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. XXII No. I
“Always Work to be Done” Diversity in Columbia Psychological Services
Monkeying Around The story of Nim Chimpsky Also Insid
e:
Jacobin’s “Chef Boyardee of Western Marxism”
February 2016
CHANNING PREND, CC ’17, Editor in Chief NIA BROWN, CC ’17, Managing Editor ANDREW LOSO, CC ’19, Publisher VIRGINIA FU, CC ’17, Senior Editor BEN SCHNEIDER, CC ’17, Senior Editor YASEMİN AKÇAGÜNER, BC ’17, Senior Editor CAROLINE HURLEY, CC ’19, Senior Editor AARON SU, CC ’19, Layout Editor ALEXA ECONOMACOS, CC ’18, Senior Illustrator ROBERT JACK GROSS, CC ’16, Copy Editor SEAN AUGUSTINE-OBI, CC ’16, Creative Consultant DANIEL STONE, CC ’16, Editor Emeritus HALLIE NELL SWANSON, CC ’16, Editor Emeritus
Staff Writers ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 MABEL TAYLOR, BC’18 VIRGINIA AMBELIOTIS, BC ’19 NIKHIL DOMINIC, CC ’18 NICK KENSINGER, CC ’18 Contributors ELENA BURGER BC, ’18 MARIAM ELNOZAHY, BC ’16 KUNAL JASTY, SEAS ’16 NICK KENSINGER, CC ’18 JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17 IRINA TEVELEVA, CC ’17
Staff Illustrator RACHEL CHIN, CC ’18 JOANNA ZOU, CC ’18 NATHANIEL JAMESON, CC ’18 Artists DARYA FRAIMAN, GS ’16 WALLACE KALKIN, BC ’18 ANNE SCOTTI, CC ’16 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 JACK PIERSON, CC ’19 Illustrator Emeritus ZANE BHANSALI, CC ’17
THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXII
FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS
No. I
Columns
4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 13 Verily Veritas 18 M easure for Measure 26 Digitalia Columbiana 27 Campus G ossip
Features 10 At Two Swords’ Length: Is This a Startup? Our monthly prose and cons
Sean Augustine-Obi & Ben Schneider Sommer Omar
12 Trivial P ursuit In which B&W editors suck at trivia
Channing Prend
14 Counseling Without R epresentation Looking into diversity on the Columbia Psychological Services staff
Caroline Hurley
16 M essed Up Methodology The story of Nim Chimpsky
Virginia Fu
theblueandwhite.org
20 M arxist M agazining A conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara
f
cover :
“Butler Rinks" by Alexa Economacos
BLUE BOOK
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR It’s a new semester and a new masthead for the magazine. Just like every campus organization, the Blue and White changes and evolves with each turnover. As trite as it may sound, this constant transformation reminds me that our time in college is ephemeral. Despite the century-old buildings surrounding us, the geography of campus is constantly in flux. Amidst this rapid exchange of e-boards and rosters, our student body has shockingly little institutional memory. Hawkmadinejad, Operation Ivy League, Obamanard, in just a few short years these terms have faded into the distant campus memory–soon to be forgotten completely. This is not to suggest that our time here is ineffectual or meaningless. There are essential qualities that transcend the fast turnover rate, among those a desire to improve the school for future Columbians. To see how students on the Mental Health Task Force have influenced administrative policies see page 14. These are the types of actions that show our capacity to affect change. It’s easy to get caught up in the fast pace of life here. There’s always another problem set or discussion post or reading to do. But every so often we need to take a break and go to Tuesday night trivia at 1020 (see page 12), have a late night snack at Roti Roll (see page 7) or sit on park exedras and take in the views of this city (see page 6), because ultimately these are the experiences we will reminisce about most. The purpose of the Blue and White is to document the disparate fragments of life that make our time at Columbia so vivid, whether they be campus politics and activism or neighborhood oddities. I hope you enjoy our humble attempt to capture this experience. — Channing Prend
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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS New New Courseworks 2.0 Blizzards with boy band names LeFrak Library Lehman Corridor Cuffing Seasonal Affective Disorder Love on the Ivy League Snapchat
DEPARTURES Spec Editorial Board Seniors’ work ethic CUSS’s Bwog presence LeFrak Gym Lehman Hall L service
Come Again?!
“We should not think of HIV as a disease that preceded us, something known only to Madonnaera gays and practically insignificant to Gaga-era gays.”
– Adam Snyder, in the Spectator
The Blue and White
BLUE BOOK
HOW CAMPUS ARCHETYPES ARE CELEBRATING VALENTINE’S DAY With Valentine’s Day coming up, students across campus are preparing (assuming their plans involve more than getting drunk at the movies). The Blue and White editors have culled lists from several leaders of campus organizations with their ideas for how to spend the big day. Perhaps they will prove helpful in your planning. Columbia Faith in Action • Soliciting students for Bible study on College Walk • Spreading the Gospel • Developing a new closet organizational system • Drinking a hot cocoa on a park bench in the snow Conversio Virium • Group bowling • Musical chairs • Horseback riding • Knitting
• Drinking a Haymaker at Mel's with sorority sisters/frat brothers ISO • Taking an ideological stance against this capitalist “Hallmark” holiday • Encouraging people in the Duane Reade greeting card aisle not to waste their money • Organizing a teach-in about the problematic historical legacy of St. Valentine • Drinking a warm PBR in the M2M loft space
The Blue and White
CCSC • Candle-lit dinner with administrators at Faculty House • Organizing a town hall/open forum about the celebration of Valentine’s Day at Columbia • Handing out class sweaters in SGO
• Reading bad poetry to an Art History grad student • Ironically watching (500) Days of Summer • Smoking cigarettes outside Butler with a misplaced sense of superiority • Drinking an IPA at Tap A Keg because 1020 is overrun by freshmen
POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE
February 2016
Postcard by Zane Bhansali
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BLUE NOTES
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he famous frieze of the Carl Schurz memorial at the 116th and Morningside Drive entrance to Morningside Park is easy to miss. Standing there, it feels merely like an aging foreground to impressively sweeping views of Harlem and the further cityscape. Members of the rock band The Who once curled up against these classical bas-relief figures under a starkly bright Union Jack blanket for their The Kids Are Alright rockumentary and soundtrack. Fans still make pilgrimages to the memorial today, not for Schurz but for Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon and Townshend. This ’60s band’s connection to the memorial—to Schurz—seems nonexistent. The Germanborn “soldier, statesman, philanthropist,” as per the memorial’s inscription, died in 1906 and lived in America for only about 50 years. Among other things, he is credited with helping get Lincoln elected, serving as a general in the Union Army and as Secretary of the Interior in addition to working for the New York Tribune. Schurz’s name is carved out on many public spaces. The Charles Schurz Park in Yorkville contains Gracie mansion, which Mayor De Blasio does or does not yet live in. You can climb Mount Schurz in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park and hike through Carl Schurz Forest on the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin. Also there have been two Navy ships in his honor. Though this monument, on a lofty edge of Morningside, a col-
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laboration between Karl Bitter and Henry Bacon (who would later design the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.), may have the best view of them all. I think I can see Randall’s Island. — Nia Brown
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ocated on the first floor of Hartley Hall, the Malcolm X Lounge is mostly understood as a meeting space for the Black Students’ Organization and students of color on campus. Yet the room is more significant than the physical space it provides. The idea for the lounge was conceived in the aftermath of the 1968 protests, which upended the social order of the University but failed to address many black students’ demands for reform. Calls for the creation of an all-black lounge had gone unanswered for six months when the Students’ AfroAmerican Society (SAS) decided to occupy a part of the Naval Reserve Training Corps’ former office space in April 1970. The resulting sit-in lasted for four days, when the Hartley Hall Council agreed to cede the offices to the group to be repurposed as a lounge for black students. The following October, administrators attempted to discipline two organizers of the demonstration for breaking with university protocol, but pushback from black faculty and others hampered their efforts. “You know, it went rather smoothly. I guess the University said ‘Oh gosh, they’re probably the only group that doesn’t have any space ... Okay, if this is where you want it to be.’ I mean, it was just a lounge, just an area where people would go and hang out. So it became the Malcolm X Lounge ... It was really that simple,” Sharif Abdus-Salaam, CC ’74, recalled. The activist tradition of the Malcolm X
Illustration by Zane Bhansali
The Blue and White
