April 2019

T H E U N D E RG R A D UAT E M AG A Z I N E O F C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y, E S T. 1 8 9 0

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXV No. III

Graduation 2019

Identity Crisis The Blue and White takes a long-range look at Barnard Public Safety

Studied NaivetĂŠ

A Conversation with Michael Stanislawski Also Inside: Rethinking Narratives

UFONOBONG UMANAH, CC '20, Editor-in-Chief ISAIAH BENNETT, CC '20, Managing Editor GABY EDWARDS, BC '21, Publisher GRACE ADEE, CC '22, Investigations Editor JACOB SNYDER, CC '20, Literary Editor ZOE METCALFE, CC '21, Online Editor EMILY WANG, CC '22, Online Editor SAHRA DENNER, CC '21, Senior Illustrator GIGI LEE, CC ' 22, Layout Editor ESMÉ ABLAZA, BC '20, Senior Editor JASMINE PARK, CC '20, Senior Editor RYAN MOHEN, CC '21, Senior Editor MALIA SIMON, CC '22, Senior Editor CASSIDY SATTLER, CC '20, Senior Editor MARY ELIZABETH DAWSON, BC '21, Senior Editor CAROLINE HURLEY, CC '19, Editor Emeritus VIRGINIA AMBELIOTIS , BC'19, Editor Emeritus Contributors SAMANTHA MARIN, CC '21 GRIFFIN JONES, GS'22

Staff Writers AMAD ROSS, CC '22 ANNIE ZAVITZ, BC '22 NICOLE KOHUT, CC '22 Staff Illustrators BILLIE FORESTER, CC '22 AMANDA BA,CC '20 DRAZEN MEDINA, CC '20 JENNIFER ALLEN, CC'20 GABRIELLA FERRIGINE, CC '20 HELEN BECKER, CC '22 HANNAH LIBERMAN, CC '20 JULIA COBB, CC '21 KATE IIDA, BC '19 MWANDEYI KAMWENDO, CC '22 KARA SCHECHTMAN, CC '19 KASSIA KARRAS, BC '22 NORA MCSORLEY, CC'20 ROSE KUAN, CC'22 KATE STEINER, CC '22 SANTIAGO COSTA PEUSER, CC '21 TAMAR VIDRA, CC '22 LEA BROUDO, SEAS '21 TILLIE LIGHTE, BC '20 REA RUSTAGI, SEAS '22 SAM NEEDLEMAN, CC ' 22 SUSAN STEINFELD, BC '22 KELLIE ZHAO, CC'19 YOTAM DEREE, GS '19

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXV

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. III

Columns

4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 10 At Two Swords' Length 18 Centerfold 26 M easure for Measure 34 Digitalia

Grace Adee

Kate Iida

Virginia Ambeliotis

Samantha Marin

Features 12 Studied Naiveté

A Conversation with Michael Stanislawski 20 Cruel and Gratuitous

ACLU deputy director condemns border conditions under

Trump’s administration policy 22 Identity Crisis

The Blue and White takes a long-range look at Barnard

Public Safety 28 A New Idea

The Blue and White continues its short fiction series with a

story about the decisions that turn our lives upside down.

Kate Iida

32 R ethinking Narratives

Professor Joseph Massad draws connections between pro-

Zionism and anti-Semitism

Griffin Jones

33 How Can I Stay?

It’s one thing to admit Latinx students, how can we make

sure we retain them?

theblueandwhite.org

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Cover by Rea Rustagi

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

There’s no more important task before us than the preservation of history.

I’m not saying this because without history, we’re little better than animals, as certain shows would have us believe. We are capable of monstrous things knowing full well the history behind it.

However, without history we tend to believe that sudden occurrences are novel instead of routine.

You should root for Wu + Nussbaum with the understanding that it’s hard to be a local city storefront these days (p. 5). You should read the SHIFT report from Columbia, understanding that a lot of students before you or I contributed to the data we now have to absorb (p. 27). And you should understand the recent protests against Public Safety as within a long and complicated history betwixt students, safety, and a right to belong (p.

22).

But a general history isn’t enough. We grow up with different histories that inform our view on the world. History is what motivated María Hinoajosa to invoke the history of immigrants during this year’s Dinkins Public Forum (p. 20). Abroad, we need to consider how local histories inform world perspectives, as I think Professor Stanislawski would say (p. 12). And in understanding that history, we can address policy issues like student retention (p. 35).

Of course history, even competing histories, can build a case (p. 34). But there’s something else. Every year, as students are forced out of housing to leave with the peacocks (p. 4) and wonder whether to stay here for the summer, we lose a fourth of the population in a snap, a fourth of our memory. It comes back, but not in the same way. And we have to find a way to adapt despite that loss. And really, the only way to do that is to know your history.

May your summer be long and plentiful as you turn the page on this academic year. And remember, valar bughis, valar rebis. All men must swim, all men must pass.

— Ufonobong Umanah PS: For women or all people, it’s ābrar.

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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS Y. Alp Aslandogan Ramadan Procrastination, George R.R. Martin Style Rules Violations on your Facebook Feed Curricular Practical Training DEPARTURES Fantasy-Themed Premonitions of Incoming Finals Your GPA, Balanced as all things should be The Class of 2019 Six Barnard Public Safety Officers

Come Again?! “what if as a society we started fucking w columbia students. they’ll be like “i go to columbia university” and you gotta be like “what? is that the co-ed school of barnard?”

— Janine Liu, Twitter

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

MADLIBS: Your Last Term Paper It’s 11:55 PM on a Saturday. Your clammy fingers are clicking back and forth from EasyBib to your Google doc, scrambling to put together your last paper of the semester before you can finally be free to sunbathe in the Maldives or smoke yourself to oblivion in your childhood bedroom. Only a few minutes left and still one thing missing: your title. If a Columbia student knows anything about term papers, it’s that they need to have a catchy title to butter up those understimulated, tenured professors. Look no further-- your alluring title is only one MadLib game away. Fill out these templates with your roommate in these final, painful minutes and look to see what you end up with! Good luck, and happy titling.

Exploring (noun) _________ theory in (noun)_________ : the (adj)______ history of (adj) America’s (noun) _________

A question for male-dominated (plural noun)_________: where is the space for (plural noun) _____ ?

Why feminism is (noun)______ and what (proper noun)________ can do about it

Bravery in the face of (noun) ____________

(noun) __________ : fact or fiction?

Comparative Short Term (noun) __________ in male (plural noun) ________

Stalin and the (verb) _____ ing of a (adj) _________ state

A proposition for less legislation on (plural noun) ________, and its (adj) _______ implications

(adj) ______ complications of the (adj other than great) _______ recession

Lazy journalism: using (noun)________ as an excuse for (noun) ________

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

March 2019

Postcard by Kate Steiner

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BLUE NOTES

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our walls are covered in command strips. Your Lit Hum books take up two full shelves. You consider the chaos of your sock drawer and you are filled with dread. How could so much junk have accumulated so quickly? As the school year draws to a close, it’s time to confront that annual, looming source of stress: moving out of your dorm.

But your check-out date might not be exactly when you expect: Rather than requiring all students to leave their dorms after finals week has ended, Columbia requires non-seniors to vacate their residence halls by noon on the Saturday after finals week OR 24 hours after their last exam––whichever comes first. (Seniors must vacate by noon the day after

University Commencement.) So all your finals are May 10? Better book that flight for early on May 11.

Even though this policy has been in place for about a decade, it may still come as a surprise, as most of the calendars posted in the dorms only include the final Saturday check-out date. But that has the potential to be a pricey shock for the uninformed: Students are charged $100 for the first hour and $50 for each additional hour that they fail to check-out, according to the Housing website.

A university representative said that this joint Housing-Residential Life policy “came as a result of students who had completed their exams and stayed in the residence halls, disrupting other students still working through finals projects and exams.”

Most of Columbia’s peer institutions seem to have a consistent move-out date for all nonsenior students, but it’s not a completely unique policy––Princeton, for example, also forces students to move out after their last exam.

However, for students concerned about any financial challenge of this policy, the university representative noted that students “should first contact their school’s Financial Aid department to discuss their individual issue and potential solutions,” and that Housing would work with the Financial Aid “as needed and appropriate.” The university also makes alternate arrangements for students who must remain on campus for particular programs.

Otherwise, before finals season is in full swing…you might want to go organize your socks.

—Grace Adee

P

hil, Jim and Harry. Three 20 somethings who prowl the mean streets of Morningside Heights, just as any Columbia student does. One thing,

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Illustration by Mwandeyi Kamwendo

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES though: Phil, Jim and Harry are not Columbia students. They’re your friendly neighborhood peacocks. To clarify—as if the concept of peacocks roaming a sprawling metropolis needed any further clarification—these birds are residents of 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, more commonly known as The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Upon entering the courtyards that fringe the outskirts of the gothic cathedral, you will find a beautiful array of foliage...and feathers. Harry and Jim boast familiar hues of blue and green, while Phil dons a demure eggshell shade. But don’t be quick to discredit his lack of organic pigments—a quick online investigation reveals that Phil has his own Twitter account.

The three current peacocks at St. John’s were purchased in honor of the previous dean of the cathedral, Reverend James Kowalski, who served as dean from 2002-2017. While this trio is approximately 18 years old (thereby solidifying their place as honorary members of Columbia’s Class of 2022), they are not the first peacocks to have roamed the cathedral’s hallowed grounds. A peacock hutch has been a centerpiece of the courtyards at St. John the Divine since one was first erected in the 1980s.

The original hutch was a mere ramshackled plywood slap-together job; however, in 2017, following a competition to design a new home for the peafowl, a new hutch mimicking the Gothic style of the cathedral was constructed. Clad with pointed arches and insulated walls, the luxurious new hutch rivals most options offered by Columbia Housing.

So don’t hate on your Art Hum assignment that requires you to make the two block trek to St. John the Divine in order to sketch some flying buttresses. You’re basically going on a trip to an exotic bird sanctuary.

—Gabrielle Ferrigine

might serve as a template for Columbians seeking end-of-semester reinvention: if you anagram and repunctuate your dilemma, it disappears. Just squint, and “Psych exam” becomes “Exam—psych!”

But whether the beloved establishment on the southwest corner of West 113th Street and Broadway can shed its old skin—sullied, as Bwog reported, from a subpar health inspection grade— and start afresh in the new term remains to be seen.

Wise residents of Morningside Heights, home to perhaps the most fickle culinary scene on the West Side, always take this sort of news with a grain of salt.

