May 2015

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

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXI No. III

The Dawn of an Office The early days of the Office of University Life

A Family Affair Morningside Heights’ two restaurant dynasties Also Inside:

A conversation with William Deresiewicz

May 2015

DANIEL STONE, CC ’16, Editor in Chief HALLIE NELL SWANSON, CC ’16, Managing Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Publisher NAOMI SHARP, CC ’15, Features Editor ALEXANDER PINES, CC ’16, Culture Editor VIRGINIA FU, CC ’17, Literary Editor CHANNING PREND, CC ’17, Senior Editor SEAN AUGUSTINE-OBI, CC ’16, Senior Editor SOMER OMAR, CC ’16, Transatlantic Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Layout Editor ZANE BHANSALI, CC ’17, Senior Illustrator WILLIAM HOLT, CC ’15, Editorial Consultant NIA BROWN, CC ’17, Senior Staff Writer TORSTEN ODLAND, CC ’15, Editor Emeritus Staff Writers JORDANA NARIN, CC ’17 JOSEPH RABINOVITSJ, CC ’18 MABEL TAYLOR, BC ’18 Contributors YASEMIN AKÇAGÜNER, BC ’17 TAYLOR GRASDALEN, BC ’17 KUNAL JASTY, SEAS ’16 LUCA MARZORATI, CC ’15 MEG MCCABE, BC ’18 JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17 BEN SCHNEIDER, CC ’17 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 IAN TRUEGER, CC ’16 CHRISTIAN ZHANG, CC ’16

Artists RACHEL AGINS, BC ’17 DARYA FRAIMAN, GS ’16 ANGEL JIANG, CC ’15 WALLACE KALKIN, BC ’18 LEILA MGALOBLISHVILI, CC ’16 ALEXANDER PINES, CC ’16

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXI

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. III

Columns

4 Bluebook 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 12 Verily Veritas 17 Curio Columbiana 24 M easure for Measure 30 Digitalia Columbiana 31 Campus G ossip

Luca Marzorati & Torsten Odland

Features 10 At Two Swords’ Length: Is This It? Our monthly prose and cons

Virginia Fu

13 The Dawn of an Office The early days of the Office of University Life

Ian Trueger

16 Blue J: Baths The J protests lavatorial incivility

Channing Prend & Mabel Taylor Yasemin Akçagüner

Taylor Grasdalen

Christian Zhang

Kunal Jasty

theblueandwhite.org

18 The Swing Set An ethnography of local playgrounds 20 A Family A ffair Morningside Heights’ two restaurant dynasties 22 E ating the Spoils Tagging along with New York’s freegans 26 On a Mission A Blue and White reporter goes to Korean Church in Lerner 27 A ddressing his Flock A conversation with William Deresiewicz

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cover :

“Test Stroke” by Joanna Zou

BLUE BOOK

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

At the end of every spring semester, Columbia has its glorious last hurrah. The weather suddenly turns nice. Half the population emerges from hibernation to tan on the lawns. Latenight classes stop finishing when it’s still dark outside. Every performing group puts on a show. Free food abounds as clubs attempt to spend unused funds. Certainly term papers, exams, and job interviews hang over everyone in some combination. But they simply conspire to make the other aspects of being here seem even more evanescent. The compromise between self-indulgence and work becomes all the more difficult—and all the more satisfying. We too are giving you our last hurrah of the semester. And we certainly hope it leaves you longing for our next issue as much as Columbia in May makes us yearn for Alma Mater during the summer. To that order, we bring you everything that makes us the best undergraduate magazine at Columbia. We explain what is happening under your nose and never cared to know—until now. For instance, Christian Zhang investigates the Korean church that draws an armada of strollers to Lerner 5 every Sunday. Meg McCabe unravels the mysterious silver buttons that dot every building on campus. Meanwhile, we give a just account of what’s up in Morningside Heights. Virginia Fu relates the present state of Columbia’s new Office of University Life. Mabel Taylor and Channing Prend tour the best and worst playgrounds in the neighborhood. And of course, we bring you the assortment of columns that you know and love. We profile Haylin Belay and Luke Foster. In The Conversation, Kunal Jasty sits down with a crusader against Columbia’s ilk. Then our feathered friend Blue J, who vanished near the Bermuda triangle nearly a decade ago, resurfaces thoroughly English. Finally, Luca Marzorati and Torsten Odland duel over whether or not this is it. I certainly hope it’s not. — Daniel Stone

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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS Flower-filled Instagrams of campus John Jay gates Censorship Course evaluation reminders Game of Thrones Dining hall “isolated incidents” DEPARTURES Young’s Fish Market $35 eighths Open lawns The class of 2015 The L

Come Again?!

“All undergraduate and graduate Columbia students are required to partake in the Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative, or otherwise face the risk of diploma or registration holds. But what good are our efforts if we gladly attend a concert headlined by a charged sex offender, moshing and singing in unison to “I got girlies half naked that shit look like the grotto / How yo waist anorexic? And then yo ass is colossal?” – Jason Eisner, Shira Becker, and Shelly Hafif in the Columbia Spectator

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

Dream of Living With some alterations, Paul Nungesser’s lawsuit against Columbia makes for deeply moving poetry. The full document is available on Bwog.

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

Correction: The article titled “Lerner’s Glass Ceiling” in the April issue of The Blue and White cited a statistic that only one member of CCSC was on financial aid. This was in fact a transmutation of the results of a retreat exercise in which council members were asked to self-identify their socioeconomic status. Only one student chose to describe themselves as being on financial aid, while others on financial aid instead used descriptors like “ lower middle class” and “upper-lower class.” Amendment: In the same issue, our Campus Character of Abby Abrams, BC ’15, referred to her by her first name, and other campus character, Julian NoiseCat, CC ’15, by his last name. This unintended oversight had the regrettable consequence of putting them on different footing. We shall not make the same mistake again.

May 2015

Postcard by Zane Bhansali

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BLUE NOTES

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nce a week, Kirby, Yoshi, Jigglypuff, and their Nintendo friends come to life on a motley assortment of old cathode ray TVs in Lerner’s Satow Room. In front of each TV, members of Columbia’s Super Smash Bros Club manhandle their joysticks with incredible dexterity as their formidable onscreen avatars fight to the death. The clicking of thirty controllers combined with the soundtracks of ten simultaneous games gives the room a frantic atmosphere. Nowhere in Morningside Heights more closely resembles a 1980s video arcade (except perhaps Koronet at 3 a.m. on a Thursday). The club feels old school: the TVs are thicker than they are wide and the game’s graphics are relatively primitive. Melee, the iteration of Super Smash Bros the club plays, came out in 2001 for Gamecube. Subsequent versions have higher definition graphics and more features, but Melee remains the best for competition. According to Alex Tong, CC ’15, the club’s president and founder, the game has actually grown in popularity in recent years. When he started going to tournaments in Chinatown, “30 was a good

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turnout, but now 70 is one of the lighter days.” The Columbia contingent is a major presence at local tournaments. Alex estimates that some members of his club are among the top 20 players in New York City. Last semester, the club won the Northeast Region of the intercollegiate Melee Games, making it one of the most successful teams at Columbia. Yet despite its talent and dedication, there seems to be more to the club than the gameplay. There’s something unapologetically childlike and carefree about the Gamecube’s physical appearance and the whimsical characters on screen. While the battles are intense and the players are passionate, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously. Perhaps that’s why the club has become so highly sought after as a partner for events like Days on Campus. At a school known for its stress Olympics, the Super Smash Bros Club provides a welcome respite. Or, as member Nick Scarfo, SEAS ’17, put it, “no one’s here for their resume.” — Ben Schneider

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ounted in the hallways of the Barnard Quad, at Hamilton’s entrance, and near doorways and in hallways of most campus buildings are small metal buttons, about a centimeter in diameter and surrounded by a black piece of plastic about two inches long. The buttons look strikingly like doorbells, often mounted at hip level or on actual doors, but that is actually not what they are at all. They are actually called memory buttons. Memory buttons can only be read by a device called “The PIPE,” a small blue metal wand carried by Columbia Public Safety officers and billed by its manufacturer as “the world’s most rugged data collector.”

