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Third-year College student Brianne Pitts, a Living Wage Campaign supporter who had fasted for the past six days, dropped out of the campaign's hunger strike after feeling faint and breaking out in a sweat in her economics class yesterday. The number of students participating in the hunger strike now stands at 17.
Pitts joined other protesters at their site near the Rotunda where she received medical attention from Dr. Greg Gelburt, a physician overseeing the strikers.
"We took care of her until Dr. Gelburt could arrive," second-year College student Carl David Goette-Luciak said. "He examined her and concluded that the hunger strike had taken too much of a toll on her and she needed to drop out."
Pitts has since resumed eating and will spend the night resting at home.
"Everything's been getting harder for all of us; we are all looking worse in health conditions according to the doctor," Goette-Luciak said. Despite this, the remaining strikers plan to continue their fasting, he added.
University President Teresa Sullivan agreed Wednesday to meet with the hunger strikers Monday morning to hear their concerns. Graduate Arts & Sciences student Dannah Dennis expressed dissatisfaction with this date, saying she thinks a hunger strike should be a higher priority for Sullivan.
"People will be weak, even more so than they are now, and in pain and suffering by [Monday]," Dennis said. "If we have to do that we will, but I hope Sullivan will meet with us sooner and will meet with us substantively."
Sullivan addressed the Board of Visitors yesterday, emphasizing the wage increases the University has made in her term, and said she could not make a promise that she may not be able to keep.
"To make the promise [of indexing wages to inflation] represents to me a fundamental lack of integrity," Sullivan said. "Equally important, it represents an abdication of my responsibility to balance all the competing financial priorities before us."
The campaign gained endorsements yesterday from
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