March 2014

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. XX No. II

March 2014

Meaning is Basic A conversation with Akeel Bilgrami

Publication without Representation Diversity in student publications Also Ins

ide:

A look into Casa

t italy

Italiana's alleged ties to fascis

TORSTEN ODLAND, CC ’15, Editor in Chief SOMER OMAR, CC ’16, Managing Editor WILL HOLT, CC ’15, Features Editor LUCA MARZORATI, CC ’15, Senior Editor ALEXANDER PINES, CC ’16, Senior Editor NAOMI SHARP, CC ’15, Senior Editor DANIEL STONE, CC ’16, Senior Editor HALLIE NELL SWANSON, CC ’16, Senior Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Layout Editor ANGEL JIANG, CC ’15, Senior Illustrator MATTHEW SEIFE, CC ’16, Publisher Staff Writers NAOMI COHEN, CC ’15 MICHELLE CHERIPKA, CC ’16 VIRGINIA FU, CC ’17 CHANNING PREND, CC ’17 TAMSIN PARGITER, BC ’16 ALEXANDRA SVOKOS, CC ’14 Contributors JULI BRANDANO, BC ’16 NIA BROWN, CC ’17 JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17 ANGELICA MODABBER, BC ’16 KATHERINE NEVITT, CC ’16 MADELINE PAGES, BC ’17 JENNIFER SLUKA, CC ’17 ALEXANDRA WARRICK, BC ’17 ETHAN WU, CC ’17 Artists RACHEL AGINS, BC ’17 ZANE BHANSALI, CC ’17 MARCUS HUNTER, CC ’15 JULIA JARRETT, CC ’15 LEILA MGALOBLISHVILI, CC ’16 ALEXANDER PINES, CC ’16 ANNIE ZHANG, CC ’17 Editors Emeriti ANNA BAHR, BC ’14 CONOR SKELDING, CC ’14

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XX

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS Columns 4 Bluebook 6 Blue Notes 8 C ampus Characters 12 Verily Veritas 13 Curio Columbiana 29 Sketchbook 18 M easure for M easure 30 Digitalia Columbiana 31 C ampus G ossip

Hallie Nell Swanson & Virginia Fu

Features 10 At Two Swords’ L ength: Is That A rt? Our monthly prose and cons

Torsten Odland

14 Taking Stock Editor in Chief, Torsten Odland, reviews Kevin Roose’s book

Tamsin Pargiter

15 P ublication Without R epresentation Diversity in student publications

Channing Prend

20 Fuhgeddaboudit Looking into Casa Italiana’s alleged ties to Il Duce

Will Holt

21 Waterfront P roperty Taking a stroll through Columbia’s new uptown park

Alexander Pines

22 Fun Zone Searching for Columbia’s playground

Torsten Odland

24 M eaning is Basic A conversation with Akeel Bilgrami

theblueandwhite.org

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cover :

“#BluePeriod ” by Angel Jiang

No. II

BLUE BOOK

TRANSACTIONS

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR This morning (March 3rd), the first thing I did upon leaving my building was check my Weather app for the week’s forecast, hoping to see some yolky sun icons, some numbers above 45. “Hoping” is an interesting subject—or whatever it is you do when you try to force your vision, pitifully, into the world. Maybe “praying” is the right word, though it’s a cheap kind of prayer. I stared at the screen as I hurried across 110th: temperatures expected to rise throughout the week, culminating in Saturday’s spectacular high of 46—a deep yellow sun icon wreathed in a bashful cloud icon, the coquette. At the moment it was below twenty degrees; a cold, foggy day, but not unfriendly. I hurried to class. Talking about the weather is vulgar, I guess. It’s the smallest talk there is and often pretty boring. I’ll bet that wasn’t the case when people believed natural processes were direct expressions of God’s will. Anyway, part of me thinks that without a religion (broadly conceived) all talk is small. (I’m sure this line of thought tempts some to mutter, “never worked a day in his life.” Not true, haters). Still, caring about the weather isn’t vulgar. Even in a place like Manhattan where every surface seems like artifice (including the “greenery”) the weather reminds us of our relationship with the earth in a deeply mystical way. I’m sure every one of you remembers the freak weekend in February when it was warm and sunny. Days like that stick out in the midst of slushy bullshit. A change in temperature can make you feel like a different person. Though I didn’t change my routine at all that balmy weekend, I opened my window and went about my usual work with new relish. There was a sweet dampness in the air that made me glad just to breathe it. On a beautiful day you feel as though you’ve been given the most sincere gift. I’m keeping my eyes out for signs of spring. — Torsten Odland

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ARRIVALS The new Cold War Everyone you know, now in a band Arugula Red tape Bell’s beer Spring Ski masks Vermont’s heroin problem DEPARTURES College Walk tree lights Blue tape True Detective Myspace Kale That kid who painted his dorm room Vermont’s obesity problem

Come Again!?

“And you know how it goes—the more time you spend with your tongue down someone’s throat, the less time you’ll spend drinking. Maybe.” – The staff of the

Columbia Lion

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

CORE REQUIREMENTS THE NINE WAYS OF KNOWING Sight Logic Taste Hallucination Inner Ear Astral Projection Faith From a Mistake Books

GS

Three Tours in Iraq Nine Years on Broadway Keeping the Dream Alive Hustling Hard and Giving It Your All

THE CORE CURRICULUM Simplicity New Jazz Age Capitalism Vegan-Anarchism Frontiers of Science Ego Death

SEAS MAJOR

Political-Economy of the Computer State The Strength of Rocks and Metals Pre-Algebra Content Management Magnets

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

March 2014

Postcard by Julia Jarrett

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BLUE NOTES

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ho owns the air? This philosophical question is painfully real for some, including DJ Fresh Kid (aka Sean Bruce, 40) who was arrested last July in Brooklyn for operating a pirate radio station. The Fresh Kid was a regular DJ on the Fire Station (104.7 FM), which broadcasted Caribbean music in the outer regions of Brooklyn without a license. Because of a change in New York state law that designated unlicensed broadcasting as a class A misdemeanor, both the Fresh Kid and Solomon Malka, a Fire Station employee, could face jail time. Fire Station’s collapse marked a shift in the decades-long battle between pirate radio and its legal competitors. Supporters of “big radio” and the Federal Communications Commission claim that unlicensed stations interfere with broadcasts, while pirate radio backers counter that they provide an essential service in underserved communities: only 51 percent of New Yorkers speak English at home, yet 86 percent of FM stations are in English. And besides, they argue, the air should be free. But the threat of jail time has forced many pirate radio operators into hiding, or online streaming. A Freedom of Information Act request sent to the FCC revealed that WKCR, Columbia’s radio station at 89.9 FM, is not spared from the interfer-

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ence of pirate operators. In the northern reaches of Manhattan and pockets of Brooklyn, some wouldbe WKCR listeners instead complained of hearing “Quisqueya FM”—a station aimed at Dominican listeners broadcasting from the Bronx at 89.7 FM—or “Love Gospel Radio”—a Caribbean gospel station run by Grace Assembly Deliverance Temple on Boston Road. Attempts to contact these unlicensed operators were unsuccessful; perhaps they fear becoming the next DJ Fresh Kid. Nonetheless, pirate radio remains a presence on the New York soundscape. Turn the dial just past the static, and a world of tinny music awaits. Walking around New York with a portable radio reveals the depth of unlicensed transmissions: the drone of Hebrew prayers in outer Brooklyn; the mellifluent tone of a French Creole talk show in upper Manhattan; the sticky urgency of patois on the streets of the Bronx. In a city of a hundred tongues, the pirate beat goes on. — Luca Marzorati

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n the southeast corner of 119th and Amsterdam stands a neo-Romanesque gatehouse of granite. Its entrances are sealed shut, its sublevel filled with sand. Finished in 1885, the structure was once part of the extensive Croton Reservoir Aqueduct, which supplied clean water to New York City until the 1950s. It is one ofMorningside Heights’ many arcane historic landmark—solitary and deteriorating. The aqueduct ran from the Croton Dam in Westchester down to a reservoir on 42nd Street, where Bryant Park now stands—an impressive forty one miles under the streets and structures of the swelling city. It provided a reliable source of clean