Illustration by Rachel Agins

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES The PIPE and the memory buttons are parts of a system that Columbia employs to “ensure that off icers are continuously patrolling their assigned areas, and that specific locations within these areas receive special attention,” according to Daniel Held, a spokesman for Facilities. At intervals determined by Public Safety, security guards punch the memory buttons with the PIPE, creating a record of each patrol. Though the system relies on technology from the last couple decades, an analog version of the system has existed at Columbia for a long time. Before the electronic signal transmitters, metal boxes were mounted on walls throughout campus, each housing a unique key. Guards would use the keys to make impressions on paper discs in a fivepound handheld clock called a watchclock. Some of the older guard checkpoints survive in places like the Crypt of St. Paul’s Chapel and Kent Hall. Perhaps they have been left undisturbed to remind us of Columbia’s history and its progress. Or maybe it’s because they’re bolted to the wall and no one can get them off. — Meg McCabe

with a chance at winning Dinosaur BBQ coupons, Columbia apparel, and a tablet computer. So it wasn’t surprising when Athletics offered $325 in gift cards from their sponsors to Fairway Market, Morton Williams, and The Heights as prizes for the #WheresRoaree scavenger hunt. On April 24, every half hour from 12 to 4:30 p.m., scavenger hunt participants sprinted to the locations of 10 Roar-ee bobbleheads on campus based on hints from the eponymous mascot’s Facebook account. “Roar-ee could never understand the elevator system in this building, so he always got a great workout walking up the stairs,” said one clue. Cue the sound of footsteps and labored breathing as sports fans and Heights margarita-lovers alike frantically dashed toward Hamilton to find the six-inchtall plastic lion. (If only the football team were as energetic on a fourth down…) The man behind #WheresRoaree is none other than Assistant Athletics Director for Marketing and Promotion, Daniel Spiegel. The event was a lighthearted attempt to raise school spirit and increase attendance at Fun Day, a softball, lacrosse, and baseball triple-header at Baker Athletics Complex the following day. While the success of the second goal was questionable—the #WheresRoaree Facebook event had 270 RSVPs, but the Fun Day event had only 33—the scavenger hunt was a chance for trivia wonks to test their knowledge of Columbiana. — Sean Augustine-Obi

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nyone who’s gotten a free t-shirt from a football game can attest to the fact that Columbia Athletics is willing to give out freebies to publicize their events. And no, that’s not just because the times and dates of all the games are printed on the back of said t-shirts. Last year, to promote a televised football game against Lehigh, Columbia offered the two student groups who could pack the stands with the most spirited students $1000 for their budgets. At basketball games, a group of dedicated students are paid in free pizza to cheer courtside in the “Roar Zone.” And until recent years, students who attended specific games were entered into an annual lottery

May 2015

Illustrations by Darya Fraiman and Zane Bhansali

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Campus Characters You might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue and White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org.

Haylin Belay

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utouts of Eva Longoria’s face plaster the walls of Haylin Belay’s East Campus living room. Haylin, a Columbia College senior, is the cofounder of “Eva Longoria for President,” a Facebook page with nearly 650 likes. Next to the heads are decals spelling out “A HOE NEVER GETS COLD,” from the oft-viewed Vine. Both have been themes for parties held in her suite. “I’m super into witchcraft,” she says. “My feminism involves witchcraft—I have this really strong interest in the paranormal, pseudoscience, magical shit, and I’m reading a lot of books to that effect,” she said, motioning toward her coffee table. An anthropology major hailing from Austin, Texas, Haylin had already committed to UT-Austin before receiving her Columbia acceptance letter. She quickly had a change of heart. “Well, obviously, right? No question.” Haylin originally intended to major in film. Her interest in the subject stemmed from a desire to use “popular culture and artifacts to trace the cultural, historical, and traditional lineage of a people.” However, she soon discovered that it was “not what the film department here is really about.” In contrast, she found that anthropolog y allowed her to explore a broad swath of her interests.

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“I bounced around, took classes in every department, and joined clubs for brief periods of time,” she says of her early days at Columbia. “If you’re a naturally inquisitive person, you can easily get lost in a discipline or an interest, and then resurface, and then find something else.” Her latest project has been a sex column on Spectrum, where she’s written about topics ranging from society’s perception of virginity to anal intercourse preparation (“lube, lube, and more lube!”). But unlike most sex columnists, Haylin often ventures into broader topics of health education and harm reduction. For instance, one recent post about Bacchanal mainly discussed the dangers of alcohol poisoning, something she says she’s witnessed firsthand working for the Columbia Bartending Agency. The column is in many ways a logical extension of the work she’s been involved in since high school, work that’s included involvement in Peer Health Exchange, Responsible Community at Columbia, and Alice! Health Promotion. Her philosophy is simple: “If you really want to effect change and make people have healthier lives, you don’t tell people what to do or what not to do. You give them information and help them make healthy choices.” To her, “restriction from access to health education is a form of oppression.” Haylin’s interest in health education is personal. After a two-year abusive relationship ended, she saw that people could use social media to spread positive emotions and began to curate her Facebook, turning her page into a treasure trove of links to articles discussing race, politics, and feminism. She’s also shared anti-violence resources to inspire others to seek help. After graduation, Haylin hopes to continue writing and educating people. She’s been applying to editorial positions at publications with a health beat; her dream job is “being paid to talk about sex.” So

The Blue and White

she’s not worried about her sex column popping up in her search results—in fact, she says it’s a representation of her values. “As someone who’s experienced a lot of slutshaming and negative attention about sex, I think at a certain point I hit a nadir and said, ‘Okay, I’m choosing not to let this affect me anymore.’ As long as everyone’s being healthy and making smart choices and everything’s consensual, then sex should not be something that anyone’s ashamed of.” — Sean Augustine-Obi

Luke Foster

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uke Foster, CC ’15, may have been twenty minutes late for our breakfast interview at Ferris, but I took the Lord’s name in vain five seconds after he arrived. I didn’t say anything at the time, though I did tweet about it later. Luke—whose family has worked as Christian missionaries in Africa since 1917—found my tweet and threw me a bone. “Hahaha quite all right. :),” he responded. Then he followed me on Twitter. Luke grew up in Gurúè, Mozambique, where, 30 years ago, despite the threat of a Communist regime, his parents traveled to embark on an extensive project translating the Bible into a local dialect. After a childhood shaped by his family’s faith and dedication to charity, Luke left his hometown, which he describes as “a large village in a mountain valley surrounded by tea fields,” and headed across the world to attend Columbia. Nowadays, Luke is well-known as a public face of the Christian community on campus. He’s a columnist for Spectator (where, since his first semester at Columbia, he has written over 40 articles), founder of the John Jay Society, an active member of the Veritas Forum, a member of Columbia Faith and Action, and involved with the Love and Fidelity Network, which promotes “marriage, family, and sexual integrity” on college campuses. He’s also a self-identified Anglophile, conservative, romantic, and One Direction fan. Despite all this, Luke made a point to direct the conversation away from what makes him extraordinary. Not because he is ashamed of where he comes from or what he believes, but because he ultimately looks at himself as part of a much bigger whole—his family history and home country are integral to how he talks about himself. This is most obvious when he responds to simple questions, ones that most people would see as having clear-cut answers. When I asked how he ended up at Columbia, he began by saying, “There

