December 2015

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. XXI No. VI

Finance or Consulting?

Navigating Columbia's job scene

Working for Tips 1020's bartenders spill Also Inside:

Wayne Koestenbaum’s Sexiness Runs Dry

December 2015

HALLIE NELL SWANSON, CC ’16, Editor in Chief CHANNING PREND, CC ’17, Managing Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Publisher VIRGINIA FU, CC ’17, Literary Editor ALEXANDER PINES, CC ’16, Culture Editor SEAN AUGUSTINE-OBI, CC ’16, Senior Editor NIA BROWN, CC ’17, Senior Editor MICHELLE CHERIPKA, CC ’16, Senior Editor SOMER OMAR, CC ’16, Senior Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Layout Editor ZANE BHANSALI, CC ’17, Senior Illustrator ROBERT JACK GROSS, CC ’16, Copy Editor DANIEL STONE, CC ’16, Editor Emeritus Staff Writers YASEMIN AKÇAGÜNER, BC ’17 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 MABEL TAYLOR, BC ’18 Contributors ELENA BURGER BC, ’18 MARIAM ELNOZAHY, BC ’16 BIANCA GUERRERO, CC ’18 KUNAL JASTY, SEAS ’16 NICK KENSINGER, CC ’18 MEGHAN HARTMAN, BC ’16 TATINI MAL-SARKAR, CC ’17 JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17 JULIE MOON, CC ’17 MIKAYLA PETCHELL, BC ’18 BEN SCHNEIDER, CC ’17 Associate Publisher ANDREW LOSO, CC ’19

Staff Illustrator RACHEL CHIN, CC ’18 Artists ALEXA ECONOMACOS, CC ’18 DARYA FRAIMAN, GS ’16 KATE GERHART, BC ’19 NATHANIEL JAMESON, CC ’18 WALLACE KALKIN, BC ’18 ANNE SCOTTI, CC ’16 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 ALEXANDRA WARRICK, BC ’17 KELLIE ZHAO, CC ’19 JOANNA ZOU, CC ’18 Associate Layout Editor AARON SU, CC ’18

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXI

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. VI

Columns

4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 16 Curio Columbiana 24 M easure for Measure 25 Verily Veritas 34 Digitalia Columbiana 35 Campus G ossip

Features 10 At Two Swords’ Length: A re You G onna E at That?

Our monthly prose and cons

Tatini Mal-Sarkar & Channing Prend Michelle Cheripka

12 Occupied on Wall Street

How On-Campus Recruitment perpetuates our finance and

consulting obsession

Alexa Economacos & Zane Bhansali

18 Columbiopoly

Do not pass Low

Julie Moon

20 Customs But No Check

What the visa lottery means for Columbia students

Hallie Nell Swanson

26 Behind Bar

Talking to 1020’s female bartenders

Zane Bhansali

theblueandwhite.org

28 Portrait of the A rtist

A conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

f

cover :

“Inside the Bubble” by Zane Bhansali

BLUE BOOK

a

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

It’s the jobs issue here at The Blue and White.

Apparently, it’s December, which I just learned is meant to be internship application season, and that means your future is impending, because it isn’t impending at all other times.

In our features on the implications of the perilous visa lottery for internationals (page 20), and the relentless finance and consulting obsession permeating CCE (page 12), Julie Moon and Michelle Cheripka sketch out the pressures that influence our decisions come graduation— or, possibly, make those decisions for us. On page 26, we hear from some 1020 bartenders on the things they put up with for the cash.

Tips for working, working for tips ... either way, there are compromises to be made, compromises little and frequent. Compromise, perhaps, is what Life—capital L to signal the traumatic rupture of undergrad/postgrad—is made of.

Yet we also see examples of something else, whether one of our bartender friends mining nights at 1020 for a gender studies ethnography; Dunni Oduyemi using media and art spaces to voice and combat experiences of institutionalized racism; or Donnie Banks using acting as an outlet in the army (see our campus characters, pages 8 and 9). Putting yourself into these projects makes them yours, and not someone else’s. It’s the difference between doing work and doing a job.

Especially when many of us, as one international intern puts it, are being “compensated in snacks,” doing work for and by ourselves must have its own value—be it art (see Zane Bhansali’s portrait of his interview subject Wayne Koestenbaum in The Conversation, page 28), poetry (see page 24), or an indulgent editor’s letter (page 4). This issue before you is one such case study.

It’s finals. Do your work—for you and what you believe in. Don’t compromise on that. This is where I leave you.

— Hallie Nell Swanson

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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS Deluxe Student Power Coalition The James H. and Christine Turk Berick Center for Advising Friends asking if you’ve donated to the Senior Fund The Rough Guide to the Universe Your family’s racist Facebook posts The Museum of Feelings (sponsored by Glade)

DEPARTURES Sunlight Civil obedience Free Bacchanal tickets Politely RSVPing “Maybe” to your floormate’s wind ensemble recital Frontiers of Science

Say What?!

“I often wish that I could go back to my childhood, because back when we were kids, having fun just seemed so effortless, you know? You could give us a pillow and a blanket and we’d build a fortress together.”

– Shannon Zhao, in her Spec op-ed

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

BY THE NUMBERS: SCIONS OF COLUMBIA Columbia’s directory reveals a number of our peers with Roman numerals in their names. Get to know these sons and heirs with our handy charts.

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

December 2015

Postcard by Nathaniel Jameson Graphs by Zane Bhansali

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BLUE NOTES

T

he prospect of briefing college administrators on one’s menstrual habits may seem invasive and weird, but legend holds that Barnard used to demand such of its students. Eager to discover if this procedure was something other than an urban myth, I headed over to Lehman Library to browse the archives. To my delight (bewilderment? dismay?), the PE department records did not disappoint: the Barnard administration appears to have a history of tracking its students’ periods for roughly the first half of the 20 th century. According to a PE manual issued to students in 1941, students were required to make up classes missed due to periods and “form a habit of filling the menstrual slip at the end of every menstrual period in the boxes provided in the locker rooms of Barnard Hall and in Office 209.”

My quest for the elusive menstrual slip produced piles of papers on Barnard’s period policies.

These included a “menstrual record card” from 1917, on which students were given a 365-day chart to map out their periods, and several PE handbooks from later years that forbade pool use and discouraged strenuous physical activity during

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menstruation. “Menstrual report card” slips from 1926 and 1931 asked for the dates of the beginning and cessation of the period, and whether the student felt any pain.

It’s understandable why the College might need such information for medical purposes, but incoming students were already asked about menstruation in their health forms, which begs the question: why the hell was Barnard keeping tabs on its students’ periods? The best explanation I could think of was to stop students from faking to skip class. But the archive reveals evidence of a health obsession at early 20 th century women’s colleges, likely a response to the apparently widely held worry that higher education was hazardous to women’s reproductive health. As a popular book entitled A Fair Chance For Girls warned, “a girl could study and learn but she could not do all this and retain ... a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.” Science!

— Virginia Arbeliotis

U

pon first spotting the pigeon man, I had never before heard mention of his presence on campus. A shocking fact, considering that the sight of an elderly man sprawled across one of the enclosed lawns on college walk is not a common one. Surrounded by a flock of the detested grey and purple birds, he reclined in the grass, his leg extended in the air, birdseed packed in between his toes. As I walked by, late for French, he wiggled his leg back and forth in an effort to better spur the interest of the birds.

For the next several days, the pigeon man spotting was my favorite story, but of all the people

Illustration by Darya Fraiman

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES

I told, only two had never heard of him before. The majority would just nod quickly, “Oh yeah, the pigeon man,” as if he were as natural an element on campus as high school tour groups. With this knowledge, I noticed the pigeon man popping up everywhere that I looked. lnstagram posts compared his variety of poses to fine art. A series of photos shot near sunset highlighted his bizarre bird-feeding poses as if modern dance.

Apparently he is an old Russian man who speaks not a word of English. Apparently he has rotten teeth. Apparently he’s actually a very wellrespected professor at NYU. Or an artist. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has spoken to him personally, but everyone seems to be sure that they know at least a little bit about his character. Some claim to know his bird-feeding schedule like clockwork.

Yet the hours I spent staking out his “usual” spot on campus, and investigating every large swarm of pigeons for its origination, proved fruitless. In the little over a month that I tried to track him down again, I apparently missed him no less than a dozen times. One night, I crumbled a stale John Jay roll into pieces and scattered them around me, hoping that if I could not attract the pigeon man, I could, at the very least, get some pigeons together myself.

But as breadcrumbs gathered at my feet, l failed to draw even one bird. Perhaps the pigeon man is an artist after all.

— Mikayla Petchell

celebrated labor, civil rights, and Black Power activist Grace Lee Boggs, is the centerpiece of Hewitt’s newly installed mural. Painted below the quote is a mass of Barnard protesters, marching down Broadway with signs and bullhorns in hand. Physically able blondes, brunettes, and redheads dominate the painting, although a few students don hijab and one is using a wheelchair. The east side of Broadway is painted in a jarring neon pink and the city skyline features a jet-black, phallic Empire State Building. One activist holds a camera that has somehow managed to find a bare butt within the crowd.

The mural was designed and executed by recent Barnard alumna, Amrita S. Singh, BC ’14.

Knowing that she would not capture the city’s horizon accurately, she distorted the scene intentionally and focused her attention elsewhere, incorporating bright colors to attract attention to the mural’s less than ideal location in the back corner of the dining hall. She was inspired by her favorite artist Van Gogh’s “synesthetic use of colors that you can almost feel,” she says. The butt was meant to be a subtle reference to herself—a visual manifestation of her initials. “Clearly, it wasn’t [subtle],” Singh said, “especially since it’s eye-level.”

While one might counter that the students depicted in the mural were specifically aimed at results, not the journey, Singh insists that she wholeheartedly believes in the motto. The piece, said Singh, was inspired by the “strength and power” exuded by students at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Maybe her execution didn’t match up to expectations, but the mural quote presumably affirms that that fact doesn’t devalue Singh’s honest effort. As her favorite artist once said, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

— Bianca Guerrero

“A

ctivism can be about the journey rather than the arrival.” One might expect to hear this from a paternalistic administrator, a devil’s advocate Spec columnist, or a jaded tenured professor. Few would expect to see those words displayed proudly in Hewitt Dining Hall.

The quote, attributed to Barnard alumna and

December 2015

Illustrations by Joanna Zou and Rachel Chin

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Campus Characters You might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue and 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 campus power couples who aren't couples.