Illustration by Angel Jiang

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES

water and the means to extinguish the frequent fires that sprung up with New York’s rapid development. Prior to its construction, the city’s system of water collection was a great deal more primitive and haphazard. Rainwater was caught in barrels, and wells had to continuously be dug and decommissioned due to contamination. The aqueduct was a revolutionary development, drawing up to thirty million gallons of water into New York each day. Underground, the gatehouse contained pumping equipment and facilities to regulate this flow of water until final termination of functionality in 1984. Facing liquidation by the city as a result of its obsoletion, the structure was designated a landmark of historical significance in 2000. (Another gatehouse down the avenue on 113th met a disparate fate. It was sold and repurposed as part of a senior center.) Though the gatehouse on 119th is an important stop on a historical trail tracing the aqueduct’s path, it is not and has never been accessible to the public. This significant relic of the city’s early infrastructure is surrounded by raffish metal fencing all the way round and flanked by an active community garden. It, indeed, has been saved for posterity in a lonely decline, sui generis, in a NYC Parks Department cage. — Nia Brown

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ith the arrival of this year’s eager Barnard first-years came a kaleidoscope of varying philosophies and viewpoints. The most opinionated campus character, however, sits outside of

March 2014

Barnard Hall, proclaiming aphoristically: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE and MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE. The bench that bears these phrases is American conceptual artist and Barnard Medal of Distinction honoree Jenny Holzer’s work “SELECTIONS FROM TRUISMS (Abuse of power comes…)” —or, as dubbed by a smattering of students, the “Douchebag Bench.” And it always has something to say. That an artwork bearing the phrase “STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BREED” sits in a cozy patch of grass at an institution of higher learning gives some students pause. “These are lofty, complacent, self-righteous absolutes…[and] many are even potentially incredibly damaging,” the Columbia sophomore who originally coined the sobriquet claimed. Other students embrace the heady sting of the piece’s austere, all-caps legends. “At first glance, Jenny Holzer’s piece shocked me and I was taken aback,” shared one Barnard firstyear, who finds the statements “seductive and somewhat inappropriate.” She grew to see the bench as consonant with her experience of the ethos of the Barnard Woman: “to push boundaries and to state the facts that others won’t.” Bret Silver, Barnard’s Vice President for Development, proudly touts the bench as “an important piece of art that invites debate and critical thought, which are central to Barnard’s academic mission” and is confident the work will be “considered and appreciated by generations of Barnard students” for years to come. Since the late 1970s, Holzer has emblazoned her inflammatory statements on surfaces as quotidian as t-shirts and condom wrappers, as vaunted as the Louvre and the Guggenheim. She aims to question oppressive paradigms, represented in these “truisms.” Whether or not institutional art is really conducive to “critical thinking,” on a campus otherwise decorated with stoic lions and reticent men, it’s comforting to know that Holzer’s bench will dependably be there to startle us. — Alexandra Warrick

Illustrations by Rachel Agins and Alexander Pines

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

Sammy Roth

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s I sit in Brad’s, waiting to meet Sammy Roth, CC ’14 and former Editor-in-Chief of Spectator, I notice a head full of hair through the window—it seems to make an entrance before he does. In the words of Finn Vigeland, CC ’14, who worked alongside Sammy as Managing Editor, “Most people know Sammy as Editor-in-Chief or as that kid with a lot of hair.” Aside from his hair, Sammy has made a name for himself as a reporter. During his freshman year, he established himself at Spec when he wrote a series about the Northwest Corner, discussing the projected plans for what the building would house, from its faculty to its labs and classes. The series gave him the

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foundation for his position as Deputy News Editor of Academics & Administration, where he covered topics such as the revival of the ROTC program. Reporting changed the way that Sammy saw and interacted with Columbia: having such intimate knowledge of the university’s inner workings, it’s hard to ignore the very things that make Columbia a more stressful and difficult place to be. “I have a very acute sense of ‘here are the things that are wrong with Columbia,’” Sammy admits. He sincerely believes that the news has the potential to make changes. “I’m really into uncovering what was hidden in the Columbia bureaucracy.” The tone isn’t one that you’d hear from a more cut-throat journalist, but according to Finn, “Sammy is understatedly bold.” He recalls when The New York Times broke the news about the SEAS faculty revolt against Dean Peña-Mora in 2012 after their concerns about space and class sizes had been repeatedly ignored. Though Spec was not the first to publish the story, it was the first to get information directly from Provost Coatsworth: Sammy’s first instinct had been to call him on his home phone number, before proceeding to call every single member of SEAS faculty, as well. Sammy’s passion for hearing and telling stories makes it all the more surprising when he apologizes for speaking too much, telling me that he doesn’t typically get to talk about this. As Editor-in-Chief, he was primarily responsible for giving feedback. At the same time, it’s easy to lose touch with the reporters, with the content that goes into each issue. “You can’t micromanage and be involved in everything that you care about or have an opinion about because that would be way too overwhelming. You have to prioritize in a big way.” It makes one thing clear: as passionate as he is about hearing and telling stories, he is equally passionate about the people who tell them. “When

The Blue and White

you’re debating where to put a comma or framing a quote in the best way that it needs to be framed, you form really strong bonds that way,” he says. When I ask him what he would tweet if he had to sum up his experience at Spec in 140 characters, he pauses for a moment before saying, “Wish I could do it again.” — Michelle Cheripka

Yiling Bao

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e looked nervously at each other before admitting it: our entire nonfiction workshop had been moved beyond belief by Yiling’s love letter of an essay, written about her now-fiancée. It was the kind of piece that typically gets torn to bits by critical readers for being cheesy and self-serving. But under Yiling’s controlled hand it was an honest, lyric tale of love built on mutual support and reliance, crossing cultures with care and attentiveness. Yiling Bao, GS ’14, was born in China to a pioneering businesswoman in a modest household. After being homeschooled for high school, in 2006 Yiling had her first novel published in “Flower City,” an authoritative literary journal in China. She also worked as a journalist, writing stories that were often put on the cover. Soon, the government invited her to be a professional “contract” author. She signed a three-year contract but only stayed for the first; she felt limited by a contract that only wanted her to write specific, positive pieces about the country. Initially, Columbia denied Yiling admission: the school told her that her English was not good enough. So she moved to New York in 2010 to take English courses. After one session, she obtained a recommendation from a Columbia professor and was accepted into the school of General Studies. At first, Columbia life was difficult. Yiling’s mother sold their house to help pay tuition. Yiling herself has been working steadily since she came here, from posting fliers for professors to consulting students as they apply for college. Meanwhile, her social life was in a bad place and she was depressed. Yiling knew something had to change, and she brought that forth from herself, changing her own perspective to live day by day. “If I can live one day in this world, I have to live with a smile,” she explains. “I have to face the world with my smile and use all my energy and love to make this day the best day of my entire life.” It is this boisterously positive energy that makes her remarkable to everyone she interacts with.

March 2014

Joanna Hou, GS ’14, first noticed Yiling at a GS international student cruise. “I didn’t talk to her much,” Joanna said, but she was attracted to her exuberance on the dance floor. Joanna approached her when she saw her in Butler and they became fast friends. “I like her passion,” Joanna said. “And how she treats her fiancée is really touching.” Yiling pulled off what many of us consider impossible: finding a husband at Columbia. This past New Year’s Day, Yiling got engaged to John Schiffer, GS ’14, the Vice President of Columbia MilVets. John and Yiling met last January while volunteering at GS orientation. When he first met her, John thought “she was really fun and outgoing, especially compared to the other Chinese girls who tend to be a little more conservative.” John speaks Mandarin, closing some of their culture gap. They quickly fell in love and plan to get married this August. Yiling has visited his family in New Mexico—“my dad loves her,” John said—and will be visiting her family in China over spring break. “I really appreciate my life, and I am so blessed to have this,” she said. “Life is sometimes down, sometimes up. Just don’t give up. Have the confidence from inside yourself so that you can make it. I really feel like I made it through.” — Alexandra Svokos

