February 2018

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. XXIV No. I

February 2018

Looking Back, Looking Forward Fifty years later, how the 1968 protests live on at Columbia

New York, New York A conversation with Kenneth Jackson

Also Inside: S

tudents'

Views on Affirmative Action

CAROLINE HURLEY, CC '19, Editor-in-Chief ESMÉ ABLAZA, BC '20, Managing Editor VIRGINIA AMBELIOTIS, BC '19, Senior Editor JASMINE PARK, CC '20, Senior Editor RYAN MOHEN, CC '21, Senior Editor HUGH CECIL, CC '19, Senior Editor SOPHIE LEVY, BC '21, Senior Editor AARON SU, CC '19, Layout Editor ISAIAH BENNETT, CC '20, Publisher SHULIE WEINBERG, BC '20, Online Editor JENNIFER BI, CC '19, Senior Illustrator UFON UMANAH, CC '20, Investigations Editor Staff Writers MARY DAWSON, BC '20 GABY EDWARDS, BC '20 ALLISEN LICHTENSTEIN, BC '19 CASEY DAVIS, BC '20 OTTILIE LIGHTE, BC '20 MIYA LEE, CC '18 Contributors ZOE DANSDILL, BC '21 NED RUSSIN, GS '18 SAIF MAQBOOL, CC '18

Staff Illustrators YOTAM DEREE, GS '19 SAHRA DENNER, CC '21 Artists KELLIE ZHAO, CC '19 RACHEL CHIN, CC '18 JEN ALLEN, CC '20

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXIV

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. I

Columns

4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 12 Verily Veritas 15 Digitalia Columbiana 26 M easure for Measure 34 Staff Personals 35 Campus G ossip

Hugh Cecil & Virginia Ambeliotis Casey Davis

Mary Dawson

Jasmine Park

Ufon Umanah, Ryan Mohen, Ned Russin, Gaby Edwards, & Miya Lee Caroline Hurley

Features 10 At Two Swords Length: Does Love E xist?

Our monthly prose and cons 13 Columbia’s NASA Connection

Goddard Space Institute occupies floor above Tom’s Restaurant 14 CCSC Targets E xclusive Student Groups

Proposed policy would take funding from student groups

requiring applications 16 Leveling the Playing Field

CU students share differing views on affirmative action 18 Out of Chaos, A Tradition of Activism Is Born

50 years later, how the 1968 protests live on at Columbia

29 New York, New York

A conversation with Professor Kenneth Jackson

theblueandwhite.org

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Cover by Jennifer Bi

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Recently I remarked to a friend how it felt to visit Carman 10 after almost two years since I moved out.

Looking out the window by the elevators, onto College Walk below, felt like an entirely different scene, even though nothing about the view was especially changed.

Same view, different perspective.

I can’t believe I’m a junior, I said to him.

Caroline, don’t be dumb, that’s how time works, he said. And don’t think because you read one Cormac McCarthy book one time you don’t need to use quotation marks anymore.

Fair point. But now that I’m a big-time magazine editor, I feel the need to be more aesthetically motivated.

My experience with the passage of time differs in no way from other young persons who can suddenly drink alcohol legally. Still, I am struck by how my perspective on this place has aged with me.

Especially at Columbia, it can be hard to think critically about our own worlds while we are so wrapped up in what is going on in them. One of the biggest problems about this place is that it is easy to think having three midterms in a week qualifies as a tragedy, until a real tragedy actually strikes—a friend suddenly loses a parent, another shooting in the news—and puts everything in perspective.

All of a sudden, life here isn’t that bad.

This issue is all about perspectives. Hugh and Virginia share their takes on love (pg 10), Jasmine collects differing views on affirmative action (pg 16), and we chronicle five different experiences of the historic 1968 Columbia protests (pg 18).

This is my first issue having to write this letter, and all I can do is reflect on the countless perspectives that I have been confronted with while a part of The Blue and White. I hope that over my year as editor, this magazine confronts you, boldly, with the same.

— Caroline Hurley

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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS Temporary nuclear detente President Sian Beilock The Wall (of Low) Juul pods at 115th Regular Decision #ROAR2022 DEPARTURES The Koronets we knew Barnard scaffolding Lecherous professors Amigos My cuffs

Come Again?! “no way i’m fucking in the stacks if the school is blowing up in 10 min catch me & my forbidden ta crush doin the nasty on u kno whose desk in low”” — instagram nut buster, January 16, 2018 on the Bwog article “What to do if you only have 15 minutes left at Columbia”

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

Columbia Crushes That Never Were Recently, popular Facebook page Columbia Crushes has stopped posting the pleas of the lonely and thirsty. The page has not been updated since the end of January after Columbia Crushes released their ill-fated app, MiniBoard, which looks suspiciously like Yik-Yak. To mourn the death of creepy posts to tag your friends in, the editors of The Blue and White have decided to publish the crushes that did not make the cut.

“You play baseball on the lawns but you’re clearly not the baseball team. Interested in a different game of ‘catch’? Call me.” e “I’ve seen you around campus with your very dainty small white dog, who does not use a leash and whose hair is always on point. Not interested in you, but interested in the dog.” e “My TA is soooooo hot he’s like thirty ish but i literally think i am in love how will i make it through a whole semester with you distracting me ugh you are so hot ugh please date me i swear to god i’m totally normal even though i’m submitting this !!!!!” e “Who is the kid who sets off the McBain fire alarm once a week? I totally love you and we should totally meet for coffee sometime because I totally won’t kill you :) ” e “I loved when you yelled at me in the boat. Take me

back to Tahoe. Call me by your name.” e “I met a girl named Kelley on Tinder, and she roasted me for my bio. Kelley, marry me.” e “I’ve seen you at Mel’s a lot and want to show you my turtleneck collection. Let’s go to a fashion show.” e “You look kinda young so I nicknamed you Lolita.

Please date me” e “I saw you playing PUBG in lecture. I can’t tell how old you are, but your skills blew me away. XBox and chill sometime?” e “Who was the guy wearing pants on Low steps today? Anyone know his name or how I could get in touch? Thanks.” e “To all my Ferris and John Jay swipe ladies—you da real homies. Next meal is on me.”

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

February 2018

Postcard by Jen Allen

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BLUE NOTES

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hile the vast majority of students can at least acknowledge the history of groundbreaking research and academic progress to which Columbia’s faculty has long contributed, there are few among undergraduates who have ever heard of the University Seminars.

The passion project of Frank Tannenbaum, a mid-20th century Columbia professor of history, the Columbia University Seminars were first approved under the presidency of Frank Fackenthal in 1944.

With a focus on a borderless sense of contribution towards rigorous study, the University Seminars meet at various points throughout the year and offer the unique opportunity for academics between Columbia’s various departments, and even those outside of the institution, to come together in discussion and critique.

The seminars’ focus is academic in the purest possible sense. Those with an invitation-only membership to any of the various seminars neither pay nor are payed for their contribution, and visitors—with a explicit emphasis on the press—are expressly forbidden.

Under the eye of current director Robert Pollack, the seminars have grown from five in 1944 to over 90 today. Three of the original seminars continue to meet (Peace, Religion, and The Renaissance), but the breadth of study has expanded

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dramatically. Now seminars meet to ponder a kaleidoscopic set of topics including ‘Neo-Confucian Studies,’ ‘Memory and Slavery,’ and ‘Global Mental Health.’ A seminar even meets which is dedicated simply to the topic of ‘Death.’

As the conceptual progenitor of the University Seminars, Tannenbaum once stated, “University departments are not departments but compartments and, classically, progress is made at the interstices of the traditional disciplines.” And with this emphasis on freedom of thought and collaboration within a broader intellectual community, the seminars have continued to be curated. Nevertheless, it could be said it is something of a shame that members of the undergraduate colleges are entirely unwelcome in these seminars. Certainly there is a fair motivation to avoid the disruptive pressures of sometimes curious, and perhaps often antagonistic, outsiders. But maybe there is a future in which undergraduates can silently spectate the seminars, joining in, if not for their contribution, but for their edification.

— Isaiah Bennett

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n Amsterdam and 108th, La Taqueria y Fonda may seem like a hole in the wall, but it’s been a Columbia favorite for ages. If you’re a diehard Vampire Weekend fan, you might have become acquainted with La Taqueria y Fonda before even you set foot on campus. La Taqueria gets its own shoutout, “through half the taquerias y fondas” in their song “California English: Part 2.” Vampire Weekend’s infatuation with La Taqueria can be understood by anyone who has been surrounded by La Taqueria’s lime green walls. Though the seating only consists of a couple of wooden tables that line the side of the restaurant as you enter and some are

Illustration by Jennifer Bi

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES Morningside. From technical gas issues to fires, La Taqueria still thrives on 108th each night, filled with Columbia students and Morningside Heights locals until it closes.

— Allisen Lichtenstein

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scattered in the back, La Taqueria is always filled with Spanish music, beer, and tacos from 11 a.m. to 11:45 p.m. each night.

Jorge López, the owner, opened La Taqueria y Fonda on May 1, 1999, as he struggled to find a place in the city to eat his native cuisine. López is from Guerrero state in Mexico which borders Oaxaca and Puebla, and the two regions’ influences are found his cuisine. You can find anything from chile en nogada to cactus tacos at La Taqueria.

With its long history in Morningside Heights, La Taqueria has had “a lot of generations work in the business,” according to López. One of his favorite parts of the business is seeing “new generations come visit the business.”

Kyle Fram, SEAS ’20, has been going to La Taqueria since his freshman year. Fram says he goes with “too many people for the tables, which makes the dining experience very intimate.”

Despite its small size of the restaurant, La Taqueria does not lack in its food portions. Fram says that La Taqueria’s giant burrito is “about the size of a bowling pin with the top part cut off.”

López appreciates that La Taqueria makes students’ lives more enjoyable at Columbia. But even more, he admires the effect the students have on the restaurant. “You guys live a very special moment where you are still students, and we feel that moment in the Taqueria y Fonda, [and] we feel the vibration and the energy you guys have,” López says.

La Taqueria y Fonda has thrived despite the various obstacles it has faced over the years. La Taqueria has endured much during its 18 years in

February 2018

ave you ever walked out of the Barnard gates and crossed Broadway at 118th and thought: Wow, I’d really like to look at a revolutionary soldier in an impressive male power stance in period pantaloons to remind me of my patriotism? Well, you should look no farther than the stone wall just North of the Earl Hall Gate, on the West side of the Mathematics building.

Embedded in the stone, a heavily oxidized copper relief memorializes the Battle of Harlem Heights.

More than just a dramatized war scene, the piece of artwork is a particularly beautiful thread of the woven history between Columbia and the Revolutionary War. The plaque commemorates the death of Colonel Thomas Knowlton and the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought on what is now Columbia’s campus, on September 16th, 1776. Proudly thrusting a sword in the air, a soldier stands over the wounded colonel who is clutching his chest in the foreground. British soldiers creep into the frame, pulling themselves from the background to remind the viewer that the victory is temporary.