If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org.

Dunni Oduyemi

“I

think that in particular, on this campus, most of the confrontations that I’ve had with white people always just prove what I was saying in the first place,” says Dunni Oduyemi, CC ’16. “It’s just so predictable at this point. You know every time you say something related to race that you’re signing yourself up [to be perceived as automatically hostile].”

Last December, Oduyemi, together with Tracey Wang, published an op-ed in the Spectator “about the ways Orgo Night is traumatizing and represents the larger culture of not giving a fuck about how students of color feel on this campus,” she says. “When we wrote that article we knew everyone’s going to hate us for this ... literally instantly people would read [the op-ed] and then think ‘huh, what should I do? I should find Dunni on Twitter and tell her that I should throw a bucket of water over her head,’” she says.

(Her Twitter bio at the time read “using white tears to moisturize my hair since 1994.”)

We are sitting in a common room in the Intercultural Resource Center, where she lives. Much of our conversation is punctuated by exasperated sighs, pauses in which she rubs her temple or slowly traces the length of her hair, or nods at her housemates rolling luggage past us, back from Thanksgiving break.

Oduyemi, an African-American Studies major, was born in New York, but having lived in

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Geneva, Switzerland, since age eight, says she is not American—an identity which also seems to inform her point of view. “It’s sometimes frustrating to be in America and see how U.S.-centric discourse about all racism is, and the way that just erases black people’s experiences outside of the U.S.” As Editor-in-Chief of The Eye, Oduyemi prioritized identity-based stories, notably a piece about race in the anti-sexual violence movement, which made the New York Times’s recommended reads, and “Studying While Black,” about the widespread and under-acknowledged issue of Public Safety’s policing of black students. That piece, though, Oduyemi recused herself from as a core organizer of Columbia Prison Divest. Formed early in 2014, CPD used actions like awareness weeks, rallies and an over four hour sit-in and teach-in in Low Library to campaign against the University’s investments in the private prison industry. By June of 2015, they had succeeded.

Though it was her only formal experience organizing, she says, “My parents, my dad specifically, has always been radical and taught me to challenge things and question things. I think I learned a lot more from him than from some of my teachers in high school. He has always thought really deeply about colonialism and I think that has been really helpful in shaping my sense of politics.”

Oduyemi says that “linking education, as a concept even, to liberation work is really what I am interested in.” Going forward, she’s looking to extend her activism to other forms than organizing. She is currently working with her friend, artist Marc Jeremy, CC ’15, on a project called Suede, billed as “an installation and performance space for black and brown artists.” The idea, says the project’s description, is to “transcend old or typically patriarchal models which involve protesting and confrontation.”

Oduyemi herself is of course not all protesting and confrontation: Jeremy corroborates Oduyemi’s

The Blue and White

affinity for cooking and cooking shows (she lists more show names than I knew existed), as well as English rapper and grime artist Skepta, which Oduyemi calls her “number one obsession right now.” Skepta, she tells me, did actually tweet her a kiss-face emoji once.

She smiles the widest she has during our entire talk.

— Nia Brown

Donnie Ray Banks

“I

cannot hide what I am. I must be sad when I have cause and smile at no man’s jests...”

Halfway through our interview in Central Park’s North Woods, Donnie Ray Banks, GS ’16, recalls a monologue from Much Ado About Nothing.

Banks learned the monologue for a showcase while studying at a community college near his home in North Carolina. “I love to play the bad guy, but I don’t do it a lot,” he says. Actually, he is a seriously good guy: I lose my wallet during the interview; after searching through piles of leaves for me, he emails the next morning to see if I found it.

Growing up in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, he followed the rules of his single mother, a strictly religious Pentecostal. She told him he could do whatever he wanted. But his hometown’s manufacturing industry collapsed in the 90s, and the army, he says, felt like “kind of my only way.” He entered training early in 2001, at the age of 17. On 9/11, he says, he knew that he was going to war.

Banks hadn’t even had his growth spurt yet. Having never rebelled in high school—“I was like a small adult,” he says—he had his first brush with insubordination in the army, where he found the rules arbitrary. “I always did better if I had a clear mission and I had something to do, otherwise I felt like it was pointless,” he says. So in 2003, while stationed in Saudi Arabia, he volunteered to drive convoys in Iraq. He drove the ten-hour route from Balad to Mosul, where roadside bombs, officially known as improvised explosive devices, were not uncommon.

In the army, an outlet for what he calls his “rage against the machine, as cliché as that sounds,” was acting, even just in training scenarios. Banks spent seven months at war and returned home, working construction gigs and truck driving before going to community college. When he arrived, theater was the only major he was interested in. His theater instructor encouraged him to apply to GS and wrote his recommendation.

December 2015

He had already applied when he went to New York for the first time to see a Broadway show with a theater class, and decided he could live in the city, if he got in. Banks got his acceptance letter the day he was meant to sign a lease at Appalachian State in Boone, NC—the only other school he applied to—and sold “just about everything I owned that was worth money” to make the move to the city.

At GS, Banks changed his medium of expression to film, working on scripts and volunteering as a judge for a film festival. Though he wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies or celebrate Halloween as a kid, he loves horror—he’s writing a paper on Cold War B-grade movies. But he worries about violence, and wouldn’t want to write language he couldn’t show to his mother.

It’s the sort of paradox that defines Banks: wholesomeness and rebellion. He got tattoos on his neck to barely brush the army’s regulations. (They would be covered by a uniform tie.) But the images are Chinese characters for love and hate. “You face toward love and away from hate,” he explains. The rest of Banks’ tattoos give clues to his life: on one hand is a Korean friend’s signature chopstick drawing, tattooed on a dare; on the other a shamrock with a motto, “Make your own luck.” On his ear is the name of his daughter, Lani, who he gave up for adoption as a baby nine years ago. He’s most proud of his sleeve, the colorful image taken from a 2003 calendar he found in Iraq. There’s also a barcode on his wrist—“I wanted to reject labels by labeling myself ... I was nineteen!”

Now, he’s getting some tattoos removed.

“I’m at the age where I’m tired of making the statement,” he says. But with plans to use the rest of his GI Bill for a masters in production filmmaking, that’s exactly what he hopes to be doing.

— Hallie Nell Swanson

Illustrations by Kate Gerhart

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Are you gonna Y

eah, why wouldn’t I eat it? crust together and settle our differences. Hey look, a The grease dripping from this pizza is bet- pepperoni piece! ter than the condescension you’re dripping. Dweeb.

“Isn’t that, like, dirty?” you ask. Sure, but It’s Saturday night after a long hard gen chem- what’s a little dirt in the context of the grand scheme heavy week, OK. What would another wild night of things? Isn’t the whole point of the college years on the town (read: back booth at 1020) be without to get a little messy for the sake of memories? Never something delicious, fatty and large to finish it all mind that I might not remember this tomorrow—coloff? Unfortunately, my lame friends have decided bed lege camaraderie! Joyous youthful spirit via carby trumps Brooklyn Lager, so what am I to do? They deliciousness! After all, as the age-old saying goes, stopped me from diving friends who eat each other’s into Koronet, and I guess I vomity pizza stay together. ended up in Carman. Is that Humans are not why I was banging on your thinking things—they’re door? eating things. Which is Abandoned and why I’m not going to deny alone, I’m just a wanderer, myself the pleasure of the you know. Searching the consumption of this slice hall for a lost soul, friend of pizza. So what if I got or foe, to persuade, cajole, in from the trash? It was or—worst case scenario— in a box. So what if someflat-out blackmail (look, one vomited on (and kind of what happens in Carman into) the box? Matter is constays in Carman… until it stant. That vomit essentially doesn’t) into accompanying may as well be mine. I’m not me for late night happy hour saying it isn’t, either. I’m all margs. I’m not done yet! In about excess and consumpthe face of all this refustion, and what’s the most al, the only option seems elemental way to do that, to be emanating luxuriously from my friend? ffirmative this trash can I’m sort of sitting Oh yes, the introduction

By Tatini Mal-Sarkar on now. Just sniff those Domino’s of foreign matter into the body— boxes, wafting from the depths of indeed, the introduction of foreign the plastic abyss. I’m contemplating substances as body. Growth only dignity, morality and gluten. And I guess I’m picking happens when you encounter new things and cataup these wads of cheese with my hands now. Mmm. bolic enzymes strip the electrons from the carbons Why don’t you put down that Jansport and and use them to drive mitochondrial proton gradicome join me at this al-fresco picnic scene? You can ents. The first mouthful of air you drew into your tell me about how it was to be in Butler all Saturday body contained molecules that were probably farted night. Why are you looking at me like that? As if out of a Cambrian era lizard’s feathered ass. Why are your Red Bull was so healthy. As if that 2 a.m. ButCaf you looking so creeped out? It’s not like I’m coming banana you snarfed was so sanitary. You’re hardcore on to you now, dude. I’m just asking if you’re gonna like me. You stayed till Butler’s last call. I know you’re eat that.w tough. I know you want it too. Let’s just break some

A

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Illustration by Alexandra Warrick

The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

eat that?

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o, I’m not gonna eat that. I’m anti-consumption; glorified microwaveable plywood, slathered in addiI’m a veritable production machine, which is why tional lard, the trashcan has coated this sample in a I was in Butler ’til just now. We only have four years at blanket of staples and wool. Who knows how many this bastion of learning, so why would I waste it con- people have touched it? Who knows how many people suming alcohol? Why such bacchanalian excesses? how breathed in its general vicinity? Is that vomit?!

Who needs Cannon’s when you have the Western “Isn’t that ... dirty?” I ask. I can’t really fathom canon? Yet my sweet, sweet slumber and dreams of what happened to you tonight, or in your early childCatallus are interrupted by hood, that has led you to eat this disheveled harpy dressed pizza dragged along the dirty in what looks like a frayed floor like a rat in a viral video maternity dress with the botI haven’t seen. You could get tom cut off­—the kind of perhemorrhoids or dysentery. son I would usually avoid. I Are you up to date on your hate Carman. immunizations? Think about The thing, meanwhile, what you’re doing! It’s garhas tripped over its own feet bage, waste deemed unfit for and by some accident of blunretention, let alone consumpdering coordination caught tion! Why do you disregard itself on the trashcan. At this epochs of evolution and drag point it’s honestly tough disyourself back into the pritinguishing between person mordial ether? I’m reaching and food, by which I mean the for the hand sanitizer in my garbage is overflowing with back pocket, thinking to dispizza boxes from the hall solve your sins like a medistudy break. (No, of course eval witch, but all that comes I didn’t attend it. I was studyout of the container is a sad ing.) The real question here isopropyl poof. Empty. I want is, why are they in the trash to take another shower but rather than the recycling bin?