Illustrations by Annie Zhang

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Is that O

f course Lerner is art: I took Art Hum. And Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes you realsome more art history after that. It’s art because ize the truth.” Lerner lies to you. It invites you up it’s useless. If it weren’t art, it would have to be design the staircase to join friends. Then you crash in to like how a really arty Swedish toaster is “design”—in an athlete and end up with Powerade all over your the sense of having a function or a purpose. I spend Moleskine. It’s an absurd moment, gesturing produca lot of time here—sketching, tively towards the sad empty contemplating existence. I’ve ritual of the student endeavor. come to know it. I’m an observer It’s kind of sublime. (I wrote here. I’ve observed that beyond that in the Powerade-drenched certain stylistic and formal eleMoleskine.) ments, there’s very little of the I mean, when you think toaster at play. This building about it, all the ramps are realis truly, I want to say ideologily only leading down. cally useless. Form over funcNot to overlook aesthettion. Art for art’s sake. ics—I mean, this building has Freshman year I came plenty of other features whose here to get my mail for the first sheer eccentric uselessness time. As I traveled around the confers upon them a certain building’s irrelevant periphery, artistic status. Look at that I gazed, perplexed, at its usesofa-esque structure in the less empty core. What was it piano lounge. Its lime green all for? I ascended the ramps, color and its odd wavy form are disorientated by the random, artistic features, surely, when purposeless changes in gradiits very form is a rejection of ent. Across the room, I thought functionality: try and sit in it, I glimpsed stairs, rising from and its concrete texture posithe void like a mirage I could tively resists you, whether you never reach. Finally, I found my sit in the weirdly high wave or mailbox. Empty. the weirdly low trough. The green ffirmative It was an artistic moment, a thing is art. By Hallie Nell Swanson conceptual moment. All my hopes It doesn’t end there, either. of finding a purpose to my jourHere, as we are all forced to become ney were subverted, the exchange viewers, we also all become art. I rendered devoid of utility. I gazed at the other mail- know a lot about that because I’ve sat here, hours boxes—all identical, all presumably empty. In that at a time, perched in one of the space-age shiny moment, I saw mail services for the farce it truly is. “armchairs.” Apparently the ramps were designed to The mailboxes appeared stacked before me as visions facilitate productive moments of random encounter. of student existence—lined up in institutionalized Here, that tends to mean judgment. Aesthetic judgorder, identified by a meaningless number. We only ment, if you will. Appraisal; a kind of voyeurism. Isn’t have them for four years. And then it hit me. Aren’t we that’s what all the glass is for? Your cynical gaze lights all just trying to fit into the same identical box? And upon Lerner’s wretched inhabitants and it finds... aren’t we all empty inside? yourself. And in that moment, you are art. Lerner Shit, I thought. This is some arty shit. makes an exhibition out of us all of us.w

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The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

art? N

o. I’m a student center. I swear I’m literally just a Because if you just looked at me it would goddamn center for students. become abundantly clear that I am a goddamn spaceThey say that Lerner doesn’t function. They ship. I am a gleaming motherfucking spaceship from say that I’m cold, unaccommodating, and don’t have outer space. That’s not a metaphor. enough space to offer. That I—and here they point out But you’re not looking. You’re not looking at how the bewilderment the uninitiated face navigat- my ramps. You don’t see their rugged functionality. ing my ramps mirrors the difficulties attending the My ramps are like arms. Warm, embracing maternal achievement of American Dream—am just a meta- arms that reach out of their homes and claw gradually phor. higher toward that tantalizing glass ceiling. I say that I say they’re not looking in the right places. if you know how to navigate me, it’s not that difficult They’re obviously not looking at Alfred Lerner Hall, to get where you want to go. a functional student center that provides space for If you were really looking, you’d see that I, students. Alfred Lerner Hall, Because if you am here, was crelooked, you’d see ated, birthed, built that I’m a go-getter, for you: the students a do-gooder, a recipiof the greatest colent of the American lege in the greatest Architecture Award, university in the the New York City greatest city in the AIA Design Award, world. Think about and Time Best Design that next time you of 1999. I’m Alfred swipe your wallet Lerner Hall, student at the turnstile and center for students bruise your crotch and I offer 250,000 on my unyielding square feet of space. metal bar. Pure, unfettered, Sometimes space. Yours for the booking. Space you look, but you don’t really see egative for your tedious weekly club meetme at all. It’s almost as if there were By Virginia Fu ings, space for you to work crooksomething between us. A partition edly on my sloping ramps, space that’s not transparent. I just want for you to rub shoulders with and spill Powerade on you to see you, reflect you. this University’s diverse multitudes as you ascend my Isn’t that what everyone wants? To be looked at carefully placed staircases. When you’re looking out and to recognize in that gaze the image of something from the fourth floor after your meeting with your you are or hope to be. But you pass by on my ramps very own academic advisor or chatting with adminis- hunched, rushed, intent on your work, eyes averted. trators in their administrative offices, leaning on the If I am cold, if there’s an emptiness at my railings surveying the transparent emptiness below— core, I am only a mirror of you, you who look at my which, by the way, in no way gestures toward some architectural daring, my yearning to be more than I deep scalloped hollowness at the heart, the core, of am, and scoff. You who only see impediments where the student experience—you can see it’s all just there there is limitless, vacuous opportunity. I just want to for you. Space. For students. be loved.w

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March 2014

Illustrations by Zane Bhansali

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V E R I LY V E R I TA S

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS

V

In which our hero takes a history midterm

erily Veritas despises the architect of the Fayerweather second floor men’s bathroom. The tall thick wooden stall doors shut out all the light. Inside and upon the commode it is much too dim, even for VV who is accustomed to candlelight, to contemplate the day’s crossword puzzle. Worse are the urinals. With no barriers to separate them, they deprive the act of its dignity. As VV stands and unbuttons his fly, his history professor enters and unzips. Oh, how intently VV does study the wall before him and appreciate its finer points. To simply call it white would be, he conjectures, an intellectual travesty. Rather, the paint has texture, depth, variety, color. He could write a treatise upon this patch of wall. If only his professor’s elbow did not nudge his, diverting Verily’s stream. VV’s anxiety does not help his increasingly reddening face. Upon his exeunt, he knows that he will climb to the fourth floor and assume his regular place in room 313, row 3 seat C. His lavatorial companion will then stand before the room, say a few words and throw a stack of blue books towards his coercively attentive audience. It will be easy, the tenured man with the protruding neck will say, and besides, he will add, grades mean nothing in the long run. Sputtering dryly, VV imagines the professor’s gnarled, glowering penis, and almost leans over to— VV comports himself to button up before his acclaimed academic neighbor upzips, and hurries back to 3c. How the carpenter erred! The angle between torso and thighs, supposes our hero, has been on the rise since the late nineteenth century. But how

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much, how? He digresses. The professor stands and smiles. Questions, printed on what VV assumes is the same stuff as receipts, are distributed. The blank staple-bound booklets arrive at his inhumanely narrow seatdesk. Commence! VV studies the questions carefully. He has evidently revised wrong. The exams asks for “compare and contrast.” He knows only “expound and elaborate.” That is all that the man in front has shown. (And is not the high art of the academic realm merely that of parrot and flatter?) And then the matter of the questions themselves make him furrow his brow. What should he know about the development of the southern French city as a product of barley exchange? That was but a footnote in lecture, he recalls, when the professor contemplated his own sabbatical in Aix-en-Provence and VV drew furious circles and triangles in frustration. Around him his classmates request second blue books. His first remains closed. Half the period has elapsed. Write he must! But what? He supposes that anything is better than nothing. VV grasps his pen and writes. He writes that the French city is but to be understood only in light of the American. And the American city should be explored individually. Yes, an essay about the American City it will be! VV is dizzy. He does not know what he has done. His time has expired, his classmates departed. The professor smiles warmly at him; he pities VV. VV can only stand, collect his belongings, and submit the solitary wrinkled booklet on which his name is scrawled.w

The Blue and White

CURIO COLUMBIANA

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h omas Merton, CC ’37, left Columbia to become one of America’s most prominent Catholic writers. In this section of his 1948 autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, he recounts a field trip taken during his sophomore year and reflects upon studenthood. Our famous course in Contemporary Civilization had involved me, one winter afternoon, in a visit to the Bellevue Morgue, where I had seen rows and rows of iceboxes containing the blue, swollen corpses of drowned men along with all the other human refuse of the big, evil city: the dead that had been picked up in the streets, ruined by raw alcohol. The dead that had been found starved and frozen lying where they had tried to sleep in a pile of old newspapers. The pauper dead from Randalls Island. The dope-fiend dead. The murdered dead. The run-over. The suicides . The dead Negroes and Chinese. The dead of venereal disease. The dead from unknown causes. The dead killed by gangsters. They would all be shipped for burial up the East River in a barge to one of those islands where they also burned garbage. Contemporary Civilization! One of the last things we saw on the way out of the morgue was the hand of a man pickled in a jar, brown and vile. They were not sure whether he was a criminal or not, and they wanted to have some part of him, after they had sent the rest of him up to the ghats. In the autopsy room a man on the table with his trunk wide open pointed his sharp, dead nose at the ceiling. The doctors held his liver and kidneys in their hands and sprayed them over with a trickle of water from a little rubber hose. I have never forgotten the awful, clammy silence of the city morgue at Bellevue, where they collect the bodies of those who died of contemporary civilization, like Fred. Nevertheless, during that year I was so busy and so immersed in activities and occupations that I had no time to think for very long on these things. The energy of that golden October and the stimulation of the cold, bright winter days when the wind swept down as sharp as knives from the shining Palisades kept driving me through the year in what seemed to be fine condition. I had never done so many different things at the same time or with such apparent success. I had discovered in myself something of a capacity for work and for activity and for enjoyment that I had never dreamed of. And everything began to come easy, as the saying goes. It was not that I was really studying hard or working hard: but all of a sudden I had fallen into a kind of a mysterious knack of keeping a hundred different interests going in the air at the same time. It was a kind of a stupendous juggling act, a tour-de-force, and what surprised me most was that I managed to keep it up without collapsing. In the first place, I was carrying about eighteen points in my courses—the average amount. I had found out the simplest way of fulfilling the minimum requirements for each one.w

