The Undergraduate Magazine of Columbia University, est. 1890 Volume XXVIII, No. IV NSOP 2022 THEBLUEANDWHITEMAGAZINE
CLAIRE SHANG, CC ’24, Editor-in-Chief SYLVIE EPSTEIN, CC ’23, Managing Editor KAT CHEN, CC ’24, Digital Editor TARINI KRISHNA, BC ’23, Publisher HART HALLOS, CC ’23, Illustrations Editor MADELEINE HERMANN, BC ’23, Illustrations Editor ANNIE POOLE, BC ’24, Layout Editor BENJAMINE MO, CC ’23, Literary Editor ELIZA RUDALEVIGE, CC ’23, Literary Editor Staff Writers Staff VICTORANOUKDOMINYGRACESeniorEditorialIllustratorsBoardEditorsADEE,CC’22.5COLECAHILL,CC’23GALLO,CC’23JOUFFRET,BC’24KELSEYKITZKE,BC’23BECKYMILLER,BC’24OMOJOLA,CC’24SONAWINK,BC’25StaffALEXANDER AIBEL, CC ’23 ZIBIA CALDWELL, BC ’25 IRIS CHEN, CC ’24 MARGARET CONNOR, BC ’23 ANDREA CONTRERAS, CC ’24 CAT FLORES, BC ’25 SADIA HAQUE, BC ’23 MISKA LEWIS, BC ’24 JUSTIN LIANG, GS ’24 WILL LYMAN, CC ’23 LEAH OVERSTREET, CC ’24 ELLIDA PARKER, CC ’24 ANNA PATCHEFSKY, CC ’25 MICHAELA SAWYER, CC ’25 DARIYA SUBKHANBERDINA, BC ’23 MUNI SULEIMAN, CC ’24 MACA HEPP, CC ’24 MAC JACKSON, CC ’24 HAZEL LU, CC ’24 VANESSA MENDOZA, CC ’23 SAMIA MENON, SEAS ’23 OONAGH MOCKLER, BC ’25 AMELIE SCHEIL, BC ’25 BETEL TADESSE, CC ’25 PHOEBE WAGONER, CC ’25 TAYLOR YINGSHI, CC ’25
TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol. XXVIII FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS No. IV @theblueandwhitemag theblueandwhite.org Claire Shang The Blue and White Staff 4 Letter From the Editor 5 Bwecommendations Anna Patchefsky Together in Tranquility Finding idyllic idleness in Quaker meeting. 6 FROM THE STAFF BLUE CAMPUSNOTESCHARACTERS Delaney Wellington12Becky Miller ESSAY Beyond the Bet What lies beneath the omnipresence of sports betting and crypto trading. 9Margaret Connor AT TWO SWORDS’ LENGTH Is it cake?24Hart Hallos & Phoebe Wagoner THE CONVERSATION 31Kelsey CoverKitzkeby Hart Hallos / Centerfold by Madeleine Hermann / Back cover by Kat Chen @blueandwhitemag FEATURES To Bag a Pulitzer Four years later, did Kendrick’s win actually mean ... anything? Victor Omojola 16 Picket Proliferations Organizers across academia speak to the lasting impact of last year’s Student Workers of Columbia strike. Grace Adee & Muni Suleiman Will Lyman How to Disappear Reflections on an NSOP made of solitude and cookie dough. 7 More Than Medication As students push for medication abortion access on campus, they wonder whether Barnard is ready for the post-Dobbs world. Andrea Contreras 20 Premilla Nadasen The continuous work of history. 26 FEATURE
Arbitrary constraints—when chosen voluntarily, not structurally imposed—force you to pay atten tion. When it manifests as picking flecks of meat from a pasta dish, this attention can seem irratio nal. Sometimes it’s more productive, the way an ar bitrary attachment to Max Caffè can lead to more clearly seeing the invasion of chain businesses in this
Of this summer’s happenings, the closing of Max Caffè was far from the most important. But eulogizing a place has endless appeal. The personal implications are potent and ambiguous: The cafe is gone, and so too is the iteration of myself that fre quented it. It sat on 122nd and Amsterdam for 19 years. Be fore the pandemic, it closed at midnight. It served paninis and crostini and even empanadas, which I ordered once and received stale. The coffee was reliably good. One of my first line edits as edi tor-in-chief was correcting “Max Café” to the sub stantially different “Max Caffè.” In the bathroom sat a Buddha, and outside, on its massive couches, sat every Columbia humanities grad student. It was the type of place that made you feel like a person who has places of their own. In freshman year, I was poll working down the block. On lunch break I drifted inside and, in a lapse of literacy, ordered a sandwich with prosciutto. Ear lier in the year I had gone vegetarian. When people asked why, it was hard to articulate—the environ ment was part of it, as was a need to make a decision and be able to stick by it. Now, presented with the sandwich, I felt a tremor of horror. Looking around helplessly, I realized that the zero other customers and the waitress who had not looked up when I en tered simply did not care what I did. So, I extricated the meat, folding it onto itself at the edge of my plate. The sandwich had lost its most important ingredi ent, which nobody had stopped me from enjoying except for myself, and because of this, it was deli cious—even if it was soggy and a bit empty.
4 THE BLUE AND WHITE
Claire Shang Editor-in-Chief
Aneighborhood.campusmagazine is predicated on arbitrary constraints: word counts, page counts, deadlines. It is the product of paying close attention and an invi tation to do so, too. Our front cover, by Hart Hallos, leads us into a dorm room, and our back cover, by Kat Chen, closes the door on it. Come and sit with us in the room that is the magazine. This fall, we are considering the possibility of rep resentation and visibility—and the ubiquity of in visibilities, misrepresentations—against the omni present backdrop of the institution. Our Blue Notes navigate the early days of college: Anna Patchefsky looks for ways to commune (p. 6) while Will Lyman reflects on a past attempt to disappear (p. 7). In our Features, Grace Adee and Muni Suleiman speak to organizers across academia to make visible the impacts of last year’s strike (p. 26). Victor Omojola finds that the Pulitzer Prize in Music, especially af ter Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 win, is a battleground for debates about inclusion and intellectual recognition (p. 16). Andrea Contreras, on the other hand, turns her gaze forward: How might Columbia change in recognition of the Dobbs ruling and student de mands for abortion services? (p. 20). Our Essays confront the highly visible. Marga ret Connor dives into the pervasive ads for online gambling (p. 9). On our website, Kat Chen describes how Google Search shapes the reality we see and Iris Chen writes of the limited possibilities YA shows of fer their captive audiences. Even our humor piece deals in the problematic of representation: Hart Hallos and Phoebe Wagoner wonder “is it cake?” (p. 24). There, the stakes are life or death. Word count urges me to conclude. Max Caffè taught me that sensemaking emerges from unlikely sources: a soggy sandwich; an arbitrary attachment to a defunct cafe; an article in a campus magazine you pick up only by chance. You never know what will be important to you until it happens.
Letter From the Editor
Some small mystery felt resolved. I understood that college would be a process of making decisions, defending the defensible ones and dealing with the others, until an identity coalesced. And I under stood better my own inexplicable vegetarianism.
5NSOP 2022 Bwecommendations, NSOP 2022 In which we demonstrate that summer break did not inhibit our mission to cultivate our rich inner lives. Claire Shang, Editor in Chief: Adania Shibli, Minor Detail. Olive oil cake. The pursuit of happiness … Sylvie Epstein, Managing Editor: Brooklyn (2015). Brooklyn (borough). Raw corn salad. All songs Van Morrison. Kat Chen, Digital Editor: Orville Peck, Bronco. Harley Quinn (HBO Max). Tarini Krishna, Publisher: Llama Inn. Neggy Gemmy, “Daydream.” Jazz in the gardens at the National Gallery. Hart Hallos, Illustrations Editor: Ohhh god. Oh god oh god oh god oh god. Oh gee. Hold on I’m thinking. I had a really good one a second ago! Madeleine Hermann, Illustrations Editor: Fiona Apple, Fetch The Bolt Cutters. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others. Finding cool rocks. Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. Eliza Rudalevige, Literary Editor: Eileen Myles, Inferno. Tommy Lefroy, “The Cause.” Collecting shiny things. Grace Adee, Senior Editor: Remi Wolf, Live at Electric Lady. Pillsbury Grands! Original Biscuits. Dominy Gallo, Senior Editor: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Almond butter. Anouk Jouffret, Senior Editor: “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” at NYPL. A Separation (2011). Kelsey Kitzke, Senior Editor: Florence + the Ma chine, Dance Fever. Arlo Parks. Trying to stay in one place. Becky Miller, Senior Editor: Listening to Doechii. Going to a psychic. Victor Omojola, Senior Editor: Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji. Official Competition (2022). Sona Wink, Senior Editor: Heart, “Barracuda.” McVitie’s Digestive Wheat Biscuits. (Best enjoyed simultaneously.) Margaret Connor, Staff Writer: Yellow Magic Or chestra, Taiso.” Guy Davidson, “Hipsters and Ho mosexuals.” People watching in unfamiliar places. Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Only Murders in the Building Season 2 (Hulu). Corinne Bailey Rae, “Put Your Records On.” Will Lyman, Staff Writer: Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends. Rewatching How To Get Away with Murder (Netflix). Belvedere club sodas with three lemons, carcass out. Anna Patchefsky, Staff Writer: Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers. The license plate game. Muni Suleiman, Staff Writer: Mornings at Joyce Kilmer Park. Beyoncé, Renaissance. Long night drives home. Phoebe Wagoner, Staff Illustrator: Witnessing lo cal high schooler having graduation photoshoot, apparently? Join The Blue and White! Apply by September 18: https://tinyurl.com/apply2bw. Read our full NSOP issue and more online at theblueandwhite.org! Follow us on Instagram @theblueandwhitemag and Twitter @blueandwhitemag. Contact us at blueandwhitemag@gmail.com to submit a pitch, Measure for Measure, or Shortcut.
Together in Tranquility Finding idyllic idleness in Quaker meeting.
BY ANNA PATCHEFSKY
In a 2019 Facebook post, @BritishQuakers pro moted their next meeting with a screenshot from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. The accom panying caption included a quote from Olivia Col man’s stepmother: “It’s very intense. It’s very quiet. It’s very … very … erotic.” Below the post, one commenter facetiously cautioned against the dan ger of becoming “the Religious Society of Friends With Bonuses.”
The palpable eroticism referenced in Fleabag is a result of these tensions—between speaking and silence, between a slouched spine and the straight backs of the pews, between your thigh and the one next to you. And these tensions arise, perhaps, from the unusual stillness induced by meeting.
A veteran of 13 years of Quaker school, I would not immediately call a single hour of the 520 I spent in meeting “erotic.” Meeting was always be fore lunch. My grumbling stomach and sporadic coughs contributed to an orchestra of other kids who couldn’t quite shut up, even with daily prac tice at silence. As I tried to count the light fixtures and lines on the ceilings, I grew increasingly anx ious that everyone was watching me: from my hair-tie fidgeting to the very thoughts I would never share aloud.