I’ve already taken four today. egative I think the thing is begin Oh, this age! How tasteless and

By Channing Prend ning to put the boxes in the correct ill-bred it is. Mother told me to live receptacle. But now I’m realizing, in Carman so I could make new to my horror, that it is merely searching each putrid, friends. But what’s the point of sharing experiences grease-soggy box for scraps like a hungry, particu- or pizza with people if those experiences are just larly poorly behaved dog. It’s looking at the goopy going to be regurgitated onto the JanSport bags of craters of the pawed-at pizza like a rabid animal, strangers? Does any of this consumption produce seemingly transfixed by the food. What’s that piece anything that lasts? Tonight you extend to me the of paper stuck to the corner of the crust—is that an ad triangular, bile-stained hand of friendship while I for the study break? Oh God, it creeps towards the hold your head so as to gently redirect the stream of mouth. I feel sick. regurgitated pepperoni emerging from your mouth, “Arssszzure yadon wannanee?” she slurs. but tomorrow all that will be left are the stains caked Clearly this girl is beyond my ability to help. As if into my shoes.w it weren’t enough that what we know as Domino’s is

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December 2015

Illustration by Alexa Economacos

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I N T E RV I E W S TAT U S : D E C L I N E D

Occupied on Wall Street How On-Campus Recruitment perpetuates our finance and consulting obsession

By Michelle Cheripka

W

hen I ask Rachel Bennett*, CC ’16 and a double major in visual arts and English, what she wants to be when she grows up, she says she wants to be an artist. But for now, she dons her business attire and sits on the benches within the office of the Center for Career Education (CCE), alongside the other undergraduates awaiting their On-Campus Interviews (OCI) with Ogilvy or Goldman. When I ask her why she even joined the On-Campus Recruiting (OCR) process in the first place, she says, “Panic.”

Last year, 3,377 students and alumni applied to jobs through CCE’s OCR program, which allows employers to come to Columbia to host recruiting events and interviews for internships or full-time positions.

The search for what a senior might do with the rest of her life begins in September with the Undergraduate Career Fair, and the process continues throughout the fall and spring semesters.

There are several events that fall under OCR: career fairs, industry showcases, information sessions, and OCI. Kavita Sharma, Dean of CCE, describes how each of these events is catered towards the specific companies that attend, and their respective recruiting methods. For example, industry showcases provide an intimate environment for something like a publishing company, which might not have the resources or need for a wide-scale recruitment process; OCI, on the other hand, caters to the McKinseys, Amazons, BCGs, JPs, and BoAs of the corporate world that recruit many prospective graduates.

Because they’re looking for a larger class, it’s often those industries that dominate the OCR process. Spectator op-eds since 2004 have bemoaned CCE’s perceived narrow focus on the finance and consulting industries, arguing that it serves to push students into these jobs where they might have done

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other things.

Chickens and Eggs Jim Geddis, SEAS ’16 and an earth and environmental engineering major, used OCR specifically because he knew its strengths were in finance, which he had decided to pursue after internships in the industry. But others who use OCR to get into finance don’t arrive with those expectations.

Julie Chen, CC ’16 and an economics major, who has gone through recruiting twice since her junior year, is going into consulting next year. She says she’s happy with her recruitment experiences, happy with consulting, but is unsure whether “it’s because I wanted to do finance and consulting, or if it’s because what was available to me,” she says. “I don’t know what came first, but I guess they did their job.”

The question of what came first is a difficult one. Does CCE privilege finance and consulting companies because those are the main industries interested in Columbia, or because those fields are what students seek out?

For a staff of 36 servicing five different schools, plus alumni, CCE’s limitations are obvious. Given the breadth of diversity in student interest, OCR companies actually provide CCE with manpower and services for students, thereby allowing CCE to focus on more programming.

It’s not as if CCE exclusively targets those two industries: according to Courtney Como, Executive Director for Employer and Alumni Relations at CCE, CCE targets and reaches out to firms based on criteria “including student interest, alumni presence, geographic location, position on various surveys including Forbes, Fortune Magazine, Diversity Inc. and others. A few of our industries or sectors of focus

Illustration by Alexa Economacos

The Blue and White

I N T E RV I E W S TAT U S : D E C L I N E D include Science, Government, Not for Profit orgs, Media and Engineering,” she said in an email.

Yet the other criteria she lists for OCR— “staffing needs, recruiting practices, hiring timelines, candidate profile and overall potential opportunities for Columbia students”—favor large companies who can take in a large batch of students in advance. Sharma says that for employers, OCR is “a very, very structured way of finding your new class of recruits,” adding that for employers, “it tends to focus around volume.”

The Path of Least R esistance In these respects, it’s exactly like a process we’ve essentially gone through before—four years ago, when we were applying to college. Sharma sees this as a reason many students are attracted to the process. She says, “We’re talking about undergraduate students, who, [before] the next stage of everything they’ve moved on to” have experienced “quite a uniform process.” She says that for students, the college application process “translates to something like OCR and graduate school applications.”

There is a level of security and comfort in the process. The interviews are on campus, meaning that you don’t have to travel to and from multiple offices. Unlike with online portals, you know that your application is being read rather than “throwing it into a black hole,” says Emily Geiger, CC ’16, an English major with a special concentration in business management, says. There are extended deadlines to accept or reject a job offer. And for students who don’t know the answer to what they want to do with the rest of their lives, the types of companies offered through OCR often have a two- or three-year contract, a window in which they can explore that question more rather than think too hard about it now. OCR is stressful, competitive, time-consuming, and exhausting. But existentially, it’s easy.

Financial security is also an important factor.

“A growing proportion of people have student debt and loans to pay off,” says Geddis. The firms large and rich enough to finance OCR can promise a correspondingly large salary. Though the stereotype of the moneyed banker frat bro has basis in reality, many recent graduates contend with student debt.

“While I’m applying for these internships, I could be applying for residencies and fellowships.

Those are also things that excite me, but I also need

December 2015

to pay the bills,” Bennett says. “I have a lot of student loan debt.” If she were to leave college and pursue art immediately, she says, “there would be hardship.

I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t romanticize poverty.”

That said, the salary is also about prestige.

Sharma says “lucrative positions” make OCR “attractive,” not just for the money, but because of a brand of success. “We definitely know that these are brand names that our students attach prestige to.” Finance is “safe,” says Geddis. “It’s prestigious.”

If OCR analogizes easily to the college application process, then certain companies and industries analogize easily to the Ivy League. Looking for prestigious positions is something we have all, as Columbia students, been trained to do. And as Sharma says, the prospect of getting such an offer is, “for some students, a big reason for why they chose Columbia. Or it’s what they expect to go along with the education they’ve received here.”

A Culture of Expectation But while that may be true of many students, it’s not true of everyone. “I mean, everyone knows that Columbia is a feeder into finance and consulting jobs, and so it makes sense that OCR mostly has those jobs,” Geiger says. She did not want to go into finance and felt unqualified for consulting positions, so looked at marketing. “But,” she adds, “I wish there were more kinds of jobs that I could have applied to through OCR.” Chen says, “There’s this whole world of other jobs besides the ones you’re so focused on during this process, but ... it felt like those were the only things I could be doing after graduation. To not come out of it with something [would feel] like you missed this huge boat that left, and it was your only chance to find such a job. And a lot of that has to do with how intense and quick the process is, where it’s all or nothing. It makes you very narrow-minded about what you want.”

The current situation creates an effect where students might well have other interests originally, but when those aren’t being served by OCR, finance and consulting snap up the majority of students attracted by OCR’s convenience and aura of respectability.

Daniel Liss, CC ’16 and Alumni Affairs Representative for Columbia College Student

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I N T E RV I E W S TAT U S : D E C L I N E D Council (CCSC), says that “for no other reason than that they’re not aware of the opportunities,” students “default” into the small number of finance and consulting companies that take in the greatest proportion of students each year.

According to data compiled by CCE last year, the top three industries for students in the Class of 2014 that reported their plans to CCE were finance (26 percent), consulting (12.4 percent) and tech (7.5 percent). Of the top ten hiring organizations, six were investment banks.

Why is it that such a high percentage of graduates are entering two fields? These trends become self-reinforcing, says Liss. “If all of your role models and your friends have gone to Goldman, that means you’re more likely to envision yourself at Goldman. And it also means that when you’re looking for a job, the people most likely to root for you on the other side are analysts at financial firms instead of technology or consulting or public service firms.”

The culture of expectation isn’t just in specific social networks, though, but the school at large. Geiger says part of the reason she began applying through OCR was because, “I kind of felt like it was expected. Particularly from ... upperclassmen. I just knew that during the winter break of junior year, you start preparing for interviews or start applying to jobs. And then, once you’re back at school, for the next month and a half, you’re interviewing. So I just thought, that’s what I’m supposed to do and I did it.”

Other Options For students pursuing other fields, they must forge a path to a job on their own. “There is a path for artists to pursue careers, but we’re not given any sort of information on how to do that and so we’re basically left kind of floundering,” says Bennett.

“With nontraditional careers, there’s more instability, so a little more guidance is absolutely necessary.” Whereas corporate firms can make themselves accessible, the onus is on students to be proactive in other industries.

Repeatedly throughout my conversation with CCE staff, they emphasize the large network of employers that they bring to campus, and the various methods by which we, as students, might have

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access to them. Sharma stresses the individual advising appointments offered by CCE. And outside of the OCR process, CCE does offer a wide range of opportunities.

The Columbia Arts Experience and Columbia Experience Overseas consistently receive high praise, as does the Kenneth Cole Community Action program. These programs provide opportunities in the arts, abroad, and through community service.

Al Spuler, Executive Director of Administration and Planning at CCE, emphasizes that of the 2,300+ opportunities posted on LionShare last year, the nonprofit sector comprised the second-largest portion of these offerings (and only 16 percent were listed as unpaid). The largest, though, was finance. And it’s not just the volume of jobs that makes the difference: recruitment for finance and consulting is still perceived as an easier process to navigate.