On a recent afternoon, signs shrouded the storefront windows. A subtitle beneath the new name promised “noodles, dumplings, and bagels,” a prospective that piqued my salivary glands after a particularly barren Lit Hum discussion. An easily recognizable “Safe Haven” sticker, designated by the University’s Department of Public Safety, already adorned the door. I pilfered a chair from the al fresco section of Mill, the Korean restaurant next door, and peaked inside.

Someone appeared to be painting the ceiling.

Indeed, it’s a construction site. A permit on the door pointed to one Mikail Pustulnik, of Finix U.S.A. Construction, as the man behind the plan.

The expiration date of July 10, 2019 bodes well for students who hope to find a polished storefront, perhaps already purveying goodies, upon their return.

One wonders if the dormitory that shares the restaurant’s building, clunkily entitled “600 West 113th Street Hall” and nicknamed “Nuss,” will find itself rebranded in the new year, too. As I traversed Broadway, heading back toward campus, I brainstormed: “Wu” is surely too festive for the dorm’s sleepy suites; “W & N” sounds too similar to “Wien.” Soon, I stopped myself. I didn’t want to jinx it.

—Sam Needleman

T

he much-discussed reopening of Nussbaum & Wu, the bagel store that shuttered in June of 2018, under the new name Wu + Nussbaum

March 2019

Illustrations by Yotam Deree and Rea Rustagi

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Campus Characters You might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue & White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. This issue, we bring you two people with interests in their Columbia class pages. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at bweditors@columbia.edu..

Sofia Petros

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any of us pass through these years at our respective schools wondering what mark, if any, we have made on our peers and the surrounding community. Some of us stop at this thought and choose to boil our time down to a academic degree, a piece of paper among many others. However, Sofia Petros, a senior in Columbia College, believes that time is invaluable; to her, in even mere seconds, a life can be changed and a new thing learnt. Sofia grew up in Queens and Rockland County, making the complexities of this bustling city, like the subway system, “embedded in who [she is],” and allowing her to think even more critically about her environment. Sofia’s personality has a vigor and a tenacity that reflects her experiences as a teacher willing to adapt to different situations. Petros initially opted to study Environmental Biology, but slowly transitioned into American Studies and Education, implementing concepts of Environmental Biology in her structure for a transformative “classroom.”

While Sofia was a freshman, she volunteered at Harlem Grown, an “urban farming nonprofit” focused on solving problems of food injustice and serving as an education resource for the surrounding neighborhoods. This organization focuses on teaching students how to garden, cook, and work with nature cohesively.

Branching out from this type of work, Petros went to Tasmania, Australia, where she worked at a forest-based nature school for six weeks.

Sofia also mentioned how some organizations she has worked for in the past did not utilize their resources properly, forc-

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ing her to take matters into her own hands. Instead of abandoning the organization, Sofia, on her own account, took “pounds of organic produce” back to her Hartley Hall dorm and gave out this food to her peers for free. She touched on her work experiences at a rock-climbing gym, the Patagonia store, Rocky Mountain National Park and the list only goes on. Sofia seeks experiences that are outside of her comfort zone and sometimes this means approaching an experience with a completely different perspective. Sofia returned to Harlem Grown her senior year, placing it at the center of her Senior Critical Inquiry Project. After having known the organization and its staff for almost four years, she found it pressing to return to these roots and find deeper connections in its successful methods of teaching.

For many, placing “doubt” into the work environment is a recipe for miscommunication at least, but it is easy to see that Sofia’s overwhelming acceptance of doubt in her teaching model is what allows both herself and her students to flourish in so many areas. Even with topics such as the Core Curriculum, Petros believes that “regardless of their virtue, [they] have built the structures of where we are today, and informed modes of thinking,” so “is it not appropriate that we understand them, and then question their validity, veracity, or application?”

Sofia does not believe that we should totally eradicate some systems already in play, like Columbia’s Core, which is an easy but possibly disastrous solution; but to doubt the viability of these structures and find a different, broader perspective on why these systems work and where they are failing. Sofia focuses on a much more cohesive student-teacher model that teaches reciprocal learning instead of it being one-sided, like it is in most traditional school settings. Sofia believes that education of young people “often can’t be distilled...it really has to be sat with and stewed,” which can lead to a better understanding of how we all learn. Sofia is also aware that “K-12 was [was probably not] made to benefit

Illustration by Rea Rustagi

The Blue and White

black, brown or Indigenous children,” which makes her teaching even more effective, critically responding to structures that may harm more than heal.

After graduation, Sofia plans to work in Chile, specifically in Coyhaique, a region where her mother’s family is from, at a community-based school writing curriculum that implements methods of learning outdoors. Sofia Petros recognizes her “education that is a privilege,” and that she must “[expands its benefits] beyond [herself].” To Petros it is important to “be humble in what you do and don’t know, and commit yourself to a goal.” No matter the topic, this mindset will always lead to discussion, and from this fruitful discussion, effective learning may take place.

— Drazen Medina

Jordan Singer

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t’s a tough task to get appointed for one of two positions from eight candidates. But Jordan Singer must have left a mark on the sitting council to not only become an appointed Student Services Representative for the Columbia College Student Council in January of last year, but then later receive a commendation, ‘Fastest promotion,’ referencing her second and current role in CCSC, outgoing student body president.

She’s also the president of CIRCA, the Columbia International Relations Council and Association, where’s she spent the most time on campus. Matriculating at Columbia in 2015, she had done Model UN in high school, but she didn’t want to compete again. She did however want to staff conferences, starting with a committee idea she interviewed for during NSOP. Part of it was about the “comardire in actually staffing a conference, where you’re doing one thing with a small group of people for four days straight and you build this whole world around the characters you’re simulating.”

But mostly, it was about focusing on the campus experience during college rather than travelling.

And it was an interesting time to stay on campus, on the coattails of No Red Tape and a year before the election of Donald Trump, which for Singer was huge. “I’ve perceived a generational shift in college students around those who came in preTrump versus those who came in after Trump.”

From student protests to even the language of university administration, “A lot of the political issues that were being discussed were less emotional and felt less like an attack on certain students.”

However, that focus didn’t really involve student council early on. After going to the informa-

March 2019

tion session, seeing 80 classmates ready to run in the first year elections, she thought to herself. “There is no way -- I’m not putting myself out there like this as a first-year.” Until junior year, it was the smaller selfcontained groups where she found community, like Model UN conferences and Sigma Delta Tau. It wasn’t until the middle of junior year, after her term as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Politics and Society by the Helvidius Group where she felt that “things had kinda just ended.” And just like her decision to staff instead of compete, she wanted to do things that involved Columbia and campus specifically.

This led to her appointment as the Student Services representative, where she focused on mental health and space access within the little time she had.

Despite this, Singer says “in some ways, that actually helped me gain a little bit more credibility with administrators than I would otherwise had.” One supposes that the credibility built over that semester led to discussions that placed Singer as the uncontested presidential candidate for 2019, but there really wasn’t an ah-ha moment there. The CCSC president was a platform to continue the policy initiatives that mattered to her from being a representative, and the community building that defined her early years.

Doubtless, it has been a tough year for student politics in Columbia College, between resignation threats and intense political votes. Singer saw her role as a facilitator in those times, and told fellow councilmembers, “This is hard work, I know it can get overwhelming, if you ever feel overwhelmed, I want you to approach me, we’ll work through it.” But this was during one of the toughest votes of the year, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest vote, where she also warned against secrecy.

“I don’t want to undermine the fact that some people genuinely felt intimidated to make a statement publically by casting their vote in a certain way, but I do feel that it’s important to have transparency,” she told me as our interview ended, “especially around the most divisive issues.” But importantly, in these post-Trump times, “if students don’t feel they can represent their own views as representatives, then that’s a much larger conversation that we would need to be engaging with throughout the year.”

— Ufonobong Umanah

Illustration by Rea Rustagi

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

Will You Be In The O

kay, so don’t get me wrong--that distinct this feeling they wouldn't be oh-so-cool about my summer-city smell and the muggy mess that newly realized smoking habit. Ok, it’s more of a habitis downtown on an 80-degree-day get to me just in-progress--I haven't gotten past the throwing-up as much as the next gal, but God, what choice did post-inhale part, but I seriously feel a dependence I have? I guess it was this one: either suck it up in forming. Plus, I’ve been noticing some vacant spots a 70-foot double with no AC but a bill to make you outside Butler at prime boge time, so I really have think otherwise or return to that God-awful home- to spend some major time practicing. What else are town of mine. I guess mine is no different from your you supposed to do over the summer anyways? My average hometown hellhole--we all come from one. parents just wouldn’t understand all that.

It has that one neighbor who’d sick his dogs on you So, as you can see: living in the city this when you’d try to take the shortcut summer was really my only option. to school and that teacher who threw Not to mention the fact that as a a chair at that kid in fourth grade, junior, society has basically bullied but somehow still teaches, and that me into believing that I need a legit creepy checkout guy at the ACME job--this, my last summer before who is never not there and never entering into the RealWorld™. All not taking too long to ring-up your I’m asking is this: whatever hapstuff. Oh and don’t get me started pened to summers being a time to on the moms back home. You had wind down and take a break from the moms who pretended to be your the chaos that is Columbia, the friend just to get the scoop on Becky early-20’s and burgeoning womanAnderson’s daughter Rachel who hood? Oh well, no time for that any“just doesn’t seem right”, the moms more I guess. Now my summer will who orchestrate every event to take be more or less what dreams are place in town and, my favorites, the made of these days: filling coffeesmoms who stared far too long at -in the day as a hot-shot intern at a your too-short skirts while simultano-name startup and at night, waitneously making googly eyes at your ing tables and cursing the kids with ffirmative boyfriend. They were bad, but it their trust funds cracking wide

By Nora May McSorley doesn’t get worse than running into open right about now. It’s ok, guess their sons and daughters, the absowho will have the gift of a good lute worst humanity has to offer-work ethic? Yeah, true, probably my former high school classmates--at the most inop- the both of us. portune times possible. I want the next time I have to City living will cost a pretty penny--ramen make small talk with one of them to be, well, never. and instant coffee will no doubt be a staple--but it will

And if all that wasn’t enough, there’s the all be worth it. Work experience, yes and time living issue of my parents and their unique ability to ruin independently, sure, they’re both great, but there’s any and all fun. The worst part about it, though, is some other perks that come along with this city. You that they don’t even see it that way--they honestly see, there’s this guy and he’s staying here too and I think it’s cool when they buy root beers for the fam- know it’s a big city, but maybe we can meet up and get ily and call it ‘cracking a cold one’ and hip when drinks at some point. Actually, that’s sort of why I’m they require full-family attendance at our weekly writing this: hey Brian, if you’re reading this, wanna JeoParties (parties watching Jeopardy). Plus, I have go out?w

A

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Illustration by Sahra Denner

The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

City This Summer?