May 2015

are many pieces to that story, many of which I don’t know.” For Luke, nothing is “a no matter what.” Nearly every decision involves a consideration of his family, the family he hopes to start a few years down the line, his home country, and most importantly, his faith. As such, Luke is constantly in the process of distinguishing himself from the secular, left-wing Columbia norm. He knows that unfortunately for him, it is just these particular commitments that separate him from the pack. But Luke looks at his engagement in campus dialogue as a way for him to advocate on behalf of a minority perspective, calling the work “swimming upstream.” His faith makes it bearable. While he tells me that he’s occasionally upset about the status quo on campus, Luke chooses to use this frustration as fuel for his work. He believes conservative voices are essential to healthy discussions and he’s eager to bring them to the forefront at Columbia. Luke loves to talk, saying conversation with anyone is always welcome to him, even when their views are less so. While I probably cringed when Luke identified as pro-life, he didn’t treat me with hostility. This is a big part of his leadership role in the Veritas Forum, a conversation-based organization which puts on events with names like “A dialogue between a Christian and an atheist.” Luke said that “bringing people together across different worldviews, without relinquishing their unique truth claims” to have “difficult and good conversations” helped him formulate his identity, which he describes as “insider/outsider.” His ability to navigate this dynamic was clear during our interview. Either because he butts heads ideologically with people so frequently at Columbia, or because his faith makes him a very generous person, Luke knows how to engage with touchy topics and leave unscathed. Reflecting on our conversation later that day, I found that Luke’s discussion of personal integrity and positivity made me feel validated in an unfamiliar way. Luke made me feel like a good person. Even when I uttered blasphemous expletives. — Mabel Taylor

Illustrations by Leila Mgaloblishvili

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Is this T

his is it. Once I sit back down in my folding But the really crazy thing is that these dogs chair, diploma in hand, I won’t have anything to only get sold if they don’t have a saggy face. Like, I get celebrate. that. No one wants a dog that looks like a prune when My dad always said, “Get a college diploma, it’s they are a puppy. That’s not the crazy part. The crazy like a ticket.” When he says ticket, he’s thinking of part is that these dogs get plastic surgery so they can the first-class one he’s got in his pocket, marked for a sell better. So these people just give dogs plastic surflight that leaves for Grand gery to fix their wrinkles, Cayman in two hours. But like are you serious? How my ticket? It’s like a crumevil are you? pled receipt for overnight That reminds me, bus service. Even if the bus my friend was telling me a comes, you don’t want to few weeks ago about this go where it’s going. kid he knew that killed a I mean, think of all cat. Just did it. Went out the problems in the world and did it. Woke up one that college has kept me morning, I don’t know, safe from: disagreement, thought about it, got up poverty, intolerance, and killed a cat… Like a Ebola—I’ve been saved. pet, a cat. Well, who knows And Dr. Oz says there’s if it was a pet, might have this new nanovirus or been one of those feral something … I changed things… But still, can you the channel when it went imagine? Who does that? to commercial but supThe really messedposedly it’s from Peru or up thing is that people Croatia or something like don’t really try to figure that? Wow. out why these things hapBut it’s not just diseases or pen. They don’t get that it’s deeper bacteria—the people in this world problems—power, money, you name ffirmative are crazy. And I’m supposed to just it. I get it though. My dad always By Luca Marzorati be tossed out there after graduasaid, work hard, that’s how I went tion? from a shoeshine boy to owning the I was reading the other day world’s largest fixed income arbiabout these dogs from China or Vancouver or some- trage hedge fund, blah blah, but he doesn’t get it. thing—big dogs, giant, they look like wolves but with Some people work hard and there are just like deeper really soft-looking fur. Seen one? Anyway, suppos- issues, you can’t even start to untangle them. edly they were super popular in Tibet, some kind of And that’s what the world is like, I’m sure. status symbol (we talked about it in sociology class All these people trying to overcome these problems once). The dogs used to go for thousands of dollars, they’ll never understand, or even come close to fixbut now no one wants them. So there are a bunch ing. And that’s what life for me will be. Starting after of these giant dogs, they look like stuffed animals, my reception luncheon. I swear, just with no purpose to their lives! No one I mean, what do people actually do all day? Is wants them! How sad is that? there a website to register for a job?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

it? O

h no, this is far from over: graduation is a begin- are afraid of education, unable to accept the burden ning. “Commencement,” they call it. On May it places on one to fight and strive to know. Education 20th, we, the Class of 2015, will take our first steps is the process of personal transformation and selfon the twisted, dimly perceived road before us. I like immolation—all college as an institution does is give to think of this road as “College: Part Two.” some structure to that process. This is what I scream Oh, sure. As a set of spacio-temporal coordi- at these at people. These people who live in horror of nates, my college years are gone. You won’t see me their own freedom, who look out the window at their eating alone in Ferris destiny and panic about anymore or wandering whether to wear a coat through Butler with the or not. texts of Wordsworth. “But you’ll have But the spirit of an to work. You have to undergraduate educasupport yourself.” tion is something that Work—so be it. But you takes time to bloom. Do don’t need self-suffiyou think a soul can be ciency if you have the molded into an autonoright kind of friction mous moral and political with the world. Friction being in just four years? I have. So I will get Ever heard of “grad by and live, and, ultischool”? mately, address some of So what if I’m not the deepest questions. enrolling in courses! Like, “Why am I me?” Sometimes you learn “What about more by skipping class domesticity?” you and listening to your might ask. “Don’t you body. How different will want to have kids?” life honestly be? Everyone I know is: I already have one, in fact. a) staying in the city, and b) unemAnd once I’m out and about as a egative ployed. I’ve heard word floating professional I can at least be a little By Torsten Odland around about a coalition of about more open about it. 20 or so trying to rent out this Yes, wherever I go, whatever warehouse loft in Long Island City. Which would be I do, it will always be college, and young Roar-ee chill because every one of us majored in American will be proud that his father has chosen the life of Studies and Film. reflection. A life that will never end, ever. If there’s I mean, we’ll see—plans are still up in the air. one thing college has taught me—and by college, I But it’s not like I won’t be living with everyone I know, don’t mean Lit Hum or Adjective Bodies: Semiotics talking about art, and drinking like a maniac. & Gender in Post-Colonial Poetry, but a life of colPlus, when I graduate, I’ll finally have time to lege—is that you can have it all, you can be lothario read again. and a behavioral scientist and a poet and a cis white Oh, there are people out there that tell will you male, and the father of a newborn and an anarchothey’re afraid—that we’re entering a different world, syndicalist and a frat star, you can waste every second that college is over. These people are weaklings. They with the people you love.w

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May 2015

Illustrations by Wallace Kalkin

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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 embraces mediocrity

arefully grinding the last of his cigarette stub into the pavement outside of the 116th St. 1 stop with his tanned leather riding boot, V.V. took a deep breath and prepared to descend the foul-smelling staircase and enter the station, doubtless a grimy den of philanderers and the unwashed masses of New York’s common folk. He might have to share oxygen—or even brush knees!— with an upper middle class professional in frayed polyester, rats, or worse, someone from New Jersey. And yet last night, after washing the vile remains of a Bud Light Raz-Ber-Rita rudely thrown in his face off of his favorite ascot, V.V. had pondered the egregious insult hurled along with the malt beverage: “Get a fucking clue, you pretentious prick.” A clue? To what? V.V. was, as he often is when confronted with the mysteries of eros, entirely perplexed. The drink had been thrown after he casually suggested to a young woman that they egress from the EC townhouse (the host was a bit of a dullard, as were most East Campus-dwellers of his acquaintance) in order to bypass the requisite intellectual foreplay of exchanging favorite Catullus quotes and skip right to mutually unsatisfying coitus. A reasonable proposition, or so V.V. thought. But confronted so viscerally with the sticky, alarmingly purple response to his innocent inquiry, V.V. decided to reevaluate. He saw nothing wrong with his elitism—his favorite bench on campus even bore the slogan “AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE”—nor did he particularly mind being called a prick, but the combination was, he realized, a touch unsettling. Henceforth he resolved to “get a fucking clue.” But how? Pacing about his apartment, V.V. decided to phone an old Lit Hum chum who’d ruminated passionately for the Columbia Spectator about the reali-

