As a group, prisoners wage hunger strikes more than anyone else, but sometimes it seems professors are not too far behind them.
In a surprising number of cases over the past several years, academics who found themselves on the wrong side of a tenure decision have tried to reverse their fate through public starvation.
Some starve themselves. Others have students starve with, or for, them. One professor in 2000 had his wife do the starving. Occasionally the tactics have worked. Usually they have not. Some professors walk away without winning tenure but then say that was never really the point anyway.
The second greatest occupational hazard of a hunger striker — whose occupation, after all, is a hazard — is the danger of drawing public resentment (attention monger!) rather than public sympathy (noble soul!). On the one hand, your actions may recall those of Mohandas K. Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. On the other, they may recall the mulish nephew who would not eat until his parents bought him a paintball gun.
To explore those issues against the backdrop of a recent, much publicized professorial fast that ended last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (The Chronicle, February 19), we spoke to an academic hunger striker from years past.
Ralph E. Luker is a retired, well-known historian of the civil-rights movement and a member of the prominent group blog Cliopatria, part of George Mason University’s History News Network Web site. Thirteen years ago, he was a man on the verge of losing his academic career. Mr. Luker engaged in a hunger strike when his bid for tenure was denied at Antioch College — an institution whose proud tradition of campus activism made it no more receptive to his protest.
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