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wish I could answer this question with a “Yes, I sitting on my textbooks on the corner of 96th and can’t wait!” or a desperate call to get drinks and Central Park West, wondering why my commute catch up that will actually never happen. But the took 6 hours too many. We run on the subway’s time, truth is no, I am not going to stay in this shithole not our own. To-Do Lists and calendars were hard over the summer. And I’m going to try and get as far enough to keep to on their own, why would introas possible from everything that makes this city so ducing inconsistent timetables make it any better? distinguishable from the rest. In particular, its noise: The truth is, maybe it isn’t keeping time or who needs to hear a man yelling about his missing the smells, even the people, that make this a horrid baseball bat (maybe card colplace for the summer, it’s problection) at 3 a.m. anyway? Its ably just the city’s fake nature. smells: it is possible to smell Like I said before, New York entirely separate processes City believes it is at the center of decaying life all within the of the world, but what are we same block. Oh, and how could focused on here? Times Square I forget its people? Countless and the infamous H&M? swathes of insipid old farts linFrozen Yogurt? Seinfeld? We ing up behind a food truck that may have trends, but they’re is infamous for food poisoning usually recycled, adapted and (but only the chicken kebabs). copied over from sitcoms.

What alarms me most And I haven’t even started about these people is their on how expensive this place is. I incessant schedules, every guarantee you that the number single person with an agenda of times I check my banking from A to Z, thinking that if at app it’s not for “budgeting.” any moment, if the intricacies of This action usually comes from their decisions falls through, so a place of insecurity, knowdoes the rest of the world. To be ing that my mind will rest easy clear to these people: New York when I know that my balance is not at the center of the world. is five eighty-four and not five This is only one step away from fourty-eight. Ahh, just enough Copernicus and one step closer to make it there and back. But of egative to pure insanity. From afar, New course, the pitfalls of an overlyBy Drazen Medina York may seem like an important expensive city don’t stop there. metropolis, studded with cleverly$5 can go a long way if you spend designed skyscrapers, bridges connecting it to all it right, but you can also end up with dishwater surrounding areas; but as one gets closer to New in a cup, stranded in Astoria. I guess that takes York’s true personality, they see that it is nothing time to figure out, but I’m tired of wasting mine. more than scraps of metal, barely held together by In essence, New York only has challengthe lackluster commutes of its citizens. Truly, we es. It is expensive, crowded, humid and smelly. are all tethered to the messiness of the city, forcing If you are devoid of pain, and are willing to parus to miss work and spend time in a sweaty subway ticipate in this amalgamation of broken trains, car when there are one too many “signal malfunc- sweaty humans, and crushed spirits, New York tions.” And I can’t forget the time that I found myself is the place for you, but definitely not for me.w

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March 2019

Illustration by Kate Steiner

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

Studied Naiveté A Conversation with Michael Stanislawski

By Grace Adee Michael Stanislawski is the Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, where he has been since 1980. His research has spanned a variety of topics, but he specializes in Jewish, European intellectual, and Russian history. Stanislawski is the former chair of Contemporary Civilization (CC) and has taught both CC and Literature Humanities (Lit Hum) for many years. He has published several books, most recently Zionism: A Very Short Introduction (2016). Investigations editor Grace Adee sat down with Professor Stanislawski in his spacious Fayerweather office for a conversation about the Core Curriculum, the crucialness of context, and the viability of objectivity.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Blue & White: I’m sure you don’t have to keep teaching Lit Hum and CC after all these years—why do you?

BW: You started to get at this, but I was wondering if you could talk about what you see as the role of the Core.

Michael Stanislawski: I do it because I love it. It sounds so cliché, but I do. I don’t think there’s been a semester in the past 15 years I’ve been here that I haven’t taught it, and it’s all voluntary—nobody can really compel me to do anything at this point in terms of my teaching.

At some points, it even comes at the expense of the history department—this fall, many history department professors are teaching Core classes, more than usual. It used to be pulling teeth to get people to teach the Core. Now it’s much more popular—to tell you the truth, there are now some financial incentives, which I had been pushing for years, as it’s twice the amount of teaching. And it’s hard. Nobody controls all the material in either class. Art Hum and Music Hum are more discrete topics, so a seasoned art historian can maybe cover all of it. But in CC and Lit Hum, nobody’s an expert from antiquity to the present. We don’t pretend to be experts. I find it intellectually challenging.

For me, it doesn’t really matter what the precise texts are, so I never really engage in the curricular battles that occur periodically. When I was chair of CC, and I was told that I had to do a curriculum review, my criteria was, how do these texts work in the classroom? The pedagogy rather than, oh no, we can’t have CC without X, or we can’t have Lit Hum without Y. For me, there are some texts that I think are crucial, but overall it’s the process, the discussion, and not so much the particular texts.

MS: The medievals said that you can’t talk positively about God, you can only talk about what God is not.

I do NOT see CC or even Lit Hum as “Western Civ.” It’s more problematic in terms of CC, because who says that Plato is a “Western” figure? That category was not available to him. And then we go to Aristotle, to the Hebrew Bible…are those texts Western?

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BW: So it’s anachronistic.

MS: It’s totally anachronistic. It’s not Western Civ, it’s not World Civ, it’s not the best texts in the world, it’s just an attempt to understand the world from where we are situated. If we taught this in a different part of the world, it would have different books. I’m teaching a variation of this at a law school in Israel this summer and I’m adapting it to the local circumstances. I gave a lecture to a university in Santiago that just adopted CC whole hog. But in Chile, for example, I don’t think understanding the Protestant Reformation is a crucial as understanding some other concepts. So for me, it’s the questions of the course. It’s students having to ponder these enormous questions that humanity has wrestled with from the beginning of our records—and you know what they are.

It’d be really easy to do what some of our peer institutions do and have these huge lecture classes, but that doesn’t do it for me. For me, it’s the interaction—you cap it at 22 students, and you have ongoing discussions about these issues and texts.

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N When it works, it’s really exciting. Most of the time, it works without being that exciting. It’s the chemistry of the class—and also the instructor—but I’ve had such varied experiences. In Lit Hum, as I joke with the class, the feeling is a little bit different, because you’re dealing with mostly first-year students. By February, you’re jaded Columbia undergraduates.

BW: But at the beginning, there’s so much hope!

MS: Well, there’s still hope! But in CC, everybody’s already pre-jaded—some are very excited to be there, but it’s a whole different chemistry. So Lit Hum is the purest form of undergraduate pedagogy. It’s not for everybody. Not everyone enjoys the reading, the kind of analysis that we do. But I think we’re teaching students how to read literature, and how to think. As you’ve seen, I depart a little bit from the normal syllabus because I always try to get a sense of the class. In this year’s class, I felt like Milton would just be a stone dragging us down, as opposed to Camus. It’s not that it’s more relevant, it’s just that different classes are interested in different things.

BW: The Core has changed a lot in the last few decades to address the diversity of the curriculum, but many people wonder if enough has been done.

MS: The biggest problem in the Core in my mind is the Global Core. That is, frankly, a mess. It’s exactly what our peer institutions do badly. Here’s a list of courses that nobody really vets, and…pick two. And then you get into these silly debates about whether or not something is “Western.” A medieval Spanish history class counts, but a 20th century Spanish history class doesn’t count, because that’s European, it’s not global. I’m not saying I have the formula, but it seems to me that it needs rethinking. As does the regular curriculum. I’ll see how Morrison goes, I’ve never taught it before. We’re always trying, but there’s a fine line between taking the issue of diversity seriously and just adding a text because it looks good.

We have to see how it works in the classroom. For me, it has become less of an issue in CC, but it’s still an issue in Lit Hum, because Lit Hum defines itself much more as a Western literature class. Again, I’m not pleased with that self-designation.

But even considering that, the Core is what has kept me at Columbia. I’ve had offers to go other places, which I took seriously sometimes. But it was

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a combination of staying in New York and the Core.

I could teach my history classes anywhere. I could move to Dallas and teach my history classes there—I mean, we have a great history department, but that doesn’t really have that big of an effect on undergraduates. I don’t know if that sounds disloyal, but I didn’t stay here to teach my history classes, or because I have a beautiful office.

BW: How do you think your background as a historian influences how you approach Core classes?

MS: I tend to think about texts and ideas historically, whatever that means—there’s no one way to do to it, and our consciousness of that has increased dramatically in the past three decades. I used to think I could just bring that objectivity to anything. I could teach a class on existentialism, on Chinese pottery, on slavery, on Israel-Palestine, and I would be objective, and I would just teach that as a professional historian.

Now I, like everyone else, have realized that it’s much more complicated than that. There’s no possibility of objectivity, but I do my best to be as objective as I can be.

What that means for CC and Lit Hum is that I tend to think contextually. I want to have students understand the context from which these texts arise. It’s probably a better thing to do in CC than in Lit Hum, so I might spend a little too much time on context than is absolutely necessary.

Illustration by Sahra Denner

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

But also, all my books have dealt with literature in some way or another. I’m always aware of how to use literary sources in writing and thinking about history. That’s why Lit Hum isn’t a stranger to me, because while I haven’t written directly about any of the texts—though I have written about the context of Crime and Punishment, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament—I’ve used so many literary texts as sources, from poetry to prose to autobiographies.

I’m also not a philosopher. I’m not looking for a transhistorical answer to any of these questions.

I’m looking at the contextualized texts. I also don’t get intimidated by texts I don’t know. I know how I work. You give me a text, I’ll figure it out. It’s a method of reading and understanding texts that I bring with me.

BW: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the development of your career in history.

“It’d be really easy to do what some of our peer institutions do and have these huge lecture classes, but that doesn’t do it for me. It’s the interaction—you cap it at 22 students, and you have ongoing discussions about these issues and texts. When it works, it’s really exciting.”

MS: In almost forty years here, nobody has told me what I have to teach! I just announce what I’m teaching. This is part of the laissez-faire attitude of the Columbia history department—I guess you’d call it a lack of curricular planning. But it worked for me, because I could say, okay, next semester I’m teaching a course on Montesquieu and Voltaire. And nobody said, Who are you to be teaching that?