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ties of life on financial aid to ask where to procure such an item (his butler, alas, had the week off to “spend time with his family”). “I dunno,” the former classmate replied. “You could try Target.” Target! Of course! The quintessential magasin pour tout le monde! Not as terrifyingly riddled with horror as a Wal-Mart or K-Mart (anywhere called “Mart,” really) but still perfectly, blissfully average. V.V. set off at once to venture uptown. Inspired by his magnificent quest, he even declined to summon the driver, preferring to make his own way via the electrified rail. Taking a deep breath to avoid inhaling the rancid stench of urine, vomit, and God knows what else, V.V. marched resolutely into the station and, after some negotiation with the draconian attendant, entered the uptown local train toward the Bronx. Nestled fearfully in his seat, V.V. watched the roaring darkness outside the smudged glass of the window, awaiting the dreadful sight of hoards of rat kings swarming along the walls until, with a sudden burst, the dismal box flooded with a most glorious light. The train, Lazarus-like, had risen above ground—oh, what joy! Buoyed by this rapturous light all the way to 225th, V.V. was greeted with the mellifluous rancor of late-stage capitalism as he stepped through the threshold to Target. As Targets are wont to do, the spatial arrangement of the store immediately entered a state of flux as V.V. walked in, because to visit one Target is to visit every Target. Visions of suburban mediocrity from Kokomo, Indiana to College Station, Texas flashed before V.V.’s eyes as his body was stretched across a vast American landscape of reasonably priced household goods. The clue, V.V. thought before falling unconscious. I’ve finally got it.w

The Blue and White

BABY STEPS

The Dawn of an Office The early days of the Office of University Life By Virginia Fu

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n April 13, Suzanne Goldberg, three months into her new role at the head of the Office of University Life, gave the keynote address at the Office’s inaugural event—a screening of the film Selma, followed by a faculty panel discussion. Formed in late January, the Office is still in its infancy, consisting of what Goldberg called “a small but dedicated office” of three staffers. It operates out of 208 Philosophy and Goldberg’s previous office in the Law School building. Goldberg is still trying to find a way to communicate with students en masse and solicit input. When we interviewed her in April, she spoke carefully, frequently prefacing her statements with phrases like, “This is just what I’ve heard,” and “You can tell me if I’m wrong.” At the Selma screening, attendees were encouraged to tweet their questions, but Goldberg admitted she was “not much of a Twitter person.” She has also written posts for the Columbia Spectator’s blog, Spectrum. She uses her blog as a platform to “share information and reflect on ideas,” but recognizes that this approach has limited reach. “From what I understand,” she said, “most undergraduates read the B-wog,” pronouncing the “B” as its own letter. “The question is just how to get the word out. If you guys have ideas, you should really just send me a list of things. Does The Blue and White have a blog?” What in the World is an EVP? According to WikiCU, the nine Executive Vice Presidents who report directly to the University President’s Office can be likened to the Nazgul who do the bidding of the Dark Lord Sauron in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The reality is much less interesting. After a wave of student activism and a title IX lawsuit against the university, President Lee Bollinger announced the creation of an Office of Student Affairs, which would be led by an EVP. It would be the first office created at the EVP level in over four years and the first directly responding to student needs. In an email

May 2015

to students, Bollinger wrote that the Office would be a “primary place of contact for issues relating to sexual assault.” Eventually, it would also respond to “numerous matters relating to students that call out for attention by an individual placed at the highest level of the University administration.” CCSC was quick to note their expectations of the position and who should fill it. In spring 2014, they submitted a memo of recommendations that emphasized visibility and approachability through functions such as monthly office hours and town hall-style meetings. In an interview, CCSC President Peter Bailinson stressed the need for a high-level administrator “who actually understands the students.” “I think there’s such a difference between how high level administrators think of the school and what students’ concerns are [...] if you talk to students for just one minute, they’re going to be able to tell you.” In many ways, Suzanne Goldberg was a logical fit for the position. Goldberg had been on the Law School faculty for eight years and had a background in legal advocacy on behalf of the LGBT community. After being appointed Special Advisor in July, she worked with the President’s Advisory Committee on Sexual Assault (PACSA) to reform the University’s sexual assault policy. “It definitely helped to have an individual who was dedicated to this issue,” said CC University Senator Marc Heinrich, who worked with Goldberg on PACSA. But by the time she was made EVP in January, the position had been changed from “Student Affairs” to “University Life,” with little explanation as to why. A dvocacy, Accessibility, Visibility The name change led student representatives to voice concerns that the office would be less student-centered. “It’s a very nice bureaucratic name,” Bailinson noted. Bailinson, like many other representatives we

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BABY STEPS talked to, has clear expectations for the position. “When things get done, it’s not just students saying, ‘We really want to see this.’ It’s when students are also able to find allies in the administration who believe in the same goals.” While concerns remain over the consequences of adding another layer to the administrative landscape, Goldberg has been, according to Law School University Senator Zila Acosta, “proactive in reaching out to student groups.” Acosta has worked with Goldberg on the Student Affairs Committee. According to her, student Senators occupy a “sort of in-between” position, “mediating the demands of activists with real concerns.” Acosta adds that the name change reflects Goldberg’s vision of her role as “more expansive than just dealing with students.” According to a blog post, this vision of her office encompasses “three pillars”: student life, student conduct, and intellectual life. “If University Life means taking away the student factor, that’s a problem,” said Acosta. “But if it just means adding more, I don’t see that as a problem.” In our interview, Goldberg described what she saw as the Office’s sphere of concern: “I think issues of race, ethnicity, and justice fit naturally within the Office of University Life, as do issues related to sexual respect.” She paused. “As do issues not related to identity at all. I mean, it’s an office with a very broad scope.” “I just don’t know why an office needs to exist to put on a Selma screening.” The Office is currently creating a committee on race, ethnicity, and justice, unveiled in an email from President Bollinger ambitiously titled “Expanding the Campus Conversation about Equal Justice.” According to Bollinger, the committee’s goal will be to “develop a slate of programs,” since “we should have discussions across campus to help us understand these critical issues better than we do.” He added that the project would “not only make Columbia better,” but also “realize the promise of our nation’s core principles,” and ultimately “bend the arc of history towards justice.” In February, a planning meeting was convened, consisting of undergraduate students from CC, GS, and SEAS, graduate students, administrators, and faculty from the Center for the Study of

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Race and Ethnicity. Omar Abboud, SEAS ’16, who sat on the panel, recalls that Suzanne Goldberg, a legal scholar who has argued cases before the Supreme Court, appeared “terrified” of the students when they voiced their complaints. During the meeting, she sat in the front of the room full of student activists, who were, in Abboud’s words, “looking at her, ready to pounce.” “[She] was describing things that she could do as this new EVP to address issues of ethnicity and race,” says Abboud, “and her ideas were basically, ‘Let’s host a conference or have panels and do things like that.’” Particularly, undergraduates, who were recommended as participants by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, were “very clear in pointing out to her that that just does not affect their experience.” “The thing I don’t think she was understanding completely was that we can sit and have these highlevel intellectual conversations, but that's not going to change the fact that the university is fundamentally engaged in acts of violence against students of color and against communities of color.” To Abboud, these acts of violence include the Manhattanville expansion and an oft-cited instance last December when the NYPD was called to police a Black Lives Matter student demonstration. “When students look back on their Columbia experience […] the incident that sticks out the most is when there is trauma, not this cool conference that the [EVP] organized,” says Abboud. “I just don’t know why an office needs to exist to put on a Selma screening.” Evidently this was a conversation Goldberg was “not prepared to have.” A few months later, at the Selma screening, Goldberg quoted a tweet from President Obama: “[A]ction requires that we shed our cynicism.” I Look Forward to Your Participation So far, the Office’s other key project, sexual respect, has been met with cynicism. When informed of No Red Tape’s planned protest (entitled Arts and Crafts to End Rape), Goldberg remarked that, “I guess I would say that, having seen the work, it’s a certain choice to protest before having seen the work.” Roughly 200 attendees came to the twoday Arts Option exhibition in Faculty House’s