6 THE BLUE AND WHITE
Last fall, I shared my experience of Quaker meeting with my Lit Hum class after my professor asked if anyone ever takes time to be still, sit in silence, or worship. We had just finished a session on Montaigne’s Essays. “The mind that has no fixed aim loses itself, for, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere,” the Frenchman once noted. Montaigne wrote in a secluded tower, his stone walls lined with etchings of his favorite quotes. He chose, then, the construction of his thoughts as re spite from the surrounding world of political and religious tumult. For him, writing was a “complete idleness” that facilitated rest. So I, too, went searching for idleness. But I did not find it on 15-minute breaks between classes— those were devoted to hurried lunches in the form of vending machine Cheez-It. Nor did idleness hide in Joseph Defraine Greenwell’s wellness tips (neither a daily glass of water nor a plant adop tion). Even on the toilet, my mind was not still— that time reserved for a 15-minute TikTok scroll. Unsuccessful and uncertain I would ever find a vacant turret to write in, I sought out more famil iarWhenterritory.Ienter the Zoom for Morningside Quak er Meeting in August, a message in the chat pops up, asking if this is my first time in attendance. I pen a reply: “Yes! Thank you for having me.” The friendly, albeit anonymous messenger wonders if I have any questions and then requests that I intro duce myself when the meeting concludes. As we settle into silence, I am unsure that I will be able to focus. Resolved to sit in silence for an hour, I cannot Zoom chat with friends to distract myself and pass the time. Like everyone else, I will simply wait—until someone, and I know it will not be me, feels moved to speak. Only one person does. A girl, around my age, unmutes herself and raises her head. Bravely dis cussing her recovery process, she shares an unat tributed quote that she has written at the top of her journal: “I am grateful for having raised myself to find the person I am proud to be.” People slowly nod in agreement as she mutes herself again, rein troducing that familiar, erotic silence for the rest of Later,meeting.during a brief extended worship for shar
BY WILL LYMAN
7NSOP 2022 BLUE NOTES ing joys and sorrows, a gray-haired man channels the religious pacifism of Quakers. “There is a war going on,” he says, “and it is impossible for me not to read about it and also not to be appalled and saddened, frightened, and amazed that people can behave in such a way against each other needless ly.”For an hour, I have sat in front of my laptop do ing absolutely nothing more than thinking. But, somewhat impossibly, I have been surrounded by other people, scattered across generations and all corners of Morningside Heights. Grateful for the silence we have shared, I finally introduce myself. I explain that I will be back in person in the fall to be idle, silent, and alone with my thoughts. But most importantly to do so with them—to be to gether. There was a time when I used to think that sitting in silence for an hour—let alone for 520— would have been better spent sleeping, studying, or eating a cheesesteak. But older now, having experienced a pandemic’s worth of intense phys ical isolation, returning to Quaker meeting has convinced me that everyone deserves time to be communally idle. Illustration by Hart Hallos and Oonagh Mockler
Friends of mine recall their first few weeks at Co lumbia in a series of crime-drama clichés: Where were you the night of August 27? Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone? Was it Miss Peacock in the bil liard room with the candlestick? Or they recount as an amnesiac would describe a traumatic car crash: All I remember is that “Good As Hell” was playing and everything was red. Memories of orientation exist in these half-state ments, in these mysteries of where was I? or why was I wearing that? My younger self feels foreign and confused, and when I think of NSOP, I am con vinced that the twink in short shorts and Air Force 1s was not and could not have been me. This sort of retrospective NSOP cringing feels pretty universal, as we are all different people than we were even a few years ago. I, for one, feel that I’m in a constant state of reinvention—where I can completely grow and transform after an eventful trip to the grocery store. Yet, my NSOP amnesia is not a result of the week’s fun moments—chugging mystery vodka in a Carman suite or a moment of love-at-first-sight reaching for the same chicken burger at the JJ’s hot bar—but is a symptom of the plain truth that NSOP wasn’t for me. I spent the majority of the week locked in my John Jay single, watching the world from the window. I felt it was just too dangerous to go into the hall, to the lounge, or to the dining hall—for fear I would run into people who would make me feel seen. I’m terrible at hiding my distaste for certain people, and so I often chose my own company over that of peo ple I simply didn’t like. I felt that every connection I had either needed to bake a few years or be erased from my memory completely. When I tired of this isolation, I would walk two blocks to Morton Wil liams to steal cookie dough and eat it on the steps with a friend from my OL group. This, of course, was a valid activity—but it was also entirely unproduc tive.My NSOP experience was significantly tainted by the fact that my closest friend from high school ar rived at and dropped out of UC Boulder within 24 hours. She definitively dipped and left her roommate to pick through her closet. Part of me admired the
How to Disappear
Reflections on an NSOP made of solitude andcookie dough.
8 THE BLUE AND WHITE
America’s-Next-Top-Model-esque “I don’t think this is, like, right for me … I don’t want to do it” senti ment, but it was also terrifying to see that everyone I knew either landed gracefully in their new lives or collapsed under the pressure. It was even more concerning to arrive on campus in August sudden ly aware of the fact that my decision not to post in the Facebook group had left me without the months of networking, coordinating, and friendship build ing that everyone else had done. I knew people who unpacked their bags with a pre-established friend group and designated going-out schedules. The sin gular conversation I had with anyone from Colum bia before arriving was a three-selfie long Snapchat exchange where we both gave “weird vibes,” and the other person—who would eventually become a good friend—vowed that when they saw me on cam pus, “it was on sight.” When orientation came, everyone seemed like they were miles ahead of me. I spent the first night in a Furnald lounge with COOP people who spent the time reminiscing about their recent wilderness ad venture. I could not keep up. A number of my other days were spent with a boy who thought every time I wanted to hang out, I was asking him on a date. None of the people I met had a fake ID yet, so I was left to do liquor runs on my own or travel in small groups to bars, where I would sit, stir a gin and tonic, and think of home. I would do strange, sad things like searching “how to combat loneliness” on YouTube—finding only
BLUE NOTES
patronizing animated self-help videos and Emma Chamberlain vlogs—or sitting in public trying to look interesting and approachable. The only relief I found was taking the train to unfamiliar parts of New York and aimlessly walking around, alone and drunk on the beauty of the new landscape.
There was no easy solution to my melodrama, as my first year segued directly into the pandemic and I didn’t get the chance to feel belonging until last year. Even now, with a community I’m deeply tied to, I still feel a distance from campus life, like I’m observing everything from another planet. I look back with a resolute sense of annoyance on my younger self. I don’t want to offer him the cliché “put yourself out there” that is probably best suited for the situation, but I do wish to make him under stand that the fear I felt in public—on the lawns, go ing to campus bars—was a product of my own mind. Perhaps it came from growing up in the Midwest, feeling like everyone was always watching and eval uating me, but it was a projection. When I think of that first year, and the two others since, I’m confront ed by the fact that we are responsible for our own interaction with campus, with our classmates, and with New York. I only gained a sense of belonging once I recognized that I was getting in my own way. One of the most common phrases I heard once I emerged from my self-imposed isolation was “why didn’t we know each other sooner?” All I have to of fer in response is that during NSOP, I disappeared, but I’m here now.
Illustration by Betel Tadesse
To find out what resources are available to prob lem gamblers in New York, I texted the little num ber on the bottom of the posters. I posed as the Concerned Loved One of a hypothetical 22-yearold with a sports betting problem living in the 10027 zip code—a Promising Young Man whose studies were suffering as a result of his sports bet ting. Soon, I was put in touch with a counselor who asked a few basic questions (What type of gambling? Is there any substance use or alcohol ism as well? Is he a current member of the Armed
9NSOP 2022 ESSAY
What lies beneath the omnipresence of sports betting and crypto trading.
Beyond the Bet
BY MARGARET CONNOR As I stepped out of 116th Street Station, trying not to slip and brain myself on the staircase, I saw a surprising face waiting for me at the mouth of the staircase. Jamie Foxx, star of the iconic Col lateral, was plastered on an advertisement for Bet MGM, “the king of sportsbooks.” Open-mouthed in a gaudy green jacket, he fist-pumped in victory next to the enormous “RISK-FREE FIRST BET UP TO $1,000” and the much smaller “Gambling problem?” I rolled my eyes, but it was far from the first sports betting ad I’d encountered. I knew they could be pervasive, but it wasn’t until I passed by the display and saw what was on its other side that I ran out of patience: There, just behind it, was a competing ad for Caesars Sportsbook. Legalized betting has a complicated history in New York City. When my parents lived in Brooklyn in the 1990s, the options were to go down to the track and watch thoroughbreds race, or to visit a local OTB—an off-track betting parlor run by a public benefit corporation. Though OTBs still operate in other state counties, the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation folded in 2010, following waning interest in racing and the growth of more private, more convenient options for legal gam bling. The two major changes that have brought about our current state of oversaturation are the statewide legalization of sports betting in 2019 and the ensuing legalization of online sportsbooks in January 2022. On Jan. 8, four online sportsbooks—Caesars Sportsbook, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Rush Street Interactive—launched. Within two weeks, they had handled over $600 million. (That comes out to around $31 per New York State resident, or three times the budget of Hudson Yards’ sui cide-magnet, the Vessel.) It makes sense, then, why these advertising campaigns are going allout. As I looked at the ads on the bus stops and subway entrances every morning on my way to class, and then on the LinkNYC boards every night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were going particularly all-out around the Columbia campus. They’d have good reason to. Young men are particularly susceptible to problem gambling, and it’s safe to wager there are some deep-pock eted marks at an Ivy. Recently, the widely publicized death of Jack Ritchie, a 24-year-old teacher who died in Feb ruary by suicide following years of struggling with a gambling addiction, has highlighted the difficulty that problem gamblers and their loved ones face when trying to find adequate, meaning ful support. The scarcity of accessible therapeutic services, combined with the current ubiquity of sportsbook ads, means it is now disturbingly easy to develop a gambling problem yet frustratingly hard to find a means out of it. And don’t let the glossy advertisements and celebrity endorsements fool you—there’s a lot to lose. In addition to mon etary loss, the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry’s webpage states, “Individuals with a gambling disorder are more likely to struggle with substance misuse and are more likely to experi ence mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, medical and legal problems, and are more likely to risk their jobs and personal relationships.”
(While the HOPEline’s website proclaims itself “New York State’s 24/7 problem gambling and chemical dependency hotline,” typing “HOPENY” followed by a space into Google will automat ically suggest “hopeny gambling,” and nothing else. Also, the ny.gov page on the New York State HOPEline has a two-sentence explanation of the service followed by a “Learn more here” link that serves you a “page not found” notice.)
As governed by 9 NYCRR § 5325.6(b-c), sports betting ads must display the numbers of New York State’s HOPEline, a 24/7 confidential hotline.
Illustration by Oonagh Mockler Services?) and gave me the number of the Man hattan Problem Gambling Resource Center.