I’ve never taught something I really don’t know anything about, but I’ve experimented—I taught a course in ancient Jewish history at one point, even though I know very little about ancient history. But I thought I should learn it. Many professors use teaching as a way of organizing our thoughts and getting insights from students in understanding something.

In terms of my expertise, I started off with

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the European Enlightenment, and how it was received or opposed in different geographic and cultural contexts—so in Jewish history, Russian history, Eastern European history. So that was my subject matter, and my first few books were about the tension in Russian and Jewish society between Enlightenment ideas and what we used to call traditional society. But I was always looking at literary texts of the Enlightenment as well as ideological texts.

Then, because of the nature of the beast, I got more interested in nationalism, which seemed to replace Enlightenment Liberalism in so many places. I started studying nationalism both theoretically and in practice, in the Russian, Jewish, and German contexts. While doing that, I got interested in autobiographies. So there was no plan, absolutely no plan. I didn’t at the age of 28 set out a life speed. It’s not random or organic, it’s just kind of how my interests developed.

My research is still so connected to what we do in Lit Hum and CC, especially right now. I’m trying to understand diaries. Isaac Babel was a great Russian Jewish author in the early years of the Soviet Union.

We have all these amazing stories about him. Then this diary was discovered, and I’m working my tail off trying to figure out how you use a diary as a source.

Scholars use Babel’s diary as source material for understanding him biographically. And I’m just saying that you don’t know who this guy is. He’s 25 years old. It turns out he’s going to be murdered by the Stalinist regime 15 years later. He’s a martyr to the cause of literature, to the cause of art…but he didn’t know that when he was 25. He didn’t know he’d write these world-famous stories. So how do I read this text? I’m carrying on about this because it’s

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N the kind of question where you wonder—is it a literary question? A historical question? It’s a source question.

BW: You’ve taught a bunch of different classes here over the years, but one you teach a lot is History of the State of Israel.

BW: I did want to talk about your most recent book— Zionism: A Very Short Introduction.

MS: Right, I’m teaching it again in the fall.

MS: Yes, it’s part of this wonderful series—it’s not the cause of the wonderfulness of the series—but Oxford has this series of very short introductions to X, Y, Z. You can find very short introductions to Schopenhauer, and probably one to vegetables. The editor is an old student of mine, and she asked me to do this. I really didn’t want to. I had written a book called Zionism and the Fin de Siecle, but she said it would be a useful thing to do.

It was the hardest experience of my writing life. Because if you look at it, it’s short, it’s tiny, and I couldn’t use complicated words. You have to try to cram all this information.

BW: And you’re assuming no prior knowledge?

MS: I kind of do, but I don’t want to get too bogged down in it. What I announce in this class at the beginning of the semester is that this class is not about the IsraelPalestine Conflict. That’s covered sketchily in a class which is trying to understand a very complex society, a very complex history, and a very complex situation right now. I’m more of a cultural and intellectual historian. When we get to wars—and there are wars—I have to have the TA lecture. I remember…who won the war? I remember some dates…1967 I kinda got down. But it’s just not how my mind works.

So it’s a course which doesn’t attempt to enter into the political debate as much as try to understand narratives. We read Palestinian narratives, Palestinian poetry as well as Hebrew poetry, and Zionist narratives, and anti-Zionist Jewish narratives. And so it’s not just like a smorgasbord of things about Israel, it’s trying to understand this society before one makes judgments. It frustrates me in the political debate—and again, it’s not one side or the other side, because there are many sides—but in many of these cases, people don’t have a keen awareness of the history, the sociology, the culture of this crucial place.

I cooperate a lot with Professor Khalidi, so I know that my teaching about Israel is contextualized in this department with other classes. I might be accused of naiveté, but for me this is not a political engage-

“You’re assuming absolutely no prior knowledge, on—I don’t need to say it—a very contentious issue. What I say at the start of the book is that I strive for detachment, and it’s up to the reader to decide if I succeed.”

MS: You’re assuming absolutely no prior knowledge, on––I don’t need to say it—a very contentious issue. What I say at the start of that book is that I strive for detachment, and it’s up to the reader to decide if I succeed.

People have had varied reactions to it. A lot of people thought, this is fantastic, and a lot of people had hesitations. You left this out, or you left that out.

Or this pretense of detachment is a pretense, because you’re not saying X or Y on whatever political side.

But for me, the hardest thing was not just the selection of material—that’s always hard. These Xerox cabinets behind you are filled with boxes of materials for all my books that I never got to, because you can never read everything. So it wasn’t so much the selection, but the condensation, saying what you’re thinking in a clear and concise way.

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BW: I would say the Israel-Palestine is perhaps the most charged issue on campus right now—I don’t know if you follow the student politics around the issue.

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N ment, it’s a pre-political engagement. It’s trying to understand this society. From there, you can go on to understand the conflict.

BW: Do you see the politics around the issue affecting how students interact with the material academically?

MS: I’m not in the discussion sections, but I can see from the paper topics that a lot of the students are naturally interested in the conflict and write papers having to do with the conflict. I don’t exclude those from our subject matter. I make it clear from the start that this is not a debating society, it’s a history class.

So if somebody is going to try to make this a debating society, from any point of view, I’m not going to engage with that. It’s a stance of studied naiveté, you might say. I say, here are my rules. I’m trying to impart knowledge about this place. We spend a lot of time on literature, on poetry—in a lecture class it’s easier to teach poetry because you can’t assign a novel, really. And we spend a lot of time on the complexities of internal politics. It’s analogous to my contextualization of texts in CC and Lit Hum. It’s how I operate.

with your major, then you have a very small number of open spots. In four years, maybe you’ll be sick of your major and you’ll want to be able to do some intellectual exploration. So double majoring limits your ability to engage in intellectual exploration.

And it has no purchase outside the university. A lot of students think that it looks better when you’re applying to law school or applying to Goldman or some NGO. They think it looks better if you have a double major…but no. When we’re doing admissions for graduate school, every school has a different nomenclature. So you don’t look better to me as a candidate if you have a double major, I barely look at what your major is because I don’t know what the requirements are.

We’re in a situation where students feel like they need to get another check mark on their resume when they’re 19.

I don’t think it was better back then, believe me. But I didn’t have a resume until I had a PhD, because who needs a resume? So in some cases, if it makes sense intellectually, if there’s something that a student really has to have….but you can take the classes anyway. I’ve just seen so many unhappy seniors, because they’re taking yet another history class when they’d really like to take a literature class, or Arabic. But they can’t, because they have these ridiculous second major requirements. For me, it’s purely that. But also, at some point when I was really involved in this issue, I wanted all the deans of the law schools—back when law school was where we sent most of our student—to just issue a statement saying, “We don’t care about double majors!”

“I might be accused of naiveté, but for me this is not a political engagement, it’s a prepolitical engagement.

It’s trying to understand this society. From there, you can go on to understand the conflict.”

BW: I have one more question for you. It’s about something you said in class at the beginning of the year, and I’ve been meaning to ask you about it since then.

MS: Uh oh.

BW: You said that you don’t think students should ever double major in anything, and I was just curious about your reasoning.

BW: Maybe students would finally believe you then.

MS: Maybe! I don’t even think so.w

MS: By the time you’re done with the Core and done

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Book Culture 536 West 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Monday-Friday 9am-10pm Saturday 10am-8pm Sunday 11am-7pm 212-865-1588 Book Culture 2915 Broadway at West 114th Street Monday-Friday 9am-11pm Saturday 10am-11pm Sunday 10am-10pm 646-403-3000 bookculture.com

March 2019

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Illustration by Kate Steiner & Sahra Denner

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NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL

Cruel and Gratuitous ACLU deputy director condemns border conditions under Trump’s administration policy

By Kate Iida

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The little acts of individual cruelty really tell the story of family separation,” began Lee Gelernt, the Deputy Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “It’s been the worst that I’ve seen in the 25 plus years that I´ve been doing this work …

[One] father told me, ‘all I want is to be able to tell my 7-year-old boy that they’re going to take him away, let me embrace him before, give me five minutes.’ Instead the guard just came up and screamed it out loud. ‘We’re taking him away now.’ He didn’t even give the father the courtesy to tell him.”

On Wednesday, April 10th, the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) hosted the 22nd annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum, an annual conference created by David N. Dinkins, Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at SIPA and the 106th mayor of New York City. Each year, the conference chooses a theme relevant to contemporary politics and brings together leaders in different fields to discuss the “challenging issues that urban ecosystems must successfully address.” Conferences in the past have addressed issues such as education, sustainability, voting, and gun control. This year, organizers chose the topic of immigration and family separation under the Trump Administration.

The keynote speaker, journalist and Barnard alumna María Hinojosa, spoke about her experiences reporting on immigration and the way in which her personal experiences as an immigrant to the United States have affected the way she tells these stories. She recounted a story from her own childhood where she herself was nearly separated from her mother while crossing with her family from Mexico into the US. She explained how reporting on the effects of the Trump Administration’s child separation policy has changed the way she views this part of her own past.

“I suddenly realized, those children that we heard crying, they could have been me … And the question that I’ve always asked myself which is, I know you were born in Mexico and that you’re an immigrant but what is this overwhelming need to tell

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the story of immigrants? And now I’ve realized that perhaps this is what trauma looks like. It stays in your brain.”

From the discussion of her own personal experiences, Hinojosa moved into a broader critique of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, especially the way in which the administration has dehumanized immigrants and asylum seekers coming to the US.

“We are at a point where the dehumanization is such that we know that this administration is okay with pregnant women sleeping on gravel.

We know that they are okay with children sleeping outside on cement in Mexico when they should be allowed into the United States to apply for asylum.

This is a crisis that this administration has created.”

To conclude her address, Hinojosa called on listeners to challenge dominant perspectives about undocumented immigrants. She urged for listeners to connect the struggles of current immigrants to the US with the history of asylum seekers in America, from immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, to Jewish refugees in the 1940s. She recounted a meeting she had with writer and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who she said challenged the notion of an “illegal immigrant.”

“He said to me, … ‘there is no such thing as an illegal human being. They may have done an illegal act, but they themselves are not illegal. What is the first thing that the Nazis did? (It) was to declare the Jews to be an illegal people. It is the first step in dehumanizing.’”