The Blue and White

BABY STEPS Presidential Ballroom, some of them to see their own submissions. (“About a dozen” students attended the protest, reports Spectrum.) Among them was Helen Chen, CC ’17, who bared her body in a Hamilton classroom as part of a video addressing her experiences with street harassment. Other works were similarly impressive. Untitled, by Anonymous, a video in which a man eats strawberries, inspired a juror—the group approving artistic submissions was called a “jury”—to wax poetic in his commentary. Many of the pieces publicly viewable on the accompanying Arts Option website more directly critique the requirement. “Columbia doesn’t prosecute rapists but they made me make this dumb piece of art,” complained one submission, scrawled in red crayon on a notepad. A prose work entitled “Why have Sex?” takes a subtler approach, repeating its titular question for a page before concluding, “But seriously, people have germs.” In response to these criticisms, Goldberg blogged, “Dissent, at its best, is yet another path to engagement.” “Will [the requirement] meet everyone’s preferences or expectations? Probably not. Some may find the offerings burdensome, and others may find them not challenging enough. [...] But is it good? Yes, certainly. By participating, you will gain something for yourself, and you will be involved in helping to create a new model for Columbia and beyond.” As cheese, crackers, and squash were laid out in Faculty House for the exhibit, No Red Tape’s protest took place on Butler Lawn. Markers were provided, along with coloring pages depicting President Bollinger, President Spar, and the infamous “sexual assault prevention cake.” Noticeably absent were pictures of Suzanne Goldberg. “But is it good?” “When I was in law school, if you had told me I’d be a law professor and teach civil procedure, among other things, I would have told you you couldn’t be more wrong,” said Goldberg during our interview. “And if you had told me I’d be a [University administrator], I would have thought you were talking about someone else.” Despite recent criticism, Goldberg is, according to Acosta, “pretty beloved at the Law School.”

May 2015

She was a beloved lawyer as well: “When I first met her I fell in love,” John Lawrence (the defendant in Lawrence v. Texas) says in Flagrant Misconduct, a 2012 book chronicling the 2003 landmark case Goldberg counseled. In 2009 Goldberg accepted the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her introduction described her as someone who never missed a “moment for a pedagogical point.” Goldberg, in her acceptance speech, said, “With th[e] power [lawyers possess] comes great responsibility. If you don’t like the way the world is you have an obligation to change it.” Goldberg’s experiences in these other roles undoubtedly inform the Office’s vision and purpose. She writes on Spectrum that she believes “that social change requires not only policy or legal change, but also—and importantly—engagement with the surrounding environment.” To Goldberg, questions about intellectual life and community citizenship “are fundamental to a great university.” Building an office around these questions, for Goldberg, is the way to bring about “engagement,” conversation, and even “[d]issent.” But how does action come about from conversation, engagement, dissent? A movie screening, a panel discussion, committees, a blog, a conversation. These are all nice things that happen at universities—just not just “great” ones newly equipped with an EVP for University Life. For students who are hoping to find an ally within the administration in Goldberg, it’s still unclear how these conversations will lead to change, or bending, of arcs of history. Students who know that the Office of University Life exists—some of whom work with the administration, some of whom work against the administration—have a clear vision for the change they want to see. Acosta imagines that the Office might “launch itself as a powerhouse at the University.” Heinrich, who will continue to work with the Office as SAC Chair, thinks that the first few months will be critical in establishing whether this will be the case. “Once this office is created, that’s how it’s going to be operating for a long time. This is a unique opportunity to be part of that.”w Alexander Pines recused himself from the writing and editing of this article. Additional reporting was contributed by Sean Augustine-Obi.

Illustration by Angel Jiang

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BLUE J

FLIGHTY RHETORIC

B

The J protests lavatorial incivility

randishing an English accent fresh off the boat from Harrow on the hill, Blue J strutted onto the Columbia campus with aplomb. He knew his diction would fare him well with Columbia birds, and with enough high-falutin’ critical theory they couldn’t understand, he would would be in tip-top shape. Yet as the winter set in, Blue J began to feel a terrible sense of ennui. He felt displaced, isolated. The life of a third culture kid—jetsetting between London, San Francisco, and New York—had left Blue J culturally confused. Pondering his place in the cosmos, Blue J was suddenly possessed by an urge to recline into a hard porcelain frame. As it had in his school daze, The Bath was calling to him. Buffeted by the winds of globalization, he too sought refuge in his very own safe space. Yet as he crossed the threshold of the 5th floor River bathroom to undertake this mission, his beady eyes became fraught with dismay. To examine the bathroom with a view to bathe is to see the room anew. His purol-addled sensibilities were confronted by white tiles that weren’t so white—strewn with different hairs of different lengths, and implicitly, different provenance. Porcelain’s subdued gleams were nowhere to be found; instead, he was greeted by a pallid plastic. Blue J attempted to console himself. Never mind, he thought. He was getting ideas above his station. Conscientious as he was, Blue J decided to check his privilege. With proletarian zeal, he scrubbed the coarse plastic surface of the tub. His deliverance from the cold, screeching winds was near at hand. With gusto, he triumphantly plunged his foot down on the bath switch. It didn’t move. He tried screwing it to the left, to see if it was jammed. He tried screwing it to the right, to see if it was temperamental. It slowly dawned on Blue J—a conspiracy was afoot! Columbia’s anti-bath machinations had gone on long enough. The discrimination must end! Pecking furiously away at his typewriter, channeling

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the energies of his intellectual forebears Mikhael Bakunin and Vladimir Lenin, Blue J drafted a pamphlet to be displayed in every bathroom. The Blue and White obtained a copy: e Despite Britain’s role as the midwife of modern industrial capitalism, it would appear that the instrumentalist mindset with which it is so often associated never extended as far as personal grooming. When a bird reclined into a hard porcelain frame amid soapy suds in order to stare blankly at the ceiling for awhile, considerations of utility never entered the equation. Whether he was immersed in cosmic ennui about the thought of being alone in the universe, or philosophizing over the relative merits of drip vs. french press, the bath did not discriminate: all thoughts were given equal weight. In the UK, the bath was insulated from its detractors—but alas, not so in the States. The utilitarians teamed up with the capitalists, who were friends with the ecologists, and they all got together and decided the bath was inefficient, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly. While such a credo would seem music to the Columbia administration’s ears, we forget that the University as an institution also supposedly has other commitments— commitments of the platonic variety, where contemplation is king. If the university is to fulfill the goals and aspirations of the myriad dead white fellows whose names embellish our skyline, it had better create spaces where this can be done. And there is no better such space than the bath. Bring that epicurean sensibility out of the attic, dust it off, and get yourself into some scalding hot water. It is the simplest of pleasures that yield the best of fruits.w