BLUE NOTES Lounge extends beyond the sit-in that led to its formation. In 1985, it lodged student hunger strikers for the Coalition for a Free South Africa, who were integral in pushing University President Michael Sovern to initiate divestment to assert Columbia’s opposition to apartheid policies. The following year, it hosted organizers in the Housing For All Federation, who protested the University’s decision to evict as many as 50 tenants from Columbia housing in 1987 by famously blockading the apartment of employee Susana Acosta-Jafaar. The BSO later offered the lounge to Acosta-Jaafar and her husband as temporary accommodations. The national media attention incurred by the protests prompted Sovern to plan a meeting with elected officials to review Columbia’s housing policies. This legacy of activism associated with the lounge remains strong. From the space it continues to provide for groups like Students Against Mass Incarceration, who challenge racist forces entrenched in the justice system down to its floorto-ceiling mural celebrating figures of anti-racist resistance. — Virginia Ambeliotis
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he corner of 109th and Amsterdam is dominated by an enigmatic red box: a building regulars know to be Suite, one of the Upper West Side’s few gay bars. Existing in its current form for 11 years, Suite is a warm, intimate space, known for hosting bi-weekly karaoke nights and frequent drag shows. After your first visit, though, you might be surprised to find that all of your credit card charges from Suite seem to be mysteriously redirected to Roti Roll–the tiny Indian restaurant next door, a favorite of Columbia students looking for a cheap bite late at night. They may seem strange bedfellows but Roti Roll and Suite are two separate wings of the same business. A door allows clientele to move directly between the bar and the restaurant; an open window lets patrons order Roti Roll directly from the bar. “It’s a very odd couple,” admits Chandra Malik, co-owner of both Roti Roll and Suite. Malik opened Suite
February 2016
and Roti Roll 11 years ago with his two business partners, Sujit Balachandran and Sudhir Bhat. Malik himself is a native of New Delhi who first came to New York as a student in 1976. During his time in college he started doing odd jobs in restaurants, leading him into the food industry. Malik also owns two other Indian restaurants in the neighborhood, Ayurveda Café and Chapati House. Suite has always been a gay bar, long before Malik and his partner Balachandran decided to purchase it.“We wanted to make it more mainstream – a place where, along with gays, everybody else was welcome,” Malik said. “My partner Sudhir, he wanted to open up a place where people just made roti rolls, and there happened to be two places next to each other…” Both places generally have separate clientele, says Malik, but there is a fair amount of crossover. “A lot of people are here, they have some drinks, they want to go have some Roti Roll–so they go over there to eat, or they can bring it back [to Suite] and eat.” Laughing, Malik recalls the confusion of several customers: “Over here we have drag queen shows, we have karaoke, very festive music, and we get some customers next door at Roti Roll who get kind of curious–‘What’s going on in this place?’… Sometimes I say, ‘Come on in! Don’t be afraid!’” Despite this welcome, though, Malik says they’ve avoided making the suite a “package”. Both institutions were consciously made to look different: Roti Roll is fairly open and simple, while Suite is more closed in to make it a “party place,” in Malik’s words. Due to this difference, the connection between the two is still a mystery for many customers. “There’s an intrigue created sometimes. As a matter of fact when we’re at Suite people tend to joke…and sometimes we call that [the window between the restaurants] a gloryhole,” Malik says, chuckling. — Nikhil Dominic
Illustrations by Zane Bhansali and Nathaniel Jameson
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Campus Characters You might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue & White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. This issue, we bring you two people who left indelible and illicit marks. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org.
Omar Abboud
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mar Abboud, SEAS ’16, has the mildly amazing ability to deliver his answers to my questions in fully formed monologues. Seven minutes into our interview and Abboud was animatedly explaining to me the cosmology of the Columbia bureaucratic hierarchy—the students being the earth, Lee Bollinger being heaven, and things like Multicultural Affairs being “closer to earth.” “I think Columbia should just hire consultants to come and, like, overhaul the entire process,” he concluded cheerfully. Abboud’s family hails from Lebanon and he attended school in Toronto. Omar credits his grandfather, a Palestinian refugee, with instilling in him the understanding of “education as a means to freedom, education as a means to success, education as something that could never be taken from me,” a view that Abboud believes may have been “part of why I perhaps strived for something like Columbia.” Despite his complaints about bureaucratic inefficiency, Abboud says that he views Columbia more positively than most. Going here has given Abboud the chance to pursue his eclectic range of interests. In addition to his major in Operations Research, Abboud “kind of completed a concentration in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies,” simply by taking classes that were
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interesting to him. “I have this reputation in the MESAAS department as this weird engineer who comes and disrupts everything,” he says, and jokingly complains that he was “ruined” by “the epistemology of MESAAS.” “Now every single thing that happens in the world seems like it kind of boils down modernity leading to the invention of the European, the European conception of himself and, as a result, the European conception of the other, and in terms of this relationship we can define every other phenomenon that has happened since the late nineteenth century.” Abboud’s passion for the Middle East extends beyond academics. According to Abboud, he has spent much of his time on campus “putting the Arab community on the map,” in his role as president of Turath, the Arab students association. Abboud has also served as Director-General of the Columbia Model United Nations Conference and Exposition, and chair of the Arab and Middle Eastern Tree of the Columbia Mentoring Initiative. Last year, he received a King’s Crown Leadership Excellence Awards in the “Indelible Mark” category. “Omar basically made Turath what it is today,” says Nadine Fattaleh, CC ’17, Conference Coordinator for CIRCA. According to Fattaleh, when she first joined Turath, events were held sparsely and attendance was “weak.” “Omar just took it to a whole new level. We became a proper functioning club and a place [where] Arab students can feel welcome, they have a place that represents them.” Abboud always manages to “have a positive outlook on things,” despite his many commitments. According to Fattaleh, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and is one of those people “you can’t be around him and not be laughing.” A dedicated pianist and self described music nerd who credits Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” as
Illustration by Jack Pierson
The Blue and White
having a “huge, huge influence in my life,” Abboud has had the opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall twice since coming to campus, an experience Abboud says “couldn’t have happened in any other school in any other city and for which I am extremely grateful.” Performing, for Abboud, is “sheer joy.” “Personally I think that there is in fact nothing more important in life than being able to express yourself. If I help someone do that, then there is in fact nothing more I could be proud of.” — Virginia Fu
Grisham Blake
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n February 22, 2014, Grisham Blake, CC ’17, rented a U-Haul truck and drove it down the FDR Parkway to SoHo, where he proceeded to dismantle a bar from a restaurant that was going out of business. He then transported it back to campus and reassembled it in his Carman 8 dorm room. Blake said he thought the bar would be nice to fill the space vacated by his roommate, who had recently relocated to a single in John Jay. “I got 7 quarts of paint, different colors from Home Depot and a bunch of paint brushes and yeah, I threw a huge party in my room,” said Blake. “It was only supposed to paint the bar, and then the paint got everywhere. You know like obviously, put people in a room like that and the paint got everywhere.” Painting on residence hall walls is strictly forbidden by Columbia Housing, and that quickly became an issue for Blake. After an RA broke up the party, Blake said that “the wheels of Columbia justice started turning.” Blake was tried at an Office of Judicial Affairs hearing on February 27th. “It was very cut-and-dry, here is your punishment,” said Blake, “I had people [who] very generously submitted character witnesses. And I went in and said, ‘Here are some character witnesses,’ because that was the only defense I could have for myself. And they’re like, ‘Okay yeah whatever doesn’t matter.’” Contrary to Bwog reporting at the time, Blake was only initially suspended from campus housing and entering campus residence halls. He was suspended from campus completely after he went to a class in Hartley Hall and attempted to gather his belongings from his room during his initial suspension. “I was persona non grata on campus,” he said, “which meant that if I came on campus and they saw me, I could be arrested by NYPD.”