While I was impressed with the hotline’s re sponse time, the counselor’s odd phrasing and word choice led me to wonder whether they were not a native English speaker or they were using a very awkward script: “He would benefit from some counseling to look into why it is that he gambles, what purpose it serves in his life at this point and how he can find ways to cope. I am glad you reached out on your friend’s behalf. He is very young and has the opportunity to serve a healthy life at this point without risking putting himself in an early financial straining situation that could take him years to recover from. The earlier he gets help, the Counselingbetter.”can be a valuable resource, but it only goes so far. Even “early help” can’t protect you from seeing BetMGM ads on LinkNYC screens or keep you from hearing FanDuel ads that play over the radio in John Jay Dining Hall. The danger of online sportsbooks and constant betting ads is that they cannot be avoided. With traditional gambling, if you recognize you have a gambling problem, you can contact casinos and request that they ban you from the premises, which they will do. The face-to-face involvement with other parties and the physical limits of these gambling spaces offer protections that simply ar en’t possible with online betting. (While the New York Constitution explicitly limits sports betting to approved brick-and-mortar casinos, legislators allowed mobile betting to subvert this by housing their servers on these properties.) Before Ritchie’s death, his father took him to local betting shops and had his son sign a form excluding him from betting at those locations. Ritchie then began gambling online. You can’t opt out of ads on the subway.Youcan’t even avoid gambling ads when try ing to get help for your gambling problem. Some posters, including those from BetMGM, include the curiously trade-restricted phrase “know when to stop before you start.” As I attempted to find the owner of the trademark, I found the slogan listed on several sportsbook and casino websites that simultaneously served me popups or overlays that advertised slots and sports betting. Go figure. This new landscape of sports betting—where anyone can place bets anytime, anywhere, with no background knowledge—is uniquely danger ous. By making gambling intensely private and extremely convenient, potential problem gam blers have few protections. On top of that, avail able “support” is insufficient, practically an af terthought. If sports betting is to become a part of our lives, there needs to be more support for problem gamblers, and our understanding of ad diction must expand to recognize how pervasive it can be. Normalizing risky behavior is dangerous for current and potential gambling addicts.TheColumbia Gambling Dis order Clinic’s description of pathological gambling empha sizes that gambling problems ar en’t confined to casinos, or even what we traditionally consider gambling: “A gambling disorder […] is not limited to casino gambling. Frequent playing of lotteries, sports betting including fantasy sports, […] whether online, on phone apps, or in person, may signal a gambling problem. Daily personal involvement in stock markets including cryptocurrencies, and difficulty in being able to reduce or stop trading activity, can also signal problem gambling behav ior.”It’s telling that this model of addiction and re
THE BLUE AND WHITE ESSAY
the public will become so educated about crypto currency that the “95% of crypto day traders lose money” factoid ceases to be bandied about. But as things stand right now, with cryptocurrencies fast growing in visibility and attracting techies and the tech-illiterate alike, is someone drawn in by one of these ads coming into DeFi with enough knowledge to navigate these waters? “The answer is probably no,” according to a Columbia CS ma jor about to start work at a DeFi startup. Just like the lack of regulation, the lack of in formation about the risks traders and gamblers face is purposeful. For sportsbooks and many crypto services, your loss is their gain. Your age, income, and mental health are irrelevant in the face of profit. Only pressure from government and consumer protection groups can induce these industries to take their customers’ safety serious ly. Uninformed consumers are better customers: They complain less and they risk more. When you see the next DraftKings ad on public transport or glimpse a promotional display for a new crypto service, know how much predation and pain lies below the brewskis and QR codes. Crypto services, too, have begun advertising themselves to the sports crowd. Sports figures who have endorsed crypto projects include Floyd Mayweather, John Terry, Stephen Curry, and Tom Brady. Eli and Peyton Manning have appeared in Caesars Sportsbook ads and have “launched” an NFT collection. A 2021 poll by Morning Consult found that sports betters are more than twice as likely to be familiar with cryptocurrency than the general population. If you are, perchance, someone who watches sports, you may have seen the Coinbase adver tisement that played during the 2022 Super Bowl. Costing nearly $14 million, it was 60 seconds of an unaccompanied QR code bouncing around the screen. That ad is now iconic: It drew such an audience that it reportedly caused the Coin base app to crash. What it was not was regulated. The laws surrounding crypto advertising are far looser than those for sportsbooks; New York reg ulations mandating the inclusion of a HOPEline don’t apply. Who can say how many sports-watch ing, DeFi-curious viewers scanned that QR code? Nowhere on that screen was there a hotline num ber, a message about responsible usage, or even a “gambling problem?”
11NSOP 2022 covery emphasizes the abuse potential of technol ogy, whether in your hand or on the blockchain.
While cryptocurrencies can function specula tively not unlike the stock market, the world of decentralized finance, or DeFi, comes with few of the legal protections that regulate the Dow Jones’ offerings. This is perhaps the blockchain’s biggest draw: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Sports betting and cryptocurrency have ex perienced a parallel rise over the last few years. Both have enjoyed an explosion in accessibility and visibility—and with them, profitability. The pandemic shuttered major forms of in-person entertainment like concerts, theaters, sports, and brick-and-mortar shopping. If you were fortu nate enough to have a chunk of disposable in come during the initial period of lockdowns, you had limited options for physical places to spend it. Crypto and online gambling became an ap pealing place to gamble, invest, spend, and earn. The sphere of decentralized finance and this new world of sports betting want to hammer home the same message: It’s fun, and anyone can do it. As one ad I saw atop a skyscraper during a walk in Central Park put it, “What’s the best that could happen?” Trading NFTs is so much cooler than suit-and-tie investing, and just look at the young men in FanDuel ads hanging out with their friends in a brightly lit sports bar! Their demographic overlap, then, should come as no surprise. Both skew male, both skew young, and both want to attract tech-friendly dudes with disposable income. The culture of new sports betting in many ways resembles that of the cryp tosphere in its flippant courting of risk and glib dismissal of loss. In Sarah Resnick’s recent article exploring the social intricacies of the DeFi scene, one of the crypto clans she encountered were “degens (degenerates, or speculation addicts),” a self-deprecating community appellation I en countered on Reddit’s r/sportsbook forum. This demographic and subcultural overlap matters because it represents a specific targeting of po tential risk-addicts, as well as the normalization of dangerous behaviors rebranded as guilty-plea sureIt’shobbies.possible that increased adoption will spur legislation on crypto marketing, possibly lead ing to something in line with New York State’s rules on sportsbook ads. It’s possible, too, that ESSAY
material is unabashedly personal— that’s where she finds catharsis in her stand-up. In “The Worst News I Got That Day Was Not That I Have a Brain Tumor,” a YouTube video of Delaney’s five-minute set at the Broadway Comedy Club, she dramatizes the story of a traumatic medical event with masterful timing and ample pauses, a cadence she worked out at the open mics. That particular night, the audience roars and contributes, and Del aney feeds off of their input and assistance, letting her story ride alongside their reactions. The brain tumor story can be a crowd killer, she said, but Delaney’s ordinary delivery creates an ironic relief, both for the audience and for herself. She justifies her choice to use this material with ease: “I appre ciate a crazy story. So when that happens to me, I’m not like, ‘oh, this craziness sucks.’ I’m like, ‘wow, I can perform this now.’”
12 THE BLUE AND WHITE CAMPUS CHARACTERS
In high school, Delaney didn’t have many op portunities to explore stand-up or comedy, but she knew she could make people laugh and was vaguely drawn to performing. When she started at Barnard, she didn’t know she was into any of it, and she didn’t know she was good at any of it. “It just slowly morphed into this part of my life,” she told me. Early in her freshman fall, Delaney sat in on some improv rehearsals and joined Memento Mori, Columbia’s stand-up show, and the student sketch comedy group CHOWDAH. After the initial Nashville push, she began in dependently doing stand-up in New York over the summer. She would pay $5 to try her material out at open mics and comedy clubs mostly filled with other comics, regulars whose recycled material be came familiar as she returned week after week. This open mic scene was composed of bombers and occasional unexpected gems. Sometimes people would suck one week and then kill it the next. Del aney took comfort in seeing that progress, notic ing how subtle inflections in tone and rearranged timing could spark a minefield of laughter from an energetic crowd. At the Hungarian Pastry Shop one summer af ternoon, Delaney confided to me that she inevita bly found out for herself what it was like to bomb. As she was performing to an audience made up of mostly distracted comics who were just waiting for their turn with the mic, she experienced the bleak rite of passage that is speaking for five minutes and getting zero laughs. Delaney described this expe rience as “really funny in retrospect.” She’d get on stage, wait for the first laugh, and if it never came, she “short circuited” and just prayed the five-min ute light would arrive soon. Sometimes she’d even get a few “aw”s—one of the worst and most hilari ous sounds to hear as a stand-up comic, as she un derstandsDelaney’sit.
Delaney dreamt and executed Bear Hug Barbara, an overly handsy seamstress who treats her clerk like a horse, and had the top floor of Lerner shak ing with laughter. That same night in February, she was the butt of the Grand Canyon Elmo sketch, an idea she conceived while walking to class. She
Picture a 20-year-old Delaney Wellington, BC ’23, sitting at a side-of-the-highway bar in Nashville, waiting for her turn to knock the sea soned, jaded country open-mic comics on their asses. She had never done stand-up comedy be fore and she was ripping off the Band-Aid; she made her friends wait in the car. After two hours of watching cowboys defensively bomb their sets, her turn came around. Delaney calmly got onstage, cracked a few jokes about her brain tumor, and scored a couple of laughs. She did well compared to the bombing cowboys, but she told me with a warm humility that she remembers her first time doing stand-up going only “okay.”
In CHOWDAH, Delaney has found a cam pus community that’s as phenomenally funny as it is wholesome. Coming from a primary interest in stand-up, CHOWDAH expanded the field of comedy for Delaney, and she called writing sketch comedy her “new favorite thing.” She has found her groove with the medium, penning and acting out the characters and scenes that kill at live shows.
Delaney Wellington BY BECKY MILLER
Delaney has had two paid gigs, which is a feat for a college student doing stand-up comedy. But her gall and balls do not come without a substan tial level of nerves—Delaney told me between laughs that at her last show in January, her Fitbit reported 119 minutes where her heart rate was over 140, meaning she was having a mini panic attack for two hours before going onstage. Unlike the solo shows, CHOWDAH comes as a relaxing alternative. The first CHOWDAH show of the year came a couple of weeks after that gig, a welcome relief after the stressful solitude of a stand-up stage.
Delaney’s musings, onstage and off, bring levi ty to the Barnard sphere. Her style’s signature is in its generosity: She wants to let you in, to share her hustles, to help you get the sketch, to relieve some of her tension and everyone else’s. I left our conver sation at Hungarian fulfilled: I had a birdwatching class on my Plan & Schedule and the comforting feeling that even without backflips, Barnard might be a little funnier than I thought.
Illustration by Mac Jackson
13NSOP 2022 CAMPUS CHARACTERS played a Times Square Elmo who hijacks a tour of the Grand Canyon by being a douchebag. At the April show, she couldn’t help breaking during a Last Supper sketch in which she played a moody, sinisterDelaneyJudas.can be described, like most Barnard students, as a loving critic, though her judgments usually take the form of humor. She and a friend created the Instagram account @whatisweecha, an examination of the origin and weirdness of the glass double helix statue called “Weecha” that stands outside of Diana. When I asked her if she thought that Barnard College had a funny per sonality, she confessed that our humor is not ob vious—there’s definitely no Barstool Barnard. “No one’s doing flips. I wish …” Delaney admitted. Even so, she remains optimistic about Barnard’s ethos: She maintains that we are funny in a “collected, smart”Delaneyway. notices some hilarity even in her ul tra-serious major, Environment and Sustainability. She told me the story of when a professor suggest ed that a real solution to climate change would be to launch a mirror the size of Greenland into space. All she could imagine was an apocalyptic scenario in which we launch said mirror and it falls back down into the ocean, creating an enormous tsuna mi and even more waste and pollution. When she had a moment to spare during her summer researching heat waves, Delaney took to interacting with the environment in a hysterically eclectic way: On the weekends, she went kayak ing for free on the Hudson and spent a lot of time birding, which she defines as “going intentionally to look at birds.” She was interviewed by NPR ear lier this summer as a witness to the running of the goats in Riverside Park. She spends a lot of time thinking about small dogs who live in New York apartments, and why they look the way they do (“a little dead”). That afternoon at Hungarian, I was lucky to hear her theory: The air conditioning in their small apartments sucks all the moisture out of the small dogs, leaving them to shrivel up.