The Blue and White

I

CURIO COLUMBIANA

t is the stated goal of Curio Columbiana to cull from Alma Mater’s obvious and less obvious collections of great works. In this number, we present excerpts from the logs of a recent campus fraternity’s Facebook group message, in which they strategize their “clan” on the iPhone app “Clash of Clans,” a video game targeted at children. Names have been removed. [Redacted] named the conversation: CoCK. so psyched to be here Are we warring soon or can I practice my skills and expend all my troops? I’m rusty promote me back u bitch im a founding member Also, UNBAN ME FUCKERS sent u an invite lol did u get it u btich Gentlemen we’re in business Welcome to the International Clan of Beta Rho Omega, a gathering of upstanding gentlemen and ruthless invaders. lets invade in a few days tho, im tryna make tweaks Damn boy try to save that clan castle one dragons are a bitch to train why are you using your clan castle to farm fuckboi you should replace your central elixir storage with your clan castle otherwise, they could just use rogue archers to get an easy 50% on you [Redcated] i gotchu with wizards I already gave you wizards, my bad bro I realized man. My fault, should have told the boys earlier. Feel bad for wasting your zards wuts the plan in terms of bases were hitting Dude just blitzkrieg trying to finish up this marketing case. Will analyze when i get out i have lvl 2 hogs not sure if that’s worth it you got much better troops than level 2 hogs. lvl 3 dragons right? yo sorry yah my army is kinda weak but i have barb king and Mad tactics IMPORTANT PUT UR GODDAMN BASES INSIDE UR WALLS ALL THE WAY someone call [redacted] and tell him to put his base

May 2015

inside his baby bro has to know that war bases are completely independent of what he sees on the screen or [Redacted] is going to go overhead press his house while Trap Lord bench press reps his baby bro [Redacted] i literally jizzed in my pants when i saw ur new base you basically combined me and [redacted]’s bases to get a hybrid i studied the greats its like me and [redacted] had a CoC baby Who’s the fucker donating giants and then make the rest archers and barbarians and send them all in after the tanks are you familiar with that strategy? bc if you dont know how to do it, then it can go awry very quickly ya ive been studying it for hours hey I will be attacking late - can I have troops for defense? whatever shit you don’t want HAPPY 420!!! Tell me if you guys need witches, hogs, golems, etc. for your castle I’ll donate the rest of wizs. i got wizzies brewing Guys can I just pay my dues to clash of clans next semester and get us a base so good we’ll be unstoppable Raiding like fam fam none of them are capable of hog rushing us—it all comes down to whether their other guys are online 2 minutes, holy shit balls If they dont attack right now they wont have time 1 minute! dude i think we’re good. congrats boys Everyone satisfied with their loot? no gimme more loot i think we’re overthinking this

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The Swing Set Words by Channing Prend and Mabel Taylor Illustrations by Darya Fraiman In search of their inner children, Mabel Taylor and Channing Prend took a gander to some neighborhood playgrounds. What follows is a testimony to their lost innocence. MORNINGSIDE PARK Particularly low friction coefficient.

Slide Velocity:

Patrons: There is a clear hierarchy in place for line formation. As a newcomer, I was unaware of the office politics and inadvertently stepped on the toes of the park’s top dog, Billy. I was subsequently shunned by the rest of the children. Maximum Swing Height: Decent elevation. Not bad! Atmosphere: My experience was colored by my initial faux pas in the line for the jungle gym. Accessibility: The equipment is top notch, but probably not worth the trip down to Morningside given the grueling uphill walk back to campus. If you do make the trek, watch out for Billy “The Hammer.” 117TH & RIVERSIDE It does the job!

Slide Velocity:

Patrons: Now this is what I am talking about! Those kids are like an angel’s asscheek. Sweet, round, and soft. I wanted to stare at them for hours. God damn this society and its regressive understanding of love! Sand to Box Ratio: Let me put it this way: I’ve been to the Sahara, I’ve been to the Gobi, I’ve been to Patagonia, and this sandbox made me feel like I was standing in a pile of cat litter. Maximum Swing Height: Once I read an article about a twelve-year old girl who got stuck in a baby swing and had to be cut out of it by the fire department. Now I understand. Zipline: I felt not unlike Tarzan swinging through the jungles of the Congo.

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The Blue and White

113TH & RIVERSIDE Slide Velocity: Never have I ever been so disappointed by a puddle of urine. Slide moisture may have been a factor in the unusually slow speed. Patrons: You call these children? More like elves with alopecia. Call me when you get some kids who don’t make me want to sew my eyelids together. Maximum Swing Height: Pretty good. If I were the kind of person who wanted to fly, I would be moderately satisfied with these swings. I would call a plumber though because those pipes look rickety. Structural Integrity of Monkey Bars: ssssssssss I am a grown woman and these withstood my weight with aplomb. Zipline: The zipline was not in service and there was no indication of when it will be back in operation. Accessibility: This playground’s greatest strength is its proximity to campus. The facilities are enough for a quick fix but will not sustainably satiate your need to play.

96TH & RIVERSIDE Slide Velocity: I slid down this slide and the whole world slid with me. I slid down this slide and I felt my troubles drift away. I slid down this slide and landed feet first in a dream land that you probably couldn’t even comprehend. I slid down this slide and I felt joy. Patrons: A child was wearing a Lehman Brothers parka. Did his father once work there, or is he being ironic? Maximum Swing Height: I don’t know if this is a matter of shorter chains or a taller swing-hanger, but I would have really appreciated more air beneath my tuckus. Dinosaurs: Dinosaurs might be extinct, but my love for play sure ain’t! Ride on down to 96th and Riverside for a bit of jurassic fun. Dinosaurs are still kicking in the 20 block radius. Accessibility: Slightly farther from campus, but well worth the trip if you have a free afternoon to commit to playing. Dinosaurs are a huge draw. Try to go early though to avoid the rush.

May 2015

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THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH

A Family Affair Morningside Heights’ two restaurant dynasties By Yasemin Akçagüner

F

eras Samad greets me at the door and extends a red-dyed hand. “Promise I haven’t killed anyone,” he says. He’d been making jello shots for a fraternity event that will take place later that night at the Heights. Feras is the son of Youssef Samad, who opened up his first restaurant in Morningside Heights in 1971, after he came to Columbia from Lebanon for a language program in 1969. A businessman by day and poet by night, Youssef published five volumes of Arabic poetry as he built a collection of successful food enterprises including Samad’s Gourmet & Deli and the Heights Bar & Grill. His first restaurant was Amir’s Grill, then located on 112th Street in the present location of Le Monde’s bar. “There is actually no Amir,” Feras tells me. “I think [my father] wanted a name that was Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. The name Amir could be used for all three peoples.” What began as a one venture soon became a series of restaurants that constantly adapted to changing neighborhood demands. In 1971, Youssef Samad expanded to Samad’s Gourmet & Deli. Six years later, he opened up Au Grenier, a high-end French restaurant that catered mainly to professors and administrators, in what is now the Heights. In 1991, in a shocking transformation, Au Grenier turned into Nacho Mama’s Burritos. “We’ve tried every single concept possible,” Feras says. “It became stagnant, the neighborhood needed a change. Similar to today, there were a few changes in the neighborhood, Columbia was picking up more real estate, renting to more restaurants, so we decided to change it.” Nacho Mama’s lived on until a devastating grease fire on December 30, 1995 burned down the

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whole building. “I remember that day really well. I drove my father into the city to check on the building after it was completely burnt down. The building was totaled. We built a whole new building in 1997.” The Samads turned the place into the Heights Bar & Grill and opened up the rooftop. The Samad family’s strategy of survival in the increasingly competitive Morningside Heights market has been to reinvent themselves constantly, a message passed down from father to son. “I think my father has always taught me to keep up with the times. Always innovate,” says Feras, who has been running the family restaurants since 1989. “In our line of business— all three actually, between Samad’s, Amir’s and the Heights—there are also a lot of external factors with the neighborhood changing.” To keep up with the times, in addition to making jello shots, Feras says they’ve been incorporating new menu items and renovating their stores. “At Amir’s recently [which Columbia moved to its current location in 1989] we’ve had beignets and coffee, which is very French. Not necessarily very Middle Eastern, but yeah…” At the Heights, the Samads have been doing all they can do adapt their menu items to changing customer demands. “The new fad of kale ... we try [to keep up], but there’s a new fad every day.” Keeping up is the key to Samad’s success especially at a time when making the rent has never been this hard. “It’s a struggle every month,” Feras says. “Especially after the fire, it’s been more of a struggle,” referring to the Citibank fire of January 2014. More than a year on, the burnt-out vacated lot is causing headaches for its neighbors, including