February 2016
While his suspension lasted from March 2014 to January 2015, Blake’s second semester of freshman year was still counted on his transcript (even though he did not receive credit for the classes he was enrolled in). “I’m not sure if I’m considered a sophomore or junior,” Blake added. Blake considers his paint party and punishment beneficial and formative because of all he got to experience as a result of it. After leaving school in March he took some time to decide what to do with his life before moving to Italy to work as an au pair in Cremona. He then moved to Japan where he worked as an intern at an NGO that specializes in helping Japanese orphans. Following this, Blake backpacked Europe and spent time in Cambodia before returning to the United States. “I don’t really have any regrets. It was a good experience because if I hadn’t done the paint party none of those things would have come to fruition. I have a very vast wealth of experience coming from that,” said Blake. Returning to life at Columbia has not been easy for Blake. He lives off campus, with no desire to live on campus again. He still hopes to graduate with the Class of 2017, but he said, “Columbia has tried its damndest to not have me come back in a lot of ways.” When asked what his advice would be to fellow Columbia students, Blake told me, “I don’t want to say anything disparaging to the university, but I don’t know. Take chances.” — Caroline Hurley
Illustration by Joanna Zou
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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H
Is this I
mean, what else would it be? hood. With the thriving competition for our hearts and But more than anything, startups bring a messtomachs in Morningside (Has anyone tried the lox sage of hope and renewal to a world filled with cyniat John Jay?), we needed innovation. We needed cism. Sure, this message might explicitly promote something that would disrupt conventional notions of conspicuous consumption as a means of social change eating without disrupting our digestive tracts. without tackling the real problem of factory farming We needed a salad restaurant. or greenhouse gas emissions, but isn’t that spirit what Sweetgreen is more than just a poor man’s American exceptionalism is all about? Forget cap and Chop’t or a vaguely celestial version of Milano’s salad trade—the people want cucumber and Thai dressing! bar—it’s a revolution in the way we eat. Nine years Sweetgreen’s commercial success shows that people ago, our cofounders began with little more than a at Columbia want food with purpose. It’s not enough chopping board and a dream. They conceptualized just to have middling food or sentimental value to win the most exalted of mankind’s dishes, the salad, with consumers ... unless you’re Deluxe. That’s why and used their Georgetown I applied to be their brand BBAs to build a well-oiled, ambassador. mean, green machine. We’re in the middle Forget about the of a pivot today towards a surf shop aesthetic at Dig sharing economy, and for Inn—Sweetgreen’s ambibrand ambassadors like ence shows our company’s me, sometimes it means vision in creating the salad sharing our time and labor of the future. Between the without being compensleek, chrome spray paintsated in anything except ed exterior and the glassy in-store coupons. It’s an interior, you can see how unfortunate side effect of our design takes a page out the low overhead and high of Apple’s playbook. And profit margins that keep those quirky salad names? Creative those sweet angel investor dolran tens of thousands of dollars beta lars pouring in. But why protest ffirmative testing them with focus groups to capitalism’s inexorable subsumpBy Sean Augustine-Obi determine which ones had the most tion of small businesses or student market appeal. Innovation don’t loans calcifying income inequality come cheap. Hence the $12 price when you could chow down on an tag. Avocobbo bowl? Really, being a startup is the best of both Look, I know you’re just sitting through my worlds when it comes to cuisine. Our ingredients are spiel to get branded swag. Unlike Sweetgreen’s prodfresh and locally sourced with the efficiency of the uct, branded swag doesn’t just grow on trees. At least corporate supply chain. It’s nothing like the factory- I didn’t hitch my horse to an E. coli-ridden wagon, processed, reheated slop they’d hawk on you at a like Chipotle’s rep. And I’m doing better than Dig chain restaurant. We have an app, so you don’t even Inn’s rep, who’s had to pick up a side hustle spamneed to talk to the person making your food. And just ming Lyft invites on Facebook events. It’s rough for like any other startup, it’ll take years of gentrification everyone out here. Guess I should’ve majored in CS.w before we open up shop in a low-income neighbor-
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The Blue and White
AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H
a startup? I
f our city’s gradual Californication teaches us But maybe I’m wrong. Sitting over my biodeanything, it’s that looks can be deceiving. Just gradable kale and quinoa bowl one evening, staring because we look healthy on Tinder doesn’t mean we out blankly at Broadway, it occurred to that there is, don’t secretly have crabs! Just because there are like in fact, something innovative about Sweetgreen. In a 12 surf shops on the Lower East Side doesn’t mean brilliant and kind of revolutionary move that further anyone in New York surfs. Just because we call it the differentiates the company from self-righteous startsharing economy doesn’t mean we’re sharing any- ups, Sweetgreen embraces their rhetoric, but with a thing. Except maybe crabs. winking irony that draws explicit attention to its own And just because its stores insincerity. are dressed up like iOS 9 doesn’t Soylent—bless its goopy mean Sweetgreen is a startup. heart—was way off the bat about 38 brick and mortar locations on the culinary desires wrought by both coasts, $95 million in venpost-modernity. At the end of ture capital—anyone with a subthe day, people don’t want to scription to Bloomberg Weekly drink white goop with questioncan tell you that Sweetgreen is able nutritional value through most definitely is not a startup. a straw—if that were the case This is a company well on it’s way Uni Cafe never would have met to market consolidation and an its untimely demise. They don’t IPO. In fact, I’m offended that you even want to feel good about would even associate Sweetgreen how socially conscious they are. with the do-good optimism of the What Columbia students really tech bubble. Sure, Sweetgreen want to do is opine about the has an app, but so does CCSC. impossibility of ethical conLast I checked, a startup sumption under late capitalism was supposed to radically disover Instagram-ready tableaus rupt the status quo, to solve of $12 bowls of free-range the world’s ills through the deux chicken and locally sourced vegex machina of business and techetables, while the service worker egative nology. Sweetgreen is a goddamn behind the counter whispers sweet By Ben Schneider salad bar. It serves uncooked sapnothings about sustainability. rophytes, albeit uncooked saproIt’s a beautiful joke. Laughing phytes dosed with a—heavy, please!—brew of Mark to the point of tears, customers buy salad after salad Bittman’s Soulcycle sweat, that luminous brain juice on the Sweetgreen app; the achievement of Green leaking from every cracked Fitbit screen, and the status returns the ability to donate one percent of most scrumptious, self-serving rhetoric of the Obama their money to healthy food for underprivileged kids. era. Sweetgreen’s success rests on the fact that it’s so Don’t get me wrong, this sort of ideological absurd and insincere as to be enchanting and fun. Its dumpster diving is a noble pursuit, and a cute inter- very existence is a protest against startups and their pretation of “locally sourced,” but it’s nothing new. techno-utopian values. Even more fun than pretendOver-priced salads and farm-to-table values have ing to solve our social ills, is having a good laugh been around since the Stone Age—in tech years that about it over an Earth Bowl.w is.