During the second half of the forum, four leaders from different fields participated in a seminar style discussion about the state of immigration under the Trump Administration, the long-term effects of child separation, and what people can do to help. Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, Michael A. Nutter, a SIPA professor and former Mayor of Philadelphia, Steven Choi, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, and Dr. Irwin Redlener, the Co-Founder of the Children’s Health Fund and professor at the

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NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL Mailman School of Public Health all offered their perspectives and approaches on the subject of immigration under the Trump Administration.

Gelernt began the discussion by speaking about his personal experiences working with asylum seekers and parents who have been separated from their children at the border. He went into detail specifically about the unnecessary cruelty of the administration’s policies, arguing they are “playing” out at the border.

“One of the things that’s so horrible about the policy is that it’s not just cruel but it’s gratuitous,” he said. “Every parent I met I would ask them, ‘would you have come anyway if you knew your child was going to be taken away?’ And they all threw up their hands and shrugged. ‘What choice did I have? I couldn’t let my child be killed.’”

Dr. Redlener expanded on Gelernt’s comments, talking about the impact such unnecessary cruelty has on children’s brain development.

Speaking from his experience as a pediatrician and child healthcare advocate, he argued that putting children under such stress causes irreversible physical damage.

“What happens to children who are exposed to this?” Redlener asked. “It’s not pretty.

It’s a phenomenon well researched now of the last 10-15 years called toxic stress, which means a level of stress that’s virtually intolerable and has to be dealt with immediately. Toxic stress over a period of time is releasing stress hormones [and] … the long-term release of those stress hormones causes irreparable changes in the physiology and sometimes the anatomy of a child.”

Both Nutter and Choi went beyond the subject of child separation to discuss the impact the Trump Administration’s immigration policies are having on communities throughout the country. Michael Nutter spoke specifically about his experiences as a mayor and the reasons behind his decision to declare Philadelphia a sanctuary city.

Nutter stressed that most mayors throughout the country are refusing to cooperate with the Trump Administration’s immigration policies. He believes city governments should support law abiding undocumented immigrants obtain citizenship instead of deporting them.

“[For] folks that are undocumented, without paperwork, who came here fleeing the insanity of what might be going on in their home country but have committed no other crime and are not a danger

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to society, we should be trying to figure out how to get them on a path to citizenship,” he said.

Choi focused on the effect these policies are having on immigrants throughout New York State. He stressed that immigrant communities have been affected in many ways, both large and small. Choi also argued that policies like child separation demonstrate the essential, racist nature of the administration.

“The fact of the matter is that … Steven Miller, the architect of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy, is a white supremacist. Let’s not beat around the bush. And we see this in ways both big and small. In the cancellation of DACA, how folks with temporary protected status are being endangered, the deportation rates … ICE officers in courts ready to arrest folks who are coming to the house of Justice.”

To conclude his discussion, Choi talked about the demonstrations and protests which have taken place as a result of several of the Trump Administration’s policies. He stressed the importance of people continuing to participate in protests and movements, and to make their voices heard.

“In the wake of family separation … we called for a march that was to go over the Brooklyn Bridge. 30,000 people showed up that day, on a hot, sweltering June day. This is something that we’ve never seen in the New York Immigration Coalition.

We used to organize for weeks and sometimes months and we would get a couple thousand people,” Choi explained. “Now all of a sudden at the drop of a hat we can tweet, create a facebook event, and tens of thousands of people will show up. That’s the silver lining.”w

Illustration by Sahra Denner

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IDS AND IDENTITY

Identity Crisis The Blue and White takes a long-range look at Barnard Public Safety

By Virginia Ambeliotis

B

efore the encounter on April 11, 2019–you have probably heard about it by now–Alexander McNab, CC ’19, had been stopped and ID’d twice on Barnard’s campus for no obvious policy reason.

Both encounters took place in fall 2018 in Barnard Hall, where McNab attended late-night dance practices in the basement for Ijoya, an African dance group. The first time he was stopped, he was exiting dance practice, which ended at midnight: “As I was leaving through the door [of Barnard Hall], there was a Public Safety officer there who said ‘I need to see your ID’ and I said ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘I need to see if you’re a student here.’”

The second time McNab was stopped was in the basement mid-rehearsal. He’d stepped outside the dance studio to use the bathroom, barefooted because he doesn’t dance with shoes. Coming back from the bathroom, “I’m apprehended by a whole group of Public Safety officers. And there’s more coming, because I hear them on the radio, and they said ‘We need to see your ID!’” McNab complied and asked what was going on. A Public Safety officer said that they had seen his bare feet and thought he might have been a homeless person.

On Thursday, April 11th, after 11 PM, McNab passed through the Barnard gates at 116th and Broadway and didn’t show his ID when asked.

This time, he knew that he was breaking a rule: students are supposed to flash their Columbia University IDs to the attendant at the Barnard gate between the hours of 11 PM and 6 AM.

The fine print describing this rule is taped to the window of the booth next to the gate, and McNab had read it before. But many students who pass through the gate late at night and don’t flash their IDs aren’t called after to comply. McNab, who is black, felt like he was being singled out.

“I understand that it looks like I’m being difficult to be difficult, but I was being difficult to make a point,” he said, referring to his choice to keep moving.

McNab had seen a post on Facebook promoting leftover free food in the Milstein Center lobby

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and was heading over (Barnard Public Safety says he ran; McNab and bystanders say he was walking) to grab a plate.

He didn’t expect what happened next.

Caroline Cutlip, BC ’20, who had left out the food on a table in the Milstein Center lobby that is right in front of the Peet’s Coffee counter, says McNab “walked in, casually, calmly into the library.” He was helping himself to food when two Barnard Public Safety officers approached him, taking ahold of his arms, and trying to get him to come outside. In a loud voice, McNab told the officers to take their hands off of him, repeating himself several times. The two officers pinned McNab to the counter behind the table, pushing him down, pressing his arms to his side, and telling him they needed to see his ID. Four officers looked on.

After about 18 seconds of lying on his back, McNab wriggled up into standing position, pulled his wallet out of his pocket, and handed his Columbia ID to one of the officers. When the officer said he was going to hold on to the ID to verify with Columbia that McNab was a student, McNab protested. The camera cut to another officer telling students gathered around the other side of the table that McNab had run past the Barnard Public Safety van, across the Barnard courtyard, and into the Milstein Center, which the students denied.

Cutlip started filming when the officers twisted McNab’s arms back, sensing that they “were not respecting his body.” Her videos of the encounter ripped across Facebook, igniting a firestorm of coverage from outlets including The New York Times, Teen Vogue, and The Washington Post. Sian Beilock, President of Barnard College, apologized the following afternoon for the “unfortunate incident last night in the Milstein Center.” The email didn’t mention McNab, his racial identity or the physical restraint that Barnard Public Safety officers had employed, which drew more criticism from students. ***

McNab’s viral encounter with Barnard Public Safety has thrust into the spotlight a policy

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IDS AND IDENTITY that Public Safety quietly implemented with SGA support in Fall 2012. Between the hours of 11 PM and 6 AM, people passing through Barnard’s gates are required to produce Barnard or Columbia ID. Guests can enter, but they must be accompanied by their Barnard host.

Rachel Ferrari, BC ’13, was Vice President of SGA when administrators approached SGA with the policy proposal in Spring 2012. When the policy went into effect the following semester, her senior year, she remembers enforcement being spotty from the start. “If you were a female walking in, there was no questions….I think I maybe flashed my ID three times going through the gates senior year.”

Ferrari’s feelings about the necessity of the policy haven’t changed since 2012, but she thinks that Public Safety must check all IDs. “If it’s not applied to everyone, then the person it’s applied to can question that policy….When you only select certain people to ask, then I think it fails to be a good policy.”

Ferrari remembers an incident involving a non-student who showed up to campus uninvited precipitating the policy change. When The Blue and White reached out to Barnard Public Safety for comment on the late-night ID policy, they also mentioned an incident involving a non-student in their responses.

Sure enough, Bwog and The Columbia Spectator reported in early September 2012 that a 26-year-old woman named Birva Patel was under arrest after posing as a Columbia Engineering student named Rhea Sen. That fall, Patel attended ISOP and NSOP activities and other student events, explaining to event organizers that she had forgotten her ID. After more information from students emerged, administrators determined that Patel had been masquerading as a Columbia student for at least nine months.

In 2019, it is hard to imagine passing as a Columbia student for as long as Patel did without a valid student ID. We tap for Columbia libraries, residence halls, computer labs, music prac-

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tice rooms, and dining halls. But at Barnard, one might be able to pull that trick for longer. The Milstein Center can be accessed by anyone from 9 AM to 6 PM on weekdays. The Diana Center doesn’t require ID. And to get into the Barnard residence halls one must simply flash their Barnard ID to the attendant sitting behind the desk, no scanning necessary. It’s not unheard of for people to flash someone else’s Barnard ID or another document altogether and make it past the desk attendant without a second glance. ***

It’s easy to forget that the modern-day ID rituals that CU students partake in each day are in many cases the end results of campaigns organized by students of earlier generations to make Barnard and Columbia’s campuses safer.

In 1988, Spectator reported that residents of Barnard’s Sulzberger dorm (then known as “Centennial Hall”) brought about major technology changes to the residence hall after a petition they circulated for better security received 100 signatures.

The petition voiced concern that desk attendants inconsistently ID’d women entering the residence halls. It also pointed out a route through Barnard’s tunnel system that theoretically allowed anyone to get into Centennial Hall and the rest of the Barnard

Illustration by Julia Cobb

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IDS AND IDENTITY Quad without passing by the security desk.

In the aftermath of the petition, Barnard Safety and Security Director John Scacalossi and other administrators agreed to install a “magnetically locking door” at the main entrance of the dorm, which desk attendants could open by pressing a buzzer; video cameras in the courtyard of the Barnard Quad and in the tunnels; and an electronic door requiring ID to pass from the tunnels into the residence hall. Lastly, Barnard desk attendants were reminded to strictly enforce the policy of checking students’ IDs as students entered the residence halls.

By 2004, Columbia dormitories, Lerner Hall, and many campus libraries required ID swiping for entry.

But Butler continued to use the flashing system.

In the same fashion that non-students continue to enter Barnard residence halls, non-students occasionally slipped past the Butler security desk by flashing an invalid document. A Spec op-ed from February 2004 entitled “Butler Insecurity: Swipe access would keep trespassers and their penises out” reported that a non-affiliate of the university, Anthony Perri, made it past Butler’s security desk and later flashed something else at a Barnard student: his genitals. He was arrested and charged with trespassing and indecent exposure.