Illustration by Leila Mgaloblishvili

The Blue and White

THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH the Samads, who have complained about rodents and flooding caused by the giant hole in its roof. If constant change has kept the Samads afloat, the owners of the Hungarian Pastry Shop and Symposium have relied on the opposite mentality. When Panagiotis Binioris handed over the keys to the Hungarian to his son Philip in January 2012, they came with a stipulation: “Keep it the same!” Binioris is originally from the Greek village of Kokla. “That was my mission, as given to me by father,” Philip says. “You don’t just change the nature of something.” Panagiotis started out working as a busboy and dishwasher at Symposium in 1974. With the help of Symposium co-owner Yanni Posnakoff and then-Columbia architecture professor Ted Maggos, Binioris took over the Hungarian Pastry Shop in 1976. The Binioris family has been running it ever since. The Hungarian Pastry Shop has looked exactly the same since the Biniorises assumed ownership. Philip Binioris says there are no plans to change the space anytime soon. “We’ve done, obviously, upkeep renovations. But in terms of the layout, this is how it will look until it looks no more.” While the Binioris family tried and tested several other restaurants—an American style bistro named Strauss Park in the seventies and eighties, and a sandwich shop Panagiotis and his wife Wendy opened in 2001 called P&W Sandwich—the Hungarian and Symposium have remained constants. According to Philip, the Hungarian never changes “because something has to stay the same. It’s just what it is and people keep coming, and as long as people keep coming, why would they change it? It offers them exactly what they need.” Philip adamantly opposes technology that would minimize social interaction. Purchasing coffee through an app, for example, is out of the question: it would turn the Hungarian into a “dispensary.” With its lack of electrical outlets and wireless Internet, and its abundance of real human contact, the Hungarian is for most an escape from “the modern world.” “At this point, if [the Hungarian] doesn’t offer them what they need, there’s plenty other places that offer them other things,” he says. “Where everything else is flat, new or modern or forward-looking, always, this place isn’t trying to go anywhere forward. It’s just trying to maintain

May 2015

some kind of essential self that it always has had. If we change that then we’ll probably fail as a business.” Even though their business strategies are different, Feras and Philip, who have both grown up in the neighborhood, worry about losing touch with many independent business owners. The neighborhood is changing fast, partially due to what they perceive to be a change in the University’s real estate policy. “I don’t know that many business owners anymore, because they’ve either all gone bankrupt and left the neighborhood or I’m just not acquainted with them. But, I feel like, you walk on the street yourself, you see a lot of empty shops now,” Feras says. Empty shops are even more visible from Feras’ vantage point, as next-door neighbor Vareli went under in early 2015. “I think Columbia’s policy, whether official or unofficial in terms of real estate, was anti-chain up until the last couple of years,” Feras says, noting that he has seen fewer family businesses move into the neighborhood in the past few years. The University reiterated its commitment to leasing to small businesses with a statement to the Spectator in 2013. It reads, “Columbia has a longterm retail strategy that favors small local businesses to help create a lively, energetic neighborhood that reflects the character of the people who live and work here.” Yet Columbia went on to work with the Winick Realty Group, whose clients include many national chains like Starbucks Coffee, Duane Reade, AT&T, and Chipotle, to lease the space that was previously Card-O-Mat to Dig Inn, a chain restaurant. “When you charge forty thousand dollars a month for rent, you kind of limit the options for who is going to take over a lease,” Philip says. “I think Columbia’s retail policy, if they have one, is basically soulless. They’ve gutted the neighborhood that I thought had a lot of character.” “There are no owners. Maybe that’s what I miss about the neighborhood. I would go down the street and I would look in the window and I knew that person. That’s a neighborhood. That’s a community […] It’s a quality to your lived experience that’s missing. Maybe most people don’t even have any idea that that’s possible. You are walking down the street and you’re just a robot, visiting a dispensary. You present your keycard and you get your coffee. And that ... it ain’t cool. It ain’t cool.”w

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T H E T R AV E L D E S K

Many of us Columbians are Morningside shut-ins. For too long have we heard the gripe, “I haven’t left the neighborhood in a month.” Fortunately The Blue and White’s crack team at The Travel Desk is not afraid to get on the subway. Here is our most recent adventure.

Eating the Spoils

I

By Taylor Grasdalen

realized all too late one Saturday as I began to dress for what I was calling a “night out” that I was on my way to meet several people whose real names I did not know, to a neighborhood downtown where I had never been, to rummage through stores’ bagged and curbed unwanted goods. The dumpster diving community in New York is surprisingly large. There are comprehensive directories online for the city’s “freegans,” a portmanteau of “free” and “vegan” and a title they generally prefer over “dumpster divers.” New York Cityfocused Facebook groups and message boards boast hundreds of members with niche diving needs or interests: specifically vegan, vegetarian, junk foodinclined, or leftist, anarchist, anti-consumerist. In Brooklyn, you can take Freeganism 101 or a Trash Tour, put on by a freegan collective on the domain name freegan.info. This crowd is a mixed bag. I find a couple already rifling through some found garbage bags at our meeting place, almost certainly students; an older man and woman discussing the weather, united by their identical and endearingly frizzed silver hair and floral patchwork jackets; and a few others, prepared in boots and gloves with backpacks or small carts and reusable bags, in their late twenties to fifties. None of them are homeless. “We’d just rather not see food still very good for eating make its way to a landfill,” says Rosa, the woman in the floral patchwork jacket. There are eight here altogether. Everyone has met before, save myself and one tallish guy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt. I learn that everyone here readily self-identifies as vegan or vegetarian, and that

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taking animal products is considered risky. None of them have ever gotten sick from their finds and a few exclusively eat only what they can “forage.” Bread is a common favorite, and easily found. A girl named Leah crosses her fingers for a loaf of good sourdough. Rosa wants to find blueberry muffins. We follow a tight schedule: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Gristedes, D’Agostino. At each store we are to take no more than thirty minutes, with or without sourdough and muffins; grocery chains like these are routine in taking out their trash and “leftovers,” and just as when the food is in the store, it’s best when fresh from the shelves. We start at Trader Joe’s. I’ve never seen such an organized process. The big bags are felt up and then carefully opened—to be re-tied when they’re finished—and out comes food. Each store’s set-up differs: here, far from the retail entrance but still public and along the street, there are two dumpsters and several neat white garbage bags beside them; all members of our group steadily, confidently open the bags and the bins, though unfortunately no one “dives.” Everyone works separately to first sort through what’s on offer, then comes together over promising bags and boxes. We find tens of containers of hummus with “sell by” dates an entire week later, containers of tofu, silken or firm or flavored, bags of flatbread and whole grain wraps. There is no ambiguous liquid or residue, or even unplaceable smells in this trash— just sealed, prepared, and acceptable food. Leah takes three of the red pepper hummus tubs and a box of chocolate coconut cake bars; my novice compadre, the Dartmouth alumnus, gingerly