March 2014

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NOT A BIOGRAPHY OF WEEZY

Taking Stock Editor in Chief, Torsten Odland, reviews Kevin Roose’s book By Torsten Odland Young Money

by Kevin Roose Grand Central Publishing, 366 pages $27.00

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oung Money is a successful book, though perhaps not successful in the way Kevin Roose intended. Throughout my reading, I felt a tension between Roose’s authorly goals and the book I actually enjoyed. He introduces a mission statement rather clearly and early in the book: “The junior bankers who flock to Wall Street every year are some of the nation’s most credentialed young people…I realized that if I wanted to understand what Wall Street, and America, would look like in the future, I had to figure out who these people were, and how the crash was changing their initiation process.” Young Money tells the stories of eight young bankers during their first two-years as junior analysts. It’s from their perspective that Roose shows us the psychotic bosses, the intensity of a one hundred-hour work-week, and the demoralizing insignificance of entry-level assignments in an investment bank. Each chapter typically focuses on one analyst and something particularly miserable that happens to them. And the lives of these junior analysts truly are depressing, if not pitiable: they get chewed out by higher-ups for a mistakes their bosses made; they receive pitiful bonuses and, in some cases, get laid off (which was unheard of before 2008); their romantic relationships decay and demise. They get fat, cruelly analytical, and money-obsessed. Some of these stories shed light on aspects of the Wall Street culture most writers don’t get access to—Roose describes one analyst who showed up “for the first day of training in a tan hound’s-tooth coat with a black turtleneck underneath, and was humiliated by the snickers and shaming glares of his peers”—but none of them are moving or thematic in a literary sense, and for a relatively simple reason:

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Roose’s subjects are not very dynamic people. In Young Money, the interesting existential questions don’t explode, they aren’t dissolved, nor are they answered in any meaningful way. At the book’s end, the subject who shows the most self-consciousness about his work’s moral indifference, is still employed at the same private equity company. In the epilogue, Roose assures us, “he remains conflicted about his job and the private equity industry overall.” Roose’s subjects basically treat these questions as professional dilemmas—“Do I really want to be sitting around for three more years doing…bitch work?” Some of them make a change, but most simply forget about the question. Despite the tedium and frustration of their professional lives, six of the eight profiles still work in finance—some of them at the same firm. If the book were only about “figuring out who these people are,” I would say it’s a waste of time. Either Roose is too skeptical to unearth these bankers’ gritty conflicted cores—or they don’t have them. Which doesn’t make them odd or inhuman; just flat, boring–and perhaps that’s true, but does the average person need to be told that bankers are materialistic and unreflective? It’s in spite of these people that Roose’s book is interesting and important, especially for Columbia readers. Roose is at his best when he uses his characters as points of generalization. For instance, he suggests that part of finance’s attraction is how easy an option it is: “Wall Street banks had made themselves the obvious destinations for students at top-tier colleges who are confused about their careers.” Roose makes important points about the way finance has drained the US economy of its best educated human capital for the last thirty years, and the sea change happening right now, as finance loses its prestige to tech. It’s an entertaining, fascinating book—one that has a lot to say about being a college student in our day—but don’t pick it up with a view to understanding human beings.w

Illustration by Marcus Hunter

The Blue and White

S E L F - F L A G E L L AT I O N

Publication Without Representation Diversity in student publications By Tamsin Pargiter

C

olumbia University advertises itself as one of the most diverse universities in the nation. Students in the College and SEAS Class of 2017 come from 48 states and 51 countries. Within President Lee Bollinger’s first four years at Columbia, the ethnic diversity of the undergraduate colleges increased by 6.8 percent, according to statistics from the annual class profiles. But within this supposedly hypersensitive, progressive, intellectual bubble, students of color often express feelings of neglect and isolation. In an October fireside chat, Gerardo Romo, CC ’14, said that students of color at Columbia felt “a lack of support” in a “predominantly white environment that forces students to essentially assimilate or die.” Who are You R eading? As non-affiliated student groups, unattached to any single identity, publications may best represent the collective student voice. And yet, upon closer examination, it seems these same channels of open student expression represent a fairly small slice of the student body, unrepresentative of the whole. The ethnic diversity statistically evident in the student body is not emulated in the publications that are meant to speak for and report on the entire community. Columbia defines “minority students” as US residents who do not identify as “white” or “unknown” when asked to check off their race on their admissions application. In fall of 2013, 47 percent of CC students were white; 34 percent of SEAS; 69

March 2014

percent of GS; and 60 percent of BC. In total, nonwhite students comprise 47.5 percent of Columbia’s undergraduate student body. Yet the estimated ratios for publication staff are drastically lower. The Lion was the most ethnically diverse publication, with a staff that was 68 percent white, while The Blue and White was the least diverse at 81 percent white. There seems to be a disparity between the diversity of our community and the media sources that supposedly serve and represent it. Kiani Ned, BC ’16, who self identifies as black, says, “This lack of representation is noticeable because rarely do I feel like these publications are speaking to me. I feel like they’re speaking at me. I’m only a ‘true Columbian’ if I care about, think about, or talk about x y or z. Shut up. Ask me what the fuck I care, think, or talk about.” Can campus newsrooms report relevant, wellrounded stories that reflect the goings on of their diverse readerships when reporters are predominantly white? Bill Grueskin, the Dean of Academic Affairs and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, says it’s an unavoidable problem. Reflecting on his days as the city editor of the Miami Herald, he said “Our city desk was 40 percent non-anglo, including African-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Haitian-Americans...given the ethnic makeup of South Florida, that was critical to how we covered the news, with everything from politics to cultural events. According to Gureskin, “Inevitably, if you have a homogenous newsroom, the publication will reflect the priorities and values of those in the newsroom … It is imperative for other newsrooms to diversify in order to accurately represent their readership.” This doesn’t mean that a sort of affirmative action is the solution. Campus media organizations go to lengths to ensure that their staff are the most qualified, talented, and interested writers and editors possible—as it should be. Yet campus publications may seem less accessible to their student readers who don’t identify with the same cultural norms as the writers and editors of these outlets. This makes it

Illustration by Marcus Hunter

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S E L F - F L A G E L L AT I O N difficult for those students to see themselves reflected in the pages they read. I ndecent Coverage Sean Augustine-Obi, CC ’16 and editor of The Lion claims, “Despite the apparent lack of racial diversity, I believe mainstream campus media does a good job at covering stories that affect minority groups at Columbia, and not just students of color.” He cites coverage of the Intercultural Resource Center and Tracey Wang’s article about Top Girls as examples. Spectator columnist and former opinions editor, Leo Schwartz, CC ’14, believes that the solution is in the hands of the dissatisfied: “People complain about a lack of diversity, but that’s weird to me because the way that you stop that is by submitting op-eds,” he said. “I think the opinions page is pretty balanced.” Last semester, Schwartz wrote an op-ed, “Discourse on Discourse” (opener: “Being a straight white male at Columbia is not as easy as it seems”), which sparked a series of similar op-eds Orgo night dubbed a “masturbatory dialogue on the Jewish White Man’s burden.” Schwartz says, “I just wished that all the people who disagreed with me had written op-eds in response, so that we could truly open up the conversation.” Yet fewer students submit op-eds about their experiences as a marginalized voice in the conversation. Romo feels people did not understand the reasons he felt compelled to submit an opinion piece, titled “Legacies of Trauma,” which attempted to explore “what it means to be a person of color on a campus that historically restricted marginalized identities from entering its gates.” (“I don’t get the point of this article,” went one top comment; “This is an incredibly lazy and problematic way of thinking,” went another.) Other students indicate that the surface analysis of identity labels, so to speak, overwhelms student discourse, drowning out the potential underlying quest for more student cohesion and collective awareness. In an op-ed titled “Cultural sensitivity and