Illustration by Taylor Yingshi
To Bag a Pulitzer
That’s a line from “AbSoul’s Outro,” the penultimate track on Kendrick Lamar’s first studio album, Section.80. Since the 2011 project, the Compton native has re leased four more albums. The first three, good kid, m.A.A.d city, To Pimp a Butterfly, and DAMN., touch upon adolescent self-discovery, institutional racism in the United States, and Christian theol ogy, respectively. By thoughtfully utilizing Black aesthetics, maintaining cultural specificity even as a world-renowned record ing artist, and producing anthems of Black affir mation like “Alright,” Lamar has cemented himself as a sort of sage regarding Black culture—man aging to remain both revered and beloved by the Black community. And through his genre-bending, rapper’s rapping, and meticulous ly crafted sonic language, Lamar has established himself among critics, artists, and fans alike as one
BY VICTOR OMOJOLA
“See, a lot of y’all don’t understand Kendrick Lamar because you wonder how I could talk about money, hoes, clothes, God, and history all in the same sentence.”
16 THE BLUE AND WHITE
Four years later, did Kendrick’s winactually mean ... anything?
17NSOP 2022 FEATURES of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, his most recent and most con troversial album, refuses the designation as cultural arbiter, but could never do too much to complicate his reputation as a rap icon. The album still boasts the impossible complexity of any of his prior releas es. It reminds one that Lamar’s music is too compre hensive to be pigeonholed by generic descriptors. In reality, all of his work simultaneously occupies and polarizes the internal, the societal, and the divine.
Hardly a week later, Marjorie Miller, the adminis trator for the Prizes, responded to the article, with a tone that does well to personify the institution of the Pulitzer itself, exhausted from decades of discourse surrounding the 1965 controversy: “We believe ci tations are as consequential as our other awards.” She quoted an Ellington biographer, who wrote, “In 1999, he got his Pulitzer.”
Each year, juries for different categories gather in New York to review submissions and nominate three finalists. Jurors for the prize in music are crit ics, composers, professors, and past winners, who review submissions from anyone willing to pay a $75 entry fee. For Ted Hearne, doing so, in 2018, was a no-brainer. “I wrote a big work,” he told me. “It took several years to really write it and get it right and then make a recording. And then it sounded the way that I wanted, it sounded right. … So I thought that I should submit it for the prize.”
In late July, Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter wrote a New York Times newsletter ti tled “Duke Ellington Deserves the 1965 Pulitzer Prize.” In the piece, he scoffs at the organization’s decision to give Ellington a special citation in 1999, arguing that denying the jazz pioneer his due in the first place was a decision too egregious to be recti fied by a posthumous recognition. “We assume that Pulitzers are awarded to work that qualifies as for the ages, that pushes the envelope, that suggests not just cleverness but genius. There can be no doubt that El lington’s corpus fits that definition,” he writes.
In the months that followed Kendrick Lamar’s history-making Pulitzer win in 2018 for DAMN., the amount of hot take–laced think pieces and Twit ter dissertations that filled the ether might have been enough to make Miller wish for a return to the Ellington conversation. Indeed, major news outlets raced to pump out articles prophesying and proselytizing on what K.Dot’s triumph as the first non-classical or jazz winner of the Pulitzer in Music meant for the Prizes, hip-hop, noncommercial mu sic, academia, and so much more. But Miller wasn’t in charge of the Pulitzers then. It was only this past April that she replaced Dana Canedy, who, in 2020, left the role behind to become Simon & Schuster’s senior vice president and publisher. Indeed, it was Canedy who was tasked with rep resenting the Prizes in the midst of the PR fusillade of criticism and praise in 2018. She repeatedly ex plained that the Board was “very proud of this se lection,” a unanimous decision that “means that the jury and the board judging system worked as it’s supposed to—the best work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.”This, of course, begs the question of how exactly the Pulitzer’s judging system is “supposed to work.”
The “big work” in question is Sounds From the Bench, a 40-minute-long cantata for chamber choir, electric guitar, and percussion. Jurors selected Hearne’s piece as a finalist for the 2018 prize. “I was totally shocked to get that recognition,” he remarked. I also spoke to Raven Chacon, who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Voiceless Mass, an ensem ble piece commissioned specifically for the Nichols & Simpson pipe organ at The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee. This being his first time submitting a composition for consideration for the prize, he’s an impressive one for one. He laughed as he detailed his newly packed schedule since the May 9 announcement: “It’s added a lot more hours to the day.”Chacon chose to submit a written score with his entry, but, since 2004, this has not actually been a requirement. Along with widening the range of ex perts from which its jurors are drawn, the adjust ment was made with the goal of increasing the di versity of music and composers considered for the prize.Fourteen years later, Lamar’s 2018 win perhaps indicated that these changes were a success. But such a conclusion is arguably marred by the fact that his victory was especially irregular. DAMN. was never formally submitted to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize, but added to the set of three finalists, along with Hearne’s cantata and a quartet by Michael Gilb ertson, after the jurors noticed a few works with hip-
And if one recalls Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize win for DAMN., one might be compelled to add “the ac ademic” as well.
Chacon provided a firsthand account of just this. “The monetary award is nice, but what’s been more valuable to me is just people understanding a little bit better what I do and recognizing some of the other work that I do—even the non–chamber music work.”Indeed, much of Chacon’s catalog can be cate gorized as noise music, an experimental genre that emphasizes improvisation and “uses electronics and electric instruments to just make what it sounds like: noise.” Music like this, that can’t be traditionally clas sified as “classical” or “jazz” or “rock”—that is not traditionally anything—can easily be forgotten when one attempts to analyze 2018 through the narrow lens of hip-hop versus classical, commercial versus noncommercial.Thisislargely why Hearne remains unconvinced that Lamar’s win was some kind of armageddon for the noncommercial cosmos. In fact, he contests that, like Marsalis’ line of reasoning, this one is problem atic, as well. It erases artists whose music straddles the public market and the academic one. “If a mu sician is a producer and a rapper, for instance … trying to make something really great, really cutting edge, and would love to sell a million records, but also doesn’t want to only be guided by the idea that to be successful they must sell, should they be ex cluded from getting those research funds or for hav ing that opportunity open to them?” he asked.
On the other hand were those who heralded the Board’s decision as a long-overdue step forward for hip-hop and/or the Pulitzer Prize institution. Such arguments, unsurprisingly, have dominated pop culture spheres. For Complex, A.T. McWilliams opined that the event “writes into history hip-hop’s undeniable influence on—and innovation within— American music.” For The Atlantic, Spencer Korn haber explained the cruciality of the decision for an institution embarrassingly on an island in its lack of respect for hip-hop. “The Pulitzers got it right,” Do reen St. Félix of The New Yorker wrote simply. … In a New York Times piece that detailed a con versation between a classical music editor and a pop culture critic, the former of the two, Zachary Woolfe, claimed that the Pulitzer Prize in Music was “now officially one fewer guaranteed platform … for noncommercial work, which scrapes by on grants, fellowships, commissions and, yes, awards.”
Hearne’s question, more broadly, alludes to the institution’s tendency—and, in many cases, its de sign—towards exclusion. Rather than dwell on the fact that the Pulitzer went to Lamar, the commer cially successful musician, perhaps it is better to celebrate that it went to Lamar, the non-classical artist—against all institutional odds. This also sug gests that looking at a work not in a vacuum, but as rich matter shaped by and capable of shaping many sociocultural forces—including the Pulitzer Prizes themselves—is key. As Chacon formulates it, “the music is more than its sound.” A Diné composer, whose winning work considers how colonial institutions have historically worked to remove and silence Indigenous Peoples, Chacon believes that subject matter should be a cru
But such a theory lies on the tamer end of those espoused by parties who objected to the Board’s de cision. Others not only disagreed with the idea that DAMN. was worthy of the prize, but contested that the album—and rap music as a whole—is not wor thy of any sort of intellectual recognition. One such individual is Wynton Marsalis, who, interestingly enough, was the first composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music for a work with significant jazz ele ments. The purportedly trailblazing jazz maestro failed to see anything trailblazing about Lamar’s achievement, telling The Washington Post that rap music presents “much more of a racial issue than taking Robert E. Lee’s statue down.”
18 THE BLUE AND WHITE FEATURES hop influence, but no actual hip-hop entries. The Pulitzer Prize Board, the body of mostly journalists and professors that chooses winners for all catego ries, subsequently decided that DAMN. was the most worthy. Lamar’s win fueled disapproval from those who interpreted the decision as another unjust nail in the coffin of noncommercial music.
For Hearne, the publicity that a young composer can sometimes garner through the prize is just as vi tal. “The recognition of it helps them coalesce some attention around their career.”
It would make quite the understatement to sug gest that Kendrick Lamar did not need the $15,000 cash prize that accompanies the Prize in Music. Ac cording to an AfroTech article, touring for DAMN. alone grossed more than 2,600 times that amount. Indeed, $15,000 can go a much longer way for a composer creating music that could never dream of blasting through radio airwaves or trending on Tik Tok. Still, it is not necessarily the financial compo nent that makes clinching a Pulitzer life-changing.
Indeed, for the moment, the barriers that stand between certain musicians and a Pulitzer Prize remain robust—yet to be shattered by the afteref fects of Lamar’s triumph. Specifically, most of these boundaries are those that define exactly what clas sical music is and, more crucially, who it keeps out. Chacon is particularly interested in rectifying this. His work with the Native American Composer Apprentice Project helps Native American students compose concert music. “The hope is that these bar riers get eliminated and there’s more access to new communities, new people who have been excluded before from having access to these instruments and education, seeing what they will do with the genre next,” he Composerssaid. who come from backgrounds that are less white and less wealthy will, since they once lacked proximity to classical music (and maintain closeness to others), likely approach the genre’s con ventions with a greater skepticism. Exposing young people from underrepresented communities to the arena of classical music has the potential to even tually disrupt notions of what the genre looks and sounds
The group of individuals nominated for and, occasionally, awarded the Pulitzer Prizes is an ex tremely exclusive one. Hearne told me that 2008 winner David Lang is a former teacher of his, that 2017 winner Du Yun is a friend, and that the only Pulitzer winner of the last ten years that he doesn’t have a personal relationship with or at least “some sort of small community knowledge of” is Kendrick Lamar. This isn’t exactly surprising, but it indicates that the Pulitzer in Music tends to circulate within a small coterie of artists. And as Hearne put it, “it’s not like that’s the only music that’s happening in the world. That’s actually just a very, very, very small fraction of the music.”
Anotherlike.way to critique the classical music space is by simply asking, as Hearne does, “does it say any thing positive, more positive, about the music if it’s considered classical music?” From the viewpoint of academia, at least, it certainly seems to.