This moment of success, preserved on our campus walls, marks General Washington’s first victory in the Revolutionary War. The attack exemplified the reckless tenacity and incendiary courage that founded the original American reputation. This victory, though followed by a string of miserable defeats, inspired a hopeful confidence, or at least established potential legitimacy for the American military.

So, the next time you walk down Broadway past 117th street, imagine a scrappy band of 150 colonists trapping British troops in a buckwheat field that once occupied where Barnard’s campus is now.

— Natalia Queenan

Illustrations by Rachel Chin and Jennifer Bi

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

Carina Hardy

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hen I walk into Carina Hardy’s, BC '18, apartment, she and three plaster boobs are waiting for me at her kitchen table. She was born in New York and raised in Bali. “I’ve always been back and forth between these two worlds,” she says. “I’ve had a really interesting time at Barnard, primarily because I’ve been reckoning my ability to be creative but also be intellectually stimulated,” she says. For her junior year, she studied design at Goldsmiths, University of London. There she designed her most significant piece of artwork to date: an enormous, inflatable sculpture of a pair of breasts, which she built in Bali.

It was important to Hardy that she not corner herself into one type of art. “I’m much more of a whole-rounded person,” she says. The inflatable breasts were displayed on the Goldsmiths quad as part of her final project after making their first appearance at the Wonderfruit Festival in Thailand.

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“That [her year abroad] was the first time I just got to make stuff and fully dive into it because I wasn’t bogged down by the academics,” Hardy says.

The motivating concept behind the project, called “Back to the Breast,” was to explore the different ways in which society interacts with and discusses women’s breasts. Part of her interest in exploring themes surrounding breasts comes from the two summers in high school she spent volunteering as a doula and translator at a free natural birthing clinic in Bali. “I had always been really motherly and interested in that world,” Hardy says. “In that process,” Hardy says, “I was also in charge of breast feed startup, so as soon the baby would come out, I would try to get it to latch onto the mom’s breast. I think having that, as a young girl, made me so connected to knowing about these women’s bodies and the power that we have… and also understanding that no two experiences are the same. No two births are the same, no two boobs are the same.”

The process of designing the enormous piece of installation art was complex. First, she used plaster-casting techniques to create many life-sized sculptures of various women’s breasts. An engineer then created a 3D scan of both one of the live models and a plaster cast of a breast, and sent the scan to a patterning company. “The first time he got a model back to me, it was literally half a sphere and I was like, ‘Really?’” Hardy laughs, lamenting that it was difficult to achieve a truly natural shape for the breasts.

Hardy then created the inflatable sculpture out of organic cotton and natural latex. Influenced by her environmentally conscious education at the Green School in Bali, it was important to Hardy that her sculpture, which weighs over 300 pounds, be completely compostable and eventually return to the earth.

It was also important to Hardy that she pigment the sculpture with rich colors (an earthy ochre

Illustration by Kellie Zhao

The Blue and White

for the skin, with golden nipples). “I didn’t want the default to be giant white boobs,” she says. “That just didn’t feel right.” She also designed the sculpture so that viewers can access the inside of the breasts through an “underwire”: a narrow tunnel that hugs one side of the breasts.

Although Hardy admits that finding community among artists at Barnard and Columbia can be difficult, she looks forward to what the rest of the semester will bring. Before graduating this Spring with a major in Art History with a visual arts concentration, Hardy hopes to display the breasts on Low Plaza, “between the penis fountains.”

— Esmé Ablaza

Osama Khalifa

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alfway through my interview with Osama Khalifa, CC '18, he starts asking me the questions, and few times have I ever been so charmed.

“Well, what do you like to do?” he counters to me, after I have just taken the same line of questioning with him. I get the sense that he genuinely cares to get to know me just as much as I am trying to get to know him, and he is not even on an assignment to do so.

Khalifa shines as the star of the Columbia Men’s Squash team, though he would never describe himself that way. He won the CSA Individual National Championship to cap off his junior season. As a sophomore, he took home Ivy League Player of the Year honors for the first time in Columbia Squash history, and this season, Men’s Squash beat Harvard for the first time in program history, clinched by a victory in the final match by Khalifa.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Khalifa never expected his squash career to turn out the way it has. In 2012, his family had to leave Egypt after years of turmoil following the Arab Spring protests.

“Before the protests, I never thought that I wanted to leave. I wanted to play squash professionally in Egypt—it is literally the best place to train for the sport there.” In Egypt, squash is a major national sport, and world champions grace the local courts, “like if Michael Phelps trained in your local pool,” says Khalifa. This proximity to greatness at his local club tilted his focus to squash and away from gymnastics and soccer, which he played as a kid. When his family moved to the United States, Khalifa continued his squash career at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

Leaving behind his life in Egypt was obviously difficult: “Even though you moved here, you’d have

February 2018

to constantly call the rest of your family back home to check on them. Because in a way it’s sort of like, ‘Goodbye!’ like you’re abandoning them. It was hard.

Especially because we still have a lot of friends and family over there,” he recalls.

At Columbia, and particularly on the squash team, he has found a support system and a second family. He describes the team as “very international,” with both players and coaches from Pakistan, India, Egypt, Canada, and South Africa, who understand the recent added stress that comes with being an immigrant.

“Specifically, with the new administration, every time they come up with the seven new countries that are not allowed to leave, you’re sort of going down the list like, ‘Is Egypt there?’ because it could be there or it could not, and that would sort of determine what you are doing in the next few years. Luckily, it hasn’t been on the list yet,” he says, “That’s one thing that sort of affects the team as a whole, so they are a big support.”

Khalifa does not want people to think that his only interest is squash, even though his days are typically filled with two practices, a lift, classes and a nap.

When the season ends, he tries to spend time with friends, rather than picking up another activity.

“I love acting, and that’s one thing that if I were to go back, or if I didn’t play a sport in college that’s what I would pursue. When I was in Egypt I was doing that for a little bit and that’s one thing that I wish I had more time for. I really enjoy it. That, and jigsaw puzzles.”

— Caroline Hurley

Illustration by Yotam Deree

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Does love Y

es.

Milano’s, so long as I have an H17 in my hand. It is People who don’t believe in love are just something I cannot stop thinking about. When you unwilling to give it a shot. Love doesn’t come easy; are in class and your stomach aches because you are it catches you by surprise. If you look too hard, then not with your significant other, you understand the you’ll miss it. It’s a strange thing, a powerful, and pain. There is something unassuming about the way elusive emotion that only finds its way into your life the H17 stares back at me. It seems to understand me when you look in the most unexpected places. So only as far as I seek to be understood—I am exactly many things can go wrong, but, when love goes right, like Gatsby. there’s nothing better.

The H17 is tailored to my liking, too. It can You’re doing double takes be as little or as much baggage as around every corner because you’d I want. My relationship can be as do anything to see them again and heavy or as light as I’d like. I can god forbid you miss a chance to keep coming back to it, guilt free, catch their eye. Your heart bursts and the Milano’s staff will never through your throat at the thought judge me for it. Although there are of being with them. The world many sandwiches on the robust stands still but the clock stubbornly pages of the Milano’s menu, there forges on. are none quite like the H17.

Love exists because there are Those who deny love’s exispeople that will it into existence. tence just haven’t found their own Love, manifest, is the willingness H17. to give up everything for something It would be a disservice to else. Love is an odd detachment the emotional capacities we have from the self, to an emotional unifideveloped over years of evolutioncation with another. You’re terribly ary empathy to say that love does vulnerable but blissfully comfortnot exist. The inexplicable nature able. In Spike Jonze’s movie Her, of love is why it pertains to our lives they talk about love as a “socially so much and the reason that we have ffirmative acceptable form of insanity;” it’s an tried to denote this feeling. There’s unconditional and impractical relino omnipotent oracle that could tell

By Hugh Cecil ance on something else. us why we do or feel the way we do— Love can take many forms, it’s just love. but it undoubtedly exists. For the landscape artist it Love has been written, drawn, and sung about might be just the right stratification of clouds across by virtually every artist because nobody entirely the sky; the musician plays just the right note at pre- understands it. The impression of love is entirely cisely the right time; or the chef delights in the right subjective, but it exists. There may not be a universal balance of tastes in his meal. Efforts to define love are Love, but the emotional interdependence from perfutile because of its amorphous nature, but it exists. son to person validates the irrational nature of our It’s just about finding the right companion. being and encapsulates what it means to be in love.

On those cold winter days when the harsh The love for a sandwich is completely irrational and winds burn ears and numb cheeks, there are few unhelpful to any future relationship I hope to have, things that will get me out of my room, but I’d gladly but, as long as Milano’s keeps serving up the H17, I’ll do a walk of shame, in my underwear, back from be happy on Valentine’s day.w

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Illustration by Rachel Chin

The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

exist?

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ove does not. ings, but you knew: the problem was us. Amidst this It is said that love for a person increases music of extraordinary feeling, we were nagged by a with knowledge of that person. Yet the closer I get sheepish revelation that we could not create this pasto someone, the more I tend to discover things about sion for ourselves. them that just piss me off. Perhaps they lack my After that night, I conceded that I wished to enthusiasm for oral hygiene; they consume alcohol, remain in a relationship with you but would no longer cannabis or pornography immoderately; or they uri- believe that it was possible to have passions for you nate strangely. that were real. Each time you unwittingly showed There can be no love where there is shame, and your vulnerability reaffirmed my choice. You felt like for many of us who are trying to you could trust me and I perceived find love for the umpteenth time, your trust; this shared understandit is shame that we ultimately ing made our being together feel feel. Shame of what we lack. Of right. But your inadvertent displays coming asymptotically close to of vulnerability repulsed me just achieving a certain knowledge, enough that you never became allonly for our pillars to crumble consuming to me. Like when you down. Of thinking we are certain drunkenly confessed you can only of something because we see no write poetry when you’re high. doubt in it, before realizing that As for my least flattering doubt is the only certainty we memory of you, I must confess: have.

I have revisited it many times in When we first started hopes of un-sentimentalizing the dating, there were things that I you I remember. Do you recall the disliked about you. Your pretentime you dragged me to Sweetgreen sions. Your humor. Your recurand scolded the assembly-line perring references to Gogol. They son for having a certain root vegdidn’t bother me enough to leave etable on hand that was not locally you. We were two people going out, sourced? I never told you, but you as youths do. I was ecstatic, not for mispronounced the name of the egative us, but because we were helping root vegetable. And no, I will not

By Virginia Ambeliotis each other fit in. Riding the conventell you what root vegetable I have tional was a high; once we’d done in mind, nor how to pronounce said it a few times I was hooked. Being with you felt so root vegetable, because I relish the idea of you movnormal and I thought we belonged together. ing down the Sweetgreen queue asking yourself what After some time it became apparent to me that a root vegetable is anyway and nervously blurting out that normal feeling was actually an empty one. When the names of add-ons that could fit the bill in front of you took me to that jazz club in Columbus Circle your future dates. last summer, you apologized to me in advance that “I love you too.” So often we say this to people the venue was “commercial”. Why? The venue was for whom we have no such feelings. My hope is to perfect. The lights were dimmed. The music was someday tell someone I love them and really mean sensuous as hell. Something about the scene still “you don’t repulse me.” seemed artificial to you. By your comment you meant “I love you. Oops—I meant I hate you. Fuck. Do to vaguely ascribe this artificialness to our surround- you want to fuck?”w

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February 2018

Illustration by Jennifer Bi

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V E R I LY V E R I TA S

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS

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In which our hero solicits meaning

ecently Verily had felt drawn to Brooklyn, perhaps due to the stultifying stagnance of Morningside Heights, or to the recent emergence in him of an acute apathy towards the social mores and academic trivialities of college. One crisp evening, as he strolled in Riverside Park with a devoted friend, they came across a well-known philosophy professor walking his dog, a small, ridiculous looking mongrel of ambiguous heritage.

