could not cite examples of Columbia attempting to thwart any humanitarian-aid deliveries to the protesters. She did, however, admit that Columbia tried to “bribe” students with $80 GrubHub gift cards.
Flanked by two keffiyeh-wearing comrades, King-Slutzky, who said she had been arrested and subsequently suspended on April 18, called on Columbia to negotiate with students.
“We have all undertaken risk to our safety, our careers, our education, knowing that it shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way, but it is that way, because of Columbia’s violence against us, and retaliation against us, and occasionally members of the public’s retaliation against us,” she said. “That’s a risk that we’re motivated to take on because, you know, it’s been over 200 days of genocide, and bodies are being recovered in mass graves in hospitals with, like, you know, their hands behind their back, execution-style while wearing surgical gowns. This is something that we feel responsible for since our tuition and labor is fueling that and we are willing to take on an extremely minor amount of risk compared to what the heroic people of Gaza are dealing with every single day.”
According to her LinkedIn page, King-Slutzky is a union steward with the United Auto Workers (UAW) and claims to get “most excited for leftist causes and candidates tackling big issues like labor rights, income inequality, and racial equity.” The Columbia teacher was Refinery29’s Director of Tumblr, where she “developed original video content about social justice issues like Islamophobia,” before she left the post in 2017 to take a more “active” role in democracy by advising the anti-semitic Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Some universities have canceled their upcoming commencement ceremonies as anti-semitic protests fester on campuses. Columbia’s commencement ceremony is on May 15 — some seniors who attended school remotely during freshman year due to Covid-19 have expressed concerns that protesters could disrupt the ceremony. King-Slutzky, who already graduated from the University of Chicago in 2012 with a degree in English Language and Literature, brushed aside such concerns.
“I don’t have any information one way or the other about graduation plans,” she said. “I think that it’s really bizarre to us and perhaps to members of the public to see so much concern about graduation when we’re in the middle of a genocide. I think you have to really look at what’s important here. The students here stand behind — it’s so obvious from just being on campus — we’ve seen mass support for the protests. They are the people who are impacted by a potential risk to graduation and they’re saying, ‘No, not in my name, like, please, like, Columbia should not be participating and fueling a genocide because of a graduation ceremony.'”
“It’s really up to Columbia to come to a peaceful solution as soon as possible if it wants to preserve graduation but that’s entirely something in their control,” she added.