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February 2016
Illustrations by Alexander Pines
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CLASS OF 1020
Trivial Pursuit In which Blue and White editors lose it all By Sommer Omar
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aul Ellerin has been hosting trivia night at 1020 every Tuesday for roughly 10 years. Each week he sends an email reminder with random ideas, pictures of his dog Tazer (presumably a Kēnjī), and sometimes a bonus tip that can earn you extra points during the game. Paul is something of an acquired taste. He always shows up in a t-shirt with faded logos, classic well worn dad jeans, and sneakers. He reads the number of the question in play with a consistency that some could find charming. Whenever we get to question number eight he unfailingly bellows “numeroooo ochoooo”; it adds some spice to the night (granted it’s the same kind of spice every Tuesday night). While he may be a fixture of Tuesday night trivia with familiar patterns and mannerisms, not much is actually known about Paul. He sends his email reminders from an account labeled triviapaul@ gmail.com. This raises the question of what other kinds of Paul exist, what does Paul do when he’s not hosting trivia night? I went to Tuesday night trivia with B&W’s EIC in tow to find out. Our team name was direct to the point of being Spartan: S + C, for Sommer and Channing. The trivia night going crowd is certainly at odds with what otherwise might be expected of 1020. Most teams consisted of 4 or more people varying from several middle aged chums out for a fun night to a large group of cackling young women, one with a tiara, celebrating the anointed one’s birthday. Before the first round of trivia began, the host announced that all you needed to compete was “an answer sheet, a few brain cells and a beer.” Once the game got started, however, S + C faltered. One category involved naming the character or show that was known for a certain saying. For instance, “How you doin’?” was flirty Joey from Friends and “Pretty pretty pretty good,” was Larry David from Curb Your
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Enthusiasm and probably real life. Another category involved listing animals according to their speed and their broader species group (did you know that gazelles qualify as bovine?). S + C came in last for both rounds. Paul announced that the losing teams would win Blow Pops because “they suck.” After looking at S + C his face lit up at the realization of an all too convenient witticism: “in last place is S+C which stands for ‘suck’!” The team name of the first round winners was “Feel The Bern in My Pants.” I approached our defeaters, all three looked homely and friendly enough. One of the women said that she has been coming to Paul’s trivia nights for about 10 years and preferred his trivia to other bars that resort to computer generated questions. At the end of the night, I approached Paul to find out more about his life, tribulations and past experiences. I went in with a strong opener: “Do you come here often?” He does not. I probed him to see what he does during the other six days of the week, even resorting to the suggestion that I already knew and he might as well just admit it, but he demurred. “That’s a secret […] I have to keep an aura of mystery.”w
Illustration by Leila Mgaloblishvili
The Blue and White
V E R I LY V E R I TA S
TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS
S
In which our hero broods on holiday
ome people harbor paralyzing phobias of planes and flying—V.V. was not one of those people. In fact, V.V. relished every opportunity to escape his earthly tethers and claim his rightful place above all other living creatures. He was willing to fly anywhere. Today, he was flying back to the allegedly hallowed halls of Columbia from Chile. He’d migrated south three weeks ago with the express purpose of determining whether Cape Horn was as frightening as every coward in history made it out to be. Now, snuggled up on his private jet in his second favorite pashmina and his finest sailor gear, V.V. had the distinct pleasure of knowing that he was stronger, more graceful, and more powerful than the most distinguished maritime fellows who’d ever lived. The decision to take a spin around Cape Horn was an arduous one. V.V. always struggled to pick a destination for his school vacations. Going home was out of the question. V.V. had no home! Staying at Columbia had some appeal; every now and then he enjoyed having the campus to himself. Yet once in a blue moon the travel bug took a mighty bite out of V.V.’s divine flesh and he had no choice but to abscond. As his flight attendant carefully removed his boating shoes and began to cover his feet in honey and manatee fat, V.V. leaned back in his seat and let his mind drift, considering all the places he could have traveled this break. There was Berlin, where he liked to buy darling trinkets for each of his eight German Shepherds. Then there was Rome, the site of his first and last animal sacrifice. And Paris, the home
February 2016
of his first love. How long it had been since V.V. had reminisced about his prepubescent jaunt down love’s tricky path! A shiver of dormant pleasure ran down V.V.’s back. The orgasmic interlude came to a grinding halt when V.V. surveyed the Patagonian landscape below and remembered that he was glad he had gone to Chile. He was tired of the Continent. But the whole idea of having three weeks off in the middle of winter to celebrate the major holidays and travel the world … how it disturbed V.V.! He couldn’t compose himself once he started thinking of how ridiculous the whole tradition of winter break really was. He dismissed the flight attendant and paced up and down the central aisle of his aircraft, careful not to slip on his own larded tracks. Why did his peers deserve this paid vacation? What sort of coddling institution insists on giving children whose whole lives are a permanent vacation vacations? The impunity! The waste. V.V. couldn’t—wouldn’t—stomach it. V.V. decided that as soon as his plane landed in New York he would head straight to Low with the first picketing implement he could pick up at Hermés and demand a change in the system. He could not stand idly by and watch the Ivy League students of the world continue to live out their fantasy lives in complete and utter disregard for common decency. V.V. knew that his life so far had been defined by apathy, but he was determined to change his ways and fight for the masses. Yes, the masses might fight him on this at first, but he knew he was in the right. ‘Till next time, well, hopefully there will be no next time, V.V.w
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PERCEPTIONS AND REALITY
Counseling Without Representation Examining CPS’s history of diversity By Channing Prend
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n 1992, when Richard Eichler became the executive director of Columbia Psychological Services (CPS), the staff he inherited was 100 percent white and 100% heterosexual. “Making the staff more reflective of the diversity of the student body was one of my goals from the outset,” Eichler said. CPS hired its first counselor of color within Eichler’s first year as director. Since 1992, CPS has more than doubled the size of its staff to include 44 clinicians. The most recent additions included eight new hires last semester. These new staff members represent a range of different races, nationalities, and gender identities. Both CPS and the Mental Health Task Force (MHTF), a student group that addresses issues of mental health within the university community, lauded the hirings as a success. “The most heartening outcome of the latest round of hiring is that CPS seems to be genuinely interested in responding to the needs of students of marginalized identities and making sure that no student falls between the cracks,” said Brennon Mendez, CC ’17, MHTF member and former vice president of Columbia Queer Alliance. The recent Spectator article announcing the new staff members states that students on the MHTF “met with health administrators a number of times over the last year to discuss the lack of diversity among CPS clinicians” and that the staff “lacks the diversity to adequately address the needs of a large and varied student body.” This sort of language seems to suggest that the recent hirings are CPS’s first attempt to increase diversity within its staff, when in reality, the efforts have been ongoing since the early 90s. In fact, the Columbia University Record, a now defunct publication put out weekly by the Office of Public Affairs, published an article in 1999 about the increased diversity of the CPS staff (by 1999 the staff was 31% minority). The piece extols that CPS has “expanded, bolstering its expertise and making the diversity of Columbia’s counselors more reflective of the diversity of the University’s student body.” This
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rhetoric is remarkably similar to the recent Spectator article introducing the newest hires. These similarities are unsurprising since issues of diversity and representation have been and continue to be relevant on campus. “For students of underrepresented minorities coming to an institution like Columbia it can be difficult to establish who you are within the community as a whole,” Saul Gomez, one of the newly hired clinicians, said. These challenges are just as pertinent today as they were in 1992. Perhaps the most notable change since the ’90s is not the focus on diversity itself but the organized work of student advocates. Founded in March 2014, the MHTF has grown to include about 20 leaders from student government and several identity-based groups including the Black Students Organization, Asian American Alliance and CQA. Last year, the MHTF initiated an identitybased concern survey that sought to evaluate student satisfaction with CPS. According to Mendez, the 172 anecdotal responses to the survey indicated that students of color, LGBTQ students, and Muslim students felt disproportionately underserved by the mental health resources on campus. The University Senate Quality of Life survey had similar results. “The ability to seek psychological treatment from someone who shares your identities should be afforded to all students regardless of race, gender, class, and sexuality,” Mendez said. He added that the survey results contained multiple accounts of students who felt more comfortable connecting with their CPS clinician when they were of a similar racial or ethnic identity. Echoing student concern, Archana Jain, one of the newly hired CPS staff, noted, “Particularly for students in therapy for the first time, it helps to have someone on staff who they feel understands them in some capacity whether those be cultural values or systemic issues.” After conducting the survey, students on the MHTF approached CPS with their findings. According to MHTF member and University Senator