The dog seemed less than ecstatic to be dragged along on this auspicious outing, and would struggle intermittently before submitting to its owner’s resigned coaxing. “That dog,” Verily astutely remarked to his friend, “represents the sum total of all human ideation and satisfaction—we expect everything come to us and submit itself before our majesty, but it actually wants to do anything but.” His friend gave him a blank look that Verily interpreted as awestruck assent.

That weekend, Verily, who as we remember, was going to work at Morgan Stanley, found himself in Greenpoint, seeking out the illumination or inspiration that he was so confident of encountering here. Directed unwittingly by the aroma of pierogies, he drifted from one Polish restaurant to another, finding his route littered with huge, modern apartment complexes that appeared replete with all the amenities of modern luxury. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, he could see the members of the petit bourgeois that he so admired going about

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their daily routines, and it seemed to him like he was watching zoo animals in their enclosures, though he was really, really high and this might have played a part in this impression. Everyone he met was of a certain type: well dressed, composed, and above all, purposeful—everything these people did, from walking to purchasing coffee at a bodega, seemed colored by a certain unmistakable intent.

Suddenly, Verily was struck by the breadth of his illusions—were these people really so different from the prophets of corporate conformism that he was dead set on avoiding?

Maybe they were just living out a fantasy as well, just one that they were more comfortable with. Was anyone even real, or was it just that some puppets have the privilege of choosing their puppeteer? What was he even looking for?

Was there such a thing, in an era of such intrusive capitalism, as a bohemian lifestyle? Ultimately, our intrepid hero resolved to smoke less and meditate more.

At the next social function he had the privilege of attending, Verily was asked about Brooklyn, about his findings on his great adventure.

“What I have come to realize,” he mused after an uncomfortably long pause, “is that we are all leashed, and the only feasible strategy is to wait for freedom while thriving in captivity. I am redirecting my attention towards the Lower East Side.” The people around him were unfortunately far too well acquainted with him for this dramatic pivot to register even a minimal level of incredulity. What can’t be cured must be endured.w

The Blue and White

TO INFINITY AND TOM’S

Columbia’s NASA Connection Goddard Space Institute occupies floor above Tom’s Restaurant

By Casey Davis

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hen students walk by the corner of 112th Street and Broadway, it is the semi-famous restaurant, Tom’s, that catches their eye. The Seinfeld restaurant! However, located in the same building directly above Tom’s is something just as interesting. The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was established in 1961 to do space science research, opting to establish itself in New York City in order to draw from the resources of nearby universities and facilitate an interest in NASA programs among their students. In 1966, the institute doubled down by moving into the space above Tom’s, what is now Columbia’s Armstrong Hall. It is part of the Earth Sciences Division of the NASA’s Goddard Flight Center. One of its major focuses: climate change research. They combine paleogeology (the study of the solid Earth’s past); global datasets; and global models of the land, atmosphere, and sea in order to analyze past climate change and predict future changes. In their mission statement, GISS emphasizes that they study “natural and man-made changes in our environment that occur on various time scales.” This means that they address anything from the temporary effect of volcanic eruptions on the climate to the destructive tendencies of carbon dioxide emissions since the industrial revolution. These studies create a comprehensive understanding of the habitability of our planet as well as conducting similar studies to look at the habitability of nearby planets.

Branches of NASA often act independently from their location, but the Goddard institute makes a point to do the exact opposite with its active involvement in New York City. Research at this institute is done in collaboration with Columbia and other universities in the area. It joins and supports graduate programs. For both researchers and students, this is a win: the graduate programs get additional resources from NASA and NASA gets dedicated and talented students to be part of their projects.

Additionally, NASA offers summer internships to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students

February 2018

who live within a 50-mile radius of the Goddard Space Studies Institute at Columbia. These internships often turn into year-round work in which teams of student and faculty work for the Climate Change Research Initiative.

Steve Cohen, the director of the Earth Institute, regularly laudes the achievements done by the Goddard institute. He says researchers Allegra LeGrande and Matt Pearce are working to “collaborate with leadership from multiple formal and informal education institutions throughout the NYC metropolitan area on the development of a high school and undergraduate STEM education program to provide authentic research and mentoring experiences to minority and underserved populations and STEM educators.” Mr. Cohen is an adamant supporter of using science in order to educate and help those less fortunate.

The Goddard Institute works together with the Columbia Department of Earth and Environmental Science, as well as SEAS and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in order to offer a graduate program in atmospheric science. This works because GISS acts as both a laboratory for NASA and as a unit of the Earth Institute at Columbia. Funding and research is shared between both of these groups.

Often it is the earth sciences division of NASA that decides on certain topics and problems that are important. From there, scientists and graduate students at the Earth Institute delve more deeply and come up with research on the subject. Additionally, many of the employees at Goddard are also employed by the Earth Institute.w

Illustration by Yotam Deree

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YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US

CCSC Targets Student Groups Proposed policy would take funding from groups with applications

By Mary Dawson

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ast semester, CCSC’s Finance Committee noticed a growing lack of inclusivity in student organizations and considered reform the best way to achieve their goals of creating a welcoming campus community. Initially, they considered reducing students’ stress related to club applications or auditions, and properly distributing student activities fees. Advocates of this initiative argued that the current club environment was not conducive to an open, cohesive community, citing CCSC-distributed surveys in which a large number of students expressed feeling unable to participate in the clubs of their choice, from news publications to dance teams to theater groups.

According to the survey respondents, the often-rigorous application and interview processes many student groups employ are both intimidating and exclusionary—62.7 percent of respondents had been rejected from joining a student organization. As the Finance Committee argued in their presentation, CCSC’s involvement in this issue is twofold: they are responsible not only for facilitating an inclusive, functional community but also for ensuring that student activity fees are properly distributed. “You’re paying for basically every student group even if you’re not getting in,” says VP Finance Adam Resheff.

Central to his argument, if students can’t find community through student organizations, they aren’t receiving the full benefit of paying tuition, which includes a $113 semesterly student activities fee, 90 percent of which go to student groups.

Initially, the Finance Committee hoped to institute an adjudication process through which clubs would risk losing funding as a result of violating CCSC-developed guidelines. At the time, some students holding leadership positions in clubs feared that the reform was too restrictive. For clubs where responsibility accompanies participation, the application and interview processes are essential to determining who is willing to put in the necessary work.

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Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal Editor-inChief Kenneth Pham explained that, because there is only a finite amount of work to be done on the journal, CUSJ’s application process allows the board to identify those who can make a meaningful contribution.

This situation applies to most of Columbia’s 27 undergraduate publications, as well as dance groups, a capella groups, the mock trial team, and so on.

At the time, committee members reasoned this concern may be exaggerated. The proposed reform aims for openness within reason, not the total elimination of the application process. Resheff agreed that such a lack of selectivity would be unproductive, but expressed the belief that every student organization currently has the ability to open up. According to Resheff, it’s just a matter of finding “creative solutions” to the issue of exclusivity. However, the committee recently reconsidered the adjudication process and is now placing emphasis on rewarding inclusive clubs rather than punishing exclusive ones.

In CCSC’s most recent meeting, Resheff talked of possibly collaboration between CCSC and the undergraduate press to promote inclusive groups. The Finance Committee plans to focus on establishing standards of inclusivity that can be used to evaluate a group’s accessibility.

As of now, Resheff and the rest of the committee hope to solidify their plan for reform, distribute a second set of surveys and begin making changes as early as this May. Discussion will be integral to re-organizing this reform, including more frequent communication among CCSC, governing boards, and student organizations. During the presentation of the CCSC Semesterly Report in January, Resheff said that utilizing co-sponsorships to promote inclusive clubs was not off the table. However, what originally included amendments to the CCSC constitution was no more. Still, what is left will be a product of CCSC’s reflection on its vision for the Columbia community. What that vision entails now is forthcoming.w

The Blue and White

DIGITALIA COLUMBIANA The letters below are a rejected Spec Letter to the Editor, and The Spectator’s reply, found on the computer of one of our own.

Dear Ufon, My name is Oliver I am an associate editor in the opinion section. I’d first like to thank you for writing this piece. Additionally, as a member of Spectator, I will begin by admitting that this is an issue in which impartiality is difficult. That being said, I feel I have done my best to remain impartial in my editing.

That being said, again, as a member of Spec (and not just opinion) I think I speak for all of us when I say that we strive to make all our content as good as it can be. In lieu of this goal, I think we all welcome the criticism, and thank you for it. This piece makes a really good point. As a (we like to think) widely read newspaper, the way news covers their analysis is wildly important. It has the ability to shape the viewpoints of the readers in a way otherwise unprecedented.

However, frankly, I feel that your piece (as it stands) is not necessarily exempt from the same issues that you noted in the news article. This is particularly the case in the 2nd to last paragraph, in which you open the floor for greater discussion on the issue. Essentially, I feel that you criticize the piece, without adding much more to the discussion. There are many points where you begin to add strong analysis, but instead seem to shy away from it in favor of disparaging news. I would like to see more analysis, which I think will bring this to being a much stronger piece.

Best, Oliver e Title: A Free Throw on Free Speech Author: Ufon Umanah Byline: The last time Spec published something under “news analysis” was in 2007, and outside The Eye, analytical coverage has been sparse in the best of times. In The State of Speech, Spec News returns to the analysis game, but it seems those analytical skills got a little rusty during the break.

The article, in giving a broad overview of

February 2018

free speech issues in little more than a thousand words, misses key nuances. While the definition of an academic setting initially confounded the University Senate, senators eventually agreed to restrict the scope of the Resolution on Academic Freedom to core academic functions. As defined, the resolution wouldn’t have much bearing on CUCR’s guest speakers, though the topic came up during debate of the resolution (again, when the Senate was confused).

Meanwhile, the analysis evaded Aristotle’s criticism of the Marching Band’s portrayal of him in the last Orgo Night. Given the fresh controversy in a facet of the free speech debate occurred during finals week, which is the academic equivalent of a Friday news dump, the absence glares.

I’m sure News enjoys the nitpicking, but the end of The State of Speech appeals to the community to approach the debate “that isn’t happening” as the title reads. It’s not that the debate hasn’t happened.