PC-ness substitute for examining real injustice,” Ricardo Alatorre, CC ’14, wrote, “most of the people I know here have habitually smoked or tried marijuana...They indirectly feed a machine that makes it that much more probable that someone in my family, still living in Mexico, will be skinned alive tomorrow.” In another response to the Theta controversy, Ryan Elivo, CC ’15, argued: “We can never hope to achieve a post-racist, post-sexist, post-elitist society if every aspect of our lives is an issue of group identity...Promote diversity by living it. Then we’ll talk.” Selective Sight A problem with a lack of diversity is that it can lead to coverage bias, the phenomenon born of reporters who are culturally biased to ignore certain stories, many of which may be important news. According to transgender Bwog features editor and B&W senior editor Alexander Pines, CC ’16, “I do think that there’s definitely coverage bias when a staff is predominantly white, straight, and from the United States.” It is worth asking whether Tracey Wang’s article on the Top Girls “yellowface” controversy, which Augustine-Obi cited as a good example of diverse coverage, would have been written at all if Wang did not identify with aspects of AsianAmerican representation. She has also covered Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the East Coast Asian American Student Union conference, and a panel about whether America will ever elect an Asian president. She has also written five articles covering Native American issues in 2012-13, the first time they have received coverage since 2009. Gianni LaTange, a Cuban, Haitian, and Jamaican BC sophomore, explains that she doesn’t look to campus publications when she is looking for news that is relevant to the African diaspora. LaTange explains her alternative, saying she attends group meetings held by organizations like BOSS (Black Organization of Soul Sisters) and BSO (Black Students’ Organization). But why aren’t student publications covering the work of these organizations? There are three articles tagged “BSO” on the Spec

“I’m only a ‘true Columbian’ if I care about, think about, or talk about x y or z. Shut up. Ask me what the fuck I care, think, or talk about.”

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The Blue and White

S E L F - F L A G E L L AT I O N website, from 2007, 2009 and 2011. While there are a few articles featuring the organization that are not tagged, the BSO apparently received no coverage in 2013. LaTange says, “this segregation is an issue because it shows a lack of inter-connectedness within the entirety of the Columbia undergraduate student body.” A picture emerges of a mainstream, visible discourse on one hand, featuring the concerns largely of white students, and niches for other groups on the other. She added that this is especially a problem “if this is due to self-segregation and the unconscious dubbing of these topics as ‘black issues.’” The problem is, media coverage serves as a group’s record and its voice: without coverage, to the wider community, these groups may as well not exist. Rega Jha’s, CC ’14, 2012 Eye article, “Rules of Discourse” pointed out: “Whether or not Spectator columnists or Bwog writers have ever been to a BSO meeting, they have no choice but to pay attention when comments fill their screens, asking that they ‘check their privilege.’” But if Ned and LaTange are representative examples, it seems students who might do so aren’t even reading campus media, and are unlikely to join it either. An op-ed by Elora Lopez, CC ’15, in the wake of the Theta mixer photos suggested that the issue goes beyond one of coverage bias, and represents an endemic culture: she recalls that at a “Columbia publication” social event she attended, while discussing the lack of underrepresented minorities in the organization, one person commented, “Well, I think white and Asian students join academic clubs freshman year, whereas blacks and Latinos are more interested in parties and stuff…” Lopez writes, “I certainly couldn’t encourage black and Latina students to join, knowing what the atmosphere was.” Commitments Is it the publication’s duty to cover stories that may affect marginalized groups, or is it the duty of the marginalized groups to reach out and request coverage? This disagreement is exemplified in the comments on Spectator’s recent coverage of Theta’s Team Mexico costumes. A “former news editor” wrote, “this just points to the news editor’s desperation for sensational content and poor judgment for what is actually relevant and productive to discuss on campus.” Another commenter asked whether “spec actually got complaints from a student organization

March 2014

or a group of students who were offended by this?” The way this comment trend sees it, people get mad, webpages get a lot of views. By this logic, it would only be newsworthy if, for example, the Chicano Caucus had independently reached out to publications to make a statement. One situation where a community directly reached out to direct the dialogue was in the wake of the physical assault of Dr. Prabhajot Singh, a Columbia professor of international relations and a Sikh, in Morningside Park. According to Sarika Kumar, BC ’16 and who identifies as South Asian, students on and off campus were able to engage in a much needed discussion about hate crimes, Islamophobia, and the way the turban is perceived. She says, “I knew it was important for the Sikh community to speak up during this time so they could tell the story from a Sikh perspective, rather than have it become a muddled story that targeted and identified the suspects and victim in a particular manner.” This brings us to the question of whether a reporter can successfully report on a community of which they are not a member. The obvious answer is yes: not only do close ties with organizations and communities create conflict of interest between reporter and story, but news stories rely on objective distance. The writer’s beat does not have to relate to a reporter’s interests or identity. Still, a more inclusive newsroom has inherent benefits. A person’s background determines, in part, what counts as news for them. And as Pines notes: “I think non trans people can report accurately about trans things and white people can report accurately about people of color...the problem is that when you’re not a member of these marginalized identities, you’re not looking for their stories, and you may not know the correct language or terminology to discuss these issues.” If Columbia student publications value their progressive heritage and journalistic commitments, it clear that changes must be made regarding staff diversity. With things as they are, it’s difficult to even gauge coverage bias, because student media is the public record. However, actually affecting a change can be a tricky process. Generally, our publications are self-selecting on either side. Real representation will surely require initiative of both parties, but it’s incumbent on student publications to treat their homogenous newsrooms as what they are: a problem.w

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M easure

for

M easure

Morning Dew glints in the grass, as the waking source begins to rustle; the beeches tilt their heads; a wind blows through the shaking, gleaming leaves, and over there, flames strip through the gray of the clouds; it surges, this proclamation, in the air as a flood rolls across a shoreline, rolling higher and higher, the rivulets. Come, and come quick, but don’t rush away from me, you golden day; don’t hurry to the sky’s summit; my eyes will fly open in faith to you, so long as you shine in heaven with such childish beauty, so long as I make you not haughty, but proud; if you wanted always to rush, heavenly wanderer, with you I could!—Of course, you smile at the overexcitement: that he would like to be the same as you. Please then, bless my human doings, you kind one; grant me, please, a quiet path today. — Friedrich Hölderlin, Translated from the German by Torsten Odland

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The Blue and White

M easure

for

M easure

The Dream We put ourselves to bed With hot tea and whiskey, To the lullaby of that nasal voice Which narrates the city In the apartment With Kerouac and Vonnegut on the walls And a quintessential still life at the table, Only empty bottles and a salt shaker, I was pure ash-white in the dark I was all burnt on the surface One layer beyond, however Was the cold ember of summer Passed on. All the people packed around me on the train Are dancers The strangers under my window Sing opera Everyone is a costume Everything is a meal — Madeline Pages

March 2014

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D I D W E A P P R O P R I AT E T H AT T O O ?

Fuhgeddaboudit Looking into Casa Italiana’s alleged ties to Il Duce By Channing Prend

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or the next 500 years, Columbia will pay an annual fee of $100 to the Italian government. This payment is part of a bizarre real estate agreement that allows Columbia’s Italian Academy to inhabit the Casa Italiana, a building located at 117th and Amsterdam. The Casa’s neo-Renaissance façade looks innocuous enough, but this agreement with the Italian consulate is just one of the building’s many oddities. One rumor, propagated by several generations of Columbia students, is that the building served as an outpost for the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. This curious Blue and White reporter delved into the archives to discover the truth of these claims. Interest in the Casa’s politics extended beyond the Columbia campus. A 1934 article in The Nation called the Casa “an unofficial adjunct of the Italian Consul-General’s office in New York and one of the most important sources of fascist propaganda in America.” One of the foundations for this allegation was the questionable friendship between Casa Director Giuseppe Prezzolini and Mussolini. “Prezzolini never denied being a personal friend of Mussolini,” says Barbara Faedda, the Casa’s current Associate Director. “There were undeniable contacts and relationships with the fascist regime.” According to a Spectator Article from 1926, a portrait of Mussolini was even supposed to hang in the Casa’s library alongside a painting of Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of the University at the time. “Of course that was the twenties,” Faedda told