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PERCEPTIONS AND REALITY Sean Ryan, CC ’17, Dr. Eichler was immediately receptive to their emails and ideas. “CPS generally wants the same things we do because they’re trying to help students,” Ryan said. “In all of my activist efforts on campus, whether it be related to private prison divestment or antisexual violence work, I’ve never had such a uniformly positive relationship with administrators as I have working with CPS,” Mendez said. This is a pretty bold claim coming from someone who has interacted with numerous university administrators in many different capacities. But Mendez maintained his statement, noting that CPS has made many efforts to respond to and elicit student feedback, even inviting leaders from identity-based organizations to conduct workshops at their weekly all-staff meetings. According to Eichler, one of the challenges has simply been making the community aware of the diversity within the staff, which he noted has been composed of at least 30 percent people of color since the late ’90s (this is more diverse than the national psychology workforce, which is over 80 percent white). “There’s been a real disconnect between perceptions and reality,” Eichler said. This disconnect is evident in the Spectator article from last semester, which presented the new hires as CPS’s first efforts to diversify. After discussions with the MHTF, CPS created interest groups on their website to better convey information to students. These interest groups help students identify counselors with personal characteristics and professional interests that match their needs. For example, there is a multicultural concerns group, an LGBTQ concerns group, and a religious and spiritual concerns group. These groupings allow students to more easily search for clinicians specializing in specific areas. “There was no change in staffing to create those groups, but there was a change in the way we organize the presentation of the staff to the student body,” Eichler said. Diversity means little however, if the staff doesn’t have the professional skills to respond to students’ needs. As one Spectator commenter wrote on the article announcing CPS’s new hires, “We should be hiring the best people, and not necessarily a rainbow for a rainbow’s sake.” Eichler however, responded that there was no tension between the desire to diversify the staff and the need to hire the most skilled people. “If you get a great pool of applicants from a very diverse base,
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then you’ll end up with diverse staff simply by hiring the most qualified people,” Eichler said. “Where the issue of diversity comes in in the hiring process is how you do outreach and recruitment.” In order to “cast a wide net,” Eichler mentioned that CPS advertises positions on listservs, websites and job boards that speak to all different communities including the National Organization of Black Psychologists and a National Organization of Latino Psychologists. Eichler also noted the advantage of being located in New York City. “Especially for people from a variety of backgrounds, New York is a welcoming place,” he said. Kori Bennett, CPS’s first trans clinician, affirmed this statement, adding that location was a big consideration given hir identity. Despite the obvious importance of diversity, Eichler was careful to mention that CPS does not presume all members of a particular race, gender, or sexuality will want the same kind of treatment. “It’s not a given that people want to see someone of the same background,” he said. For example, Bennett said that most of hir caseload is not composed of students seeking identity-specific help on LGBTQ issues. According to Eichler, most students do not request to see a clinician who specializes in a particular area, although they have the opportunity to request this during the initial phone triage. Moving forward, Eichler said that CPS will grow and change with the student body. Currently Gomez is working to start a men of color support group. CPS is also launching a quality assurance survey within the next month to help evaluate their service and gain student feedback (Eichler noted that members of the MHTF gave input on content and specific questions in the survey).“We’re here to serve you [the students], you’re our constituents, so it would be kind of absurd to not listen to what students say,” Eichler said. “It doesn’t mean we’ll always be able to deliver, but we try our best.” The CPS staff, even if it continues to grow, will never be able to represent all of the identities in the student body. That said, the newest round of hires and the trajectory of the MHTF is progress worth commending. What’s more, CPS’s attitude towards student feedback should be a model for other parts of the University administration. The new hires are a tangible example of incorporating student input. But as stated by every single person interviewed for this story: “there’s always work to be done.”w
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GOING APE
Messed Up Methodology When primate researchers go bananas By Caroline Hurley
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ob Ingersoll met Nim Chimpsky in 1977 at the University of Oklahoma when he was studying at the Institute for Primate Studies, and the two became fast friends. “Sometimes you just know you’re going to be friends—you like each other right off. That was the case with Nim and me,” said Ingersoll. They took frequent walks together and occasionally split a joint and shared conversation. It became a lifelong friendship for both of them. Chimpsky’s name was derived from famous linguist Noam Chomsky. Unlike Chomsky, however, Nim was a chimpanzee who formed the center of a landmark study conducted by Columbia’s psychology department in the 1970s. In 1973, Professor Herbert Terrace of the Columbia psychology department began a study of primates and their ability to learn language. He took an infant chimpanzee from the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, and then brought it back to Morningside Heights and raised it like a human. Terrace intended to test the hypothesis that chimps could learn human sign language if they were exposed to it from birth – like how humans pick up
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a first language. Chomsky, though, had maintained that chimps could never learn human language despite their genetic similarities to humans. For the next twenty-six years, Nim Chimpsky towed the line between animal and human. His entire life is documented in the 2011 HBO documentary Project Nim, which was based off of a book by Elizabeth Hess. After being moved to New York City when he was just a few days old, Nim was placed in the home of Stephanie LeFarge, Terrace’s former student. LeFarge raised the chimp like she raised all of her children, from outings to the beach to breast feeding. While living with the LeFarge’s, Nim was expected to learn American Sign Language from the family, who doubled as his teachers. Terrace monitored Nim’s progress in learning the language. No one in the LeFarge family, though, actually knew much sign language and certainly none of them were fluent. Nim grew faster than his family could keep up with him, so he was moved to the thenUniversityowned Delafield Estate in the Bronx. By this point, the project had expanded to include multiple undergraduate and graduate student research assistants, many of whom appear in the HBO documentary. He was cared for at Delafield and was taught in a Columbia classroom until 1977. In 1977, the project was defunded due to safety concerns over caring for Nim. Terrace concluded that Nim did not succeed in learning language because most of what he signed was only repetition of what the teachers previously signed. Nim was unceremoniously taken back to Oklahoma and left at his birthplace at the Institute for Primate Studies, where he met Ingersoll. Bob Ingersoll was a student
Illustration by Alexa Economacos
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GOING APE at the University of Oklahoma, where he began studying primates in 1975 under a contemporary of Herbert Terrace. He studied and worked at the Institute for Primate Studies. In Oklahoma, his class had been keeping up with Terrace’s research on Nim in New York, so Ingersoll was acutely familiar with Nim’s past. On Nim’s first day back in Oklahoma, Bob took Nim out for a walk to calm him down. “I went out there and took Nim on a walk and there you have it. That’s how I met Nim.” After extended interactions with Nim and years of studying chimpanzees, he has developed strong opinions on Terrace’s treatment of Nim. Of the experiment in New York, Ingersoll said, “Herb [Terrace] doesn’t really clarify and didn’t really ever clarify his position to even his own students until after Nim was here [back in Oklahoma]. So how the hell could Nim learn language if the people that were trying to teach him language weren’t even certain about what it is that they were trying to teach him? Were they trying to teach him communication? Were they trying to teach him language and sentences and grammar and syntax?” “I’m not so sure that it’s fair to characterize what happened to Nim as anything other than a really messed up methodological study that didn’t prove or disprove anything,” he said. Eventually the primate institute needed to get rid of some of its chimps, and so it sold Nim and others to a New York University medical research facility. The chimps were kept in small cages as human drugs, treatments and medical procedures were tested on them. Footage from this time and most of Nim’s life is included in the HBO documentary. Working with Nim deeply affected Ingersoll. “I was like most students: a little bit naïve about the real world and how things actually work. I thought at that time that the world always does the right thing; it never does things like sell chimps to medical research after they’ve lived in homes and been taught sign language. That was obviously very wrong,” Ingersoll added.