Despite the weekly emails, students still criticize CCE for its alleged lack of opportunities, visibility, accessibility. Despite job postings on LionShare, it is perceived as a broken and disorganized system by those who use it. Despite CCE’s reassurances that they try to accommodate students’ interests, they enable a recruitment process that streamlines the pipeline to some industries, but not others, relying on students to be proactive in a way the future consultants and analysts of our class don’t need to be. CCE invites students to suggest employers in those weekly emails, but a large number of students delete the emails as soon as they see Niamh O’Brien’s name in the heading. So are these methods of programming actually a valid means of comparison?

As CCE tries to diversify the scene, a clear dichotomy emerges in the programming provided.

Individual attention is given to finance and consulting jobs: there are specific sessions for ‘JP’ or networking events for ‘McKinsey,’ while ‘history majors’ or ‘the publishing industry’ get very generalized attention. In the very language CCE uses, the corporate firms are the most visible and prioritized, and therefore the perception remains that CCE only works for people going into finance and consulting.

If Everyone Jumped Off A Bridge...

In order to address some of these criticisms, CCE produced a report in 2013 that compared

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I N T E RV I E W S TAT U S : D E C L I N E D Columbia University to its counterparts at peer institutions. These results were never made public, so as to protect the privacy of the institutions used as comparative models within the report, but Dean Valentini did go on record saying that there was no significant discrepancy between Columbia and peer schools when it came to pushing its students into finance.

But just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it a good thing. Part of Columbia’s mission is to “advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world.” What does it mean that more than a quarter of people who embody these efforts direct this knowledge and learning to Wall Street?

“Columbia always touts the Core Curriculum and its love of the humanities and being so well-rounded, and being able to think analytically, no matter what you’re doing, and then CCE is so ‘Here’s how you do an elevator pitch,’ and ‘Here’s how you network,’” says Chen. “But at the same time, it’s love of knowledge versus practicality, because if you think about what the function of CCE is, I think it’s just to get you a job. It’s not really for your love of Homer.”

But while CCE may just be one part of your undergraduate experience, OCR is an inescapable part of senior year even for those students who don’t participate. A culture irrefutably exists, one in which there is a pressure to enter a traditional career path.

It perpetuates a belief and anxiety that the OCR process is the be all and end all of post-graduate employment opportunities.

Herein lies one of the major failures of the OCR process, and CCE as a whole. CCE does not do enough to acknowledge its own role in an undergraduate’s undergraduate career, not just their postgraduate one. It is possible and valid to chalk up some of the detriments of OCR to the infrastructure of different organizations, the difficulty in gauging what students want as well as their ability to be proactive, among other things. But CCE also does not take ownership of how the processes they support and validate contribute to this culture of anxiety on campus. Consequently, in trying to address students’ concerns of students, they approach it via employers’

December 2015

recruiting strategies, rather than students’ perceptions towards the programming offered.

Now What?

When I asked students about what could be done, Liss spoke about a CCSC initiative to get more alumni recruiting on campus; Bennett called for greater support from departments, whose professors often have the industry-specific connections CCE lacks.

A solution requires students to reevaluate how they see CCE’s role on campus. Are we here for an education or as a stepping stone for what comes afterwards? Are we here to have connections made for us? Does CCE have an educational obligation, or is it a material and professional obligation, where we feel entitled to high salary jobs because we go to a high tuition school?

Maybe the situation requires something else entirely.

Geddis says, “We’ve always been set to follow this pre-determined path of ‘go to a good high school, get the best grades, do these extracurriculars.’ We’ve sort of been living off of a checklist and knowing what to check. Like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go to the best college, now we’re at that college, what do we do?’”

Those pre-determined steps, says Geddis, often lead to “finance or consulting or to an abyss,” because “we’ve never been taught how to properly think about what we truly want as individuals rather than what the next step is that we’ve been told to do.”

What if we hedged our bets a little more? What if we did things that weren’t as easy to understand?

Students should take more calculated risks so that we can dive head first into the post-graduate abyss.

This involves a fundamental shift in our perspective that CCE has nothing to offer except for finance and consulting, but also perhaps a refusal to rely on CCE to point us to the obvious way to get a job.

The problem with OCR is twofold, and it falls on both CCE and students. We need to be honest about what we want to be when we grow up. And if we don’t know, we need to search harder than the OCR homepage. And if CCE actually provides support for that answer, maybe we won’t all end up on Wall Street.w *Name has been changed.

Illustrations by Alexa Economacos

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F L I G H T S O F FA N C Y

A

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CURIO COLUMBIANA recent complaint about elevator use in the Carman Hall Facebook group quickly descended into Columbia self-parody. With names changed, what follows is the whole slow-motion car crash.

Olive Yu There seems to be a very serious epidemic plaguing Carman Hall. The people on the lower floors like 3 and 4 just can’t seem to take the stairs. I wish that I could take the stairs and be in the lobby in a matter of seconds. However, I can’t. The amount of time I have to wait for the elevator nowadays because I live on the 11th floor is simply absurd.

The elevators are in high demand and if you can take the stairs, please just take them. Or you can get death glared by me for a good 10 seconds. Your choice.

Edit: Okay guys I didn’t expect this to become such a flame war. Let me put it in a different way. I don’t care if you use the elevator during the weekend if you’re on a lower floor.

Honestly. But when it’s during the school week and people are on tight schedules and we have so many elevator usage it makes life more difficult. I just wanted to raise awareness of the feelings of those who live on higher floors, during the school days. I am not trying to oppress anyone’s elevator usage. I am only asking for empathy within our community.

Ed Itorial and 9 others like this.

Anna Lytics Are you serious C28 Louls Ville Who are you? Fuck this. America is the land of the free. C44 Ed ltorial And also of obesity (...if yo ass is takin’ da lift to da lower floors). Let’s jus’ try to do the right thing, kna’l’mean C2 Anna Lytics What C22 Louis Ville You calling me fat? You calling the girls on floor 3/4 fat? Mate, let me give you a wake up call, they are fit and hot as fuck C20 Sven Gineer I also don’t appreciate your appropriation of the Ebonic vernacular C15 Ed ltorial Mate I’m just keeping it real. I ain’t called nobody fat; but it’s a possibility I ain’t willing to rule out. Stay fit, take the stairs. C0 Lynn Guini remember; these people are our neighbors. Everyone has those types of days when they don’t want to walk up any amount of stairs, accept their presence and make the most of it. C7 Barney Cull Especially after 5 hours of training C10 Peter Pants ^ PREACH C3 Ed ltorial Lynn Guini I expected better of you. I think we need to take a stand against injustice and quite frankly, an obvious manifestation of (some peoples’) privilege. It’s time to get up, stand up; stand up for our rights. get up, stand up; it’s only five damn flights 1&3 C0 Olive Yu I am completely fine with people taking the elevator to the third or fourth floor if they’re having a crappy day. But everyone is using the elevator now. We have to reach back to our traditional Carman roots and have stair users and elevator users. C0

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F L I G H T S O F FA N C Y

Sven Gineer I wish I could get an 11 floor stair workout every day, but instead I have to settle for 3. Check your privilege bruh C23 Cooke Edoh Bro I would just quit now and take the L. You lost on this one C7 Louls Ville 1st amendment. C39 Ed ltorial ^ still triflin’ bruh C0 Barney Cull Please stop talking like that. It’s offensive C22 Marvin Gardens Who are yall to criticize how I talk; who tf imposed an embargo on language? I’m just keepin’ it one hunnit flat out C0 Anna Mull When when you’re clearly saying something with the intent to mock a group of people it’s not cool or funny C25 Reggie Stration http://www.Iinguisticsociety.org/what-is-ebonics-african-americanenglish C18 Marvin Gardens Maybe come talk to me before you pass judgement ha dig C0 Reggie Stration I grew up in an African-American community where AAE was used often, I had the privilege of going to a private school where I basically had to unlearn AAE because I was looked down upon because of it. At school they called me “ghetto” because of the way I spoke until I started to talk like them. Even here at Columbia l shy away from using my slang because I want people to perceive me as “smart.” Using African American English is probably easier for you Holly Graham because you have never had to experience the racism behind it. For kids like me I have a very complicated relationship with my language because I was judged for it. You can say things like keepin it hunnin’ and have no judgement passed on you for it because you are white and privileged. Just like white people can keep appropriating black culture as if it makes them cool while black people have been shamed for those same things. Please don’t think I am attacking you, I just think you would do better knowing this. And as a future military officer, I think it’s important that you understand what different cultural sensitivities there are among people and how to better build a community of unity. C32 Anna Mull bruh you just got wrecked C5 Marvin Gardens Again, I invite you to come speak to me before you judge how I choose to speak. You’re not the only one who has had to change how they speak. But thank you for sharing, I do apologize if I offended you, and respect your opinion. I only ask that you respect mine in turn. C1 Reggie Stration I don’t think I understand your opinion, all I’ve seen is “you can’t tell me how to speak” in response to multiple people telling you that how you’re speaking is offensive. If you have a reason for speaking this way I would love to hear it. C2 Ken Tucky Olive Yu, I don’t take the elevator but I’ll start to just for you, and I have a feeling everyone on floor 3 and 4 will start to as well hope you’ll enjoy our 10 second death stares too. Thanks for the defense Louis Ville and Anna Lytics. #floor3forlife next time try not being so rude. I’m sure we would’ve had more compassion if there was a please or sincerity in your message instead of threatening us with “your choice.” C8 Sara Bellum Look, I wasn’t trying to be threatening. And it is hard. When you have to wait 5 minutes for the elevator and then it messes up what time you get to class. And there was a “please” in my message. The people on the lower floors honestly, do not understand the feelings of the people on the higher floors. C0 Ty Pryder Lol you probably thought you were gonna get so many likes on this C10 Ray Diation If your desire to get to the lobby is so urgent, you should probably consider taking the stairs. C0w

December 2015

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D O N O T PA S S L O W

Columbiopoly

By Alexa Economacos & Zane Bhansali When Columbia owns possibly the most land in New York, Monopoly seems an appropriate game. Try your luck at our take on the classic game of land-grabbing, gentrification, and eminent domain!’