Perri had allegedly had a history of sneaking into Butler to masturbate prior to his arrest. In the op-ed, the editorial staff emphasized that flashing IDs made for poor security. ***

The year 2007 was a turning point in the modern history of campus security at Barnard and Columbia. A six million dollar plan conceived by CUIT to replace all Barnard and Columbia IDs was finally enacted. The push for an upgrade had come from concerns that the Social Security Numbers linked to each student’s ID were creating an envi-

ronment ripe for identity theft. By swapping SSNs for computer generated numbers, the new IDs made Columbia’s proposed Flex program a go. They also expanded Barnard and Columbia’s students’ access to academic buildings on their affiliate campuses.

Spectator reported that student government leaders and many administrators anticipated the new IDs would pave the way to online sign-in options for guests and swipe access to both Barnard and Columbia dorms. In 2008, Barnard Director of Public Safety Dianna Pennetti said to SGA in a meeting that she supported Barnard residence halls making the transition from flash access to a swipe system. Also in 2008, the CCSC Vice President of Policy ran on a platform of creating an inter-school swipe policy that would include Barnard and GS students.

Why hasn’t any of this happened? On Barnard’s end, the interconnectedness of the Quad poses a security headache for Barnard administrators overseeing an interswiping policy. A guest who is signed into one of the Quad residence halls could easily access the other three. To address this concern, Barnard’s guest policy mandates that Barnard hosts accompany visitors at all times. But turn the clock to early morning hours and add alcohol and the policy doesn’t translate well to practice: in March 2018, an unclothed Columbia first-year who had been signed in by a Barnard Quad resident wandered into the room of another resident and urinated on her floor. (Barnard Public Safety detained the Columbia student and contacted the NYPD, who arrested him.)

The March 2018 incident highlights another security woe of Barnard living that swipe access technology has eliminated at Columbia: many Barnard residents leave their rooms and suites unlocked. While Columbia residents’ IDs are programmed to unlock the doors to their rooms with a tap, Barnard residents get regular old keys. For

“[Black Columbia students] have expressed to me that they felt singled out on Barnard’s campus, regardless of having a Columbia ID and also in hours of the day when the college claims to be an open campus.”

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The Blue and White

IDS AND IDENTITY forgetful Barnard residents or roommates of forgetful Barnard residents, locking the door and remembering to carry the keys is a logistical problem that can be easily sidestepped by not locking the doors in the first place. ***

As SGA Campus Affairs Representative, Chelsea Sinclair, BC ’21, is working hard to make Barnard’s campus more welcoming to students of color. [Editor’s note: Sinclair and the reporter served together on SGA’s Campus Affairs Committee in Fall 2017.] She supports upgrading to swipe technology, but has been told that the administration can’t devote the funds to it right now.

Sinclair, who is black, has heard stories of troubling interactions with Barnard Public Safety from students, who allege racial bias and sometimes sexual harassment or transphobia. “[Black Columbia students] have expressed to me that they felt singled out on Barnard’s campus, regardless of having a Columbia ID and also in hours of the day when the college claims to be an open campus.”

Barnard Public Safety spoke at an SGA meeting on March 11th, a month before the McNab incident. The meeting was arranged two days in advance, after Public Safety finally responded to a email request that Sinclair had sent in November. For Sinclair, the Q&A was not fruitful. “I felt that they weren’t really prepared for the meeting and I felt that they didn’t have a lot of answers to the questions that students were asking.”

Before the McNab incident on April 11th, Sinclair had been trying to change Barnard Public Safety’s practice of posting printouts of Clery Crime Reports in highly trafficked areas of campus. While Columbia Public Safety circulates these reports online, Barnard has continued to print them out.

The reports typically describe larcenies and display low-quality images of the suspects, who often appear

to be black men. Other black students have confided in Sinclair that the images make them uncomfortable—it’s like seeing “anonymous black faces all over campus with, essentially, wanted signs,” Sinclair says. After months of communicating with Barnard Public Safety, the printouts have finally been taken down and Barnard appears to be reconsidering the policy. ***

On February 24, 1969, a new group on campus, the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters (B.O.S.S.), released a list of demands addressed to President Martha Peterson and the Board of Trustees. The items on the list ranged widely, from creating an AfroAmerican studies department and a lounge for black students to serving “Soul Food” in the dining hall.

The last list item? “We want an immediate end to harassment by campus security. There have been many instances in which the Black students at Barnard have been unnecessarily asked to produce Barnard identification.

We feel that such practices are discriminatory and we will not tolerate them.”

As the decades went by, this demand continued to resonate. In 1988, a coalition of students, faculty and staff organized the Committee on Race, Religion, and Ethnicity (CORRE), which convened until its work was absorbed by the Office of Multicultural Affairs in 2001. In a focus group CORRE conducted on April 27, 1990, respondents shared anecdotes of feeling unwelcome on Barnard’s campus.

One student challenged the administration’s practice of advising first-year students to avoid certain neighborhoods near campus for safety reasons, which the student argued fed the narrative that nearby black communities were a threat to Barnard students. “You are telling first year students who

“I realized it was an act of civil disobedience,” McNab explained. “It’s important to use that vocabulary.”

March 2019

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might not have ever had any contact with African Americans from Kansas City that we are dangerous, we are not to be trusted, [the black residents] are animals. I am a Harlem resident, I am not dangerous, I am not an animal, I am intelligent, I am here to learn.”

Another student described the racial language campus security used in crime reports and how descriptors like “black male” potentially made them and any black visitor on campus “a suspicious person.”

Next, a student shared that a friend who was a visiting student at Barnard with Barnard ID had his ID questioned by a security guard and taken to show to the security guard’s supervisor. “He said: I live here. The guard said no you don’t, what are you doing here? Because he was male, black and early 20s.”

The parallels between this last anecdote and McNab’s encounter are striking. The visiting student’s Barnard ID did not change the security guard’s perception that the visiting student could not possibly be a Barnard student. For McNab, producing his Columbia University ID for Barnard Public Safety officers to see in Milstein did not convince the officers, at least initially, that his ID was real: an officer tried to walk off with it, saying Public Safety needed to “verify” it.

It’s tempting to think of counterfactuals.

If the security guard had been briefed that some male visiting students do study at Barnard and hold Barnard IDs, perhaps the student’s Barnard ID wouldn’t have perplexed the guard. But it’s less clear why McNab’s Columbia University ID appeared suspicious to security personnel.

Both of these incidents, though decades apart, speak to the arbitrariness of ID as proof of Barnard-Columbia student status and point to appearance as the real passport for uninterrupted travel through Barnard’s campus. If your appearance isn’t consistent with that of most Barnard students— cisgender, female, white—then you are probably more likely to get flagged for questioning.

After McNab had had a few days to sit with what happened and talk to reporters, he started to reflect a bit differently on his decision to keep walking when the gate attendant asked him for ID. “I realized it was an act of civil disobedience,” McNab explained. “It’s important to use that vocabulary.”w

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FURTHER READING If you’re interested in learning more about the debate over Public Safety as it has developed in the headlines, here are some pieces from around Columbia we suggest reading.

The student at the center of the latest flashpoint between students and Columbia’s Public Safety officials wrote a personal essay for The Eye, I Am More Than My ID, that touches on “having to explain to white people that I didn’t just get into Columbia because I’m black, and having to explain to black people that I didn’t become white when I started going here.”

Along with a formal statement, the Black Students’ Organization’s Political Committee in A Brief History of Anti-Black Violence and Policing at Columbia University, which additional research into Columbia’s history with Public Safety and policing in general, concluding that “Columbia and Barnard Public Safety, like all police institutions in the United States, need to be abolished and radically restructured in order to properly address and eradicate the systemic inequalities which perpetuate racial violence against Black people.

Conservative-leaning students have critiqued the pressure placed on Public Safety by concerned students, arguing that “there’s no reason to suspect that the policy is enforced in a racist manner,” as evidence that the ID policy is inconsistently enforced is anecdotal and the policy is important for security in a “closed women’s college campus.” (Barnard’s campus hosts events for the public, including the Athena Film Festival.) This argument was advanced both in Quillette and The Columbia Beacon by Coleman Hughes and Morgan Raum respectively.

For more about a different context in which Barnard students may interact with Barnard Public Safety, we recommend reading Here’s What It’s Like To Call Barnard Public Safety on Bwog, where Sophie Tobin describes how she came to appreciate Public Safety after being catcalled and calling the emergency number. “There was nothing condescending about” the way Public Safety answered, “he just wanted me to feel calm and safe.”

The Blue and White

Digitalia Columbiana April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and this year in commemoration the Office of University Life hosted an event on the SHIFT survey, Columbia’s multi-year attempt to study sexual assault on the field. The full survey is worth reading; here are selected passages from the final report from March 2018 discussed during the presentation.

KEY FINDINGS SHIFT found that nearly 1 in 4 (22%) CU/BC students had experienced sexual assault (defined as unwanted/non-consensual sexual contact) since matriculation. These rates are similar to those found at other universities. Higher rates of assault victimization were found among women, students outside the gender binary (hence referred to as gender nonconforming), and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer students.

Although a majority of students reported no incidents of sexual assault, among those who did report experiencing assault there were high rates of repeat victimization, with an average of 3 incidents per person.

Pre-college sex education is a particular area of opportunity. Many students have had steady romantic relationships before college (46%), or initiated oral, anal, or vaginal sex (44%). Having received formal education about how to say no to sex (i.e., refusal skills training) before age 18 was one of several pre-college factors associated with a reduced likelihood of experiencing penetrative sexual assault in college. However, many students arrive at CU/BC having received only limited education about sexual consent, sexual health, or how to protect themselves from sexual assault….

Negative sexual experiences, including sexual assault, were linked to alcohol use, including incapacitation. It is vital, however, to bring nuance to the alcohol-sexual assault nexus….Note that students frequently have consensual and positive sexual experiences in the content of alcohol use, and that a third of assaults occur under conditions in which neither student is drinking or using drugs, including in the context of intimate partner relationships.

Sexual assault was also associated with increased depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as hazardous alcohol use….

March 2019

Students knew about affirmative consent, but didn’t necessarily say they practiced it….CU is effectively conveying information about the expected standard of behavior, and yet students’ actual consent practices...varied widely. One key social dimension identified was the idea of ‘sexual citizenship’ -- people’s understanding of their own right to determine if, when, and how sexual encounters occur, and others’ equivalent right.