Ironically, since it is what leads to the speculation in the first place, the configuration of winners since 2018 suggests that, for now, the answer is “no.”
years is not long enough to know truly and fully any theoretical reverberations of the Pulitzer Prize’s most controversial decision to date. What’s worthy of more general concern is the fact that without a commercial platform or academic en dorsement working to amplify their art, experimen tal musicians composing in any genre remain largely unaffected by the decision—even in theory. There are about a million Kendrick lines that one might use to effectively poetize this, but it is Chacon’s wordless Pulitzer Prize–winning work, which con siders how best to empower those who struggle to be heard, that is most applicable.
19NSOP 2022 FEATURES cial part of how Pulitzer jurors assess a given year’s applicants. “It is in what it’s saying, where it’s being made from, who it’s being made by,” he continued. “And sometimes, it’s who it’s being made for.”
It is commonly held that institutions of higher education are all about messy scholarly problems, challenging knowns, and a lack of resolution in pur suit of resolution. Well, if this is the case, then Ken drick Lamar, in all his aforementioned complexity, certainly fits the bill. And so do many other rap and hip-hop musicians. And so do experimental artists of all genres who push boundaries and create ten sion. We might more fiercely indict academia for what it deems worthy of study and how it makes such determinations. More often than not, a history of race and class discrimination is central. It is important that establishment sympathizers understand the implications of their cries against the introduction of popular musical styles into an institutional space. Whether intentional or not, such appeals suggest a contentment with, or even en dorsement of, a discriminatory conceptualization of music.Four
The fact that operas by Ellen Reid and Anthony Davis, an orchestral work by Tania León, and Raven Chacon’s piece have received the last four awards since 2018 supports the argument that Lamar’s win was not as transformative as many speculated it might have been. However, it would not be much more than speculation to suggest that bias or a de sire to draw renewed attention to the awards fueled their selection. Individuals that served as jurors in 2018 and others who served in administrative roles for the Prizes either declined or failed to respond for comment.Still,even if one were to ascertain evidence that implied the reasoning behind awarding Lamar the prize had to do with anything other than a belief that his work was that year’s best, would it really matter?
Lorena’s first appointment was on Barnard’s campus the week prior with nurse practitioner Anne Herlick. She had known she was pregnant for a few days beforehand. After the initial emo tional whirlwind, she researched her options and decided that the medication abortion pill was the right choice for her. For Lorena, who grew up in a low-income household with inconsistent access to health care, the thought of any medical procedure was enough to send her reeling. A surgical abortion seemed like the worst possible iteration. The pills would be easy and discrete.
According to a former staff member, though, Lorena’s experi ence indicates the biases and misinformation held by many individuals at Barnard Primary Care. “I think Barnard students
“She didn’t really describe what the symptoms will be like with the pill,” Lorena said. “She just kind of brushed it off. She’s like, ‘don’t consider that, just go with this Despiteroute.’”thewarnings, Lorena requested the pills and paid the $80 bill. Both appointments left her with stark feelings of shame and alienation. Lorena felt her proudest accomplishments had been soured by her experience at the clinic. She left feeling like she had become a stereotype—a scared pregnant teenager. “Going into [the] Barnard Health office was—I want to say humbling, but it was kind of de grading,” Lorena said. Nurse Herlick and the Columbia Fertility doc tor’s views on the MA pill may not reflect those of the Columbia health care community as a whole.
(When asked for comment, a Barnard spokes person did not address inquiries about campus medication abortion provision or collab oration with student activists, instead sharing links to two existing public state ments.)
20 THE BLUE AND WHITE FEATURES
Barnard says they’re ready for the post-Dobbs world. But their reluctanceto provide medication abortion has left many doubting the level of their commitment.
HermannMadeleinebyIllustration
More Than Medication
Barnard Primary Care wasn’t Lorena’s first stop for reproductive care. She tried Planned Parent hood, but the months-long wait time meant she would be unable to get a medicated abortion by the time she got an appointment. So she turned to campus services, hoping they could provide her with pills and the support she needed. Herlick tried to comfort Lorena: A lot of students go through this, don’t worry. Not usually first-years, though. Herlick made her dislike for medicated abortion clear. She told Lorena the surgical route is better; medicated abortion would be extremely painful. With the surgery, at least Lorena could get an IUD installed at the same time. But Lorena didn’t want an IUD—she hadn’t said a thing about contracep tion. You know, so that it won’t happen again, Her lickOffhandsaid. comments like these replaced in-depth explanations of the advantages and disadvantages of Lorena’s choices. After being told to think about it, Lorena was finally referred to the Columbia University Fertility Center in Midtown, where she would see an OB-GYN the following week. If nothing else, the Columbia doctor in Midtown was kinder than Herlick; her tone made Lorena feel “a little bit more like a person.” But when it came to asking Lorena what she wanted to do about her pregnancy, the doctor discouraged medicated abortion. She echoed Herlick’s warning that med icated abortion would be painful, probably the worst pain Lorena would feel in her life, and added that it wouldn’t be covered by her school insurance.
BY ANDREA CONTRERAS
Lorena was the only person in the waiting room at the Columbia University Fertility Clinic on 5 Columbus Circle. It was spring 2021—her first spring in the city as a Barnard first-year—but from the clinic window she couldn’t see the Callery pear trees blooming. Her boyfriend loitered outside, un able to enter the building to wait with her: Covid protocol, the nurse explained as Lorena took a seat. (Lorena is a pseudonym.)
21NSOP 2022 FEATURES
RJC’s first year of action before their official club recognition in 2021 involved surveying the cur rent reproductive justice landscape on campus, fundraising for abortion clinics, and compiling resources for awareness campaigns. When it came to medication abortion, RJC thought it would be a relatively smooth process to make pills available on“Wecampus.genuinely thought that if we garnered
some students are wondering what repro ductive health care Barnard was referring to. Bar nard offers contraceptive services through Primary Care (which they offer appointments for one halfday a week) and has a Plan B vending machine; however, these resources are not what has come under threat with the Dobbs decision. The decision backtracked on abortion and abortion services, of which Barnard has none. The college’s statements were particularly frustrating to the Reproductive Justice Collective, who have encountered numer ous administrative roadblocks in advocating for abortion justice on campus for the past few years.
maybe felt a little bit of, maybe, paternalism, or like they weren’t actually being heard because providers felt like they knew best in that scenario,” said Dr. Payal Patel, a former primary care physician at Bar nard. Patel said that fear of pregnancy, not a desire to help pregnant people, was at the forefront of re productive care at Barnard. “The way that we think about pregnancy, I think that it clearly doesn’t come from a reproductive justice lens. Pregnancy is not a bad outcome. I think the bad outcome is the patient not receiving the care that they wanted.” Before receiving her prescription, the doctor warned Lorena not to take the pills alone. But Covid rules on campus meant that complying with this order might take some maneuvering. She de cided to borrow her roommate’s ID card and build ing key to swipe in her home friend from Fordham, the only person she trusted enough to tell about her pregnancy. But Lorena and her friend were caught by the security guard at the front desk and her friend was sent home, leaving Lorena to take her pills alone in the bathroom of her dorm.
Founded by Barnard students Niharika (Nix) Rao, BC ’23, and Maya Corral, BC ’22, in 2020, RJC began as a way to address the need for intersection al health care on campus, including birth justice, doula programs, queer, trans and gender-expansive inclusive care, and medication abortion at Bar nard. Rao, who is nonbinary, said that RJC’s di verse membership of people of color, queer, trans, and low-income individuals informs their fight for medication abortion. “Abortion care in New York is a very two-tiered system, if you are low income and a person of color versus white and high income, because the care options are just so different,” Rao said. “And one of the biggest benefits, I think, of providing this on campus, is just that it helps with so many of those barriers that low-income students of color, queer, and trans students face.”
A few weeks later, Lorena was no longer preg nant. She wasn’t asked to come in for a follow-up appointment at the fertility center, nor did she re ceive any further communication from them. She doesn’t know her doctor’s name. What she did receive was a surprise bill on her Barnard Health portal: $130 for the ultrasound, in addition to the charge for the pill. A few days later, another surprise arrived in her inbox—a request for a meeting with her RA and hall director regarding the guest policy. She met with them, apologized for breaking the rules, and assumed the situation was resolved. Then, at the beginning of the summer semester, Lorena was kicked out of her housing. Her appeal, which cit ed a medical emergency for the rule violation, was rejected.Oneyear later, Lorena’s inbox was flooded again. This time, it was with communications from Bar nard condemning the outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision which overturned federal protections for abortion. Barnard organized informational panels with Terry McGovern from the Mailman School of Public Health and Janet Jakobsen from the Wom en’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department; they set up Zoom calls where students could offer feedback on steps the University could take. Their official emails responding to the decision cite Bar nard’s mission statement, which “calls on us, indi vidually and collectively, to help lead and inform this national conversation.” It solicited proposals from students for new initiatives that the College could lead. President Beilock even co-signed a New York Times op-ed with the presidents of the six oth er sister colleges, stating that “we will continue to provide reproductive health care on our campuses, which are situated in states where it is possible to doNow,so.”
A quick look at RJC’s website provides the an swers to many of these common questions—an swers which RJC organizers have repeated to ad ministration in countless emails and Zoom calls. Barnard and Columbia student health insurance does cover abortion with a copay of $0. If a stu dent doesn’t use student health insurance, there are funds that help them cover costs. New York City Council also recently passed laws making medica tion abortion pills free for in-state and out-of-state users. Training is not required to prescribe med ication abortion, as New York State law allows all nurse practioners, physician assistants, and nurse midwives to provide the pills in-clinic. Medication abortion is considered to be safer than Tylenol and has been FDA-approved for 20 years. Despite
During her brief period at Barnard, Patel nev er received any bias training. It was not because the staff at Primary Care didn’t need it. Assuming gender pronouns was common, she said, as was the ubiquity of non-affirming white bodies in the clinic’s medical imagery—flowery white vaginas on the wall and in office models. Patel expressed con cerns that the demographics of the Primary Care staff weren’t reflective of the student body and tried to implement training to start conversations with staff about affirming reproductive justice health care. When it came to the medication abortion protocol she helped to draft, she expressed uncer tainty about whether anybody in her office took the time to consider the materials. “When I was told enough [support] and explained that students wanted this, that they would work with us. Same for Columbia—we thought that they maybe just needed students to do some level of groundwork around it,” said Rao. But initial conversations with Barnard Health in February 2020 did not go as ex pected.Barnard
bleeding being a side effect of Misoprostol, a re cently approved abortion pill, it is considered to be similar to a heavy period. At private physicians’ offices and Planned Parenthoods, patients often ex perience extremely long wait times and anti-choice harassment. They would also be seen by a new doc tor rather than their primary care provider, with whom they might already be comfortable. And, as demonstrated by Lorena and other Barnard stu dents with similar stories, there is considerable and urgentDecemberneed.
2021 marked the first proceedings for the Dobbs hearing in front of the Supreme Court. The threat presented by outlawing abortion in half the country meant that New York City’s clin ics and abortion providers would imminently be overwhelmed. The first days of 2022 brought new organizing initiatives, including mobilization and direct action. RJC started spring semester by col laborating with Patel to draft a medication abortion protocol right before her resignation. The protocol includes information on how the University could order medication and how to instruct the patient to take the medication. Patel noted that in her halfyear of employment at Barnard Health, the office had no standardized practice for referring students to abortion or reproductive care, apart from pro viding a handout. Patel, who is now an abortion provider, views the ability to provide abortion pills in-clinic when her patients ask as an important part of her philosophy for everyday care. For her, fulfill ing on-demand requests for the pill is important for depoliticizing, normalizing, and destigmatizing abortion care, and for showing students what eq uitable and just reproductive medicine looks like.