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The Blue and White

D O N O T PA S S L O W

December 2015

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I N T E R N - AT I O N A L

Customs, But No Check What the visa lottery means for Columbia students

By Julie Moon

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few weeks ago, Omar Abboud, SEAS ’16 and operations research major, got asked to interview for his dream job at a tech company in New York. Just three and a half hours after Abboud received the interview invitation, “I got an email from them being like, ’Sorry, but we changed our mind,’” he says. “Basically, see you later.” The company explained that they were not able to sponsor H1B, the work authorization visa that Abboud needed as a non-U.S. citizen. Abboud never got the chance to interview. This has happened before: upwards of 25 companies have explicitly told him that they could not hire him because he is not a U.S. citizen. Omar holds Canadian and Lebanese passports.

At the beginning of this semester, Anna Hotter, CC ’16, an Austrian citizen who wants to go into the entertainment industry, got a fall internship at NBC Universal. After planning her schedule around work, registering only for 8:40 classes, she got a call from Human Resources about not including a social security number in her legal forms. After the representative realized Hotter did not have US citizenship, Hotter said, “She called me back [after having talked to her supervisor] and her tone was completely different. She in this very rehearsed, legally appropriate way, [told me] that they were not able to offer internships to international students because their internships are very much a pipeline program,” meaning that they’d like to hire after their interns graduate, “and that NBC does not want to sponsor international

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students.” They withdrew the offer, taking away not just the internship but the job it may well have led to.

This is not uncommon: at my own internship this summer, I watched as a Brazilian student was hired for her ideal job at a top publishing company and then, hours later, had that offer be retracted by the company’s HR department. The problem is especially severe at Columbia, which has the third largest international community of any university in the country. About 10,000 international students are enrolled at the university on F-1 status, a nonimmigrant visa issued by the federal government to those studying full-time in the U.S.

As F-1 holders, these students have the opportunity to remain in the U.S. for up to twelve months after graduating by applying for Optional Practical Training (OPT) work authorization status.

It’s optional for a reason: it costs $500 to apply to OPT, which can also be used for paid internships during school, though that time is subtracted from the twelve month allowance. (According to Columbia’s International Students and Scholars Office, about 3,000 internationals at Columbia are on OPT at any given time.) This presents a dilemma: like American students, internationals without US citizenship want to gain work experience before applying for full-time jobs, but they cannot work for pay without using up precious time that could be spent on a full-time job after graduating.

Compensated in Snacks Hotter has worked more than five unpaid internships over her time at Columbia in order to get around the OPT work restriction. “If I look back now, it’s kind of crazy how there was literally no compensation involved, ever,” she says. “In my current internship I’m being compensated in snacks. That’s the extent of it.”

To evade the OPT restriction, Barnard senior Maya Daver-Massion opted for Curricular Practical Training (CPT) which grants work authorization to students who take a course associated with

Illustration by Kellie Zhao

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I N T E R N - AT I O N A L their internship, such as an independent study. This requires the direct assistance of academic departments but, as Daver-Massion learned, many departments aren’t willing to implement such a policy.

Maya approached and was rejected by four different departments at Barnard. One department head told her: “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that to my professors.

Asking them to give you CPT is like asking them to teach you another class, and it’s not fair.” It wasn’t until finals week that she found out that she was able to accept her internship with CPT from the human rights department. “It was a lot of crying. A lot, a lot of meetings,” she says. “It was a month and a half full of just intense stress.”

Daver-Massion says that after her fiasco, Barnard is no longer offering CPT. Columbia, meanwhile, currently does not facilitate CPT for undergraduates, but the ISSO is reportedly working on making it a possibility. As well as getting around OPT, CPT is also critical for giving internationals access to nonprofessional opportunities. Without a CPT, I cannot volunteer at a hospital in New York, or even volunteer for the national park system over the summer.

Winning the Lottery After OPT expires comes the challenge of staying in the U.S. In order for F-1 students to be able to work in the U.S. past the OPT period (12 months for nonSTEM Bachelor’s degree students; 17 for STEM, and 24 for M.A. students), they must obtain the six-year H1B visa, which is often a stepping stone for permanent residency in the US. Students can only apply for the H1B through the sponsorship of an employer, but many companies don’t have the financial and legal means to offer sponsorship—or they simply prefer domestic employees to foreign ones. (An extra $1,225 can be paid to process the application in 15 days, rather than the usual six months.)

For many internationals, recent developments have further complicated the situation. Due to a 2014 lawsuit, the current 17-month OPT extension

December 2015

for STEM students, for example, is projected to end.

Sponsorship used to guarantee a visa, but now it no longer does: sponsorship puts you into a pool from which a lottery is drawn. Even after getting sponsorship, in other words, you can still be rejected and made to leave the U.S., with no return on your $825 application fee. (Or, if you paid for express processing, your $1,225.) Companies, who also spend financial and legal resources on the process, don’t see the benefit of doing it for someone who may well not work for them afterwards. Hotter notes that multinational companies increasingly encourage internationals here to apply where they have citizenship.

Moreover, the likelihood of obtaining sponsorship varies among industries: Center for Career Education (CCE) Dean Kavita Sharma admits it is virtually impossible to get sponsorship from nonprofit employers in the civic engagement field, unlike in finance and consulting. This frequently influences a F-1 student’s major, and career, selection. “We talk about career exploration—think about what you love, what you’re interested in,” she says. “But if you’re an international student, and that lands you in an industry where, you know what, they’re never gonna sponsor—that’s antithetical to what a liberal arts education is about.”

ISSO Communication Barrier One thing that made encounters with U.S. employers even more difficult for international students is that they feel inadequately informed.

Columbia College senior and Canadian citizen Jack Gross, for example, spent his last two summers working outside the U.S. as he had no idea he could use OPT before graduating. If he had known, he might have. “Ideally you could have every international student have one person who checks in with them every few months, saying, ’Hey, have you thought about how hard and horrible it’s going to be when you have to deal with the immigration system after you graduate?’” he jokes. He thinks they could use more serious language than they do: “This is not about getting a

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I N T E R N - AT I O N A L form signed, this is about the difference between illegal and not in this country.”

But when students look to ISSO for information, they may unwittingly be looking in the wrong place. While ISSO offers information to students by describing issues related to F-1 status on its website (which looks like it was designed in 1990) and offering a few workshops about how to apply for OPT each semester, neither is designed to help students with the essential question of finding an employer willing to sponsor a long-term visa after graduating and completing the OPT. As Hotter says, “ISSO has been helpful in cases where I lost my I­-20 form, and they sent it to me in Austria; it has been helpful in trying to fast­-track an OPT application. What they haven’t been helpful in is creating realistic expectations for what life is like after graduating.” Not surprisingly, the most contact the students I interviewed had with ISSO was getting documents checked before traveling over break.

That could be changing. While ISSO Director and Vice Provost David Austell emphasizes that US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy for internationals is “beyond the control of the university entirely” and “going to play out one way or the other in Congress,” he adds that “here on the ground at Columbia, there are things that we can do.” The ISSO is working to both expand its presence on campus (this semester, it’s piloting a “Fridays in Lerner” weekly session for students to be able to ask advisors questions in the building, rather than going all the way to the main office on Morningside Drive) and re-design its archaic website, so that

students can better understand information related to F-1 status. Similarly, in January, the International Student Advisory Board plans to start focus groups for internationals about the job search process, so that students can share their experiences.

But ultimately, it is CCE, not ISSO, that can advise students on remaining in the U.S. after college with a work visa. Of the five senior students that I interviewed, none of them had ever made an advising appointment with CCE because they weren’t aware that CCE would offer guidance on the visa issue.

Neither had I. Like Hotter, this semester, I also accepted a job at my dream workplace, the New York Review of Books. After a couple weeks of work, when I realized that this would use up the 12 months I had after graduating to work, I quit. Had I approached CCE instead of ISSO, I might have thought twice about applying to the position.

Most internationals, rather than receiving information from Columbia officially, learn about visa problems anecdotally from other F-1 students, often through nightmarish stories ranging from having job offers withdrawn to being forced to go back home.

Different Perspectives Yet Sharma says that “sometimes talking about this amongst your peers can just make it worse.” She recommends “talking to people who have a longer, different perspective that can tell stories, and help contextualize what you’re experiencing.” She urges students to sign up for extensive one-on-one appointments with advisors, all of whom are trained to work with international students.

“We will talk about how they can find employers who sponsor [because] we subscribe to certain resources that allow internationals to identify employers who have sponsored in the previous year,” she says. According to Sharma, this is more helpful

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Illustration by Kellie Zhao

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I N T E R N - AT I O N A L to internationals than applying to jobs on LionShare and attending networking events in isolation.

Clearly, there is a communication gap between internationals and CCE. Of the students I interviewed, none were aware of CCE’s 4-year ’action’ plan for internationals, a PDF that outlines visarelated concerns from freshman to senior year, such as the selection of major—which “does play a part in whether you’re sponsored or not.” Neither had anyone used its new app, which allows students to learn which employers at the Undergraduate Career Fair are willing to sponsor. Such a list could have been helpful to Daver-Massion, who recounted wasting hours at various networking events only to find out at the end of the night that employers weren’t willing to sponsor her.

Certainly, it is internationals’ responsibility to seek out resources—but without knowing that such help is available, many F-1 students will feel helpless.

Without adequate communication, as Gross puts it, the administration risks being just as much of an “impenetrable bureaucratic system” as the USCIS it’s supposed to make intelligible to students.

Plan B Part of advising is to help students build resilience, as well as to establish what Assistant Dean Niamh O’Brien calls “Plan B.” “For example, if you want to be a curator in MoMA—we’ve had an international who wants that. We’ll talk about how you have to do a PhD. You’ll probably have to work at a national gallery in some other country, build your reputation.

Because they will sponsor for specialists. But they won’t sponsor entry-level,” says O’Brien. “So we also talk about long-term, how internationals do get sponsorship, not just entry-level.”

Director of Education, Outreach, & International Student Support Chia-Ying Pan says that the new focus groups in January will address questions like, “So is it true that staying in the United States at this very moment is the only way to define me as being successful? How do people come to the decision that I want a job in this country and this is the only thing I want?”

To students like Hotter and Daver-Massion, the answer to the first question is a passionate yes. Hotter says that, having been educated in English since the age of 16, she would not be able to work comfortably in an exclusively German-speaking office. Daver-

December 2015

Massion, who is half-Indian and half-German, and grew up in Japan like her parents, speaks to many other internationals when she says that she doesn’t feel as strong of a connection to her country of citizenship, as she does to the States. “Once you go through college here and you’ve invested so much time and energy into the culture and people, and money into the school—you want to stay in the U.S., you know?” she says.