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The move to Oklahoma and later the research laboratory was difficult for Nim’s teachers and caregivers to watch. Many blamed Terrace for exposing Nim to human life and later casting him aside when the study ended. Criticisms of Terrace range from downplaying how much Nim learned to engaging in relationships with his female students. Terrace admits to the latter in the film. Of a student’s attraction to him he said, “I’m sure that unconsciously I took advantage of that. If somebody admires you, why not?” Much of the animosity towards Terrace comes out in the documentary. Of Terrace tranquilizing Nim one morning in New York and waking him up in Oklahoma, one graduate assistant said, “It was just a nasty thing to do. Very deceitful I think.” Ingersoll said of the film, “They [Terrace’s graduate students] actually said what they were feeling. It took a long time until they finally unleashed on him in the movie and when they did, boy they really did. I mean, wow. We [in Oklahoma] heard rumors, but we had no idea. Personally, I’m shocked that he still teaches at Columbia.” Terrace, in a 2011 letter to The New York Review of Books, defends himself and his research saying, “Marsh’s [the director] ulterior motive was to create a film that would sell better because it had both a hero, Nim, and a villain, me.” In the same letter Terrace says of Nim, “We all wished that he could have learned. But it didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen, despite his and his relatives’ genetic similarity to humans and the aberrational tendency of some animal rights advocates to anthropomorphize simians as humans.” Of all Nim’s teachers and friends, only Bob Ingersoll maintained a friendship with him after he was released from medical research. Nim died at the age of twenty-six at a sanctuary for abused animals in Texas. Ingersoll continues to advise the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma and is an activist for just treatment of primates. The film Project Nim is available on HBO and Amazon.w
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M easure
for
M easure
Woman with a Paintbrush After Georgia O’K eefe
Six blue petals or a woman’s hipbones. in soft clean linen.
Bury them
I come home to red cliffs, where I match the color-scheme. What I love burns me up so I curl like paper. Feet grind desert dust down to red pepper. Stigma traps the pollen. What I love about this isn’t clear to me. See what you need to see, then let’s go drink mosquitos and grainy coffee. Desire a mountain, pay for it with every brushstroke. Have I asked God for too much? Those antlers are too close. I retrace familiar territory. In the paint sink, spare hands make half-formed gestures. “What do you know about hunger?” says the afterthought.
A red brushstroke. A red brushstroke. — Irina Teveleva
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The Blue and White
CASUAL ENCOUNTERS
Staff Personals Because even magazine writers want to get laid By the Staff of The Blue and White
After spending Valentine’s evening drunk at the movies once again, the staff of The Blue and White is ready to return to the world of love. Should these vulnerable, earnest essays (which nonetheless exude sexual maturity [and undeniable potency]) move the reader to the appropriate human response, the ads are followed by our personal mailbox numbers. SEEKING WOMEN
WHATEVER I CAN GET
Consent educator feeling enthusiastic. (5899)
Me: rising editor-in-chief of prominent campus publication. You: first year stunned senseless by power. (5857)
Recovering ironist lookin’ for a Midwestern gal (Ruggles 601) Visual arts enthusiast inspired to explore a new medium. (1807)
Red tape-loving administrator aching to get tied up. (Low Library)
I’ve got a supply for your demand. (5886)
Looking for large, reflective surface. (President’s House)
Boston native wants to put cream in your pie. (6082)
I stole your piece. You stole my heart. (Frat Row)
McBain resident just wants something clean. (4810)
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SEEKING MEN
Heat isn’t working and I’m looking to stay warm. (9686)
Senior looking to up my cardio before the swim test. (1203)
Looking for the owl? It’s in my vagina. (Alma Mater)w
It was between here and the campus snap story. (8829) MESAAS major looking to be decolonized. (5268) There is no Aviation department here, but I’d really like to test my landing strip. (3000) I’m into old white men. (Hamilton Hall) British-born and eager to deconstruct colonialism. (1963) Cub reporter seeks to bare all. (3086)
February 2016
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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N
Marxist Magazining A conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara By Virginia Fu Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, a publication that describes itself as the “ leading voice of the American left.” Noam Chomsky believes that Jacobin is “a bright light in dark times…. an impressive contribution to sanity and hope,” and Chris Hayes “really like[s] Jacobin.” Senior editor Virginia Fu originally suggested this conversation take place at Applebee’s or Chuck E. Cheese but they decided on Silvana instead. If Sunkara had gone to Applebee’s he would have ordered the Jalapeño poppers, or just anything sizzling. He would not have eaten anything at Chuck E. Cheese. Bhaskar Sunkara: Do you have to transcribe this yourself? The Blue and White: Yeah. BS: That sucks. Up until recently I had to transcribe things myself. Now we mostly have interns do it. We pay our interns pretty well so it’s costly. B&W: How much do you pay them? BS: Well it depends on if they’re getting money from their school. We pay anywhere from $12-15. $15 internships are not that bad. Our circulation manager position which is kind of like, a temp in our grunt work, pays $17. So you know I get paid a much lower hourly rate, but I just work 70 hours a week. B&W: So Bhaskar, how did you get your start in socialism? BS: I got started on two different tracks. First, I was interested in liberal left activism. I was born in 1989, so by the time I was coming into any sort of political consciousness, it was the buildup to the Iraq war. And you know it’s kind of one of those things where I would assume children or young people saw through it a lot easier than a lot of liberals. So I was kind of politicized through that, going to anti-war rallies when I was in middle school. B&W: Middle school, huh. Did your parents take you?
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BS: It was eighth grade so I could, you know, take the train down. Throughout high school I was interested in broad liberal left kind of political things that were going on in my area: Working Families Partyendorsed candidate running for office and things like that. I had a sense of broad political consciousness because my parents were immigrants who came over in 1988. I was the youngest of 5 so my three older siblings didn’t nearly have the same opportunities as I did. My family struggled in the early years but by the time that I was older, we were much more comfortable, in large part because my dad was a public sector unionized employee working for the city. So that instilled in me some sort of broad understanding of the value of public goods. I was educated by a very good public school, I had access to a good library and my dad had a public sector job and so on. So that was the first track. I want to say that that’s all pretty normal for someone who’s politically conscious who grew up in the New York area during those times. The unusual part is that I discovered Leon Trotsky. I read him in the seventh grade. I read Lenin and then Marx, and the New Left Review throughout high school. So it was kind of like a dual consciousness where I was engaged day to day in left mainstream politics but I also had intellectual sympathies with the far left, and it was only in college that I started doing more activism explicitly as a socialist. B&W: You founded Jacobin in 2011 as an undergraduate. How did that come about?