22 THE BLUE AND WHITE FEATURES
Primary Care makes a point to employ some administrators who boast lengthy back grounds in justice-oriented care. Executive Direc tor of Student Health and Wellness M.J. Murphy touts experience in “providing health services to underserved, at-risk populations, from various backgrounds” on her CV. One of Dr. Marina Catal lozzi’s positions prior to being hired as the first vice president of health and wellness at Barnard and Columbia University Irving Medical Center was as the co-director of Mailman’s Sexual and Repro ductive Health certificate. Despite this expertise, RJC claims that much of the institutional reasoning against providing abortion pills has been rooted in “not knowing” crucial information about the med ication. In meetings, along with concerns about the pills’ safety, student organizers have been told about the score of logistical uncertainties providers face: whether the University could be held liable for malpractice concerns, questions as to what training staff on ectopic pregnancies would look like. These non-answers have at times been coupled with mis information: concerns that students might bleed out in their dorms, speculations that private physi cians’ offices would be less crowded and offer more privacy, and generalizations that there wasn’t suffi cient need among the student population.
“It sort of felt like Dr. Catallozzi was at a press con ference fielding questions from us and got very de fensive at times; it felt like a deferral time after time. And it got a little comical,” said RJC member Alys sa Curcio, CLS ’23. “Non-conversations that keep happening again and again, which they like; [they] are able to say something over doing something be cause they’re having this conversation.”
“A lot of students are coming here with a lot of fear,” said Claire Burke, BC ’25, an RJC member. “There is a need to meet this fear with a solution. And not just a number like, ‘oh, we only get two students a month.’ Well, those students need your help. Why are you not helping them?”
23NSOP 2022 FEATURES to assemble this, there seemed to be some interest in medication abortion care, but I think it’s hard,” PatelForsaid.Abortion Advocacy Week in mid-April, RJC turned to direct action, releasing their petition de manding pills to the student body, and collaborat ed with political art collective The Illuminator to project their demand for abortion pills across Low Library’s exterior. Both actions spotlighted RJC’s social media and their mailing list grew from 25 to around 300. Increased attention facilitated RJC’s collaborations with the broader New York City abortion advocacy community, including NYC for Abortion Rights, the New Women Space, and NYC Democratic Socialists of America. When the Su preme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, RJC organized protests and rallies across the city. Conversations with highly experienced orga nizers were enlightening for RJC as they developed their strategic toolkit. “We were approaching this as, like, Barnard being our ally, Columbia is an ally, they want to do this, and they told us to model this as a government or a state you’re demanding rights from,” Rao said. “And once you do it with that lens, which is the lens that they’re used to, we’ve actual ly had so much more success.” Now, RJC’s petition has garnered almost 1,300 signatures, including support from the WGSS Department, the Barnard Zine Library, and multiple tenured faculty mem bers.For the collective, however, “more success” is relative and far from perfect. At one point, it re ferred to Murphy and Catallozzi finally responding to RJC’s requests for a post-Dobbs meeting. Catal lozzi and Vice President of Inclusion and Engaged Learning Jennifer Rosales had mentioned—and included a website hyperlink for—RJC in a June 27 “community message” in response to the Supreme Court ruling, encouraging students “to learn from Barnard and Columbia students leading the Re productive Justice Collective, which advocates for and shares resources for reproductive equity and justice.” This led RJC to believe that the adminis tration was ready to come to the table. The meeting was meant to be the culmination of their efforts: a public forum at which any Barnard student could speak openly about the state of reproductive justice on campus. Initially, Catallozzi was cordial, thank ing RJC for their work. She agreed: Abortion is great. She then referred attendees to existing Alice resources and reverted back to old talking points.
Barnard may not identify an urgency in provid ing medication abortion on campus due to its avail ability in the city. They may think it is enough to say the right things and take meetings with students and collective members to consider offering the re productive health care that they claim to support. Yet, many students understand this inaction as a familiar failure. Low-income students such as Lo rena see it as Barnard further marginalizing their underrepresented students. “This school is just so painfully performative,” she said. “The administra tion is just not as supportive or liberal really as they like to Performativeadvertise.”is not an uncommon word to de scribe Barnard’s (re)actions. Roxane Gay, invited to speak at Barnard in 2020, famously challenged Barnard during her address, claiming that “public intellectuals, writers, and other interesting thinkers are brought to college campuses as part of splashy initiatives that administrations hope will absolve them of any long-term responsibility for creating a genuinely inclusive institution.” The longstand ing critique about Barnard’s performative rhetoric exists uncomfortably but simultaneously with evi dence of actual change: Barnard’s 2022 admissions cycle demonstrates a diversity it has previously lacked, with two-thirds of admitted students being people of color, 21% being first in family, and 41 be ing QuestBridge scholars. For students like Lorena, coming to Barnard Health might be the first time they have consistent access to a medical provider; it might also be the first time they step into a city or state which supports reproductive autonomy or are confronted with a choice to make about their reproductive health.
24 THE BLUE AND WHITE BY HART HALLOS & PHOEBE WAGONER AT TWO SWORDS’ LENGTH
25NSOP 2022 Read the rest at theblueandwhite.org under Humor … if you dare!! AT TWO SWORDS’ LENGTH
In March 2022, Columbia College Student Council was preparing a letter on behalf of Co lumbia’s first-generation, low-income students to bring to the Board of Trustees. Included was a list of demands, one of which was equitable pay for resident advisors who are on financial aid. While RAs who pay full tuition receive free housing (the equivalent of $10,000–$11,000) and a $1,000 sti pend, RAs who have their housing already cov ered by Columbia grants receive only the stipend.
BY GRACE ADEE AND MUNI SULEIMAN
Laura Colaneri, the former communications secretary for Graduate Students United at UChi cago, described the cross-institutional solidarity the strike fostered, as many GSU organizers had friends or partners at Columbia or had studied there themselves. “The academic world is actually quite tight,” she said. “We’re in conversation with these people. They are our colleagues.”
When one RA, CC ’23, saw a draft of the de mands shared in the resident advisor GroupMe, it only added to her growing frustration with the RA work environment. In addition to experiencing sexual harassment and discrimination while per forming RA duties, she has regularly found her self running up against the limitations of strained crisis care services like Emergency Medical Ser vices, Sexual Violence Response, and Columbia Psychological Services. Seeking to reimagine the fraught role, she worked with fellow RAs to form Columbia University Resident Advisor (CURA) Collective, a student group dedicated to improv ing work conditions for RAs through pay equity, mental health support, additional recourse for ha rassment and discrimination, and protection from housing loss. Soon after CURA’s formation, they turned to Student Workers of Columbia, fresh from their strike and subsequent contract negotiation, for advice. CURA sent SWC information about the RA position—its pay structure, training, and re sponsibilities.
The long-term ramifications of the negotiations between Columbia’s graduate student worker union and the University are only beginning to make themselves known. SWC’s strike, which last ed for 10 weeks, was the longest strike in higher education in over a decade. The standoff between the University and its instructors, teaching assis tants, and research assistants garnered national at tention, becoming a flashpoint amid intensifying debates over graduate student unionization across the country. The contract that was eventually rat ified included a 6% raise for workers with annual contracts, an increase in hourly wages from $15 to $21, a $300,000 emergency fund for out-ofpocket medical expenses, and the ability to seek third-party arbitration in cases involving discrim ination or harassment, among other stipulations. In 2016, the National Labor Relations Board decided that graduate students at Columbia Uni versity were statutory employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act and allowed to or ganize a union, overturning their 2004 ruling that graduate students at private universities could not engage in collective bargaining. The decision pre cipitated a surge in graduate worker organizing at private universities including Harvard, Brown, Georgetown, the University of Chicago, and New YorkTheseUniversity.unions watched the strike at Colum bia very closely, knowing that it would have wide-reaching implications for their activism. “I think leadership in our union really admires what they did,” said Michael Ziegler, the political direc tor for the Graduate Labor Organization at Brown. “As far as I’m concerned, they won. They won big.”
Picket Proliferations
SWC responded emphatically, the CURA organizer said, “egging us on and being like, ‘you guys should organize, this isn’t right— you need just workplace policies.’” Another CURA member, SEAS ’25, decided to join in part because of her experiences supporting her striking Univer sity Writing instructor on the picket line last fall. She sees expanding undergraduate worker rights as the next frontier in campus organizing: “We’re absolutely building off of the work they did.”
Student Workers of Columbia made labor history with its 10-week strike lastfall. 10 months later, organizers across academia speak to its lasting impact.
26 THE BLUE AND WHITE FEATURE
…
… HGSU went on strike for three days in late Oc tober 2021, just a week before SWC did. “That wasn’t an accident,” said Ljunggren, who was part of the bargaining committee. The unions hoped to coordinate the timing of their strikes in a way that would mount pressure on both universities. But Harvard’s bargaining committee ultimately took a different path than Columbia’s: By the end of November, they had ratified their contract with 70.6% approval. Though many, including Ljung gren, were ultimately satisfied with the stipula tions of the new contract, the ratification process created tensions within HGSU and with collabo rators at SWC. “I think a lot of folks at Columbia were also blindsided by what happened here at Harvard,” they said. Leading up to the ratification vote, some of the core members of HGSU ran a forceful cam paign urging graduate students to vote “no” on the contract, arguing that its clauses didn’t go far enough on issues such as ensuring union securi ty or recourse for discrimination and harassment.
These same connections catalyze the creation of new unions, as students transfer knowledge be tween undergraduate and graduate institutions, as well as postdoctoral programs and adjunct posi tions.
Colaneri attributes the growing acceptance of “radicalism” in part to the example of student workers at Columbia and Harvard, who have proved “willing to go out and be striking in the frickin’ snow for that long.” While acknowledging the many similarities in the platforms and strate gies at Columbia and Harvard, Koby Ljunggren, president of HGSU, characterized SWC as unique in its politics and its impact. “I’ve never seen a more militant graduate union, at least rhetorical ly,” said Ljunggren. “In that 10-week strike, I feel like the message was like, ‘burn it all down,’ which I feel like they did.”
Col in Vanderburg, a union representative for NYU’s graduate student union, said, “It takes a lot of en ergy, dedication, courage to go out on strike and to stay on strike. And you need all the support and all the solidarity you can get … we tried to be there supporting graduate workers at Columbia.”
Dominic Walker, a Ph.D. stu dent in Columbia’s sociology department, former bargaining committee member, and a prominent SWC organizer, remarked that NYU’s trailblazing efforts provided important lessons for SWC’s de velopment and motivation during the strike.
27NSOP 2022 FEATURE
During recent Columbia strikes, many NYU students took the train uptown and joined the picket line themselves. The proximity of the cam puses, as well as a shared national affiliation under UAW, heightened this sense of connection.
Colaneri observed that Columbia’s strike en couraged her and others in GSU to pursue more radical goals as they reconfigured the union in the wake of the pandemic. She’s been a part of the or ganization since she came to UChicago in 2016; in the past, she said, “dialectical” tendencies in ac ademia led her to settle for “good enough” when formulating demands and to make compromises even before proposals were brought to the Uni versity. But Colaneri has noticed a growing move ment at UChicago and other campuses “to become more comfortable with having to go to what might seem like extremes—like a strike.”
