A small group of Stanford University students and others are in the ninth day of a hunger strike they started to protest the university’s four-year-old living-wage policy, which they say is largely ineffective.

According to the Associated Press, 10 people were fasting on Thursday at an encampment on the campus. Seven were students, joined by an alumnus, a janitor, and a groundskeeper.

Four of the students were in the eighth day of their fast. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a student who had joined the original four strikers sought medical care on Thursday, when she became nauseous and disoriented after more than four days without food. She was given intravenous fluids.

The strikers want the university to extend the living-wage rules to cover everyone who works on the campus, including employees of companies that provide contract services. A spokesman said that Stanford administrators were sympathetic to the strikers’ demands and had been meeting with them throughout the strike, but that broadening the wage requirement would be complicated. —Lawrence Biemiller