Overview

• More than 30 Harvard students participated in a 12-hour hunger strike to show solidarity with Brown University students on an eight-day hunger strike.
• The hunger strikes aimed to pressure universities to divest from companies tied to Israel's actions in Palestine, but have been criticized as performative.
• Brown University President Christina Paxson stated that the university consistently rejects calls to use its endowment for political advocacy on contested issues.
• Critics argue that the hunger strikes demonstrate a misunderstanding of the conflict's complexity and trivialize the concept of protest.
• The actions have sparked a wider debate on campus activism and the effectiveness of hunger strikes as a form of protest.