Many men expressed fears about ‘doing consent wrong’, and men of color raised particular fears about racialized vulnerability to accusations.

Only 2% of students in the survey who had experienced sexual assault said a formal complaint was filed with CU or BC. The ethnography shed light on the perceived ‘social risks’ of reporting in terms of students’ identities, social relationships, and broader goals for college.

THE SURVEY SHIFT’s examination of sexual assault focused on unwanted, non-consensual touching without oral, anal or vaginal penetration; completed oral, anal or vaginal penetrative sex; and attempted penetrative sex. SHIFT did not look at other forms of genderbased misconduct such as harassment and stalking.

The survey, which took students 30 - 40 minutes to complete and which was emailed via a link to a random sample of 2500 students garnered an excellent response rate (67%; 1671 participants), particularly in relation to typical higher education response rates (The most recent AAU and ACHA surveys at CU, for example, had 26% and 27% response rates for undergraduates, respectively.

The ethnography provided a nuanced and rich look at the lives of undergraduate students (CU and BC) through 151 in-depth individual interviews with students, 19 interviews with administrators and student leaders, 17 focus groups with students, and more than 500 hours of participant observation.w

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M easure

for

M easure

Poem Songs that sound like rain Windows down to catch them.

Neck of strings and pain Something to forget him.

Legs too small to dangle And ask if you’re below.

Voice of hands that strangle A love I used to show.

Match to light my chest And hope that you can feel it Wonder if it’s best If that’s the way you see it.

Calls made in the dark And hoping you can hear me.

Watch me rip apart Just to not believe me.

—Nora May McSorley

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The Blue and White

M easure

for

M easure

DSM-VI Are you easily fatigued?

Are you often disorganized or indecisive?

Do you experience recurrent disturbances in appetite?

Do you find waking up and getting out of bed to be two distinct negotiations?

Are you frustrated by a diminished vocabulary?

Do you find it difficult to relate to friends or family suffering from terminal illness?

Are you troubled by feelings of impermanence?

Do you yearn for an element of mysticism in your life?

Do you find it difficult to identify some kernel of the self?

Do you avoid large crowds?

Do you worry about the rise of ultra-nationalism at home and abroad?

Are you frequently irritated by unenthusiastic greetings from peers or coworkers?

Are you drawn to places of significant class tension, such as airports or art galleries?

Do you lack confidence in your opinions about ballet?

Are you often suspicious of friends or family?

Are you usually unsatisfied by sleep?

Are you unsure whether you are—finally, outrageously—okay?

—Jacob Snyder

March 2019

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T H E S H O RT C U T

A New Idea The Blue and White continues its short fiction series with a story about the decisions that turn our lives upside down

By Samantha Marin

I

got the idea—no, more like the first inkling of the real idea to come later on—when my manager told me I was “a good for nothing mess of an employee.”

Not sure if it was that specific string of words or the extra cup of coffee I’d had from the break room that fueled the explosion of thoughts, but that was the first day I can remember thinking about it. I walked home in a tangle. My hair was inside the zipper of my purse and my shoe lace was inside my sock. I spat my gum on the sidewalk like the rowdy teenager I never was.

That night was when I got the real idea.

If I’m being honest, it really all started when Steven got me pregnant by accident. Not saying it was his fault, not saying it was mine, just saying that that was that. I had a little boy named Grant on a Tuesday afternoon in January when I was supposed to be at work, my absence from my cubicle probably contributing to my good-for-nothingness. I gave Grant to Steven so he could take him home. The nurses told me I should lay in the hospital bed and watch soap operas for a while so I could recover. I put on my col-

30

lared shirt and clocked back into the office.

Steven and I did alright with our kid at first. I kept working at my telephone sales company, which I was surprised hadn’t gone out of business on account of the fact that every rational person in the United States had clipped their landline’s wire years ago. I called old people and people who kept their phone just to give people like me that number instead of the one they actually used. Sometimes I actually had nice chats with the old people. They were lonely.

Lonely people are easy to make friends with.

Steven wasn’t exactly good at what he did.

He was a bartender downtown until three a.m. every day and was too nice so he gave away more drinks on the house than he should have. Girls loved him.

I stopped going to that bar after I realized that. I wished he would realize that a drink “on the house” really meant a drink “on our paycheck,” but sometimes you just gotta let nice people be nice and move on. That’s what I did with Steven—just let him do his thing.

The three of us were struggling to get by. We couldn’t afford a nanny so I gave Grant to the retired guy downstairs everyday while I was at the office. Steven usually worked out in the morning at the gym before opening the bar at noon, so him taking Grant was out of the question. I worked until seven or eight at night, just in time to take Grant off of the retired guy’s hands and put my strange tiny human to sleep. Even though both Steven and I worked all the time there was never enough money. It got worse once Grant kept growing and kept needing new sets of clothes. Why do they make baby clothes that last only four or five months? How has someone not invented expandable baby clothes? Should I invent expandable baby clothes?

Anyway, the idea came about

Illustration by Sahra Denner

The Blue and White

T H E S H O RT C U T when I was lying on the air mattress in our tiny studio apartment and waiting for Steven to come home. When he walked in the door the idea came to me in a single explosion, a collision of feelings. The door swung open and the hallway light came in and suddenly the idea was right there, sitting at my feet.

I picked it up and looked at it, turned it over. Then I gave it to Steven.

“That’s great,” he said when I presented it to him.

“I never liked working at the bar anyway. And Grant will love it. He’ll learn how to start a fire with nothing but two sticks and a spoonful of willpower.”

Steven was always talking like that. Spoonful this, heaping that, cup of this, box of that. Why was he always measuring everything out? Emotions can’t be measured out. At least I didn’t think about them being measured in a manner like that.

We bought our bus tickets the next day after I’d spent the entire night on the communal computer in the lobby of our building picking out exactly where to go. I carried Grant through the bus station in my oversized tote bag so he could breathe but also so that no one would notice him.

I didn’t need gawkers in the bus station.

The bus drove all night and all the way through the next day. It wiggled ridiculously throughout the East Coast—we weren’t sure why it wouldn’t just go straight to the bottom of Virginia like we wanted it to.

We got off on a dirt road and looked around.

The bus drove away.

“Let’s go that way,” I said. Steven followed me with Grant in the oversized tote. The three of us walked into the town I had researched. I found the agency quickly on account of the fact that I’d thoroughly planned my idea out, like I already said.

“Hi, could you help us buy a plot of land?”

I asked the woman at the desk inside the agency. She nodded and handed me a bunch of brochures. I picked

one. Steven agreed without hardly looking—I think he was feeding Grant or something. I knew he’d do anything with me, that’s just how Steven was.

We walked to our land because the town didn’t have buses or anything like that. It wasn’t far— the agency was purposefully located close to it.

The thing is, my idea wasn’t just to move to rural Virginia. It was to get the hell out of the city and into something different. I thought maybe we could farm. I’d always wanted to see if I could grow things in places other than my own uterus, which Grant could attest to if he could talk.

When we got to our land I did not see what I was expecting. We’d bought a ten-acre piece in the corner of Virginia that was part of a huge private project some rich dead guy had started.

He owned a farm for fun and wanted poor people to be able to have land and grow things and run around with their kids, so he divided up his massive property and started selling it to people like Steven and Grant and me for dirt cheap. The end goal was for people to start growing their own food. It didn’t look like that’s what was happening here.

The field we walked onto had a bunch of homeless people living on it—tents pitched and fires for warmth out of trashcans and everything you’d expect. I guess homeless was what we were, too, but at least we didn’t look like these people. They had beards down to their hips and were living in the tents and smoking. I saw some dug up ground where someone had maybe tried to start a garden, but the massive tangle of weeds on it showed me that they had been unsuccessful. That wasn’t going to be us. I knew it.

Steven would help me figure it out. He’d do anything with me, I knew it.

The first day, Steven tried to start building a little mini house for us to live in. He said that the tent wouldn’t do when winter came, and I agreed. I made friends with the homeless people and talked

“He owned a farm for fun and wanted poor people to be able to have land and grow things and run around with their kids, so he divided up his massive property and started selling it to people like Steven and Grant and me for dirt cheap. ”

March 2019

Illustration by Helen Becker

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T H E S H O RT C U T trash with them about the rich dead guy’s weird goal to “return the lower middle class to pastoralism.” I didn’t know about the lower middle class—all I knew was that the word “lower” in relation to our funds was probably accurate. We mostly talked about how rich people were always trying to do weird stuff to “help” us because they think that poor people have the same ideas that they do. They think that we will grow organic food and make kombucha and have an honest living if they give us some untouched earth on charity. No one really has an honest living. That’s why I figured it wasn’t worth trying.

As soon as me and the homeless people were really friends I borrowed rusty tools from them that the agency had left lying around for people like us to start our farms.

They were nice about that.

I wasn’t afraid of the homeless people and wasn’t sure why the rest of the people in the town called them poor dirty hippies and whatnot. They were poor, yes, and dirty, of course, but pointing it out to them didn’t seem very necessary to me.

Between tilling the garden and feeding Grant I went to the town and got a job so we could have money for food until we really got our feet on the ground. I worked as a waitress at a Waffle House. It was a good gig—making waffles and eggs was just as easy as talking to lonely old people on the phone—and paid enough money so that the three of us could have food.

I talked to the farmers—who were also poor and dirty but I didn’t feel the need to tell them so—that came in for breakfast. I learned about how to get chickens for eggs and cows for milk and eventually cows for meat.

I learned about growing things. I told them about the city I used to live in. They told me I was crazy for ever trying to make it there. I thought about Steven opening the door at three a.m. and the hallway light coming in and the idea being right there. I knew that I must’ve made the right choice because of that. I knew

these things. And Steven would do anything with me.

The homeless people started helping with Grant so I could do more important things with my time like chase the chickens I’d bought back into the pen Steven made and get information from the farmers about how to live off the land. Every time I went to drop him off with them I would get in a conversation with one of them that would last longer than I intended it to. Most of them came from cities like we did because their lives weren’t working for some reason or another. Some of them had been horribly addicted to a whole slew of things.

Others just wanted to sleep under the stars instead of under the light pollution. I couldn’t help but agree.

Grant grew and grew throughout the entire summer. Steven wouldn’t shut up about teaching him how to make a fire someday.

Neither of us knew how to do that since we made all our food on our tiny cookstove. I actually got a few vegetables growing and really did get eggs from the chickens. Steven was supposedly still working on the mini house, but not a lot of progress was being made. I wasn’t sure why.