“[HGSU] diverged in that we ratified that first
Many graduate labor organizations felt galva nized by the policy changes that resulted from the contract between SWC and Columbia, ratified last January after 97% of 2150 members voted in favor. The contract negotiations were notable not only for the lengthy strike and looming threat of retaliation, but also because Columbia conceded to demands which unions at peer institutions had never yet won, such as the option for third-par ty arbitration in Title IX cases. (Harvard’s union, Harvard Graduate Students Union, won the right to neutral arbitration in their contract negotia tions last fall, but only for cases which do not al lege gender-based discrimination under federal law.)
“There’s people who go to grad school and they came from a different university for under grad where there was a grad union there,” Jewel Tomasula, the former president of the George town Alliance of Graduate Employees, added. “They come to a new institution for grad school, and they have some of that knowledge and fire with their friendships from their old institutions.”
NYU’s rich history of graduate student labor or ganizing makes clear that Columbia students have both inspired and learned from movements at other schools. In 2001, NYU’s union became the first graduate employee union at a private univer sity and negotiated a contract with their universi ty’s administration.
… Since SWC’s strike last winter, the union has fielded requests for advice from universities and graduate students nationwide. Walker observed various students from across campuses that were on the picket line, physically or virtually, felt in spired to start advocating for themselves. This in cludes individuals from schools such as Indiana University and Rutgers, where the administration “is trying to bar them from receiving an additional year of funding that they promised to them from Covid.”These conversations, cross-campus and cross-coastal in some cases, create a strong sense of communal learning in a high-stakes environ ment where constantly refining skills and strate gies is essential for success. “We build off of each other,” Walker said, reflecting on his experience on SWC’s bargaining committee. He explained that SWC was able to examine other union contracts, see what they had, and ask themselves, “should we be demanding more?” That question is especially on the minds of new or developing graduate student unions. In its short four years at Georgetown, GAGE has not held a strike, but their recent efforts are to achieve a con tract with higher wages. Current president Dom inick Cooper has been inspired by the uptick in actions from other university unions: “We see other grad locals with contracts that are starting to resemble what we’re fighting for.”
In January, just as Columbia arrived at a ten tative agreement with its student workers, Princ eton announced an average increase of 25% to about $40,000 in fellowship and stipend rates for its graduate students, the largest one-year increase ever at the school. Princeton’s graduate student union, Princeton Graduate Students United, has not been legally recognized. Attributing this raise to the collective power of the unions, Walker is very convinced that Prince ton’s stipend hike was directly correlated with the severity of the Columbia strike. He felt that with the raise, the administration was really saying “please don’t do any of that crazy shit that they’re doing down there … Just take this money and go.”
Harvard and Columbia’s diverging paths have not undermined a shared understanding of the im portance of unity across graduate unions. Short ly after the strike, Walker recalls speaking with an HGSU member and agreeing that the unions should ask each other about strategies, informa tion, resources—whether or not it’s strike or bar gaining time. Because university administrations coordinate with one another, Walker explained, unions must also collaborate. As Habr put it, it is crucial to “fight back against that and build power together.”AtBrown, GLO’s three-year contract with the University expires in June 2023, and Ziegler de scribed how they plan to study campaigns at Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere as they sur vey their members and generate their proposals.
Walker affirmed that “we’re not just fighting for ourselves, but we’re fighting for graduates in simi larProfessoruniversities.”Adam Reich, who studies labor issues in Columbia’s sociology department, argued that this pay increase is a “classic” form of union bust ing. Many organizers at other schools also inter preted the pay increase at Princeton as an attempt
28 THE BLUE AND WHITE FEATURE contract we proposed. Because that happened, a lot of our militant folks have dropped off,” Ljung gren said. Columbia seemed to have “the opposite problem,” ultimately losing members who, like Ljunggren, were put off by more polarizing rhet oric and Shortlytactics.after
Ziegler acknowledged that the 10-week Columbia strike was “very difficult” and that there are “al most certainly going to be members who do not want to do that,” while emphasizing that GLO has been inspired by Columbia’s success and that they are likewise prepared to go on strike if necessary.
Ziegler also affirmed the old union adage that “the best strike is the one that you don’t have to have.”
Harvard’s acceptance of the con tract, representatives for Columbia weaponized the decision against SWC organizers in bargaining sessions. In discussions between Harvard and Co lumbia organizers, Columbia organizers were told to consider Harvard’s route but ultimately decided to continue with their strike. “It was certainly chal lenging to feel like we were supposed to be giving each other power and then they kind of decided to go a more concessionary route,” noted Katy Habr, an SWC organizer and sociology Ph.D. candidate. She feels that though the time-coordinated strik ing “didn’t work out exactly,” it is a strategy full of potential that should be employed in the future.
29NSOP 2022 FEATURE Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza
Of course, the most profound effects of SWC’s strike are felt on Columbia’s own lawns. When CURA sought their guidance, SWC organizers encouraged them to collect testimonials from as many RAs as possible, emphasizing the impor tance of creating solidarity when many students feel “very siloed in their buildings,” the CURA representative said. CURA ultimately chose to cir culate a petition with their demands—first among RAs, and then, once they had collected 50 or 60 signatures, across campus and beyond. They deliv ered this petition to the Columbia Board of Trust ees on June 30. On July 26, the University respond ed with the updated payment policy, in which all RAs are compensated with a $13,000 honorarium irrespective of their financial aid package, securing equal compensation for all resident advisors. (This policy is advantageous for RAs, but not equally so—for instance, international students can be subject to a 30% tax on this income because of its classification as an honorarium.) For the 2022–23 school year, RAs retain the option to be compen sated under the old policy. They were given until Aug. 2 to make that decision, a tight timeline that frustrated CURA organizers. “We appreciate that [the University] made a policy change, but we also ask for clear communication, and this is not ad hering to that,” said the organizer. The University agreed to extend that deadline on a case-by-case basis and to hold individual meetings with RAs to discuss their choices. How ever, the University has not yet taken steps to ad dress CURA’s other demands, including mental health resources and harassment recourse. CURA Collective plans to continue organizing around these issues. As they move forward, they hope to focus on the unique position of RAs, whose needs may deviate significantly from those of instructors and researchers. “It motivates me to think outside of the traditional labor demands that people have,” a CURA representative said. “What is our work like? And what do we need that might not be very clear to us or that Columbia might be completely ignoring?”Evenas they forge their own path forward, CURA Collective representatives said that SWC set the stage for CURA to generate momentum. In particular, SWC’s insistence on including un dergraduate teaching assistants and research as sistants in their campaign energized Collective members to see themselves as workers in their own right. With so many undergraduates spend ing their very first semesters at Columbia on the picket line, many couldn’t help but turn to each other and ask, “what’s next?”
Ziegler said he noticed a similar but subtler re action to Columbia’s strike by Brown’s administra tion. Under their current contract, Brown’s gradu ate worker union renegotiates their wages for the upcoming school year every spring. In 2021, when their agreement included a 2.5% raise, negotia tions extended almost until the end of the school year; this year, they settled on a 13% raise by ear ly March. “There are a lot of factors that you can maybe attribute to this, but honestly I think that they were just really afraid that we were going to strike,” Ziegler said.
In contrast, Colaneri argued that UChicago’s administration hasn’t become much more amena ble to graduate student demands over the last few years of nationwide union activity. However, she has observed the University quietly preempting union demands and shifting unpopular policies. She pointed to a $50 referral fee for students seek ing off-campus medical care. When the Universi ty eventually waived this fee, Colaneri felt that it was part of a strategy “to mollify us so that we will quiet down or that some of our support will di minish.”
But for Colaneri, changes like these aren’t evidence of turning tides within administration; rather, she said, “that’s just evidence that we’re winning.” Ljunggren has noticed a similar pattern: While Harvard has “ramped down their messag ing” with regards to the union, this has meant that their communications often downplay or erase HGSU’s role in policy change. Ljunggren characterized the union’s relationship with Harvard’s administration as having reached a tentative detente for the time being. Since their strike and second contract, Ljunggren said, Har vard has “sort of accepted the fact that we exist and that we will continue to exist.”
30 THE BLUE AND WHITE FEATURE to preempt an upswell in union organizing in spired by strikes and protests at peer institutions.
“All of these workers have organized for very honestly radical demands on Columbia’s campus, considering what contracts usually look like,” a CURA member said. “So if they can organize, you know, why can’t we?”
The overturn of Roe is, possibly, our time’s most stark reminder of the resurgence of history. A landmark decision that guided and, perhaps, en abled our understanding of the solidity of histor ical moments and the forward march of societal progress is no more. What used to be a grim but passing comment about what once was—a preRoe America—has become our enduring reality. It is simple to say that history never unfolds in a straight line, but it is harder to say that history is made in the small efforts of the present. As Bar nard history professor Premilla Nadasen reminded me, history is an urgent question of the contem porary moment. How do we imagine our past in ways that mobilize our future? How does the fo cus of our historical thinking prioritize those most marginalized? And what does it mean to engage with feminist efforts of the past both critically and inclusively?Nadasen faced these questions from an early age. Her political engagement began at 17 after a visit from her father’s friend, a South African who was imprisoned and tortured in Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela for donating $25 to an anti-apartheid organization. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1980s, she became involved in the anti-apartheid movement herself, through organizations led by women of color. As a scholar and historian, she has written about Black women’s often-ignored organizing ef forts in domestic workers’ collectives and the wel fare rights movement. And at this critical juncture for political organizing on the left, I talked with Nadasen about where we have been and where we have to go. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
As a 17-year-old who lived a relatively good life, it was really, really powerful for me to hear that. Out of that, I started an anti-apartheid organiza tion in my high school. But I also think that the question of politics was something I had a gut in stinct about from the time I was very young. My family immigrated from South Africa, my mother worked in a factory; we didn’t have a lot of money. There was a lot of gender inequality in our family, where my brother was asked to do certain chores and my sister and I were asked to do other kinds of chores. So I always had a gut instinct about social justice, but I didn’t have words for it and I didn’t have a framework to understand it. As I became politicized, I developed that language and I devel oped that worldview that helped me understand what I had been feeling for so long. When I went to college, I was involved in a cou ple different organizations. One was an anti-apart heid organization and one was an organization that was focused on racism at the University of Mich igan. We were a radical multiracial organization led by women of color. And this was in the midto-late eighties—so before Kim Crenshaw wrote that famous article on intersectionality, before Patricia Hill Collins wrote her book on Black fem inist thought, we were engaged in and practicing
Premilla Nadasen
…
The Blue & White: How did your early political experiences impact your interest in studying social movements?
Premilla Nadasen: I was an undergrad in the 1980s, and we don’t really think of that as a de cade of social movement organizing or activism. With the Reagan-Thatcher era, it’s probably de fined more in terms of big hair and bad music and bad politics. But that was the formative decade of my political development. And it actually started when I was 17, and a high school friend of my fa ther’s came to stay with us during my senior year. He was in Robben Island with Nelson Mandela and a lot of other prisoners—he was an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience—and he just started talking to me about his time as an activist there. And as a 17-year-old, I was deeply moved by the stories he told me about when he was detained and tortured. I think one of the most vivid things I remember was when he would tell me, “Don’t sit on my right side, sit on my left side because they broke my eardrum when they tortured me and I can’t hear on my right side.”