Being denied work opportunities after getting educated in the U.S. is, for many, a collapsing of their American dream. Says Abboud, “My grandfather was a Palestinian refugee; he instilled in me the value of education as a means to success. So that’s a difficult thing to be thinking about.” As an interviewer for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, Abboud worries about incoming students who look forward to attending Columbia. “There are people that are leaving countries that are in extremely bad economic and political situations, especially in the Middle East, and I can’t be the person that tells them, It’s not as bright as it seems to you right now,” he says.

Only time will tell how USCIS policy will change. But until then, as Abboud says, “Either [incoming internationals] need to address their expectations and they need to realize that graduating with a U.S. college degree is different than finding U.S. jobs. Or, Columbia needs to be doing a better job of providing these resources to people so that they understand what their options are, and what they can do and not do.” Clearly, both need to happen.w

Sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University.

This funding is made possible through a generous gift from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

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M easure

for

M easure

Heart impale the glistening sharpened nail to hole and wriggle deep and plunder all. And plunge each beat a sour sweet tangerine leaks citric sparks suffocated into blood orange. —Meghan Hartman e

Flesh afresh the flame scorch high beyond the ground but to soft lime sky. Breathe not a tear comes flood abound, and echo softly drowning sounds. —Meghan Hartman

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The Blue and White

V E R I LY V E R I TA S

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS

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In which our hero has the salmon

oath to leave the cloistered, wood-panelled den of his dear Morningside Heights residence, Verily gingerly stepped over a crawling toddler—that miserly screaming, V.V. thought, must be from Jersey— and exited his towncar, bidding his driver, Parker, farewell with a slight, dignified wave. Immediately doubling at the waist and pulling the collar of his herringbone topcoat above his eyes and aquiline nose, V.V. instantly regretted asking dear Parker to drop him here, at the foul heart of Times Square, as opposed to the New York Center for Fiction, his destination a few blocks east. I can be a man of the people, V.V. had thought as they wound south along the Henry Hudson Parkway, before sending a quiet blessing to his hero, Robert Moses. But these filthy fanny-packed masses ....

Clutching his tan attaché case to his heaving breast in protection, V.V. trudged down 47th Street, hoping that the evening’s itinerary—some Indian woman called Jumper or Juniper in conversation with the English translator of the esteemed Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels—would make up for the drudgery of making it to the venue.

However, standing under the crimson flag for the Center, V.V. was aghast. “Event location changed to the Center for Jewish History?! Egads!” The evening, V.V. feared, was shot to hell.

He would have to drown his frustration in good company, and not wanting to make Parker brave the idiotic, I <3 NY-swaddled frenzy of midtown, V.V. made for the Columbia Club.

V.V. pulled his membership card from his calfskin leather wallet and shuddered in horror at the iniquity of presenting it to the vile orange and black of Princeton. We own New York, he hissed. How is it that we must rent from these carrot-colored cretins?

V.V. walked into what amounted to the lobby of a

December 2015

roadside Best Western. The mediocrity did not end there.

The menu for the Woodrow Wilson Dining Room (V.V. resisted the urge to hurl spittle at the sign, muttering Hamilton’s name under his breath, face darkened by the thought of Wilson’s fellow Princeton alum Aaron Burr) was insidiously chatty.

Settling into the dark wood chair, V.V. glowered at the placid face of his waiter and inquired about the Tuscan kale salad, featuring Bermuda onions (“Named so because they get lost?” V.V. enquired, acidly) and a bizarre variety of goatslash-sheepsmilk cheese.

“Halloumi?” This was almost as bad as the Jumper lady.

“The greens are gently massaged in vinaigrette, then tossed with pine nuts and finished with some lemon zest,” the waiter intoned. “But perhaps you’d be interested in the heirloom tomato salad with micro arugula spears.”

“Damn you, just bring me a steak,” V.V. hissed, tossing his menu across the empty dining room.

“New York strip, hanger steak, Wagyu, filet mignon, t-bone, or cowboy cut, sir?”

“Cowboy steak? You know what, I’ll have the hidden fjord salmon,” V.V. said, defeated. He could at least delight in the image of beleaguered men in pristine chef’s hats prancing through the Norwegian wilderness, searching for fish, cleaver in hand.

Prepared for the oncoming onslaught of bland, soggy-skinned salmon, V.V. watched his meal arrive with trepidation. Dipping his spoon into the pale green sweet pea risotto, V.V. raised the silverware to his mouth cautiously. It was ... divine. The pea tendrils married perfectly with the earthy morels, the tender flesh was delicate and fresh—even the beets were good, the beets! V.V. drifted off to slumber in the barely-better-than-EC-couch in a sated stupor.w

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BROADS AND BREWS

Behind Bar Talking to 1020’s female bartenders

By Hallie Nell Swanson

T

hings are heating up unusually early at 1020 Amsterdam Ave. It’s 10 p.m. on a weekend and there is an eclectic mix in the packed bar, though the undergrads are nowhere to be found. What seems to be a reunion is going on in the front, where a rowdy group of guys are playing darts, and some old dudes play pool in the back. A woman is telling a bartender to put the drink on the ‘Wonder tab.’ “People are always like, did you make your name up, and I’m like, it’s on my fucking credit card.”

Behind the bar are two Columbia students in identical tight black tank tops, more or less the 1020 bartender uniform, flitting from customer to bar to customer to tab. Girls from Columbia have been bartending at 1020 for four or five years now. The ex-bartender recalls she came in at the time when “the professionals” were starting to leave, and “he just got pretty amateurs.” The Columbia bartenders change up the otherwise exclusively male, slightly on the older side of things, staff. As usual, there’s a male barback and a male bouncer, “to make us feel safe,”

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says one bartender. They will break up fights and eject people who need to be ejected, if only because male patrons won’t listen to the girls.

While the guys are on payroll, the girls are working for tips. The division of labor neatly encompasses 1020’s schizophrenic identity: old man dive bar Sunday through Tuesday; undergrad scene Thursday through Saturday. (Wednesday remains disputed territory.)

On a typical night, one tells me, the bar will start off quiet, with “a wave of drunk undergrads” coming through between 11 and 1. “By 1:30 a.m., only an undergraduate would want to actually be there,” says another. From there on, it’s “a shitshow” until closing time at 4. The bartenders deal with hazards ranging from having a knife pulled on them, “misogynistic Russians;” “this wasted wrestler adamant that my boobs should go on a date with him;” or a Delta Sig guy throwing up on the pool table, falling asleep on it half naked and then leaving an $80 tab open. (“Usually if you haven’t paid after $50, we try to close you out because then people don’t pay,” says an ex-bartender.)

After closing time, each bartender takes home the tips for half the bar: new girls typically work the front of the bar (“You’re a fresh face” to patrons, reasons the ex-bartender) where you learn to converse with people, and get better tips. At the back, the bartender gets to control the music, but has to constantly churn out drinks to a rowdier crowd of line-cutters.

“It’s really infuriating,” she recalls.

The job pays well. A slow night will yield $250350; a good night, as much as $450-500. On big nights, like Homecoming, “when it sucks, you walk away with a lot of money,” says one bartender. “It’s worth it in some respects.” Another adds, “I work one day a week and I’m financially independent.” The ex-bartender says the management prefers girls who need the money, so will take the job more seriously— “which is really fair,” she says, noting that girls have been fired for being on their phone too much or taking too many cigarette breaks.

Management is, by all accounts, invasive.

Illustration by Alexandra Warrick

The Blue and White

BROADS AND BREWS The owner lives two flights above the bar. Variously described as “omnipresent” and “a little weird,” he is rarely seen except by staff. Still, cameras above the bar mean he can see what’s going on, and he’ll call down if he doesn’t like it, say the girls. This can include what’s on the TV (sports are not allowed) or the music, which is meant to keep up the atmosphere.

It also extends to dress.

The ex-bartender remembers witnessing a previous employee answering the bar’s phone to have the owner “verbally abuse” her for wearing sweats, and recalls him phoning her to demand she take off the flannel shirt she was wearing over her tank top.

He also pairs certain girls together in the belief that they’ll make more money if they look good together, or perhaps because they’re more fun to watch on camera. (The ex-bartender notes a progression in the past few years from a “tall, dark haired, ethnically ambiguous” type to more “honey” blondes.)

“Dress code was a huge thing,” she recalls, “a bigger thing than I expected.” Working at the bar was, she said, “the only time I wore a push up bra in the past five years.” The reasoning is simple: as a current bartender puts it, “The sluttier you dress, the more tips you get. I know that sounds fucked up.” “If I just wear a t-shirt, I’ll still make money,” she adds, but it doesn’t hold the same prospect of “a 50 dollar tip one night from that one guy who’s just creepy as fuck.”

“Our managers tell us to kind of play up the sexuality, and our owner told us be fun, be friendly,” says one bartender. “Which makes sense, you want customers.” One girl was fired for not obeying the maxim of “when you’re working, you don’t have a boyfriend.” Unavailability doesn’t get great tips. “The whole point is to make the male customers, who most of the time are the ones paying, to feel interesting and happy. They’ll drink more, buy more, spend more in the bar and then everyone makes more money,” she says.

The girls are keenly aware of the tricky balance they traverse as the precarious elements in the bar’s employment structure. They may make more than the guys, but the requirements are different. “You had to constantly play on the fact that you are unavailable and yet available,” says the ex-bartender. “The social politics, manipulating that image, it was a very integral part [of working at 1020]” One bartender wrote a paper—Deconstructing 1020: Sexism and Power in Columbia Bar Culture—for a class. “Bars, as institu-

December 2015

tions, are designed to sell sex,” she writes, and goes on to detail the harassment and manipulation she has witnessed and been subjected to.

Why not leave? Clearly, it’s a good gig: bartenders get their friends the same jobs, and most of the girls there now were hired through friends who worked at the bar, either as female weekend bartenders or male staff.

But the girls don’t hang out at the bar so much anymore. “When you spend 8 hours here a weekend, you don’t need to come the next day for another 4 hours,” reasons one. The ex-bartender says she ended up resenting it. “I ended up being so worn out by the idea of going to work,” she said. “Initially you feel included in the behind-the-scenes section. After a while you want to go home.”