Illustration by Alexa Economacos
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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N BS: So on my 18th birthday I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. It seemed like they wouldn’t really ask me to do a lot and I would still have a card that would let me say I was a socialist. So I did that and almost immediately they offered me the opportunity to edit their blog. So I had some background, learning how to edit and commission writers. The work was obviously all volunteer, similar to student journalism. Then in the summer of 2010 I thought of the idea of starting my own independent magazine. It was a journal but it was meant to be more visual and more accessible, more edited for style. I didn’t want for there to be knowledge prerequisites for someone to get it. And I never wanted to be on the outside banging at the door with radical ideas. I kind of wanted to pull radical ideas into the mainstream and not lose track of the mainstream. So I think Jacobin’s tone, even though it’s a socialist publication, is more in the vein of trying to win over and engage with liberals in contrast to the tone of, say, an anarchist publication which is just like, “Fuck you, this is our thing.” Our politics are politics that people want to engage with, whether or not they they agree with them. And I do think that socialist politics are in the interest of a vast majority of people. B&W: Jacobin has received a lot of attention from mainstream outlets. Why do you think that is? BS: So for one we’re kind of seeking it by engaging with figures especially from the liberal mainstream. We engage with the Ezra Kleins of the world, with people like Chris Hayes and Katrina vanden Heuvel, and they engage back. Also I think we’re somewhat fortuitous in hitting a political moment when people are looking to ideas to the left of liberalism. And of course we do a lot of things right. Our publication, the branding and the layout design— even on a shoestring budget—is one of the best designed magazines in the country. And of course we have a lot of very good editors. So I think we attract attention partly because of our merit. B&W: I first found out about Jacobin the summer I graduated from high school because I’d read about it in this New York Times article. I was working as a waitress and read it on my breaks. I was really struck by [Peter Frase’s] article about work. I thought, we
February 2016
should all work less! BS: I think a lot of people discovered us around the same time. To be honest, I was working at Brooklyn College up until this time last year doing secretarial work. I was doing Jacobin during work and also on the side, and it was only recently that I’ve been able to do it full time. Its growth did take me by surprise. I knew there was an audience for it, but didn’t ever think we would ramp up this quickly. Professionally I’ve learned how to become a very good publisher. A lot of our other production staff are not magazine people. We didn’t grow and say, hey we want to be in the magazine business. We grew up and said we want to do all sorts of different things but we discovered socialist politics and this is a way for us to be professional socialists. In the US there are only a couple dozen of us who could say they’re full-time professional socialists. B&W: If you hadn’t gone through that spell of concentrated reading in college, do you think you would still call yourself a socialist or Marxist today? BS: Well I started reading those ideas in the seventh grade. By ninth or tenth grade I’d read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History. The book wasn’t that groundbreaking to me, or even that good as a work of history in many ways, but it was really inspiring to me that this guy in the introduction called himself a socialist. And I was like hey, this guy is famous, he’s around, he’s calling himself a socialist. And I was reading Eric Hobsbawm and other historians who are explicitly calling themselves socialists. So I was like why don’t I just call myself a socialist. Since then it’s been a pretty consistent part of my ethics and worldview, to be a socialist. Now being a Marxist—that’s contingent. You can’t say, oh I’m going to be a Marxist for the rest of my life, because that’s against the spirit of Marxism. It’s a framework to understand the world and obviously frameworks can be wrong. I’m more than willing to in the future abandon—though I don’t think I’ll ever do it—the Marxism part. The socialism part though is based on more of a moral and ethical framework of saying that domination and exploitation are bad. Everybody has the right to reach their full creative potential. We have Einsteins and Da Vincis living and dying in sweatshops and they’re working 12 hours a day. And also just like people who are not Einsteins and da
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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N Vincis. But I think we want a society where everyone can flourish, a society where, in that old line Marx uses, the “conditions for the development of one are the conditions for the development of another.” It’s a worthy goal and aspiration and, I think, the only basis for a fair and just society. B&W: What publications do you hate? BS: Hate’s a strong word. Well first, I’ll also say what I like. The Financial Times is good. It’s very interesting. You should read it, especially if you want to know where bourgeois opinion is at. It’s like the most intelligent publication of bourgeois opinion. I read the Financial Times every week. They should put that on their website—known socialist reads our publication every week. The Economist is crap. The reason why it’s unsigned is because half the people are like 25 year old LSE grads who are just writing nonsense half the time. I actually try to avoid the publications I don’t like. There are certain publications that are just purely focus on literary stuff. Jacobin is often lumped in with a smaller crop of literary publications even though we’re a publication about politics and economics in a pretty direct way. B&W: Why should I read Jacobin when I can just steal my roommate’s Socialist Worker? BS: I would say Socialist Worker and these other publications are good but they represent, well, not quite a line view but a view from one perspective. Jacobin is kind of a broader box. We do have things that define us and the people writing for us but it’s the difference between a publication that’s a straight line and a box where everything within the box is acceptable and everything outside is not. It’d be a bad way to run society but I think a publication needs a rudder. B&W: What’s your rudder? BS: I would say that there’s three things that kind of distinguishes what Jacobin and socialists in the Marxist tradition do. One is kind of we have a moral and ethical critique of capitalism. We think that capitalism is bad because exploitation and domination are bad. Because capitalism is a class society it’s built on exploitation and domination, and because of capital-
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ism’s success it means there are material means and resources to build a society that’s not structured this way. We’ve had class society since the neolithic revolution. We want to create like a post neolithic society. We want a society without class. Obviously it won’t be a perfect society, it won’t be a utopia, there’ll still be problems and inequities, there’ll still be heartbreak and angst and whatever. So we have this critique of capitalism for the hierarchies and exploitation inherent in it but we also have this vision for a society after capitalism. A lot of radicals have those two things. What socialists in the Marxist tradition have and offer and the reason I think we’ve dominated the far left since the late 1800s—for better or worse—is some sort of theory of transition. So we can actually say we fight for reforms today and through this accumulation of resources and strength and fighting organizations, we can build movements capable of that transition. B&W: One of my friends described Jacobin as “pop Marxism” but kind of in this disparaging way, as though Marxism were something that should remain in the classroom. BS: That’s actually a great compliment. That’s basically what we try to do. On my Twitter profile my bio is “Chef Boyardee of Western Marxism.” The “Western” part is just for style, to add balance to the sentence. Some people who are already on the left and already steeped in the ideas would have a “this is obvious” kind of approach to articles and that’s silly and condescending. No one was born with this kind of knowledge and background. You have to accumulate it somewhere. And while we’re on one level popularizing the work, but we’re also deepening and enriching it. We publish engaging serious articles. A lot of the articles are by academics popularizing longer works they did elsewhere and we edit and punch them up. The core of Jacobin is pretty weighty. We’re also launching a theoretical journal later this year. It’s going to be longer form and we’ll hopefully win over that crowd as well. So I take it as a compliment. That sort of criticism never bothers me, it always bothers me in the other direction. The goal is never to talk to the existing left. Talking to a few thousand people is the opposite of what publishing or politics should be about. I always think we have to do better.