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me. “Until Italy invaded Ethiopia, many people in America and at Columbia were optimistic about the fascist regime.” As the U.S. began to turn against Italian fascism, there was considerable speculation in the national media about the nature of the relationship between the Casa and Mussolini. “It is reasonable to assume that Professor Prezzolini is reporting to his chief on his success in furthering the cause of fascism,” declared Carlo Trescal, the editor of Il Martello, a radical political journal. While it is unclear whether there is any validity to this accusation, the Spectator editorial board called for sanctions against Casa Italiana in 1935. “Dr. Butler has not the slightest excuse for allowing Columbia University to be utilized as a sounding-board for fascist propaganda in this country,” they wrote. There is little proof, however, that the Casa actually disseminated any propaganda, and it’s improbable that the Italian government influenced the intellectual climate of the University generally. “Yes, Prezzolini invited many fascist scholars to speak at the Casa, but he also invited many anti-fascist scholars as well,” Faedda noted. “From a cultural point of view it was a fascinating social laboratory.” Be they real or not, the Casa’s fascist ties will remain a pithy anecdote on admissions tours. Like the Maison Française’s past as part of an insane asylum and maintenance funding from Ghostbusters royalties. People will continue to circulate these myths, I’m sure. For, what do Columbia students love more than a scandal? Maybe things would be a little different if it were Deutsches Haus.w

Illustration by Rachel Agins

The Blue and White

A PLACE IN THE REEDS

Waterfront Property Taking a stroll through Columbia’s new uptown park By Will Holt

A

fter nearly three years of planning and collaboration between Columbia University and the New York City Parks Department, Muscota Marsh received a muted opening in mid-January. Located at the northern tip of Manhattan, the public green space and ecological conservation project sits next to Columbia’s Baker Athletic Complex and is in some respects its byproduct. In exchange for extended land rights to build the Campbell Sports Center, the University promised Inwood residents a nature sanctuary. The park, situated at the corner of West 218th Street and Indian Road, aims to restore a portion of the area’s native marshland and provide increased access to the waterfront along Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Harlem River. A sleek, modern-looking boardwalk slopes down from the road toward the marsh, where a gravel path stretches around the shoreline toward the University’s boathouses. For the time being, a network of wooden stakes and orange string stretches over the water, erected to protect the soon-to-be-planted spartina grass from the foraging Canada Geese that will return in the spring. The word “Muscota” comes from the language of the Lenape, Manhattan’s first inhabitants and the tribe that purportedly sold the island to the Dutch for the 17th century equivalent of $24. The word means

March 2014

“place in the reeds,” a fitting title considering the site’s unique topography, as well as the nearby caves in Inwood Hill Park that the Lenape once used as summer fishing camps. James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm behind the High Line, designed the park after being approached by Columbia in 2008. The area’s unusual blend of a saltwater marsh and a freshwater wetland became the focal point of the design. “We really wanted to create an ecologically sensitive park that sort of builds on Inwood,” said Karen Tamir, the senior associate from James Corner in charge of the project. “The proximity of freshwater to saltwater is something unique there.” A ribbon-cutting ceremony was originally scheduled for the fall of 2012, but Hurricane Sandy flooded the marsh and pushed the park’s expected opening to 2013. According to Tamir, the difficulties of navigating city bureaucracy postponed the opening even further, to January 2014. “It’s just a matter of working in New York,” she explained. “You have to get all the proper signage, especially for something on the water, which adds yet another complexity.” Tamir emphasized that the park isn’t exactly finished yet, despite its recent opening. She said there are still more rounds of planting to be completed, and her firm will continue to collaborate with the University as these final steps are put into action. An official ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for the spring. Despite inclement weather over the last couple of months, Muscota Marsh appears to be getting a fair amount of use. On a given Sunday, one can find local residents enjoying the gorgeous views of Spuyten Duyvil and its rocky cliffs across the water. “It’s a small ecological gem that’s meant to be part of the life of the neighborhood,” said Tamir. “You don’t get the opportunity to do this in Manhattan very often.”w

Illustration by Leila Mgaloblishvili

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WE BOUGHT A ZOO!

Fun Zone Searching for Columbia’s playground By Alexander Pines

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or as long as Columbia students have been demanding recreational student space (one of Columbia’s lesser-known but long-standing traditions), these recreational spaces have been periodically constructed, chronically underused, and eventually repurposed. It’s a tragic dialectic that goes all the way back to the opening of Ferris Booth Hall in 1960. Students entering the basement of their newly constructed student center were greeted by the clatter of bowling pins and the crack of rifles in the building’s shooting range. The space also contained a student entertainment center called The Lion’s Den that housed easily reconfigurable space for dining, lounging, and musical performances. The menu was reminiscent of JJ’s Place, featuring late-night snacks like hamburgers and pizza, and even “breaded hot dogs impaled on popsicle sticks and known as Corn Dogs,” according to a 1971 Spectator article announcing the Den’s demise. Hopes were initially high for Ferris Booth and the recreational space it contained. A passionate Spectator editorial from a special issue dedicated to

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the time of the building’s opening reads: “[Ferris Booth represents] the progress toward a genuine campus community through the implementation of recreational and lounge facilities which, up to now, were sorely lacking on the Morningside campus. Booth Hall is perhaps the first and most important step toward the ultimate ideal of a true residence college.” These hopes quickly soured. Eight years after the closing of The Lion’s Den, a 1979 Spectator article insisted that Ferris Booth was not a “real student center,” calling it “pathetic” and “sterile” in an argument for renovations. As Ferris Booth became increasingly irrelevant, students turned to “The Pub,” a bar and dining center in the basement of John Jay Hall where JJ’s Place is now. The Pub opened in 1976, but closed soon after the drinking age was raised to 21 in 1985. It later reopened to tepid reactions from students with a woodsy redesign. “Did you ever read Amityville Horror? The blood in the basement, that’s what this reminds me of,” said Eric Dawson, CC ’89, in a Spectator article about the renovations. Part of the mission behind Alfred Lerner Hall’s construction in 1999 was to fulfil the original promise of its predecessor: a genuine student center. This promise remains unfulfilled. Many of the original, more student-focused spaces have been reprogrammed into offices or are now open to reservation by student groups instead of being available to all. Lerner used to have a darkroom on the fifth floor, a credit union, and even a travel agency. What is now the Broadway Room used to be filled with a ramshackle assortment of pinball machines and billiards and air-hockey tables. By 2005, though, even CCSC thought it was useless and worked with the Office of Student Services to repurpose the room. This space eventually became the target for renovations proposed by the Student Space Initiative (SSI), a group formed out of the Columbia Student Forum (an open discussion series that also spawned the Student Wellness Project) in 2011. The initiative

The Blue and White

WE BOUGHT A ZOO! passed a resolution through both CCSC and ESC in late 2011 that outlined the basics of a new student lounge space in Lerner Hall; requiring that the space be non-reservable, accessible to all Columbia and Barnard undergraduates, furnished and designed by members of the SSI, capable of accommodating a food provider, and more. The SSI planned to renovate both the Broadway Room and the Lerner Piano Lounge, adding a kitchen, game consoles, and a stage to the re-furnished spaces. They even went so far as to draw up architectural plans detailing the tentative renovations to present to Columbia College Dean James Valentini and Former Dean of Student Affairs Kevin Schollenberger. “Students approached me shortly after I became dean, asking for a loungelike space that would be just for them, a ‘Pub,’ in a sense, in which students could relax, hang out and play games,” Dean Valentini said. “I told them if they designed it, I would find a place for it, and I would find the money to build it.” Despite this administrative support, the project was stalled and the specific plans were abandoned in spring 2012 after the Activities Board at Columbia (ABC) protested, demanding that adequate space elsewhere on campus be made available for displaced performance groups that use the Broadway Room as a rehearsal and practice space. “Giving up space is giving up space. The only way [the SSI] could be truly equitable is if they open up an entirely new space,” then-ABC President Daniel Brown, CC ’12, told the Spectator. The SSI essentially disbanded by fall 2012, in part because many of its members graduated. Functionally defunct, the SSI has been distilled into several movements focussing on smaller changes, such as adding charging stations to Lerner, better furniture for the existing lounges. Barry Weinberg, CC ’12 and a member of the SSI, expressed frustration with these efforts. “[SSI got] diluted by sort of asinine, tiny details-orientated pushes, and a lack of a grander vision,” he said. “We wanted to make Lerner a real student center—and get rid of that fucking piano.” However, Dean Valentini insists that he still supports the cause. “I have been working on [creating leisure space] ever since [his meetings with SSI],

