Some graduate students of prestigious Duke University (DU) reportedly used yoga as a protest form to bring back free gym access for fourth and fifth-year students and exhibit how strongly they felt about the issue.
Protesting the revocation of access, these students held yoga classes on Abele Quad, named in honor of architect Julian Abele, on Thursday and spread around a petition seeking support signatures urging DU to cover their gym charges, reports suggest.
Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, calling it a crucial health issue for the graduate students, in a statement in Nevada today, urged DU President Richard H. Brodhead and Trustees Chair David M. Rubenstein to take care of the health and wellbeing of graduate students by allowing free gym access to all of them immediately, as the recreation center fee might be unaffordable for many.
Moreover, complimentary access to gym would be quite consistent with DU’s mission of promoting “human happiness” and “health”, Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, noted.
Rajan Zed commended the graduate students for this novel-healthy-thoughtful-peaceful-authentic medium of yoga as a civil rights and social action in an effort to change the minds of university administration. This community yoga gave the protest a deeper-wholesome dimension and brought it to a higher level.
Zed also urged all North Carolina university/college students to incorporate multi-beneficial yoga in their lives.
Yoga, referred as “a living fossil”, was a mental and physical discipline, for everybody to share and benefit from, whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, Rajan Zed pointed out.
Zed further said that yoga, although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. According to Patanjali who codified it in Yoga Sutra, yoga was a methodical effort to attain perfection, through the control of the different elements of human nature, physical and psychical.
DU, prominent research university in Durham (North Carolina) which traces its origins to 1838, “consistently ranks among the very best”. The Abele Quad is at the center of West Campus’ academic and student life.