While I can’t speak to the negotiations between the Student and Faculty Affairs Committees, the debate elsewhere has become entrenched since last year. The Columbia Political Union hosted two large debates across the aisle my maiden year, indeed one on free speech, and a gala to unite the political community. The Student Governing Board hosted a panel on activism which included such disparate voices as Columbia Democrats, Right to Life, Aryeh, and Students for Justice in Palestine. Today, the Columbia Democrats are on record calling for sanctions against CUCR. Understanding the nuances of the debate, and particularly where it derailed, and where exactly the moral Rubicon has been crossed, is critical to having that debate.

It’s hard to say where analysis should fit in the news-opinion divide. Does it deepen a reader’s understanding of an issue? Does it provide an agreeable solution to the problem? But by not giving enough space to the analysis, The State of Speech does neither.w

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GIVE ME A CHANCE

Leveling the Playing Field Columbia students share differing views on affirmative action

By Jasmine Park

C

ollege admissions are a special iteration of hell.

Most, if not every student at Columbia can probably think back with a cringe to that process, where insecurity, ambition, and anxiety dangle in the hands of busy, untouchable admissions officers. Amid this chaos, Americans are confronted with the idea that race can play a heavy role in determining one’s future—affirmative action is a widely discussed topic, and one that the Trump Administration is taking on with renewed vigor. Given that higher education plays such a key role in the classic American Dream story, some people are uncomfortable when affirmative action pulls college out of the meritocratic narrative.

The Supreme Court has scrutinized affirmative action many times. The most recent episode being Fisher v. University of Texas, where a white female student sued the University of Texas, citing discriminatory admissions policies. Although the Court allowed Texas to use race as a non-quantified factor for admissions in June 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice has revived the attack on affirmative action in a new investigation of Harvard University, where anti-affirmative action advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, claims there is intentional discrimination against Asian American students in admissions.

With the persistence of the “model minority myth”, the generalization that Asians are inherently high achieving, it is already difficult for Asians to determine where they fit in the American narrative. However, the current administration and the Department of Justice occupy a particular ideological space, and when US Attorney General Jeff Sessions champions Asian-Americans to attack a policy meant to ensure diversity, it places that community in an impossible situation.

For Chinese-American student Victoria Hou, CC ’21, affirmative action is a serious point of contention. Having grown up in Northern California near UC Berkeley and Stanford, with a significant Asian-American population, she’s keenly aware of the hypercompetitive environment that can feed into

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the anger surrounding affirmative action. For many in her community, college is more than a place to spend four years; it’s an indication of success and the culmination of exhausting years of work. It feels like “everything [revolves] around going to the best college, getting the best ACT or SAT scores, doing the right extracurriculars, etc,” she says. “Every single thing in your life starts to feel like it’s about getting into college.” Hou calls it a positive feedback loop, where expectations and ambitions trip over each other, creating a toxic environment that’s especially dangerous for vulnerable high schoolers.

With the model minority myth working against Asian-Americans, a rejection letter can be more than just that, which is especially frustrating for a community often placed outside of the conversation about race in America. Hou sees Asian-Americans as feeling isolated, never here nor there in the spectrum of privilege and discrimination and lacking an obvious historical precedence of speaking out. In that environment, affirmative action becomes more than a small hindrance; it’s another unacknowledged weight.

Hou, like many Asian-Americans, doesn’t want to stereotype or disregard the struggles of other minority groups. And yet she can’t help but empathize with the group of Asian-Americans suing Harvard. With so much pressure to get into a good university, the opacity of the admissions process is difficult to handle. There’s the sense that affirmative action can place Asians in a situation where they feel they have to work extra hard on top of all the hypercompetitive stress that goes on.

Beyond adding to stress culture for certain demographics, Omar Khan, CC ’18, notes that there are other moments when affirmative action can be complicated. To illustrate his point, he throws out, “What is an Asian-American?”

When someone says “Asian-American,” they’re likely to think of an East Asian, often pushing South Asians and Southeast Asians to the side.

With parents from Pakistan and the Philippines,

The Blue and White

GIVE ME A CHANCE Khan admits that he doesn’t find the term “AsianAmerican” particularly valuable in describing himself. In terms of Asian-Americans at Columbia, he notes that there tend to be many Korean, Chinese, and Indian-Americans, but there isn’t much discussion about Filipino representation and whether or not that community is well-represented on campus.

Filipinos make up a large minority in the U.S., but that’s not reflected on Columbia’s campus.

Despite that, he believes that the institutional barriers in the American educational system make the value of affirmative action incalculable. To him, it’s ridiculous that in his academically rigorous New York City high school there was not a single black man in his graduating class. Since coming to Columbia, he has come to understand the specific position that certain racial groups have come to occupy in U.S. history.

“While the treatment of Asian-Americans under affirmative action sometimes can be unfair, affirmative action itself can be a good thing and those two things can be true at the same time,” he says.

For Kennedy Stacy, CC '20, a black QuestBridge scholar, programs with similar policies to affirmative action have helped her succeed.

Although she believes the education system in general could do more to promote academic excellence in minority students, as a student who doesn’t come from a school that traditionally feeds into universities like Columbia, she does have faith in the efficacy of affirmative action policies.

However, she’s also aware of the criticism such policies face. Beyond rude comments stemming from ignorance and stereotypes, Stacy understands that in an ideal world, affirmative action would not be necessary. But we don’t live in a post-racial society, and she doubts we ever will. Stacy understands that there is bound to be conflict, especially when on one hand there are people who are disadvantaged, and on the other there are those accustomed to privilege who feel something is being taken from them.

“It’s not that people are being disadvantaged, it’s just that other people are getting a chance now,” Stacy explains.

For Elektra Williams, CC ’20, and others, it’s been a learning experience. As a white woman raised in a very conservative family, she’d been told that affirmative action is something negative that would unfairly affect her chances of getting into universities. However, she admits that coming to Columbia

February 2018

has changed her perspective a little, allowing her to realize that some people are historically disadvantaged and affirmative action is necessary to even the playing field.

She thinks a university population needs to accurately represent the population of the U.S. and that is impossible with strictly merit-based policies.

But Elektra is precise by nature. She wants equal representation, nothing more and nothing less. Still, though she understands there’s a necessary element of give and take, something about affirmative action makes her uncomfortable. There’s a hesitancy in her answers that reflects the difficulty of taking a firm stance on something so riddled with politically correct landmines.

On its face, splitting hairs over who gets into what university could seem trivial, but the opportunities of higher education are never ones to be taken lightly. Admissions decisions are quite literally what brings Columbia students together. When I asked a friend how she felt about affirmative action, she shrugged, “It can bring out the worst in us.”

But for some Columbia students, it can also bring out their best.w Editor’s Note: The students interviewed above are speaking of their own personal experiences, and are in no way expected to be representatives of their respective races or ethnicities.

Illustration by Jennifer Bi

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L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D

A Tradition of Activism Is Born 50 years later, how the 1968 protests live on at Columbia

By Ufon Umanah, Ryan Mohen, Ned Russin, Gaby Edwards and Miya Lee In recognition of the anniversary of the 1968 protests that roiled Columbia’s campus 50 years ago, The Blue and White interviewed five individuals close to the events which brought the University to a screeching halt that Spring. We asked them to recall the events of 50 years ago, and to reflect on the University’s place in New York City today.

I

t is 1968, and Columbia is reeling.

Since its move to Morningside Heights in the late 1800s, the University has been as much a surrogate of society as an academic institution. This has never been more true than in 1968, as the bonds between institution and community are strained to a breaking point.

On one hand, reads the Cox Commission Report, ordered by Columbia in the aftermath of the events of 1968, “the University look[ed] down on the flats of Harlem, one of the most depressed of all urban ghettos.” The post-WWII Morningside Heights housing market was littered with single room occupancy apartments. The cheaper rent attracted those with little means in life, mainly working class people of color. During the early 1960s, Morningside Heights Inc., an neighborhood association group operated largely by Columbia, “engaged in a massive campaign of evictions” that helped transform the community into “a sterile institutional enclave.”

The eviction campaign would displace 7,500 people, or more than 10% of Morningside’s current population. As students tried to do community outreach work through the Citizenship Council, Columbia pursued expansionism without regard for the community. By 1966, the Trustees unveiled in President Kirk’s $200 million capital campaign a plan to annex city blocks down to 111th Street to build college residences and an undergraduate expansion of Butler Library. More poignantly, the University wanted to build a gymnasium on Morningside Park, asking the non-Columbia community to exchange 2.1 acres of rocky hillside for a quarter-acre of facility space.

On the other hand, Columbia answered the call to arms drummed up during the Cold War. Columbia’s relationship with the military predated the decades-long conflict—the famed Manhattan

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Project, conducted in the Pupin basement, employed close to half of the current population of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and naval WWII officers trained here to administer occupied territory in the Pacific. As SEAS expanded to accommodate all the incoming research for the war effort, Columbia joined the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in 1959, created to provide research and analysis to the Armed Forces. While Columbia’s admitted responsibility for how much research was conducted was limited to a small group of faculty, the University was extremely secretive about what research it did do for IDA—perhaps with an eye on the times. When students started asking questions about Columbia’s military involvement, America was already entangled in the Vietnam War. Students had only in 1967 forced Columbia to stop giving the Selective Service class rankings that could determine the legitimacy of the student deferment for which they were attending college. But this did little to improve sentiment towards the war on campus, especially after the Tet Offensive in January of 1968.

As American soldiers fought in Saigon and Hue, Columbia had endeared itself to no one. Faculty were demoralized, students radicalized, and the community extremely wary. Smaller protests peppered the lead up to an explosive Spring of 1968, particularly demonstrations against the ROTC, military recruiters, and what would be known as ‘Gym Crow.’ Columbia’s black students, few in number but inspired by the civil rights movement and organized under Students Afro-American Society (SAS), were less and less willing to deal with the racism that permeated life at Columbia.

Meanwhile, 100 members of the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), led by Mark Rudd, pushed Columbia to disassociate from

The Blue and White

L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D the IDA in an indoor demonstration in Low Library on March 27, 1968. Kirk had illegalized indoor demonstrations the previous September, after SDS students protested some Marine recruiters, and punished Rudd and five others with what one month later, on April 22, would become probation, a final warning before suspension. The next day, SDS would mobilize against the IDA, against disciplinary punishment for the IDA Six, and, with the SAS called in at the last minute, against the gymnasium.

From here, after an attempt to take Low Library, the protesters occupied Hamilton Hall and took the Dean of Columbia College hostage.

From the Spectator’s Kenneth Barry, analysing the crisis for the April 24th edition, “Never before have a group of students forcefully challenged the administration of Columbia University.” After SAS requested that SDS move out of Hamilton Hall, Rudd moved his people back into Low Library. By April 25th, the Architecture students had revolted in Avery, other students had occupied Fayerweather, and radicals had set camp in Mathematics. All the gates leading into campus, sans those through College Walk, were closed and manned by police officers. The counter-protesting students, known as the Majority Coalition, obstructed the protesters each step of the way, surrounding Low Library and cutting them off from other protesters outside Low. Within the week, Columbia called in the NYPD to suppress the rebellion.