I worked hard in the garden whenever I could.

Growing things in the earth wasn’t as easy as it was in my own body, but it wasn’t quite as hard as I thought it would be. The sun was free and the water from the nearby creek was free and the water that fell from the sky was free and the ground was free and the hands I worked with were free. Not like the twelve-dollar salad I used to sometimes buy on the way home from the office back in the city.

Everything out here was just. . . here. It felt odd that I had been living surrounded by fake trees and fake ground and fake hills made by humans. In our mountain village in Virginia everything was here without anyone putting it there. It just was.

And for the first time, I just was.

I got really excited when I picked our first tomato that summer. It was perfectly ripe and tasted

“Steven wouldn’t shut up about teaching him how to make a fire someday.

Neither of us knew how to do that since we made all our food on our tiny cookstove. I actually got a few vegetables growing and really did get eggs from the chickens.”

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The Blue and White

T H E S H O RT C U T amazing. Grant tried a bit of it and made a face. Steven said he didn’t like tomatoes, which I genuinely did not think was true. How could such a nice guy that gives away drinks at a bar all the time not like tomatoes? He wandered away to drive a nail into a random recycled two-by-four. I shrugged and finished the tomato on my own. It was so good. Maybe I could even sell some.

I went to the homeless people’s camp to give Grant to them so I could walk to the Waffle House and work the late shift. That’s when I found out—via their kindly-granted information, of course, since we were friends and all—that Steven wasn’t driving a nail into a random recycled two-by-four but was driving another very specific nail into a very specific part of a very specific woman who lived in the homeless camp with the guys who took care of Grant. I fell on the grass, wet from the free rain from that afternoon’s summer storm, and Grant fell with me. He probably hit his head and I did too.

I didn’t cry. I crumpled. I didn’t speak. I let my body tangle up with Grant’s.

He was mine and Steven wasn’t mine. Steven left the next day.

I wandered into the town with Grant in my arms and sat on the cracked sidewalk on Main Street. The town was too poor to have buried power lines, so they hung over me like garland on a mantle at Christmastime. I looked at the pieces of gum that rowdy teenagers I’d never been had spat on the ground. I wondered what the grass had looked like before people came and paved it over with the cement I was sitting on. I looked up. I wondered what the sky had looked like before people came and crowded it with powerlines.

I walked out of town with Grant still in my arms. He wasn’t crying and neither was I. There was a grassy hill that we walked up. I made my ambling way to the top of it and sat down. I saw a stream surrounded by trees and bushes at the bottom of the hill. A deer drank out of it. I started crying. The sunset was so beautiful. I’d

never seen anything like it before—the city we used to live in had too many tall buildings in the west where the sun set. It wasn’t like the hallway light that flowed onto the air mattress when Steven came back at three a.m. This light was everywhere: it was in my ears and my lungs and my feet. It flowed through my knotted hair and made it tingle on the ends. People used to do this, I thought. They used to live in places where they could see the sunset every night and the sunrise every morning. I cried again. I was in a tangle, but this time my hair wasn’t in my purse zipper and my shoelace wasn’t in my sock.

Instead, my heart was in my throat and my stomach was in my knees and my head was probably rolling around on the grass somewhere nearby.

I walked back into town in the dark. There would be a place for me to stay until Grant and I figured out something without Steven since I didn’t want to stay in that horrible half-finished shack he was building. The Waffle House manager liked me better than the telephone office guy from my last job, so I knew he’d lend me a couch or an air mattress that hopefully wasn’t next to a door that’s always leaking light out of it..

That was when I got my next idea.

I went to an old guy’s driveway and bought a used SUV on credit that I promised to pay back when I had enough money from my Waffle House job. I drove it to the top of that grassy hill. I parked it there. Grant and I slept there every night. I knew that eventually Grant would be too big for us to stay in the SUV but we would figure that out when it became a problem. For now I wasn’t worried. I saw the creek. I had a job. Steven was gone. I was homeless—poor and dirty for sure—but no one felt the need to tell me so.

We saw the sunset and the sunrise every single day and I felt myself slowly unraveling from my knot. I never needed to turn the lights in the car on to see things. Light was free, after all.w

“I wandered into the town with Grant in my arms and sat on the cracked sidewalk on Main Street.

The town was too poor to have buried power lines, so they hung over me like garland on a mantle at Christmastime.”

March 2019

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I S R A E L I - A PA R T H E I D W E E K

Rethinking Narratives Professor Joseph Massad draws connections between pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism

By Kate Iida

M

ore than eighty people squeezed into a small lecture room on the fourth floor of the Mathematics building Tuesday night to listen to a lecture by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad entitled “Pro-Zionism and Anti-Semitism.”

The lecture occurred on the second day of “Israeli Apartheid Week,” a weeklong series of events co-sponsored by the organizations Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Columbia/Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace, and Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Lecture attendees filled the seats, lined the walls of the room, and stood waiting in the hallway for a chance to listen to Massad’s lecture.

This lecture came just three weeks after the Columbia College Student Council, following four hours of intense debate, voted down a referendum that would poll student support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The referendum was voted on in a secret ballot, and the result caused controversy among the student body.

Massad began by elucidating the main argument of his lecture: that both historically and currently, pro- Zionist groups have allied themselves closely with antiSemitic groups. Massad discussed several historical examples of this, specificallymost prominently examples of the anti-Semitism exhibited by Arthur Balfour, author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration which first stated the British government’s support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He then went on to give more recent examples of anti-Semitism exhibited by pro-Israel groups. He argued that equating Israel with all Jewish people, and therefore labeling antiZionism as anti-Semitism, was an intentional strategy on the part of the Israeli government in order to encourage more support for the state of Israel.

“The strategy of inventing something called the New anti-Semitism, which equates

34

anti- Zionism with anti-Semitism, is in fact a strategy to conceal and distract from the very real … anti-Semitism that was always pro- Zionist and allied with the Zionist movement,” Massad said.

Massad brought up many examples of modern supporters of the state of Israel who are also antiSemitic. One of the most prominent examples he mentioned is American Neo-Nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer, who coined the term “altright.” Spencer has stated that he wants to create “an Aryan homeland in North America,” according to Massad, and he quoted Spencer as saying that Israel “is the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state.” Massad used Spencer’s quotes and his support of the state of Israel as evidence in support of his argument that “…anti-Semitism, proZionism, racism, and pro-colonialism are inseparable companions.”

At the end of the lecture, Massad took questions from the audience. The questions covered a wide range of topics, including some about the historical figures mentioned earlier in the lecture,; the reasons why such a large percentage of Jews now live in Israel,; and more personal questions about Massad´s perspective on the viability of a two-state solution.

Despite the moderator´s insistence that there be no back- and- forth discussion between Massad and the audience, several audience members did attempt to engage Massad in debate. One audience member in particular questioned the ethics of Massad discussing the topic of Zionism without a Jewish Zionist present. Massad responded that he was not representing Jews or Zionists in his lecture. “I am a scholar who is speaking about and is concerned about the inordinate amount of attention paid to anti-Semitism among the left and among anti-Zionists, and I’m very concerned that there’s so much anti-Semitism on the pro-Zionist side that goes unmentioned, in fact that it was always forgiven. It is much more dangerous.”w

Illustration by Sahra Denner

The Blue and White

L A L AT I N G A

How Can I Stay?

It’s one thing to admit Latinx students, how can we make sure we retain them?

By Griffin Jones

W

hen Maria, a student from Mexico, started her first semester at the University of Texas at Austin she never expected it would also be her last.

“I had to leave because I didn’t have enough fundings to pay my tuition,” Maria, who asked only her first name be used, told The Blue and White, “since I’m an international student who has an F-1 Visa.”

Without the ability to get loans to finance her education due to her citizenship status, she returned to her home in Mexico, intending to one day return to university. That’s when she got some bad news: even though she had two years left on her visa, it had been cancelled.

“I [had] to do all the process again...get like everything new, start over as if I was never a student in the US...I didn’t expect to have to pay again to do all the process, which is very expensive and it takes a lot of time,” Maria said.

Maria’s story is far from a rarity—data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that Latinx people have a 54.4 percent chance of graduating from a four-year institution within six years, 9.5 percent lower than white students.

The rest drop out for various reasons. For many, like Maria, it’s because of financial difficulties.

According to one study by Pew Research, a number do so to enter the workforce to support their families.

Other studies suggest it may be because Latinx students are more likely to choose underfunded open-access schools because they believe more selective schools are out of their price range, unaware that many universities offer financial aid. This lack of information is often due to their status as prospective first-generation college students: their parents are not familiar enough with the American higher education system to help them.

Thus, a number of students eligible for admittance to schools ultimately choose not to attend or, in some cases, to even apply.

At Columbia, however, the graduation rates are far more even. Statistics from Univstats.com show that 93.3 percent of Hispanic students graduate on

March 2019

time. 94.29 percent of White students do the same, making for a gap of only 1.01 percent.

Why is Columbia different from public universities? Athena Guizar, the School of General Studies representative for the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership, attributes the rate of retention to community.

As she told The Blue and White, “I would say that it's very possible that the ways students function on this campus does help lead to retention,” Guizar said. “I feel my retention is more connected to my community than I would say with academics.”

Resources like Counseling and Psychological Services, the lending library and FLIP coat drives, Guizar said, are another important aspect of retention. She told The Blue and White, “Every time a student has come to me as just a friend and said like, I don't know if I could do this ... I do my best to offer up resources. Then they're like, oh, I didn't know that I could.”

She also noted, however, that a number of fellow GS students that have left the university. “This has been my experience more than not, from people that I know that have left ... you can get here and find the mental pressure [that] is involved and the financial pressures involved [are intense],” she explained.

“Perhaps [it’s] the elitism, you know, just coming from a background where you don't know what a name brand name [is],” Guizar continued, “it could be the social structure of the ways the institution either recognizes or doesn't recognize the color of your skin or your identity or your financial backgrounds, your culture, your religion even.”

As for Maria, she’s been able to return to school, this time in El Paso, Texas, thanks to the resources there dedicated to students like her.w In the first issue of the March 2019 of The Blue and White, we reported in “Retaking Butler’s Facade,” that Columbia would be installing the Butler Banner Project in March 2019. While this information was correct at the time, The Blue and White staff has been informed that, due to increased funding, the project has been postponed to the Fall of 2019.

This story was adapted from an unpublished story written for another publication.

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