31NSOP 2022 THE CONVERSATION
The continuous work of history. BY KELSEY KITZKE
intersectional politics and the importance of wom en of color leadership. And then, on the academ ic side, I was taking courses that really solidified my thinking and really expanded my thinking. I remember a course that was taught by Aldon Mor ris, a sociologist, who would help me see how to understand social transformation from the point of view of social movement. We think about his tory as changing because laws are passed, because we elect presidents who take initiative. But I think Aldon Morris’ course helped me understand how history is transformed from the bottom up.
32 THE BLUE AND WHITE THE CONVERSATION
B&W: When looking at second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s, I think most people now tend to think about it as a movement dominated by white, upper middle-class women and their is sues. And certainly it was, but how has your study of the organizing work of Black women at this time changed that idea of what feminism meant?
PN: I’ve always had a fairly expansive notion of Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner
33NSOP 2022 THE CONVERSATION what feminism is. So for me, even though I first be came politicized around the anti-apartheid move ment, feminism was always really integral to what that meant. I first learned about the welfare rights movement in my organizing as an undergradu ate. Our organization called the United Coalition Against Racism was addressing the question of racism on campus and the particular experienc es of African Americans on campus, but we also started an oral history project in the larger Ann Arbor community. That was a movement that I had not read about or heard about before. The wel fare rights movement and the domestic workers movement helped me realize and understand what the practice of intersectional politics looks like on the ground, particularly for poor Black women. We think of intersectional politics as something that emerged in the 1990s, but I think it was a prac tice long before that. African American women, Asian American women, Latin American women, Latinx women have been practicing intersection al politics for generations because, for them, the questions of race and gender and class are insep arable. I call [people in the welfare rights move ment] “organic intellectuals” because they were articulating a politics of social transformation that sought to critique the welfare system as something that oppressed women. Johnnie Tillmon, for exam ple, wrote a really important essay in Ms. Magazine in 1972 called “Welfare is a Women’s Issue” and that was something that was very novel at the time because nobody in the 1970s thought about wel fare as a women’s issue—welfare was a class issue. But what Tillmon was saying in her essay is that welfare is the way in which poor Black women can achieve autonomy, bodily control, liberation—can be able to take control over their own lives. The feminist movement in the 1960s was so cen tered on white middle-class women who wanted to liberate themselves from the household, so they wanted to get jobs outside the home, they didn’t want to be tied down as mothers. But for Black women, the history of motherhood and work has been very, very different. Black women under slav ery were separated from their children, were de nied the right to be mothers, have always worked outside the home at much higher rates than white women. And so that idea of staying home and tak ing care of their children was not something that they had access to or the privilege to have. And so the welfare rights movement was [for] state assistance to be able to stay home and raise their children. And that was a very different feminist de mand than what we normally think of as feminism.
PN: Yes, absolutely. So, women of color and white women have had very different experiences as mothers. When you read the social work jour nals and the popular literature [of the 1960s], there were a lot of social pressures on white women to stay home and take care of children, and so the so cial work journals wrote about how children would be somehow damaged, would feel abandoned if their mothers went out to work, psychological damage to them. At the very same time, there were a lot of social work journals who were writ ing about why Black women needed to go into the workforce—that if, in fact, they didn’t go into the workforce, their children would experience psy chological damage and would not understand the importance of the work ethic. And so we’ve seen a very different language around the construction of Black women as mothers and the construction of white women as mothers. Historically, there has been a lot of pressure on white women to be a cer tain kind of mother, to be a “good” mother, while at the same time, for Indigenous women, for African American women, for Latinx women, there has been very little support and very little acknowledg ment of the importance of their roles as mothers.
PN: Absolutely.
PN: Exactly, exactly. And that has to do with the very long history of their role in the labor force. Because women of color are more often seen as workers than they are as mothers.
B&W: Thinking of contemporary feminism, some people bemoan the fact that it’s become this bloated thing, as I know you talked about in your Washington Post opinion piece, that has every kind of issue under the sun. But at the same time, I’ve noticed a lot of hand-wringing over what is and isn’t a feminist issue. How do you find yourself de termining what is considered “feminist?”
B&W: And it sounds like an entirely different kind of question of bodily autonomy that white feminists at the time were fighting for.
B&W: It seems like the opposite, like a denial of the fact that they are mothering at all.
B&W: Does that need to broaden our definition of sexual and bodily autonomy also include a defi nitional broadening of motherhood?
B&W: Have you seen that activist knowledge has had an impact on knowledge production in academic spaces?
PN: When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, that was an era of postmodernism. There were very few people, either professors or students, who wanted to address the question of why does this work matter? How does this work impact ordinary people? There was even really this pressure against making academic knowledge accessible or part nering with community organizations. So it was a really alienating time for me because all of my work has really centered on how to uplift the voices of ordinary people, how to make work accessible beyond the academy. I think what I have seen over the past 25 years has been a growing acceptance of engaging with people outside academia. So today, there are more and more people who are engaged scholars or scholar-activists who are thinking about how can I engage with communities? How can community organizing enrich how academics produce knowledge? How can we involve students in what’s happening in communities? Barnard got a grant from the Mellon Foundation for a program called Barnard Engages, which is centered on fac ulty and students partnering with community or ganizations for the purpose of furthering the work of the community organization.
PN: In my academic work and my popular writing, I’ve really tried to expand the notion of what feminism means because I think too often the mantle of feminism has been claimed by white middle-class women, people like Sheryl Sandberg who have a particular vision of feminism that’s re ally centered on the most privileged women. So my intention has been to say hey, wait a second, there are lots of women who are feminists who practice a feminist politics that are not centered around privilege but are really around econom ic liberation, about bodily autonomy in different ways. I think it’s important to reclaim the notion of feminism. But at the same time, I don’t want to get caught up in semantics. So my goal is not to debate how we want to use the word “feminist.” It’s real ly about trying to understand what is the politics around feminist liberation. And for me, the poli tics around feminist liberation is inclusive in the sense that anyone, male or female, poor or rich, or whatever racial background, can collapse around a radical agenda that is centered around liberating the most oppressed sectors of society. I think it’s important to use the term feminism to reclaim the term feminism; I think that has to sit alongside a genderqueer liberation, alongside class liberation, national liberation, and an anti-racist politics.
Puerto Rican women, African American women, Indige nous women have a very long history in this coun try of coerced sterilization by either state or private entities. So, I think when we talk about reproduc tive justice, that includes the right to abortion but it also fundamentally includes the right to bodily autonomy, it includes the right to have a child, it includes the right to contraception, it includes the choice to be in an intimate relationship with who ever you want regardless of gender, it includes the right to live your life however you feel most com fortable regardless of the gender that was selected for you at birth. But in addition to that, we have to look at whether or not people have the resources to be able to make those choices. That includes state resources to raise children, it includes the right to free reproductive health care, it includes the right to gender confirmation surgery, and so we have to think about rights not just in terms of legal rights but in terms of economic support so people can make the choices to live their lives in the ways they feel most comfortable.
B&W: At the same time, I think after Roe was overturned it seemed like it was the embodiment of women’s rights in the U.S. How did abortion be came the feminist issue—even the women’s issue?
PN: I think at this very moment, the politics of abortion has kind of become ground zero for political organizing for people on the left. And I think we absolutely have to push back against the Dobbs decision and insist that women have re productive autonomy, because I think the Dobbs decision is the beginning of what could cascade into more restrictions on not just women’s, but on people’s right to sexual autonomy. At the same time, I think that that notion of an agenda around abortion alone has misrepresented the broader struggle around reproductive justice. The welfare rights movement, as I’ve mentioned—their cam paign was around the right to raise children and have the resources to have the right to raise their children. So they fought for state assistance; they also fought against coerced sterilization.
B&W: And what is the ideal of academic activ ism in your mind?
34 THE BLUE AND WHITE THE CONVERSATION
35NSOP 2022 THE CONVERSATION
B&W: Considering the increasingly devastating urgency of questions about our future, what makes history also an urgent question in our present pol itics?
PN: History is contested terrain. It’s an extreme ly important foundation for our understanding of the world. We see that in our debates around mon uments, we see it in the debates around people who are trying to construct a vision of the history of this country centered on a white republic. In that, there’s been an erasure of the history of Indigenous people, the history of slavery, African Americans, the history of immigration, the history of impe rialism. And unless we look honestly at what our history is, we cannot understand the complexity of this nation, we cannot understand the contri butions of different groups of people. I think peo ple like Dorothy Bolden and Johnnie Tillmon are inspirational models for us today. We are living in challenging times, but they also lived in challeng ing times. They were poor women who were not formally educated who had enormous hurdles to overcome to become the kind of leaders that they did eventually become. And when we unearth sto ries of people like that, it offers us a way [to see] how social transformation can happen. History is not just about the great leaders, not just about peo ple in power, but about persistence, about organiz ing, about baby steps towards trying to achieve the kind of society we want to achieve.
Last year, during the pandemic, I taught a Bar nard Engages course with a group called the Da mayan Migrant Workers Association, a group for labor-trafficking survivors in Lower Manhattan, mostly Filipino. So [Damayan members] were co-curators of the course, they looked at the syl labus, they helped me decide what readings to as sign to students, they decided what the final proj ect would be based on the work they were doing. They asked us to interview labor trafficking survi vors and staff members of Damayan and produce a report about the impact of the pandemic on the Filipino community. And that was a report they then used, they shared with their constituents, they shared with representatives on the city councils and other advocates.
PN: In my classes, I talk about how the frame work of the 1960s has actually circumscribed our understanding of social transformation. Because it was organizing in the 1950s and 1940s that laid the groundwork for what happened in the 1960s. So I think we have to think about resistance and organizing as a continuum rather than these short bursts of transformation. Even in this moment, it seems like there’s been a lot of setbacks, but there are still a lot of people who are organizing on the ground: the Damayan Migrant Workers Associa tion, the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Ini tiative, the Movement for Black Lives, the mutual aid work that’s happening all around the country right now. I think we have to embrace and uplift those examples of organizing and we will eventual ly see the fruits of that labor.
I [also] taught a course called the Mississippi Se mester, and this was in partnership with a low-in come women’s organization in Biloxi, Mississip pi. This is an organization that lobbies on behalf of women on welfare and tries to expand child care assistance for poor women in Mississippi. They needed some assistance to develop an index around women’s economic security. So I organized a course so the students could do the research for the organization, and we did eventually produce a report. We went down there for a week over spring break, traveled all around the state of Mississippi to meet with the various stakeholders. Our goal was to really try to understand the meaning of poverty and economic security for poor women in Missis sippi. What I wanted the students to learn was ac tually how to listen, that we as academics are not always the experts, that we have to talk to people on the ground. We have to disabuse this notion of academic expertise and think about how knowl edge can be co-created with community organiza tions and how that partnership strengthens both academia and community organizations.
PN: I think there is the kind of academic activ ism that is extractive, where professors or students go into communities to learn and they take that knowledge and they write papers or books and they never give anything back. There’s an unequal relationship between people in academia and peo ple who are in community organizations. The first thing we have to do is acknowledge that. For me, the ideal is one in which the community organi zation has equal say and is an equal partner in the kind of work that is produced.
B&W: History isn’t just in the moments that they put in textbooks, but is happening every day, continuously.