March 2014

and continue to work on it. It’s not so easy since we can’t just take space away from someone else or take money that is designated for another student program. But I think it will happen.” Despite Dean Valentini’s optimism, he can’t bring the SSI back from the dead. Lacking the springboard of the Columbia Student Forum, all current efforts have been coordinated through the student councils. Weinberg stresses that this approach is flawed because it doesn’t have the element of openness that he feels made the project so special. “Students could really take ownership of the [SSI project]—and hopefully a space—on campus, a rarity at Columbia,” said Weinberg. “If they try to resurrect it by appointing some ‘student leaders’ or doing it through the student councils, it won't be the same and will likely fail.” Even if a bottom-up movement succeeds in setting aside some space for student recreation, this sort of project may be doomed. The widely despised Ferris Booth Hall was operated by a Board of Managers (BOM) staffed entirely by students. While there are obvious differences between the building and the renovations suggested by the SSI, it’s hard to believe any kind of recreational institution could overcome the Columbia Smirk, unless you can get drunk there. In fact, there is a space on the University campus dedicated just for hanging; Barnard has the optimistically named “Fun Zone” on the first floor of Altschul Hall (nicknamed “the mancave” by Barnard blog The Nine Ways of Knowing). It’s a room with several large posters announcing “this is not a study space!” Speakers periodically play music to encourage conversation. The few students who spend time there frequently request lower volumes, however, because the noise distracts them from their homework. A recreational center might be something we need—decades of efforts seem to demonstrate that. Yet the expectations for these spaces—that a lounge can make Lerner into a “real” student center, that charging stations improve wellness—are unrealistic on a campus with notorious levels of stress and a dearth of space. Wellness is more than a bean-bag chair. But we still want the chair.w

Illustrations by Alexander Pines

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

Meaning is Basic A conversation with Akeel Bilgrami By Torsten Odland Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. A faculty member since 1985, he served as the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities from 2004-2011 and currently serves as the director of the South Asia Institute. A key concern of his work is formulating traditional philosophical notions–regarding mind, moral psychology, and politics–in way that clarifies our understanding of agency and value. Torsten Odland met with him to talk about his ideas, his field, and himself: The Blue and White: I know your first degree was in English; what made you switch to philosophy? AB: You know it’s funny, because somewhere on my [department] website…they asked me to write up something, and I say over there that I gave up English because it was too hard. And it’s funny because all my philosophy friends think I’m being sarcastic, and all my literary friends think I’m being modest [laughs]. And I’m not going to tell you which I was being. But I did give it up, because [pause] ... you know, I think I found—at the time I was doing literary studies and criticism, it was very long ago, and it was not a very theoretical discipline. It was just readings of texts, and I didn’t find myself wanting to say the kinds of things literary critics said. You know, I loved those books, and I didn’t read them with a view to produce some learned commentary on them. Literature just meant a different sort of thing for me [...] And of course, [after I switched], the field was completely invaded by theory. And my understanding of the reason why literary departments became so central for humanities in universities of this country is in part because English studies became a location for doing things [that] the social sciences had abdi-

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cated. In this country I think the social sciences by and large, for some decades now, have abdicated the value-oriented aspects of their discipline. So English had to step in to pick up the slack. For instance, just by way of example, if you ask yourself, “Why is it that Edward Said’s book Orientalism became so canonical and iconical in the humanities?” It’s because the social sciences never discussed colonialism. The idea that you can study political economy, the economy of nations, and not study the fact that half the world colonized the other half, and therefore changed the whole canvas of political-economy—that’s something you couldn’t study in economics departments. So that explains why Edward Said’s book, which really stressed the fallout of imperialism, became a location that everybody turned to. So literary studies really became a place where you did everything: social science, philosophy—and some of it is badly done. There’s a lot of bad philosophy that occurs in literary departments. But nevertheless, there was a kind of yearning that people had, which they weren’t finding in their own disciplines, so they had to turn to literature. B&W: The history you just gave is interesting, because I’d say the tradition, it seems to me, that you’re coming from [analytic philosophy] was also— there was a similar de-emphasis of value justifica-

Illustration by Leila Mgaloblishvili

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N tions. What, for you, are the most interesting philosophical questions? AB: Well I started off at Oxford. When I was there, because I was defecting from English, I became very interested in language. I attended lectures by P.F. Strawson and there was this very charismatic, young philosopher who died tragically early named Gareth Evans…I wasn’t on top of the material then at all, because I was very young and I just didn’t know any philosophy, but I was very struck by it, and stimulated by it, and that’s what I wanted to do. I then went back to India for a couple of years and just [pause] taught. Sort of a fit of idealism, I guess: I wanted to go back to my country and do things. And that didn’t turn out very well, so I came to the United States to study with Donald Davidson. And I really just wanted to know very basic questions like, why do sounds carry meaning? Or why do little marks on paper carry meaning? Well they’re not just physical things. So what does meaning add to physical things, such that [etc.] And I think in the end someone like Plato was right. It’s wrong to think that physical things, like sounds and so on, are basic and meanings are an accretion on them. I think, in fact, [meanings] are basic. I don’t have any notion that they are abstract notions or anything, like Plato, but I think Plato’s deeper insight was not that meanings are abstract entities but that they’re basic, and they don’t break down into sounds plus something else, marks on paper plus something else, which is meaning. Meaning is basic. As basic as physical sounds or marks on paper or screens. So that’s what interested me: what is meaning. And you know, Davidson had written about this; he’d constructed a very elaborate system of thinking about it, which turned on Tarski’s account of truth and notions of logical form. Which were, in some way mimicking or echoing things said by Chomsky, notions of deep structure in Chomsky’s transformational grammar. So all that interested me a lot, and I studied with Davidson—those were very happily instructive years for me. I spoke a lot with Davidson; we meet every Thursday over a pizza, and talked about philosophy for the entire period that I was a student, for five

years…So those were the years when I became sort of knowledgeable, and got into the culture of research… So Davidson was an early influence. You know, I’ve come to disagree with him quite extensively, but he was a tremendous influence and he was very, very kind and attentive to me. B&W: What are some points of disagreement that you have with— AB: With Davidson? B&W: Yeah. AB: Well, you know, I don’t think there can be a theory of meaning. My first book, Belief and Meaning, was basically arguing that meaning is a very contextual thing. Now I think that view has become quite fashionable. But when I’d argued it in the late eighties—or mideighties—I don’t think it had really been suggested then. I called it the “locality” of meaning. I think it’s now called the “contextuality” of meaning, but it’s the same idea. And that was certainly against Donald’s views. I thought that meaning was too contextually, locally determined to have the kind of general theoretical possibilities that he wanted from it. And in that sense, I suppose I’m sympathetic to Chomsky, who really only thinks you can have a theory of syntax, not meaning. And my reason for thinking so was that [meaning] was too local a phenomenon. That’s what I argued for in my book. So that was a deep disagreement with Davidson. There are things in Davidson that I think are right, and I still believe in. In a way my view is that Davidson doesn’t take some of his own instincts far enough. What is remarkable and wonderful about Davidson is that he showed you cannot have enough philosophy of mind in the philosophy of language. You know, if you read somebody like David Kaplan there’s almost no philosophy of mind…But there was a whole range of philosophers—I’m giving you just one example, in Kaplan—who didn’t see that you couldn’t do philosophy of language very seriously without philosophy of mind.

“I think that, the idea there’s no more to nature than what the natural sciences study— nobody knows when that was proved.”