There’s some fondness, though, as she recollects, “I’ve kept most of the phone numbers slash poems slash drawings slash things” that bar patrons left for her. “The number of phone numbers was absurd. It was like a joke.” (She went on “multiple dates” as a result, she says.) Another says she would “love to write a book” about bartending there. But she adds, “‘I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t pay off. It’s fun and stuff, but it’s a job.” They’re currently hiring.w

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

Portrait of the Artist A conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

By Zane Bhansali Wayne Koestenbaum is a prolific painter, poet, essayist, and critic known for Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon, My 1980s and Other Essays, Humiliation, and, most recently, The Pink Trance Notebooks. His work spans genres and his obsessions range from reality TV to Roland Barthes, Andy Warhol, and hair. Currently, Koestenbaum teaches painting at the Yale School of Art and is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Senior Illustrator Zane Bhansali, CC ’17, sat down to talk and draw with Koestenbaum in his Chelsea studio.

The Blue and White: We’re in your studio and we’re surrounded by paintings, but my engagement, and I think a lot of people’s engagement with you, is primarily in writing. And in your writing you make a point of identifying yourself as a writer very explicitly. Why is that?

Wayne Koestenbaum: Well, I am a writer, and I like self-consciousness of all forms, and I like artifacts that know that they’re artifacts. They don’t get more cerebral because they know that they’re artifacts, they get more stimulated and effervescent. I’m thinking of my beloved progenitor Robert Walser who’s a really amazing, tragic figure. A Swiss-German writer from the earlier part of the 20th century who committed himself to a madhouse and stopped writing, but whose writing is in a constant state of freefall self-reference. And so I think that the constant or frequent gestures of selfconscious inscription of the fact that I am writing reassure me. I would hope that they make the texture of the work itself more vulnerable and porous to a reader’s entrance and touch.

B&W: Would you say that it’s more the fact that you’re constantly reassuring yourself and the reader that you’re a writer? Would you say that you do that when you’re painting as well to reassure yourself that you’re a painter?

WK: I’m always aware that I am painting because of the mechanics and the theater of painting which you call paint and canvas. And because painting is still an unfamiliar practice to me, and an exotic practice

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... and an expensive practice—I’m very aware that I’m doing it and that I’m investing in it. It’s taking time, it’s messy. Writing is more invisible. It doesn’t require much technology and it’s silent. And it’s undetectable.

B&W: What’s your job as a writer?

WK: I’m thinking of an essay I wrote about the painter Adam McEwen. And I had done two studio visits, I had thought a lot about it, I had a lot of notes ... And then I didn’t know what to do, and I burst forward on the page and I made a mess for about four pages. It felt kind of exalted and creamy as a result. And then I thought, “Ok, now my job is, I really have to talk about these five things of his work. So let me make a list of these five nouns and now I will do those.” So my job is to get out of the labyrinth that I’ve set up in the essay.

B&W: One of your own devising?

WK: One of my own devising, or ... maybe a sentence is a labyrinth and I need to get out of a sentence.

Maybe I’m talking about a death wish, or entropy, or a wish to stimulate myself into rapid motion but then quell or tranquilize the motion in something like a death wish, but maybe like an overdosed love potion; a swoon.

B&W: Humiliation is obviously a big motivator for you and you call it your idee fixe at one point. You talk about the pleasure of being humiliated, the redemptive properties of being humiliated.

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N WK: I feel very purged by having written a book about humiliation ... and so I actually don’t feel very addicted to, or in chains to, the experience of humiliation. What I am aware of are sudden syncings of ... you could call it ego-structure, ego-solidity: one’s conviction that one has a right to exist. I wouldn’t say it’s always under the dramatic sign of humiliation, but I’m interested in and prone to moments of identity spoilage and temporary but eternal-seeming collapse of the sensation of viability. And that oscillation between viability and non-viability is just a metronome on the “whereof.” It can be even in the process of doing a painting. At the moment I’m looking at a painting that I like, I remember when I didn’t like it and I foresee the moment when I’m not gonna like it anymore. Or when someone else isn’t gonna like it.

B&W: Andre Bazin has this theory about the reasons humans create art being a mummification.

WK: A mummification. I love that.

B&W: An unintentional mummification and a desire to preserve themselves in some sort of fashion.

WK: Wow. Wow. This notion of amassing that I mentioned earlier is very important to me. Collecting and building up an archive or a body of work. I’ve always counted the number of poems I’ve written, counted the number of books I’ve written, counted the number of drawings or paintings. There’s something compulsive or defensive and fearful about this wish, perhaps, in Bazin’s words to mummify or wrap myself in what I’ve produced. When I think of death—when I think of sudden death, or the possibility of sudden death, like in Paris recently, the massacre ... I really don’t think about loss of sensation or loss of future as much as I think of the loss of all the things I have made and the fact that they could be thrown away or never found. It seems like a very childish and literal interpretation of death.

B&W: But in a way those things are you.

WK: Yeah. I’m watching you draw and I must say to see—because you are erasing. And that’s a real amazing thing. I’m so bad at doing that.

B&W: Erasing gets so stigmatized in art, I don’t

December 2015

know.

WK: No, I think in any drawing thing it’s considered the only way to do anything. But for me it’s very hard to break the contact of the pencil with the page and interrupt it.

B&W: I can see every time you went down you...

WK: I started all over again. That’s also because I’m using a pen. How do you ... what are you using for the work.

B&W: This is just a mechanical pencil.

WK: Staedtler. And you like these because you don’t have to sharpen them.

B&W: Yeah. It depends. I have a whole brand of art pencils that I use too from HB to 8b but I like this more because more often than not when I’m doing pencil the thing that intrigues me is that line can imitate form. So having the thinness of the line is in itself what draws me to pencil. If I’m going to do pencil that’s usually why I do it. If I’m going to lay down a thick swath of value I would rather just use marker usually.

WK: And so when you draw my face, what’s the first thing? Do you first look for the overall egg of the face or the oval and do the whole form or do you start with the detail?

B&W: It depends. When I’m drawing from imagination I do the egg of the face. When I’m drawing people I usually just go feature by feature because that matters more in getting a likeness. But I haven't drawn a portrait from life in so long—I’m really out of practice. It’s really bad.

WK: It’s hard. But it looks like the proportions are really good. I’m going to imagine having my eraser at the ready. This is very similar to the way I was talking about writing. There’s a kind of nervousness that overtakes me and I have to get it all down. I’m loath to stop or look. Once I enter the trance of observation I think if I look away or if I stop the spell of composition it will be shattered and I can’t stop. Even though I know that if I erase something it will give me a fresh start. So I’m gonna work on this erasure thing.

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N B&W: There’s an interesting trend I’ve noticed recently, at least with my generation.

So much of how people of my age become engaged in art these days is through fandom or wanting to express love for a specific book or movie or TV show or character. So you see a lot of art online and a lot of the really talented artists are doing these fan illustrations of their favorite characters. I think there’s a whole other art world being developed that is more about illustrative and aesthetic meaning rather than indexical or symbolic meaning.

WK: Are you part of that new generation?

B&W: I think so.

WK: And what are your fandoms?

B&W: Oh man. Pokémon. I can say that Pokémon unabashedly shaped my life as an artist. I don’t know.

Mad Men. I draw a lot of pictures of Don Draper.

WK: I didn’t ever develop as an artist until middle age but I had a kind of underground life as a kid as an artist in that mode. And certainly, in elementary school I was fascinated by nudity—men and women, pretty equally men and women, and I would draw naked bodies from imagination or from any pictures I could find. I constructed a series of little scrapbooks that I called nudism handbooks that you could call book art. Collage. I also drew stars that I liked. Very painstaking pencil drawings of just their faces. I had never seen any art really, and I didn’t understand it as—I certainly would have only understood it within the realm of illustration.

B&W: A friend recently went to a screening of Pasolini’s Medea where you apparently did the introduction.

WK: Yes!

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B&W: And he said that you talked for so long that the people there were trying to get you off stage. Is that at all true?

WK: Well I don’t think it’s because I talked so long.

I think it’s because they didn’t like what I was saying or they didn’t like the notion that I was even ... I think there were a few hecklers ... I think it was a most unusual, mortifying experience that I don’t even care to discuss.

B&W: Would you call it humiliating?

WK: No. I would consider it...

B&W: If you don’t want to discuss it...

WK: No, I would say that it was—my assumption was that I was invited to introduce a film, I’ve done this before, and that I would give a ten or fifteen ... I was paid to do this thing, and I was going to talk before a film. I quickly realized that there were a few people in the audience who didn’t want any kind of introduction to the film—or certainly not a queer one. I think it was more homophobia, honestly. Because there’s a certain kind of homophobia ... I was speaking very explicitly about the homoerotic, and even pedophilic, dimensions of Pasolini’s film and I was talking explicitly about the plot of the film, which is a myth. And that people didn’t want me to give away the plot, but it’s the story of Medea, so it’s a plot that’s 1000’s of years old.

B&W: So would you say it’s homophobia stemming from queerness placed somewhere it wasn’t expected?

WK: Yes, so even though they would never ... much homophobia doesn’t think it’s homophobia and doesn’t say it’s homophobia—because why would it— any more than racism says, “I’m racist.” It’s blind. It’s dumb. And so I think that in that case the homophobia came from a distaste for intellectual over-elaboration. For fey interiority, for detail, for verbal ostentation, and pleasure taken in words.

B&W: Interesting. Do you think that that’s the more present form of homophobia or racism that we encounter today? The unknowing one?

Illustration by Wayne Koestenbaum

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N WK: Well there’s all kinds. So I can’t just say it’s the unknowing one. But I think in my relatively privileged, insular, New York life where I’m not around a lot of virulent gay bashing of my body, for example, I am aware of various forms of dismissal and silencing that happen around other things that aren’t explicitly called queer but that have to do with cultural values that are queer. And I would call them prurient— some of the things I stand for and that I feel I have been scapegoated for are prurient overinterpretation, pleasure taken in services, pleasure taken in the wrong ways: flamboyantly, conspicuously.

B&W: You said you don’t watch TV. Even though the cover of My 1980s is Blondie, you stopped listening to pop music in the 1980s.

WK: More or less. I checked out Taylor Swift and Adele yesterday, and I just listened to a song and loved it by Joe Moe. So I’m alive and I’m in the world.

B&W: Is that what’s necessary to be alive and in the world, listening to pop music?

WK: No, not at all. I like a certain freedom from trend. I have the advantage through age, education, distance, hermit-like life, absorption in my own asocial, antisocial vocations of making that I don’t have to pay attention to what other people consider the important things to pay attention to. And I can pay attention to what I want to pay attention to. Which are usually things that are off-topic.