By then, however, the damage was already done. Though protesters had kept the offices clean, the media circus orbiting Columbia had exacted its toll. Whereas Columbia received the fourth-largest amount of federal government money before 1968, the relationship chilled in the aftermath. The gymnasium, which the Cox Commission complained would be beneficial to the community, was hastily scrapped.

President Kirk resigned. Alumni donations disappeared and applications to Columbia decreased by 20 percent. The $200 million capital campaign came up $20 million short, and the next couple of years would be defined by a nearly lethal budget crisis that closed Columbia’s School of Pharmaceutical Studies at the time.

But out of that came inspiration. 1968 became a beacon for activists trying to make change at Columbia, and from the protests came the formation of the University Senate and the Student Governing Board, both of which try to channel student input

February 2018

through cooperation and self-governance, respectively. 50 years later, Butler Library proudly exhibits relics from the tumultuous era, as Columbia has recovered and surpassed its 20th century limitations.

Some might ask, though, at what cost.

Politicizing the Campus It is April 1968, and Mark Rudd, CC ’EXPELLED, a New Jersey native and a third year, is running “headlong into a mob of pissed-off rightwing jocks” before occupying Hamilton and then Low, almost immediately becoming the face of the entire protest.

After three years of organizing, Rudd, who was recently elected chairman of Columbia’s Students for a Democratic Society Society (SDS) chapter, is planning victory. On the front page of the SDS published newspaper Up Against the Wall, Rudd wrote an open letter to Columbia’s President, Grayson Kirk. “You are quite right in feeling that the situation is ‘potentially dangerous,’” he wrote. “For if we win, we will take control of your world, your corporation, your university and attempt to mold a world in which we and others can live as human beings.”

The culmination of events leading up to the April protests—the Vietnam War and civil rights movement with more recent events like the plan to

Illustration by Jennifer Bi

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L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D school’s plan to build a gym in Morningside Park, Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement both that he would not seek re-election and that he would substantially reduce the U.S. presence in Vietnam on March 31st, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4—were well established, but to say that the occupation of buildings was due simply to these events is simplifying matters too much. The Blue and White spoke to Rudd recently over email, and he said the role of black students, specifically in their occupation of Hamilton, was an integral part of the protest’s success. Columbia’s Student Afro-American Society (SAS), who Rudd cited as being voices to Harlem’s opposition to the planned gym, entered into “ad hoc coalition” with SDS on April 23, 1968.

“I believe that the CC Class of 1969 had a much larger number of black students than previously. Columbia was basically a white institution.

The new larger black cohort found their presence on campus an extremely unhappy and uncomfortable experience,” says Rudd.

Rudd and other members of SDS broke into

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President Kirk’s office, the broken glass a manifestation of their opposition. But shortly after the Low occupation began, Rudd resigned as chairman. The SDS wanted to lead discussions to increase their base, while Rudd advocated to take another building, capitalizing on their success. Rudd’s proposal was voted down 70-3. This didn’t matter though, his name was already synonymous with SDS and the protests.

As the occupation continued in late April, both opposition and support grew. Despite Rudd’s resignation as SDS chairman, he was still involved in coordinating and planning action. By the time the police raided campus on April 30h, beating and arresting students, five buildings were occupied.

The day after the raids, Rudd met thousands supporters on campus to inform them, “We won’t let them turn us around!” Despite calls for non-violence throughout the entirety of the protests, specifically from a group called the Green Armbands, the violence exploded that afternoon. Police charged a line of organizers who were yelling, “Cops must go!” and then, as Rudd describes it, “a melee broke out.”

Police and students punched and kicked, leaving one another bloodied and injured, both trying to ensure justice for their side.

In a talk given at Drew University in 2007, Rudd states: “In retrospect, [saying, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker!’] was one of my few regrets about Columbia, since it muddied the waters concerning the non-violent nature of our protest. Verbal violence is still violence, I’ve come to understand. We weren’t too clear about our non-violence at the time.

But we were essentially nonviolent in our actions, and that created our moral and political strength: it was Columbia that resorted to violence, in its racism, its support for the war, and its using the cops against us.”

Rudd was arrested several times, suspended, and later expelled, but not before the press got to him. Rudd states in our interview, “We really didn't consider our impact at all past Columbia. Our original aim was to ‘build the movement’ by ‘politicizing the campus.’ To SDS, this was much more important even than the demands around IDA and the gym.”

Through the actions on campus and the reporting surrounding them, Rudd was able to accomplish just that. When asked about the legacy of 1968, Rudd responds humbly: “The movement is everything.

Still is.”

Illustration by Jennifer Bi

The Blue and White

L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D And so it makes sense that Rudd, today, doesn’t claim to have an understanding of the climate on Columbia’s campus. Despite his absence, and given the prominence of the protests and his notoriety afterwards, having later organized with radical leftist group the Weather Underground and serving jail time, it would make sense that Rudd’s impact would still be felt on campus, however, Columbia’s Harlem expansion is not something that can be protested away; it is a reality that exists nearly ten blocks away from the buildings that the activists once occupied.

When asked about Columbia’s current place in New York City, Rudd states that he thinks it is “standard New York City institutional segregation.”

“Columbia is and always has been white and corporate and upper middle-class to ruling class. So why should they take into account poor black people’s needs? That’s not New York or any other city in this country.”

The realization of Manhattanville is the antithesis of the goals of the '68 protests. “Student power was exerted only through the anti-war and antiinstitutionalized racism protests of 1968. Then it was back to normal,” Rudd remarks. Despite having a cause to rally around, the modern culture of Columbia did not react to Manhattanville the same way it did 50 years ago. This time, the administration claimed a mostly quiet victory.

What could be done now? Rudd shares his advice: “Link up with the larger social movements of the city. That’s what made the '68 protests powerful.

Go beyond the university.”

Mutually Exclusive Ideologies It is spring 1968, and John Philip Hesslein, CC '69, School of Architecture '73, is as torn as the rest of Columbia’s campus. The most climactic events of the school’s protests are about to occur right in the middle of his eight years on campus. Hesslein was a member of the track team as an undergraduate, but he neither matched the team’s primarily conservative mindset, nor associated with the radical politics on campus, which placed him in a uniquely conflicted position that pulled him at both ends. While he was never involved with the SDS and their protests that lead to the police raid on April 30th, Hesslein was not completely opposed to their civil rights and anti-war attitudes. This differentiated him from a significant portion of his friends, many of whom were fellow

February 2018

student-athletes involved with the counter protest movement the Majority Coalition.

When asked in a recent interview with The Blue and White what factors might have contributed to the tension on campus and in the community, Hesslein recalls one of his earliest interactions with the school, “I had a very good teacher in high school, when I applied to Columbia he wrote a recommendation for me, and he told me, ‘When you take the train down there, look across at Columbia. Doesn’t it look like the medieval castle sitting above the rest of the city?’ That’s just an image, and that was there for a whole lot of other reasons, I mean that’s just the landscape, but it could be interpreted that way [as a fortress].”

Hesslein remained in tune with the power of this imagery in his college career, an image that surely fueled student outrage at the proposed gym in Morningside Heights. That same imagery compounded with the inequality in Harlem residents’ limited access to the proposed Morningside Gym, made the community entrance through a basement “back door” seem all the more atrocious to many Columbia students.

When discussing other factors that lead up to April 30th, Hesslein cites all the well-known influences like the war, racism and the civil rights movement, the SDS, and more. But Hesslein also offered another image: “A big part of it was Grayson Kirk, who was the president then. He’s relatively short, dumpy-looking, and always had a three-piece suit with a chain on his watch in his pocket. A lot of the faculty were much more progressive, and I think that was a real part of it as well.”

The conflict was as much ideological as it was aesthetically driven, according to Hesslein. “There was an antagonism between the extreme leftists who were dressed more like hippies,” he says. “These guys, the football team, they went out in jackets and ties. We were talking about the image of the medieval castle; this is a similar symbolic issue. There’s also a history of this. There were two bars on Broadway, one was the West End Bar and Grill, South of 114th street, and down Broadway few blocks was the Gold Rail. The Gold Rail was the jock bar, and the West End Bar and Grill had been the place where Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg would hang out, that was all in that place. You already had that division, to some extent, in the student body.”

These divisions and the rising tension on cam-

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L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D pus created the famous occupations that occurred in the Spring of 1968, and what Hesslein remembers ranges from the playfully resistant, to the gruesome results of an attempted uprising. Hesslein recalls, “Hamilton Hall got taken over. Hamilton Hall was all covered in ivy, and this was in Spring so at some point people started pelting eggs. So all the eggs stuck to the ivy, and of course it faces South, so the sun’s beating on it all day and started to smell. For four weeks … it was awful.”

When asked about the night of the police raid, Hesslein only has a sad chaotic picture to paint. “I was outside but I tried to stay away from police. That night the students were picking up the bricks in front of them and throwing them at police. All the paving was picked up and thrown and the police were going after people with nightsticks. They were all in masks and helmets and all. I saw one of the students, in order to avoid getting hit with the nightstick, jump through a plate-glass window. It was pretty brutal.”

The aftermath of the protests forced the University into a changing of the guard. They replaced the president and changed the structure of the administration, “They set up a congressional kind of system where they had representatives from the different schools that met, and as most of these things in my opinion it ended up a big fraud. It was better than what was there before but in the end, government is only as good as the people in it.” The problem of racism and careless disregard for the community that was present in the past administration was carried on in the people who were not forced out.

Hesslein observed this persistent attitude but in another vital authority on campus, the athletic coaches. He described the two types of coaching mindsets of the transitional era: “Coach Wooden is an example of somebody who figured out how the world was changing, how the students were changing, how basketball is changing, and he realized that he had to go along with that. When I was on the track team we had a coach named Edgar ‘Dick’ Mason, and he was the opposite of that, because he couldn’t understand the changes that had taken place.”

One cannot help but think that Dick Mason’s mindset played a role in the attitude of the studentathletes. Certain manifestations seem merely frustrating, like Mason refusing to let certain students compete if they had unacceptably long hair, but other more serious experiences might further explain the conflict between the student-athletes and the

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politically radical on campus at the time. Hesslein explained the story of a fellow student, who set school records freshman year only to quit the team after joining SAS. The idea of these two activities as mutually exclusive is representative of the ideological divide between the athletes on campus and the political left at the time.

Hesslein now lives in a beautiful Chelsea apartment that he designed himself. The crafty design skill is all his own, earned over decades of engineering and design experience in his career, but Hesslein’s architectural skill and mindset began at Columbia.

That mindset and experience influences Hesslein’s view of Manhattanville. “The success of Columbia now and over the last many years has been due to the Columbia President that we have. I think he worked very hard to make this new campus come into being. He was very political in the way he dealt with it.

He also hired Renzo Piano, the Italian architect—he did the New York Times building. Look, they weren’t taking down very much housing, it was mostly factory buildings and truck garage space that had no use anymore. If Columbia invests there, they create a lot of jobs, then that’s good for the community; it’s just a question of how you do it … I can’t see how what they [Columbia] did there [in Manhattanville] was bad, they just handled it in a very very different way.”