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N B&W: And what is so essential about that connection? AB: You cannot understand meaning without understanding belief. So for instance, Kripke has this idea, the principle of disquotation, which is: if somebody assents to or utters a certain sentence, and if it’s sincere—it’s not a lie or metaphor or something—then if you remove the quotes from sentence [you get the person’s belief]. So if x utters or assents to a sentence “[Snow is white],” then you can removes quotes and say […] x believes that [snow is white]. So that’s just proof that there’s a great and deep connection. So if you take Tyler Burge’s essay, it’s individualism in the mental, but the social aspects of the mental turn on language. So the mental and the linguistic just aren’t separable for a whole range of philosophers, but Davidson was the pioneer, I think. I mean, in a sense Frege’s idea of thought being connected with the notion of truth conditions and so on was already implicitly talking about it. But Davidson was very clear about the connection, and [his] essays on action and events are really not separable from his essays on truth and interpretation. It’s part of a single systematic view of mind and language. What interested me very much too, was that, beginning with Davidson and followed up more deeply by Evans and McDowell, was a further raising of the stakes involved. Not just the stakes of adding mind of language, but of adding epistemological issues…So you couldn’t separate out issues of skepticism from issues of Cartesian mentality, Cartesian notions of mentality—and that raised the stakes even higher. So meaning couldn’t be studied not just without mind, but also not without issues of skepticism and the external world. My book was really about that:

you bring in, not just mind, but issues of the external world…[I tried] to carve out a distinctive line, which is anti-theoretical, because [meaning] is all very local, I claimed. So those are the main issues that I found interesting. And now, since then, I’ve taken my intellectual [interests in a different direction]...What I’m now writing about, is the nature of practical reason and its relationship with agency…[And] then you know, Torsten, I have this whole separate set of interests which is slowly connecting with the stuff of philosophy. Part of my interest in practical reason—it is a self-standing interest—but I also want to see the role of reason in politics. B&W: Do you see a systematic connection between that interest and your work in the philosophy of language and mind? AK: Not so much with the philosophy language and mind, but the stuff with practical reason that I’m now writing about, which really grew out of the sort of things I say in the appendix [of my book on selfknowledge]. I’d already started writing about internal reasons—which is a term in Bernard Williams—as absolutely central to understanding politics. B&W: In what sense? AK: In the sense that, if there’s political and moral conflict on ideas and principles and so on (to live by), then I don’t believe you can change people’s minds by just some external thing, but by actually looking at contradictions in their thinking and deploying those tensions within them to make them change their mind from within. A sort of Hegelian view. And that’s really what Williams called internal reasons. So I’m

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N using that notion of internal reasons as absolutely the right notion of rationality in politics, in order to talk about the possibilities of political transformations, getting people to change their minds, and so on. My stuff about the concept of identity turns on that, and secularism turns on that. Then I’ve got this book coming out now, [that explores] a further interest in some of this reading of Aristotle by McDowell in which value properties are part of the world. I want to derive a politics out of that. It’s what I call “secular enchantment.” The world is enchanted with properties that natural science can’t study, and that’s value properties. So values are things out there in the world, and we respond to them with our agency and our perceptions. So it’s a phenomenology of value. I think that’s very important for politics. B&W: Why do you think so many philosophers in the last two hundred years or so have resisted that kind of account of value? AK: I think it’s a superstition of modernity. I really do. I think that, the idea there’s no more to nature than what the natural sciences study—nobody knows when that was proved. B&W: [laughs] Right. AK: It’s not a scientific proposition. No science contains that proposition, that there’s no more to nature than what the sciences study. So you can’t be unscientific if you deny it…You can only be unscientific if you deny a scientific proposition. So this is just a dogma. And I think the dogma has political grounds that go back to the 17th century, because if you evacuated nature of value properties, you could then take from it at will. And a lot of extractive capitalism grew out of that outlet. It was explicit! Absolutely explicit. If you look at the Royal Society and all of its lectures—this was part of the goal of the Boyle Lectures, for instance. And the alternative view was called “enthusiasm.” Where you thought God was

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everywhere and value was everywhere, and anybody could see it. Quite a radical politics existed when people thought that God was in nature and nature was sacralized and everyone had access to God. And I of course don’t—I’m an atheist, [laughs] so I don’t believe that. But I think our modern secular version of it is that values are in nature. That’s why I insisted on calling it enchantment even though it’s not religious. It’s “secular enchantment.” So I think a radical politics can grow out of that, and that’s part of my interest in Gandhi, is to derive this radical politics. Which actually goes back to radicals in the 17th century like Winstanley and people like that. So I see a long line from Winstanley to Marx to Gandhi in taking this view, which is in McDowell’s reading of Aristotle, and deriving a politics from it. Now— McDowell has no politics as far as I can tell. Analytic philosophers just don’t see connections of this kind. It’s not in their DNA. But I think that’s impoverishing the subject. B&W: Do you see most of your work as falling into the analytic tradition? AK: I do, I do. It’s just the way I write, and if you read the book that’s coming out, it’s very analytically written. Sometimes I get angry, and I notice that when I get angry about reactionary politics or some creepy conservative views, or even just undemocratic views often held by liberals. When I get angry I tend to write in a non-analytic mode, so I have this slightly schizophrenic style in my essays on politics and philosophy and moral psychology. I sort of tend to get analytical and so on, and get angry and then it becomes less analytical, there’s more emotion involved. I just do straddle—my entire upbringing is analytical in philosophy and I can’t leave it behind. So if you read this book that’s coming out, at least half of it is analysis. And the other half is really taking a stand on politics and giving a historical—a genealogical—account of present concerns about the environment, about alienation and things like that.w

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Sketchbook by Angel Jiang

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DIGITALIA COLUMBIANA These excerpts were culled from documents left on Columbia’s lab computers. We encourage our readers to submit their own digitalia finds to us, via email, at bwgossip@columbia.edu. This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. e Colonists who petitioned for autonomy from the imperial homeland could store the knowledge of other classes’ oppression in their repertoire of critique, wielding it as a weapon to indict undesirable foreign regimes of moral failure and illegitimate uses of violence while strengthening their own authority and appearance of ethicality. e At first, I was convinced, but after further thought, I realized the different parts of our brain depend on each other. Each part is specialized to contribute to a whole function. Are the works of left-handed artists, such as Pablo Picasso, a result of neuronal errors or creativity due to the interconnected nature of the brain?

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’Twas the night before finals, when all thro’ the library, Not a student was stirring, not even the fidgety athletes; The notes were lined up on the table with care, In hopes that comprehension soon would be there; The triple shot espressos were nestled snug in their hands, While caffeinated visions of A’s danc’d in their heads, When out on College Walk there arose such a clatter, I sprang from the desk to see what was the matter. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, Handing out papers to stunned students who turned with a jerk We all opened those books, and exclaimed with pure glee For on each was written words that set out hearts free “No finals this year” they said in black ink “Instead you all get A+’s! Go on home in a wink.” Then smiling at all the euphoria with which he was faced And giving a nod, past Blue Java Bar he raced. He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle: But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sightHappy Winter Break to all, and to all a good night! e When Smith holds a female yabby, he knows its gender (p). Imagine that Smith has a reliable yabby-sexreader iPhone app. e Logline: When a struggling college girl unexpectedly loses her financial aid package, she and her roommate begin an online scam that blows spins out of control after one of their classmates goes missing.w

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CAMPUS GOSSIP BY NATURE In Joe recently, a reporter was interrupted by this piece of reflection: “By nature, I just like, think all poetry is good. Like, the depreciation of words. Like even a bad poem still has amazing words.” e PROBABLY TOO SOON This year’s Varsity Show is being re-written as a dramatization of/reflection on the Theta controversy. The role of Katie Barclay will be reprised by Barclay, CC ’15, herself. Several sources expect the performance to be ugly and redemptive. e GOTTA GET PAID One member of Bo$$ $tatu$, the hip-hop collective that made a bunch of people angry in 2012, currently lists the group in the experience section of his resume. e The Columbia Daily Spectator has requested “cultural sensitivity training” from ROOTed, the IRC’s discussion facilitation team. e In his seminar on Freud, Jonathan House shouted at the class in a fit of frustration: “When you were four years old, your uncle sucked your dick. And you liked it!” e Rumor has it that a soon-to-be-renowned campus news site has been created to provide the city with the world’s laziest student journalism: The Columbia Sloth. Eat brick, Bwog.

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BRING OUT THE HEMLOCK There’s a tomcat that lives in a storage closet of Woodbridge. Complaints have been submitted, and facilities has ejected him before, but every time he finds a way back in. Last week he started making an annoying racket, so a student called it in. Hartley sent an exterminator with a cage to take him away. We’ll see if that works. e ANGER BE NOW YOUR SONG Overheard from enthusiastic Theta pledge: “I mean, people throw toga parties, and that’s not offensive?” e The bar from Grisham Blake’s notorious Carman paint-party has been repossessed by Beta. It was installed in their basement on March 1. On that day, they became alcoholics. e CLASH OF AWKWARD In the Men’s bathroom on Butler 3 there, was a ten second stand-off between the man trying to force open what he thought was a sticky stall-door and the man inside, sitting on the toilet, who held the door closed with his forehead. e SEA OF RANDOS SEAS days on campus is reportedly the same weekend as Bacchanal. Mistakes were made, people are scrambling, and one administrator with more reco will probably be fired. e Buzzfeed … it’s sucking you dry.w

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