Purdue Student Protesters Have Starved Themselves for 25 Days

Ten Purdue students reached Day 25 yesterday of a hunger strike meant to encourage Purdue to adopt a new anti-sweatshop initiative. The program would require that three quarters of the factories the university's apparel producers work with pay employees a living wage, Inside Higher Ed reports . Several of the protesters have been subsisting on only liquids and multivitamins since before Thanksgiving.

One student was hospitalized but refused to be force-fed. Perhaps he was reacting to goading from a former student activist. "Puh-lease," she wrote in a letter to the editor published eight days ago (Day 18 of the strike) in The Exponent. "It's not a hunger strike if you're healthy. You need to get sick and emaciated to protest. Do you think Gandhi was popping Flintstones and drinking Evian?" Yesterday, when Inside Higher Ed called the student who'd been hospitalized, his "fatigue registered even through the phone lines."