Superficial Activism It is 1968, and Todd Gitlin is an editor at the San Francisco Express Times, an underground, counterculture newspaper covering radical politics and progressive culture in the Bay Area.

Gitlin’s activist career began in 1960 when he joined Tocsin, a Harvard political activist group that protested against the use of nuclear weapons. Soon thereafter, Gitlin became the third national president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963, and then coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project from 1964 to 1965. Gitlin organized a number of protests, including the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965, which drew around 25,000 participants, and the first demonstration against American support of South African apartheid. While Gitlin was not present at Columbia during the 1968 protests, he was closely watching as the events unfolded.

“The two issues of 1968 at Columbia had something at their core in common,” Gitlin says.

The Blue and White

L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D “What was really driving the protests and occupations began with an understanding of the depth of racism and the Vietnam War. Both of these were rightly seen as unbearable. The success of that movement in '68 was based on the ability to find places where those surrounding evils touched the university, where the university was—to use a word very commonly used at that time—complicit in those evils and complicit through the gym and complicit to the IDS.” Now, Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology, as well as the chair of the Ph. D. program in communications at Columbia University. While parallels have also been drawn between the much disputed gym from 1968 and Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, Gitlin considers these two situations markedly different.

“The gym was an insult,” Gitlin says. “It was perceived as an insult. In fact, I think there were many people in Harlem who wished the gym had been built, but the setting of 1968 made it offensive, especially with the ‘back door’ component,” which was the proposed entrance for Harlem residents located at a ground floor back door of the gym.

The difference, for Gitlin, lies in the demographics of the land Manhattanville is on: “As I understand it, Manhattanville was largely uninhabited, many of the businesses were absent. You can make an argument that for years Columbia has dominated and warped local real estate. But to me, Manhattanville is not a problem.”

Despite the resurgence of activism in recent years, Gitlin views the protests of the '60s as strikingly different from activism on campus in recent years. “As somebody who came through these movements, which were generated by a morally serious and intellectually serious approach to the larger operations of the world, to see how superficial our so called ‘campus left’ is fills with me dismay,” Gitlin says. “The last place I would look for useful activism in America is a campus.”

Gitlin’s concerns over contemporary student activism derive from his belief that students are ignoring the bigger picture and disregarding enduring problems, both locally and nationally, in favor of more fleeting controversy. “There are so many issues in the city that call for citizen engagement—affordable housing is a central issue, thousands of people living on the streets—if you actually care about the conditions of people in New York City, there are

February 2018

plenty of points of entry for engagement,” Gitlin says.

“There’s no shortage of opportunities. But I don’t know if anybody’s looking.”

Gitlin attributes the dissolution of activism on college campuses to a lack of methodical and continual coordination among activists. “There needs to be a critical mass of people who understand themselves as organizers,” he says. “An organizer faces variations in the state of commitment. There are peaks, there are valleys. The job of the organizer is to work with the existing atmosphere and further it.”

Although Gitlin does not view college campuses as the wellspring for activism they once were, Gitlin acknowledges the grassroots efforts of citizens all over the country, citing their motivation brought on by Trump’s election in November 2016. More specifically, Gitlin recognizes their organizational efforts to affect change in local elections, as well as the upcoming midterms. “A wonderful thing has happened, starting with the Women’s March,” he says.

“A lot of people understood the need to build enduring organizations. Those organizations have been surprisingly robust. They’re the ones who are doing the work towards midterm elections. It’s not coming out of the student left, but it is coming out of these citizen groups, many of whom have not been involved in politics before.”

According to Gitlin, the use of social media in activism today has created brief moments of overwhelming political involvement, but these spikes in participation should not be misperceived as a movement. Although social media may facilitate an easier way for individuals to connect with one another, Gitlin accredits stronger and more reliable organizational methods to authentic relationships built on mutual responsibility and open communication.

Gitlin associates the success of the protests from the civil rights movement to the dedication of its participants and the connections made as a result of their commitment. “What made the Montgomery Bus Boycott great was that once they decided to boycott the buses over segregation, there was a group of women who met every night in the church basement,” Gitlin says. “They became the infrastructure of that movement. It’s the infrastructure that’s been lacking.

Moving forward, Gitlin encourages student activists to be more fully aware of their surroundings, rather than cherry picking issues that may receive the most attention. “Open your eyes,” he says. “Look

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L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D

around the corner. Take off your blinders.”

1968’s Failure It is 1968, and Tom Kappner is fighting for his home. After graduating from Columbia College in 1966, Kappner moved into an apartment on West 122nd street with his wife, Augusta. After only a year living there, Kappner and his wife were pressured to leave. Columbia University’s Teachers College, located on 120th street, intended to expand its campus northward.

Although Kappner and his wife were distressed by the threat of losing their home, they knew that their situation was not unique. Throughout the 1960s, Columbia was engaged in a massive campaign to acquire nearby real estate. Thousands of residents, many of whom were low-income, were displaced as the University bought property after property in Morningside Heights.

Kappner, who knew dozens of those evicted as friends and neighbors, believes that Columbia’s motivations were two-fold: not only to convert residential buildings into dorms and faculty housing and clear space for new academic buildings, but also to alter—and, in the University’s eyes, “improve”—the socio-economic and racial composition of the neighborhood.

“At that time, the iconic Provost, Jacques Barzun, who contributed to the founding of the Core Curriculum at Columbia, said, ‘It is the University’s mission to rid the neighborhood of ‘the undesirables,’” Kappner recalls, shaking his head. “The

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PR of the University was all about drug addicts and prostitutes. They did live around here in what was then known as single occupancy hotels, which is essentially low-income housing, but the majority of people here were upstanding and hardworking—just trying to make a living.”

As Columbia continued to acquire new properties, resistance efforts were organized by community residents, including Kappner himself. Kappner became the chair of the block association representing ten residential buildings in the the square block between Broadway and Amsterdam and 121st street and 122nd street. “We did everything we could legally and extralegally to oppose Columbia’s acquisition of our homes,” Kappner says. “We swore that we would not move unless they carried us out of our apartments horizontally.”

When the protests erupted in 1968, Kappner and many other community members found an outlet to voice their frustrations and oppose Columbia as an institutional power. Residents who were displaced

by Columbia or faced the threat of being displaced joined and supported the protests. “You know, usually when people talk about '68, they talk about the ‘Jim Crow Gym’ or ‘Gym Crow’ in Morningside Park, they talk about the University’s connection to the Defense Department and the War in Vietnam, but what is often left out is the community side, and that was an important element.”

In the aftermath of the occupation of campus buildings, the police crackdown, and the Universitywide strike, Kappner and other community members were able to gain a slight upper hand. “1968 was

Illustration by Sahra Denner

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L O O K I N G B A C K , L O O K I N G F O RWA R D very key for us because that brought a sudden halt to the University’s efforts to expand,” Kappner says.

While Columbia’s expansionary project was put on hold, Kappner and other community members had time to organize a city-wide coalition of tenants who successfully appealed for legislation that would grandfather in residents who were in occupancy at the time that their buildings were bought by large institutions like Columbia. After a long and exhausting fight, Kappner and his wife were able to remain in their home.

Now, 50 years later, sitting in the living room of his and his wife’s apartment on 122nd street and Amsterdam, Kappner characterizes 1968 as a major, but temporary, victory for the Morningside Heights community. “We had stopped the expansion process in '68, but it only lasted for a little while,” Kappner explains. “Columbia has remained the same! Buying up property again in the mid-70s and now … Manhattanville! When I heard about Manhattanville project, I immediately thought ‘Deja Vu.’ This is history repeating itself.”

In 2003, when President Lee C. Bollinger announced Columbia’s plan to build Manhattanville, a 17-acre additional campus that will span from 129th street to 134th street, Kappner and other

February 2018

residents who had survived the Columbia’s previous expansionary efforts came together and formed The Coalition to Preserve Community which hosted monthly meetings in St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on West 126th street between Broadway and Amsterdam. In the meetings, the Coalition worked with roughly 200 Morningside Heights residents to create a community vision regarding Columbia’s expansion. “The basic premise of our proposal was to share the space,” Kappner explained. “Instead of a zero-sum game, Columbia vs. the community, our point was why don’t we integrate the community’s concerns with the University’s needs? It was a comprehensive plan. A lot of thought was put into it. But when we went before the City Planning Commission and presented our community plan, they said, ‘Oh, this looks wonderful. We endorse it, however, excluding the area that Columbia wants to develop.’ So it undid the whole point of the plan.”

Kappner thinks the outlook for the community will only get worse as the new campus stretches further and further North. “The impact of that Manhattanville expansion in the area north will be extreme,” he says. “I can predict to you that in the span of ten years that area that is mostly Latino will be entirely gentrified.”w

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M easure

for

M easure

A story about a Tarahumara boy in the Sierra Madres, mothers of the Sierra, of Mexico. It is set in the late 1700s when mining of the mountains was at its peak and the indigenous people began adopting most aspects of Catholicism; tensions were rising between Spaniards and indigenous people in Mexico as a whole, leading to the War of Independence in 1810.

Curanderas are indigenous shahmen, often women, that employ indigenous, African, and Catholic rituals in their healing practices and ceremonies.

Curandera Some say she kills things; but to me, she gives life. Some murmurs in the mountains mention that either can happen to the Rarámuri. There are anxious stirrings in the belly of my people, that drive us ever closer to freedom from the cream-colored people.

Night’s parchment began to lay itself across our side of the mountain. That day was our first harvest after the full moon, but the night was absent of the reverent noise that only fills the canyons during our celebrations, the rain fiestas.

In its place the foreign sounds that marked the night now seemed regular, the clanging of pots, the shouting of men. In our small village of Tuaripa, the newly settled Spanish miners and friars always stomped about with a feverish, unidentifiable purpose, as though irritated by the need for constant conquest. Their skin, light like the cream I milked from our goats each morning, contrasted against my own, which resembled the dirt underfoot.

One year, centuries ago, instead of the rain, it was the Spaniards that stormed our mountains with thundering footsteps and booming weapons. Our people retreated further into the the Madre until this moment.

Their missions and mines dotted our mountains so that no matter which direction I looked, a foreign edifice or pronounced abyss, interrupted my view of the Madre. Their ways now penetrated ours through a process more deadly than the weapons they carried.

That night, when the darkness consumed the last of the pink rays, during what should have been the rain fiesta, I set out to find who should have led the ceremony, the curandera or—shahmen—as those who trade with us in the cities would say. I tucked in my golden chain, massaging the cross of Jesu Cristo that hung at the end of it with one hand, while I used the other hand to push aside the firs that covered the ground of the Western Sierra Madre. I finally reached the curandera’s house.

Mamá cautioned me about getting too close to them.—Be safe—she would

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The Blue and White

M easure

for

M easure

say, abbreviating multiple warnings into one phrase. As she did, the lids of her eyes would half close with the utterance, in the pain of recalling when she was not safe, when she went out alone at night and a drunken Spaniard took her.

