The Alligator's accusation that Students for a Democratic Society are hunger striking for personal glory is unfounded.
I don't recall this line of reasoning when students at the University of Miami struck for janitors to get a recognized union last year. You listed historical hunger strikes which you implied were more noble, but SDS is fighting to get the University of Florida to reveal its investments so that the school's monies don't go to corporations that engage in child labor, gross environmental destruction and other dubious practices that they would rather keep quiet.
SDS's goal is to provide a negative economic consequence to those corporations: they're thinking globally and acting locally.
You might call their methods extreme, but in our experience UF traditionally ignores reasoned pleas unless accompanied by direct action.
Deeb Kitchen and Bret Seferian
Graduate Assistants United co-presidents
Coverage should focus on the issues
It strikes me as odd that the Alligator Editorial Board consistently emphasizes the "problems" with SDS' protest tactics, as opposed to emphasizing and exploring the actual social problems that SDS is trying to address. Whether or not someone agrees or disagrees with the way SDS goes about doing its activism, I would think most people would agree that their causes are noble, especially if students were able to find out more about them.
To me, that should be the focus of the Alligator's editorials, since it is the responsibility of "independent" university media like the Alligator to examine the issues in our society that the mainstream American media will not cover.
Instead, we as students are constantly inundated with the Alligator Editorial Board's personal attacks against the character of SDS members. I, for one, am not really feeling the Alligator's Editorial Board becoming a surrogate father figure whose energies (and ink) seem to be constantly spent scolding campus activists.