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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N B&W: Do you advocate a violent overthrow of global capitalism or is it the democratic socialist route for you? BS: My own view is that essentially one should pursue a parliamentary road to socialism, but I don’t think capitalists will ever allow the final step. They might allow something up to Sweden in the 1970s but I don’t think they will actually allow us to take their stuff. My vision is the transformation would involve what Leninists call dual power. Power in the streets plus power in parliament. People would be protesting and occupying factories and workplaces and there would also be this broad parliamentary majority—I think you need the democratic mandate—but at some point the capitalists would violate their end of the bargain. So yeah, in a certain way I am saying my view is kind of a revolutionary socialist view. B&W: Is Bernie Sanders the hero we need or the hero we deserve? BS: He’s not a hero. What’s interesting about Sanders is he’s not the manifestation of a vibrant movement on the left. Normally you expect a mainstream electoral option to be to the right of where the people and the movements are. Sanders just came out of the blue in many ways but I think he’s capturing a sentiment. I think the majority of the American people when it comes down to it would vote for a social democratic president or type of person who’s just a no bullshit anti-establishment person saying, I’ll take on the millionaire billionaire class and give you a social safety net. I think there’s a majority for that in America. I think groups on the far left have had a kind of vulture theory of capitalism. We’re just going to let things go to shit and then people are going to have a revolution. I think that’s not how politics works. Winning begets more winning. People have to be encouraged and build on victories and that’s how you can push more radical politics.
someone of that age. There’s a high probability that would happen to Sanders. I think in that case he would win the nomination and the general elections. I honestly think he’d win the general election despite his age. Without a doubt. So we’ll see. I’m unapologetically pro-Sanders and I occasionally even go and hand out flyers. B&W: Where do you see Jacobin going? BS: I think that we can continue to gain around 200 new subscribers a week at least for the next year and who knows what we can do beyond that. But I think with our steady growth by the end of 2017 we’ll have between 25,000 and 35,000 paid subscribers. We’ll be a pretty large publication. The New Republic has around 40,000 subscribers and that’s dropping. We’re growing really fast and we’re growing without any real funding. Other publications do direct mails, do discounts, and they lose their circulation. We don’t do anything. We just publish stuff, then sit back and wait. I think we can continue to grow and the question is what that peak will be and that’s always stressful. It’s easy and fun running a publication that’s growing by leaps and bounds and it’ll be a bit depressing managing a decline or something that’s plateauing. I know there are going to be some setbacks ahead and it’s just a matter of bracing myself for it. My goal is just to keep pushing to forestall the decline, though it’s inevitable that we hit some sort of ceiling. I just think the ceiling is much higher than what people expect. I think the ceiling could be 80-90,000. Most people thought the ceiling for Jacobin was one or two thousand but look where we are now.w
B&W: Do you think Bernie has a chance in the primaries? BS: Not in the primaries. Unless there’s a Hillary Clinton scandal or—and I don’t wish this upon anyone including Hillary Clinton—if she stepped down because of health reasons, which is a possibility for
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February 2016
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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. Our move to a weekly print model has produced vast improvements in every aspect of Spectator, including the quality of its journalism, its financial health, and the development of our staff. What we predicted during the discussions at the board actually happened. We argued during the debate that Spec was an organization devoted to a print product no longer embraced by our audience. Since the transition in the fall of 2014, we have higher engagement with both our print and digital editions. Focusing on the ways our readers see our stories online, we have doubled the “likes” on our Facebook page and tripled the number of email subscribers to our daily newsletters of top stories, metrics of engagement we like to look at because these users are typically students or members of the University community (as opposed to, say, referrals from search engines). The increased impact isn’t the result of magic; it’s because the staff is now more productive and doing higher quality work. We have substantially more traffic to the site and observe more weekly print editions being picked up because our work is much improved. Our stories are better, and the University community has noticed. A particular satisfying moment for Michael came when a senior administrator—the day following a particularly good work of aggressive journalism targeted at her organization—told him “Spectator is a different entity than it was a year ago, and everyone knows it.” [...] e For Columbia, then, the challenge of “branding” means providing clear, unified identity standards that allow the many parts of the University to leverage the greatest strength of Columbia’s name and reputation in ways that support the mission of each individual
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Having a strong University-wide identity that adds to each unit’s value while reinforcing the collective value of the institution as a whole has a number of benefits. A clear set of identity design standards: •provides a single brand that endows all of the University’s prestige onto each unit •limits duplication of effort and resources across the University by minimizing the cost of trademark, design, legal, and other branding expenses •prevents dilution of the University’s brand •applies the brand management expertise of Columbia’s communications professionals across the entire University •builds a sense of shared identity, community, and pride [...] Going forward, we would discourage the proliferation of visual marks, colors, and identities that do not place individual units within the framework of the larger University, a best practice increasingly followed by our peers. While it is not necessary to seek uniformity in the ways that different schools, institutes, and centers shape their identities, we believe that everyone is best served by employing some combination of core elements of name, color, typography, and visual mark. As a guide, we have developed a series of “co-branded” identities that communicate individuality while bestowing the value of Columbia’s name and reputation. A growing number of schools, institutes, and programs have already taken on this co-branding approach and are finding it highly effective with both internal and external audiences. w
The Blue and White
CAMPUS GOSSIP JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY Management at Spec has gotten rid of their editorial board, whose aim was once stated as “to be more than just the voice of Spectator—we’d like to be the voice of the community at large.” At the same time, the arts and entertainment section has been left without an editor, and staff are reportedly being reassigned to Spectrum and The Eye. Efficiency! e A University Writing op-ed by CC freshman Benjamin Chevlin published in both the Morningside Review and the Cleveland Plain Dealer defends Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering America, arguing that failing to place such a ban might be a “historic mistake.” He states that criticism of Trump’s remarks prevents “a valuable debate on this critical issue for all Americans.” e After news broke of the fatal Medical Brigade crash in Honduras, a student interning at a national publication posted a now-deleted message to the Class of 2018 Facebook group, seeking interview leads for an article about the accident. One reply called the student out for their insensitivity to those affected, suggesting that the intrepid reporter learn Spanish and read local reports. e LOCAL LEADERS Community organizer and anti-Manhattanville activist Tom DeMott believes that V&T offers “without doubt, the best eggplant pizza I’ve ever eaten, a most fine topping.” After another group member reported seeing a cockroach at the eatery, DeMott responded with rhyming couplets rebuffing the complaint. e Summet Shah, Senior Associate at Brand Foundry Adventures, recently updated his contact details on Haystack.
February 2016
PROFESSIN’ A former student of Barnard film professor Robert Brink emailed everyone enrolled in his section of “Feature Film Screenwriting” asking them to drop the class, describing him as “a menace to Barnard's campus and a stain on the film department” as well as “a racist and a fetishist.” This comes one semester after a Slant op-ed accused a Barnard theater professor of asking students to stereotypically act out scenes as people of other races. e MESAAS professor Gil Anidjar’s interfaith “GOD” class was relocated at the last minute from Union Theological Seminary to the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. He was formerly named as “anti-Israel” by AMCHA. e Faculty and administration residents of Columbia housing on Claremont Avenue complained that the rebuilding of Lehman Library by Barnard College will diminish the amenities of their apartments, since it will be much higher than the existing building. e MEMOS An update to our ongoing Barnard Buy | Sell | Trade coverage: a student posted a message asking “those of us who are white” to “choose other words beside ‘nude’ to describe light beige clothes” in the interest of inclusivity. e 133 people reportedly attended a Facebook event titled “Hotbox Carman 2k15.” To prevent suspicion, the event’s creator wrote, “this is just a joke i am just a bored lady making a joke pls dont arrest me.” Discourse ... it’s toxic!w
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The Blue and White