She would not say it, but I knew she worried for the reason that I was now old enough to be seen as a threat and taller than many of us who could almost be considered men. But I had no reason to fear; though we were consumed by them, they were the ones who truly trembled around us. That is why they changed our name from Rarámuri, meaning fast-foot, to Tarahumara and changed the Sierra Madre to Copper Canyon.

But they cannot take Madre away; we have run over every inch of her body while they ripped her open with their mines, draining her of a future with her children, my people. I ran long before I could walk, and right then, I let the urge throw my feet. My pressing desperation to stop the cream-colored people led me to the curandera. I stood there, watching her, Tia Magdalena, with an inexplicable tingling in my lower belly. It burned.

I could make anonymous trips to Tia; without announcing my presence, she possessed the ability to see and feel everything inside without invitation. So I came with the offering of my concern: how to heal these wounds of my people, of the Madre.

It was such a modest power, one that could kill or one that could resurrect, condensed in a pot sitting atop a slow-burning, quiet fire. It sat full of thick liquid, reflecting the light from the night sky, as though it were syrup dripping from the moon’s combs. Standing there, I longed to see how she hears, feel how she tastes, and smell what she sees. Her hands, laced with an intricate pattern of veins, cracked an egg and tossed the two sides back and forth to separate the yolk and tossed various herbs with a rhythm that seemed to originate from habit rather than thought.

As I stood there and looked on, I panted as though my lungs were being held by some spirit. I watched Tia Magdalena breathe in the steam, pick up a garden snake laying near the heat of the fire, and breathe hard into its mouth before dropping it.

Stunned, I watched as it lay there motionless.

Seconds later, the snake leaped into the air. I gasped—I could finally release the breath I held onto since first opening the trembling legs of my mother.

— Mallory Shingle

February 2018

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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

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

New York, New York A conversation with Kenneth Jackson

By Caroline Hurley This year, Kenneth Jackson embarks on his fiftieth year as a professor of history at Columbia. In his last half a century in Morningside Heights, Jackson has become an expert on the history of New York City, and he famously leads an all-night bike ride through the city each year. In addition to his work at Columbia, he is the author of numerous books on American urban histories, and he was the editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City. Caroline Hurley, CC '19, spoke with Jackson in his spacious office on a bitterly cold January day, just before Jackson set out on a cross-country road trip.

The Blue and White: I would say one thing that you are probably most known for on campus is the History of New York class and the all-night bike ride.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that, sort of how you started teaching it?

Kenneth Jackson: Sure. I came here to sort of teach about cities in general. But it did seem a little bit ridiculous to be talking about cities in a classroom when there was one right outside the window. I do believe in experiential learning, or whatever you call it. If you go to the dairy, you’ll be more interested in

it than if you just read about. So when I first started it [the class], there were only 15 people and I taught it as a seminar on New York City. That was probably [the] early '70s, and that was more fun for me, frankly, because, first of all, there wasn’t such a big responsibility. A few of us were riding our bikes at night, and if you saw an interesting building or church down the road, you could go there. Now, the spontaneity is out of it for me. Even the learning is out of—I’ve been to these places many times. It’s just become part of a tradition, and it just got bigger and bigger. And then it got out of control because people expected it. And I thought, ‘Well, they’re paying a lot of tuition and this is what they want.’ And I was younger and thinner and it was relatively easy to do. And now I’m a lot older so it’s not easy. I think I’ll do it maybe one more time.

BW: One more time? Any idea when you’ll do it?

KJ: Probably in the Fall of 2019. I think I’ll teach the course this fall, but not with the bike ride.

BW: So, you don’t do the bike ride every year?

KJ: Every time I teach the course, I do the bike ride. It’s just that I’ve got to figure out how to do it. If I fall over it would be not good, and I did fall over last Fall. I didn’t hurt myself, but it’s easy to get hurt when you have so many people together, and

February 2018

Illustration by Kellie Zhao

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N I’ve just been lucky. Nobody has gotten badly hurt.

Every time I get back at like 6 or 6:30 in the morning, I get out of the subway and I go to my office, because my apartment is a walk up to the third floor and I can’t take the bike up. But I can take the elevator in my office and go lie down on the sofa there.

But when I get off the subway, it’s late September so the sun’s up and it’s daylight, and I’m thinking, ‘Thank gosh, I made it and, as far as, I know no one got hurt.’ Because if someone got hit by a taxi and becomes a quadriplegic, people will say, ‘What idiot took hundreds of people on a bike ride.’ Thank god it hasn’t happened. I think that’s one reason why it’s not been really copied in the United States. One thing is you are worried about legal liability. I don’t think Columbia wants anyone else to do it. They’ll allow me to do it because I’ve been doing it for so many years and they use it in their publicity. But I don’t know if they want somebody to pick it up after I’m done.

BW: Well, people really like to go. You’ve been doing the bike ride for more than 40 years, and you started at Columbia in 1968.

KJ: '68, yes this is my 50th year.

BW: Right yes, so 1968 is getting a lot of renewed attention because it is the 50th anniversary of the protests that occurred that year. Were you around that spring?

KJ: I happened to be in the United States Air Force at the time, and this was the height of the Vietnam War. I wasn’t in the Vietnam War, but I was an officer in the Air Force. I was teased by some of my friends that I was going to a war zone. Because there was so much publicity about Columbia. People knew about it. I was not here in the Spring of '68, but I was here in the Fall of '68, and the campus was still alive with political protests. It was different than it is now because of the draft. Anybody could go because of a number.

You could be over there. Now, what’s Afghanistan got to do with your life? It wasn’t the same then. And anyway, then I was in Fayerweather one time, and there was a student take-over. But I refused to leave.

I stayed in my office because there was a professor who had had his, he said, entire manuscript taken and destroyed. He was in Hamilton Hall in the Spring of '68, and this is before computers. He said he didn’t leave, and he lost everything, years’ worth of work.

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I thought, ‘They might beat me up, but they’re not getting my work.’

KJ pauses to eat lunch.

KJ: I’ve got a blood sugar problem, and all of the stuff in there for lunch is either sandwiches or cookies or fruit. Fruit is not good for you!

BW: You ended up staying in Fayerweather – KJ: Overnight!

BW: To protect your work?

KJ: Yes, with two other professors. We were having an exam, and one of the professors, when they came ‘round the halls banging on the doors, said, ‘This building is closed.’ And one of the students in the exam, one of the leaders of the SDS movement, he couldn’t even hold back the revolt. It must have been a bit distracting to him, but he finished the exam and he passed. And then Richard Hofstadter, probably the most important American historian in the last how many years, climbed out the window. I slept in my office. Another time I slept in my office was when the big blackout happened in '77. I have a little apartment on 82nd street, and all of a sudden, the lights were going dimmer, then they just went off. I was on the sixth floor, and somehow, I thought if I went outside I would catch a train or something, but power was off for the whole city. That was a bad time because there were riots and stealing, whereas when they had another blackout—I can’t remember the year, but I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about it— there wasn’t much then. '77 had the bad riots.

BW: You were the president of the New York Historical Society, and you’re a pretty renowned historian of New York City ... I would say you are more familiar than most people with the events and institutions which have shaped New York in particular. How impactful would you say Columbia has been in shaping the history of New York? Has its legacy been for better or worse? Its engagement with the surrounding community has been heavily examined, even criticized.

KJ: I would say two things. One, on the positive side, Columbia has clearly been a net plus for the

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N city, to have a world-renowned institution. All great cities have great universities in them. At the time [of Columbia’s expansion into the Morningside community], NYU was not quite … NYU has gotten a lot better. Columbia generates hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars in economic activity. Where are you from?

BW: I’m from outside of Chicago.

KJ: See, you’re bringing money to the city. The City University of New York has less economic impact because the students are already here. Whether they go there or somewhere else doesn’t matter, but you’re coming here from outside of New York.

Pauses to eat chili.

KJ: That’s a positive. Compared to the University of Chicago, which is where I went, Columbia has not been as quick to embrace the city. And it is Columbia University in the City of New York—that’s a huge benefit now, but there was a time in the 1950s when the trustees thought about moving the whole university 40 or 50 miles North to the Herriman Estate on the other side of the river, because the city’s going to hell. Now, nobody thinks that. It’s why the number of applications has gone through the roof. It’s a major draw. And I’m not saying that the Core and other great traditions aren’t, but the fact that a mother can let her daughter come to the big, scary city … you know what I mean? So, you get to go where you want, and it’s got all of these other things that people want to do. But [Columbia] didn’t embrace the city until late.

Pauses to eat more chili.

BW: I know you said Columbia has had a massive positive economic impact on the city, but would you say at all that Columbia has had any negative impact on the city, in more social regards? This gets criticized all the time.

KJ: I know it does. But the University is older than the neighborhood, and when the university was built, there was nobody here. Look, I think it would be a tragedy for New York for Columbia to leave. It needs to have more space in order to compete with Princeton, which has more space, especially per

February 2018

person. Look, could it have handled the 1968 problem better? Yes. It sure could have. Grayson Kirk [Columbia’s President at the time] and [the other administrators] were probably not the best … they were very, how should I say this, elegant, aristocratic.

They were really not ready to deal with Mark Rudd or the black activists. That was trouble waiting to happen, I think. There will be a lot about 1968 this Spring I presume.

BW: Yeah, our magazine is doing a big piece about 1968, and a lot of what we are hearing in interviews with former protesters is that some people view the Manhattanville campus as the ultimate failure of 1968—they were once protesting only a gym, and now we have a whole campus in Harlem. That’s an interesting perspective, but maybe not one that everyone at the University today shares.

KJ: Well, part of it is that there were not that many people who lived in Manhattanville, that’s the one secret. There’s some number, but in the area that the campus is in, it was mostly chop shops and it probably, in the long-run, will be good for Harlem and the area around it. If you have a delicatessen, business is probably going to get better. And look—the story of African-Americans in cities has been not a happy one, and not a good one, but it’s better than rural Mississippi and rural Georgia. People came to Harlem because of opportunity. Now, it’s less than half black, so it’s a different ball game. The fact they’re leaving is self-evidence that those people didn’t come to stay in Harlem. They came to prosper and move to the suburbs like everyone else, at a time when everybody thought that that was the thing to do.

Now, it’s a different time. Now, people want to be in the city. But you know what, I do not want to defend the way we have treated blacks here, or anywhere else in the country, because it is a black mark on the United States. But better here than in Mississippi.

BW: You mentioned people moving to the suburbs, and I know that that is one area that you have studied a lot, the suburbanization of the United States.

Looking back on your conclusions about the suburbs thirty years ago that you made in Crabgrass Frontier, would you say that they occupy the same space today?

KJ: No. First of all, a lot of kids who grew up in the suburbs are applying to Columbia, because they want

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N to be in the city. What suburb did you grow up in?

BW: I grew up in Countryside, Illinois.

KJ: Right. These kids have been there and done that.