B&W: Would you say that your reasons for not watching television and not listening to pop are the same?

There’s a recent thought among a lot of film critics and scholars that TV is becoming the forefront for more artistic expression.

WK: It probably is. I’m sure it is. Movies are expensive and there aren’t movie theaters anymore. And TV is so diversified and strange and filled with weird little things that I’m sure there are tons of culs de sac and villages all over TV. For example it would be really easy to say that the poetry to which I belong is pathetic, insular, elitist, dead, etcetera. But I’m very well aware that there are forms of dissident passionate making and ... as I get out my eraser, because your ear is too close in my drawing to your eyes.

December 2015

B&W: [...] Well there’s “camp,” of course, which is probably highly related to what you talk about and what you do.

WK: I think so. I used to be very identified with the word, I’d say, until 1993 when I published my book The Queen’s Throat. And I made the argument in that book briefly, in the third chapter, I think, on divas, that camp is another form of sublimity, not of failure.

And so I took a turn away from camp towards sublimity. But sublimity found in odd and degraded and soiled places. And that’s different than camp. Camp is a really beautiful historical place that I still visit a lot. But I don’t visit it as camp anymore, I visit it as a different kind of shrine. A shrine of indefatigability, minority, majesty, effort, loneliness, corpuscular stardom ...

B&W: One of my favorite quotes from Advice for Young People was “utilize your youthful sexiness before it runs dry.” Why does sexiness run dry?

WK: You know it’s so funny, I just had an interview the other day and somebody else quoted that. That’s so interesting to me, that that gets quoted. That’s a big coincidence. Well I hope it doesn’t run dry ... he says. I didn’t understand that I actually qualified visually as a sexual being. To that extent, I didn’t understand that when I entered a room or that when I was with another human being, that I physically registered at all. That I wasn’t invisible.

B&W: Do you think there’s a tie between confessional media—social media—and humiliation? In the vein of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter ...

WK: Well clearly there’s a very documented connection between the two, and I would say that therefore humiliation lies to some extent in the desire to be seen or recognized at all. And that’s why invisibility can be a blessing. That’s why I think sometimes the best way to make art is to be invisible. Even though invisibility can hurt.

B&W: I got a message ... Have you ever used Tinder?

WK: No. Tell me about it.

B&W: So Tinder is a dating app. I think it’s actually pretty genius, because it’s online dating, but it’s on

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N your phone, so it’s not stigmatized.

WK: So it’s like Grindr?

B&W: Yeah, it’s like Grindr, except it’s not explicitly gay. Also, I would say it’s less focused on the sexual or the hookup aspect of it, although it definitely still has it.

WK: So it’s for straight and—it’s for all sorts of?

B&W: Yeah. So for example I have it set to show both men and women, and you can do that or have it either way.

WK: Are you bi?

B&W: Yeah.

WK: That’s cool.

B&W: [Laughs] Is bi cool?

WK: Yeah, it is. It’s making a big comeback.

B&W: Yeah, I think that’s true.

WK: Is there a bi-consciousness at Columbia?

B&W: Yeah, I’d say there’s a bi-consciousness but I wouldn’t say I’m part of any bi community.

WK: I know, the minute I said it I thought God forbid.

B&W: I think you’re right, bi is “cool.” With all that that implies right now. Oh yeah, I matched with a girl on Tinder recently and she messaged me and asked, “What is the part of your body that you are most in love with?”

WK: That’s a great question.

B&W: I said my hair.

WK: Is that the part of other people’s bodies that you’re most in love with generally?

B&W: I realized recently that it is, yeah ... I think so.

B&W: I realized that I think I appreciate it equally in both men and women but it has disproportionate measure for women than for men, and that it will trump other things I find conventionally attractive if someone has good hair.

WK: I think hair is really interesting. I like hearing the word. There’s nothing more interesting in the world than hair.

B&W: At one point in My 1980s, you describe a postman, or a UPS man who you fantasized about who you thought maybe the entire town of New Haven was fantasizing about.

WK: Oh, they were in love with him.

B&W: You say, “If you want me to describe him I will.” Would you describe him for me?

WK: Yeah. He looks like a really young and much sweeter Tom Selleck combined with Sal Mineo combined with kind of a goofy bookish Marlon Brando, I mean, super muscular, very olive complexion. Kind of Mediterranean, whatever that kind of look would be. And I always thought Italian because there’s a big New Haven Italian-American community. But there was something both super macho and Playgirl circa 1978. He looked like Playgirl 1978.

But with genuine non-homophobic friendliness. And just—so built. Just so flamboyant of a physical package arriving at one’s doorstep for that simple delivery of an envelope or a box that it just seemed like an embarrassment of riches.

B&W: Do you think that the reason so many porn setups start with a mailman is just because the word package can be used?

WK: Maybe it’s the word package, but I also think it’s the notion of solicitation, knocking, ringing the bell, privacy—the intimacy of a regular daily visitor and the kind of genre specificity of a uniform, which is like Lana Turner’s femininity is like a uniform like a UPS man’s. Costumes like that make desire function the way a sonnet makes a personal conflict. Structures and uniforms abet and nourish desire, I think.w

WK: Men and women? Or more women?

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The Blue and White

PAY I N G T H E B I L L S

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

December 2015

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DIGITALIA COLUMBIANA These excerpts were culled from documents left on Columbia’s lab computers. We encourage our readers to submit their own digitalia finds to us, via email, at bwgossip@columbia.edu.

Dear Participants, The Lab Staff would like to apologize—you received this week’s weekly study digest in error due to a mistake on the part of the sender of emails. Rest assured, the sender of emails has been sacked, and you should receive no further weekly emails.

Best, -The Lab Staff e At a recent CCSC meeting, Dean Valentini gave a lengthy speech about the virtues of fun and the “Beginner’s Mind.” An excerpt: “This is a long time ago in a place far away, I worked really hard and I was the valedictorian in my class and I did work, but I actually had fun and it makes me sad that this isn’t fun. While it may be an issue here, I want to see if it’s generational—my son at U of C was in a frat, but it looked like he didn’t have as much fun as I did. That makes me sad. My generation took the fun out of adolescence and turned it into a career. This isn’t an idyllic time, but you should be able to do work and still have fun. I don’t know why this is. ‘Without Bacchanal, I wouldn’t have any fun’— It’s in April! This Friday morning, just ask yourself what you need in order to have fun. In order to have fun, what would you want to have provided? I’m flummoxed by this.” e Then I saw the movie Madagascar, in which a lion (called Leo, of course) escapes the zoo to find his birthplace in Africa. The movie left the twelve-yearold me in tears, because I finally figured out the right place for wild animals to live—the wildness.

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Interfaith and Agnostic Open Mic: Come check out this cool open mic night next Thursday. The goal of the event is to showcase how members of the Columbia University and Barnard College community are sophisticated enough to be able to disagree and still be amicable with each other. There will be food, drinks (non-alcoholic), and a prize for the best performance of the night. e James Colgrove hardly considers himself a snob. “I am,” he declares “a man of the people.”

During his biweekly lectures, Colgrove slackens the pedagogical reins to encourage class participation. He poses large questions to the students before him. They attempt to answer. Some say that having any sort of discussion among seventy students is a futile exercise. He calls them pessimists. “I am, after all” he explains “a man of the people.”

Lectures are hardly confined to the highfalutin realm of spoken words. Colgrove regularly employs audio-visual aids. Some people learn differently, he points out. As you know, he observed “I am a man of the people.”

Though a tenured professor at the school of public health takes in more simoleons than the average coed, Colgrove doesn’t assert his rank sartorially.

He wears his dress shirts one size too large. Ties are not for him either. He prefers leaving the top button undone, letting some of his undershirt show. He is, if you must know, a man of the people.w

The Blue and White

CAMPUS GOSSIP ALL WORK AND NO PLAY A B&W editor was invited to a Facebook event titled “Quench His Thirst One Last Time: Brad Badgley's Going Away Drinks.” Badgley is the outgoing Greek Life director. e A class called Vacation—call number 29278—is unlisted in the directory but open to registration. It has no points or meeting time. e Former CCSC President Peter Bailinson recently spoke at a Columbia Economics Society career panel.

Heavy lies the crown of McKinsey campus outreach. e DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH The theme for a recent party at Delta Psi was S&M. Over at Fiji was ‘Champagne and Shackles.’ e A “dance/stripper pole” is being sold on a community Facebook group for $75 OBO. Pickup near Columbia. e In response to Carman 13’s Trans Awareness Month bulletin board being torn down four times, residence hall leadership put up an installation explaining the vandalism in the lobby that states “HATE HAPPENS AT COLUMBIA.” To its right is the torn bulletin board, encased in glass. e The private Buy | Sell | Trade at Barnard Facebook group regularly hosts posts bemoaning how XS clothes are just too big. A group named “Fat Buy Sell Trade,” the name the subject of some dispute, launched in response. They recently held a clothes swap event, entitled “So Thick Everyone at BST is So Uncomfortable.” It’s for sizes 6 and up. Gird your loins. e PLUS ÇA CHANGE The group behind the Barnard winter housing peti-

December 2015

tion is called Barnard College Student Coalition for Financially Insecure Students (For Students, By Students). Or, to our campus alphabet soup of acronyms, BCSCfFIS(FS,BS). e Camille’s is due to be replaced by an arts and crafts beer hall. The hall, literally called Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor, will diversify Columbia’s developing bar scene, which most recently added beer hall Amity Hall, beer hall Bernheim and Schwartz, and beer hall West End Hall. e Deantini, who has run into social media picture problems before, changes his profile picture with enthusiasm every few days. Recent updates include a photo of a fundraising pamphlet, a Columbia College Student Ambassadors mug, the logo for Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs, and a photo of a man who is definitely not him. e DUE RECOMPENSE Perhaps to remind us that they’re part of the Core, the Phys Ed department has been offering free t-shirts to seniors who’ve fulfilled the requirement. The back of the shirts feature the words “DIDN’T DROWN” in large text. e After being rendered obsolete by PawPrint, Print@ CU briefly displayed a thank you note to students for using the site. The URL now redirects to a Filipino offshoring company. e From the smell wafting through the hallways, a Hogan suite seems to, inspired by Pith, have opened up a Yankee Candle shop. e Spotted: One of Gayatri Spivak’s assistants with a Lanvin bag. e Disobedience...it isn’t always civil! w

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The Blue and White