They don’t want to go to malls; malls are in trouble now. The grittiness of cities is what people want to see. It’s a different world—there are still people who want to be in the suburbs, usually for reasons of choice and money. You can get a much better value in the suburbs than you can in the city. I think the suburbs are wonderful because they give you another option. But the city, if you can afford it, is better. And young people, they don’t want to have a house with crabgrass out front. They want to be sitting at outdoor restaurants. Of course, once you have a 6-yearold daughter, a lot of people will move to the suburbs, not because they love it more, but because they feel like it’s safer or it is a better deal for the schools.

BW: Yes, it’s certainly been different coming here and living in the city.

KJ: And you’re in the city. You can jump on the subway and be in Times Square in fifteen minutes. Whereas at somewhere like the University of Chicago, it’s separate. It’s a bigger campus, and the public transit to the city is bad. It’s not connected; that’s a little island.

They almost tried to get me to come back to Chicago, but one of the things I liked about Columbia is that they couldn’t care where you lived. In fact, if you were recruited to Columbia, they would kiss your feet if you wanted to move to the suburbs because they have so much demand on their housing.

BW: You’ve obviously spent a lot of time in other cities like Chicago, but what would you say makes New York so unique?

KJ: New York is much denser—less grass and bigger buildings. Chicago is closer to being a farm than it is to being New York. So that’s a big difference.

Chicago was relatively more industrial with manufacturing, but it’s lost a million people in the last 30 or 40 years; New York has gained people. New York has done a more successful job shifting from an industrial to a service economy. It may be because New York is closer to the ocean, so it’s more of a world city; it’s closer to London than it is to Buffalo, in real terms.

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What happens in London is important in New York but what happens in Buffalo is not. The crime is also a huge difference. New York is three times bigger than Chicago and it has less than half as many homicides.

I don’t understand that. I know it’s a racial thing in Chicago, but New York just about has more African Americans than Chicago has people, so that can’t be the only answer. I think it’s a failure of leadership on Chicago’s part, even though they are both great world cities. One of the things that’s different about New York from Chicago is that in New York, you’re not aware of high school sports in the suburbs. Long Island is a world, Westchester and Connecticut is a world, and New Jersey is a world. In the Midwest, sports pull the whole region together, but I can’t even tell you what goes on in Long Island.

BW: How does New York fill that space then? What occupies the minds of people here such that they don’t have to pay attention to the surrounding areas as much?

KJ: It’s easier to get to what’s exciting in New York.

BW: You wrote an op-ed in The New York Times addressing a group called Landmark West, which essentially criticized the group for recognizing too many buildings as historic landmarks. How can we be open to growth and change as a city, while still being attentive to history?

KJ: Well, my complaint about Landmark West specifically, and the whole landmark preservation movement in general, is that they have designated many many thousands of buildings, certainly on the West side, including my apartment on 82nd street which I think I could’ve designed in the fifth grade. In other words, people are using historic designation to keep out change that they don’t want. I don’t think New York’s most important tradition is architecture. If you want to see architecture, go someplace else. New York is a world city in competition with London and Shanghai and Singapore; it’s the capital of the world.

Let Boston and Philadelphia have old buildings. New York is about density and vitality. I’m on the Historic House Trust, so it’s not like I don’t like old buildings.

There are maybe 100, 300, or 1000 that are really important, but I think we have gone too far. I am certainly in favor of saving Grand Central Terminal

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N and stuff like that.

BW: So it’s more about the use than the architecture?

KJ: Yea, I think what’s important about New York buildings is what happens in them. Not who designed the darn thing. New York has got to be the most historic place in the United States, but the importance of New York doesn’t lie in its architecture so much as in the events and the people that have made New York such an incredible place. That doesn’t mean no buildings, or no architecture is important—obviously the Chrysler Building is a treasure, the Empire State Building is a treasure, Rockefeller Center is a treasure. But a lot of buildings are not treasures, and we just designated them as historic to stop change.

BW: Speaking of the events that have shaped New York City, one thing that happened during your time as president of the New York Historical Society were the September 11th attacks. In the aftermath of those attacks, you and the New York Historical Society made a great effort to document them and preserve them.

KJ: I think we had thirteen exhibitions in the few years following them. We saved hundreds, maybe more, of documents, shoes, guns that we didn’t know where they came from, pieces of paper that blew out of the buildings, a bicycle that a messenger had probably taken to deliver bagels, and nobody will ever know who that person was. If anything, I wish I could have done more, but we did a lot.

BW: What’s the importance of documenting a tragedy like that?

KJ: The Great Fire of New York City, the most devastating physical event from New York’s history, was the fire of 1835. We have almost nothing from that period of time. It was a huge fire. It burned 674 buildings or something like that. In terms of destruction, it was even greater than the World Trade Center, and we have nothing from then. So I thought instantly that the attack on the World Trade Center was going to be an important event in New York history, and needed to be remembered and documented. And the buildings came straight down–there’s not a typewriter, not a chair, it was nothing. Everything was turned to dust. But we did get a few things. There were high

February 2018

heels that women left in the corners on their way down [from the World Trade Center] because they were slowing them up. We have those, and we have the crushed door of Rescue 2, the rescue company in Brooklyn from which many were killed. They gave us their door; those fire engines are important to those people. I wish we could’ve had more but there wasn’t very much. The way that those buildings fell, they pulverized everything.

BW: Are those things still at the New York Historical Society today?

KJ: Yes. We have hundreds of films and photographs.

BW: Collecting those must have been quite the experience.

KJ: It was. I went down to the garbage dump in Staten Island where everything from the collapsed towers went. 1400 destroyed vehicles. All of that stuff was collected over there, as well as everything from the site itself. I didn’t do everything, but I went through a lot of those vehicles. The people over there were looking for the black boxes. They never found them, they probably burned. But everything came through those conveyor belts. Columbia allowed me to go on halftime, so I took a half leave of absence.

BW: What is your favorite place in New York City?

KJ: What I would say to somebody is, ‘Where should you go to most understand the city?’ And that would be the Queens Museum. There’s something called the Panorama of New York City there. It’s a scale model of New York, all five boroughs, with 865,000 little buildings. My apartment building on 82nd street is there. You can look at it with binoculars. All of Columbia’s campus is there, and big things like Yankee Stadium, but even smaller buildings. You can see the expanse of the city. Is this where LaGuardia Airport is? Is this where Flushing Meadows used to be? Is this Queens Village? Is this the Kingsbridge Armory? You can see that building and you can see the huge housing projects. They even leave the World Trade Center up. You want to see the vast expanse of New York, the importance of Central Park and open space. There’s a lot of things you can do in New York.

Go to Central Park and sit on a bench and watch the world go by.w

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I N T I M AT E E X C H A N G E S

Staff Personals Because cuffing season is over and we're getting thirsty again

By Blue and White Staff Seeking M en Barnard sophomore seeks photogenic CC or SEAS boy with a respectable amount of Instagram followers to accompany her to her first sorority formal. Must be comfortable with having a photoshoot on College Walk. (5262) Green-thumb seeks shapely bum. (Greenborough) Street-view looking to get shafted. (McBain) Catholic boy kneels for prayer and for pleasure.

(1356)

Lonely transcendentalist seeks Thor-beau to warm bed; must enjoy solitude, the infinitude of the private man, ponds. (6741) Well-endowed oncologist seeks something his metasta-size. (Faculty House) South Dakotan exploring for Rushmore to Mount.

(8669) Whatever I Can Get

Wien girl willing to proxy some emotional baggage.

(8926)

Me: Rising editor-in-chief of prominent campus publication.

You: First year stunned senseless by power. (3086)

WBAR host looking for someone to fill her 3-4 a.m. slot. (6327)

Columbia meme-lord seeks anyone with dank stash of memes who knows how to hodl. (4635)

Linguistics major seeks Italian speaker, French kisser. (4028)

I just really want someone to go to Cafe Lalo with :( (1099)

Seeking Women

Film major seeking a date who lives and dies by Rotten Tomatoes, only that I can impress you with my superior taste. (7765)

Columbia sophomore seeks woman to bring to the Library Gala. Must be okay with debating the entirety of the Columbia political spectrum. (5828)

Human rights major opening bed to displaced peoples. (4983)

Former student-athlete looking for a new way to get a workout in. (3227)

Burned out, but always on the market for something firey. (Ruggles Hall)

My girlfriend went to study-abroad in India, so I have till May. Call me. (1180)

Tired research assistant just hopes to experiment.

(2458)

Classics major looking for the Lesbia to my lesbian.

(2140)

Typewriter enthusiast looking for someone to push my buttons. (2225)w

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The Blue and White

CAMPUS GOSSIP A workshop for students who “pay full tuition” and who “are graduating debt free” will be hosted so that the Rich Kids of Columbia can recognize their privilege and redistribute their wealth. “While this workshop is directed towards upper-middle and upper-class students with access to wealth, anybody who wants to attend is welcome,” reads the Facebook event. Maybe Marx got it wrong, and the opiate of the people is just money. e CUCR’s posters for their Anthony Scaramucci event misspelled Roone Arledge Auditorium as Roone “Aldridge.” LaMarcus Nurae Aldridge is a power forward for the San Antonio Spurs. e On Saturday February 10th, members of Sigma Nu got into a bar fight with a Columbia Milvet student outside of 1020 around 2 a.m. Rather than shake hands after throwing hands and end with mutual sense of respect, members of SigNu escalated the situation by then sending the veteran taunting Facebook messages, making light of issues like posttraumatic stress disorder. e Timothée Chalamet, CC '17 dropout, was apparently a not-so-nice college boyfriend. He claims he is nothing like his character in Ladybird, but one ex-girlfriend with Columbia connections says that’s the perfect character for him. See the movie to find out more! e Speaking of movies, the Supreme Court scene in The Post was filmed in Low Library over the summer. It doesn’t even look like they bothered to change the chairs! e Rumor has it, newly installed Barnard President Sian Beilock has a tattoo on the small of her back. This

February 2018

is according to a student who attends the same yoga classes as the new president. e Barstool CU, a new Twitter and Instagram offshoot of the popular Barstool social media brand, has graced Columbia with its existence. They tweet at other schools’ “Barstool” accounts often, and have even called for submissions for “Babe of the Month.”

Columbia State University, yea! e Cornell’s ZBT chapter facilitated a ‘pig roast’ among new members where they would accumulate points for having sex with women, with the woman’s weight being the tiebreaker. Let those whose universities do not have misogynistic fraternities cast the first stone. e A member of the Student Governing Board is under investigation for multiple charges of sexual assault.

While he maintains his position in SGB, he has resigned from all other positions of campus leadership and has stepped away from his fraternity.

The member has also been barred from making any financial decisions about No Red Tape, who were concerned his participation would raise a conflict of interest. e New York lawmakers are considering forcing Procter & Gamble to make Tide Pods look less tasty through legislation. Why anyone would want to try to digest a personal chemical grenade is beyond the editors of this magazine, but regardless, do your laundry you crazy kids. e Columbia has been called to conference on March 21st regarding a lawsuit against J. Paul Martin, a Human Rights professor who was quickly moved from Columbia … to Barnard, when the sexual harassment lawsuit initially landed in 2013.w

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E AT I N ’ G O O D I N T H E N E I G H B O R H O O D

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The Blue and White