The Blue and White

T H E T R AV E L D E S K selects a few bottles of lemonade and some sliced bread; Rosa and her quiet significant other load up on unbruised apples and pears. (I am not yet bold enough to enter the fray.) This is legal. Going through trash on the street is not criminal, though it does become complicated when you get too close to a store, or enter an actual dumpster. My companions asked me not to use full names more out of concern for their personal or professional reputations than their legal standing. Angelo, a CUNY undergraduate, has never been harassed about going through the bins by more than a few back-stock or sales associates. “They tell me I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I’m like: ‘Do you have a problem with it?’ They always go, no, they don’t, they don’t care, they’re just doing their jobs. Their boss or manager or whatever told them to say something. And I’m just finding dinner and some solid meals for the week.” It occurs to me that for many here, not only is this their grocery shopping for the week, but their Saturday night out on the town. It’s only around nine, but this is a party. They’re having fun; these are their friends. Some of them like the weirdness of this thing (even if “it’s only weird to you,” they tell me, the passersby still stare), some of them like saving hundreds of dollars each week, and all of them are interested in sustainability and reducing waste. Rosa explains, met with nodding heads from our gang of foragers: “It’s a win-win. They need to get rid of the food, we’re willing to take it and eat it, and we can do a tiny part to help the city’s trash problem.” Whole Foods, next, is a disappointment. David, a middle-aged veterinarian, guesses that they must have turned over their shelves earlier and tossed their goods before scheduled, but he manages a few pounds of carrots. One woman collects a bunch of flowers. There are small cardboard boxes full of fruit, and I’m handed a few spotty bananas and some sunflowers. I stow these into my backpack and look toward the street. I’m excited to have my first goods from the dive, but church ain’t out ’til they quit singing. As we walk I talk with Sarah, a paralegal, and

May 2015

Ben, a self-described “chronic graduate student.” Sarah shares openly how little she earns against her input hours, and found in dumpster diving, when introduced by a friend from AA in 2010, a healthy solution to handling her free-time and some of her monthly expenses. “My quality of life is better, for one. And I’ve met people like Angelo and Ben, and they’re really my best friends.” She’s been a practicing freegan for nearly five years, as has Ben. He agrees: “I love it. I basically live off grants and stipends, and this way I don’t necessarily have to choose between money and health.” Gristedes gives us the best food, and D’Agostino is just “predictable.” Some of the harvest: ripe avocados, berries, pre-cut mango, plenty of bread (sourdough included), pastries (blueberry muffins not among them, but some banana nut were scored), freshly packed salads (quinoa, couscous, soba noodles), and other in-house prepared foods (hot soup, stir fry, sautéed vegetables). Their grocery yields aside, I want to know these downtown freegans better. This is not the most political or radical group in town, they admit, but they are adamant about waysiding capitalism as best they can. Many work with soup kitchens, churches, and food banks to disperse information and to volunteer, and to help others live more cheaply and sustainably. They have a lot to say, and want to invite more to their table. Theirs is a unique way of living and the more I learn, the more it seems a sacred charge. “Not everyone can do this, I get it,” Angelo says. “But imagine if more people felt comfortable trying to. People would be less willing to pay store prices. Food would be way more affordable.” Back on the 1 train, I bite into my organic golden delicious apple, courtesy of Rosa, and consider going with them again next weekend. They’ve asked me to a group dinner, too, which will be comprised exclusively of found foods. This is a way to eat and a way to conserve. I’m far from deterred. I make it home, and look outside to see light from the grocer across Broadway. I set my sunflowers on the window sill; this marks the spot where I can watch for their nightly drop-off.w

Illustration by Alexander Pines

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M easure

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Empedocles Fragment Here’s old destiny’s deal, the god’s decree, a pregnant promise and a proper oath: if ever a perennial, imperishable spirit strikes out in strife and stains his dear body falling in failure by fraudulent oaths, he must meander three myriad seasons coursing down byways banished by the blessed transmuting in time through all mortal forms, supplanting one painful path for another. The passionate spirit first splashes to sea, sea drags the poor devil onto the dirt of dry land, From ruddy earth he’s regurgitated to the rays of the sun, whence again windy air costs him to whirling of the sea spume, I too follow form to another harboring hate for this doom, from the gods a vagabond wanderer, a tenant of this terrestrial tomb. — translated from the Ancient Greek by Nathan Levine

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Far East Love Song Colonize me, baby. I want your arm around me, your fist in my hair. I’ll make you kimchi for breakfast, spicy pho noodles for lunch, my teeth at your neck for dinner. I’ll show you the best way to put a rabbit on the moon, to strangle yourself in spiderwebs, to kill yourself over a man you barely know. We can be constellation lovers on a bridge of butterflies. And our first child will burst into flames, be the death of me. Look for me in the underworld but turn away at the last moment. My Orpheus, my Izanagi. Wash your eyes clean and birth our children, the moon, the sun, and the storm. We burn our myths first. This is the end of the story. Tell me, how do you tame a dragon lady? It’s simple: you cut our tongues out. — Kailee Pederson

May 2015

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ASCENSION

On a Mission A Blue and White reporter goes to Korean Church in Lerner By Christian Zhang

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lfred Lerner Hall on Sunday mornings is a quiet, peaceful place—except on the fifth floor. Young couples sit on lounge chairs next to their strollers, discussing the Bible in Korean. Kids bounce down the ramps. Inside room 555, rows of chairs are set up before PowerPoint slides of psalms in English and Korean. Welcome to the Korean Christian Students Association’s weekly Campus Mission Church service. Catering to Columbia undergraduates, graduates, alumni, and even students from other schools, the CMC holds three services every Sunday, usually in Lerner Hall. Though the content is in Korean, audio translators are available (though on a recent visit, I was the only one using them). The church, a spinoff of KCSA, was started by a group of Korean Christian students in 2003 and describes itself as “open to anyone regardless of their background, age, and culture.” Early meetings were held in a variety of locations—various classrooms, lecture halls, and even in Public School 165 on 109th Street. Ki Seok Oh, who is 38, started attending CMC services when he was an architecture M.A. student in 2007. On a recent Sunday, he brought along his one-year-old son and enjoyed the company of friends, many of whom are also students or alumni of Columbia. “I went to Columbia, so it was a natural progression to find a community here,” he said. “It’s

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bonding with people who speak the same languages, share the same culture, and have the same Christian beliefs.” Ryan, a physics post-doc who asked to only be identified by his first name, first came to KCSA’s services back in 2001 when he was still an astrophysics graduate student. The church was smaller back then, he recalled—with only about 30 congregants and one weekly service­­—but the community was still strong. “I was baptized here. I know a lot of friends—very close friends—who are almost like brothers and sisters,” Ryan said, adding that he met his wife through the church (they got married in 2003). More than 71 percent of Korean Americans are Christian, according to a 2012 Pew report— compared to 42 percent of all Asian Americans and 30 percent of South Koreans. And according to the Presbyterian Church in America, there are more than 4,000 Korean-language churches in the U.S. Though this high religiosity among South Koreans is unique due to a combination of historical and governmental factors, the churches, especially in immigrant communities, serve as more than just places of worship—they’re community centers where people who might not speak English can seek support from peers for everything from opening bank accounts to filing taxes. CMC is just an extension of that world into Columbia’s bubble. “I still feel like I’m part of the Columbia community,” Ki said. “More than just an alumnus.”w

Illustrations by Darya Fraiman

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Addressing His Flock A conversation with William Deresiewicz By Kunal Jasty After spending 24 years in the Ivy League, William Deresiewicz is now its fiercest critic. Upon receiving a B.A., M.A, and Ph.D. from Columbia, he spent ten years teaching English at Yale University. Since leaving Yale in 2008, he has written acerbic? relentless? pitiless? unforgiving? critiques of elite American colleges with titles such as “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” and “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” This past year, Deresiewicz published Excellent Sheep, an indictment of the elite schools that he claims produce students with “toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.” Deresiewicz met with Kunal Jasty, SEAS ’16, to discuss what he calls “the miseducation of the American elite.” The Blue and White: You write in the introduction of Excellent Sheep that elite American colleges “manufacture students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.” I’d love to discuss how you think we got to this point. Your book has a great history of colleges from the 19th century to the present. Can you trace that history? William Deresiewicz: Sure, but let me begin just by qualifying the passage you quoted, which is simply to say that I recognize this is not true of everybody. I think this is a typical product of the system and I think it’s the direction in which the system is headed. I also think it’s a clear and present danger that faces just about every student that goes through the system. So even if it isn’t necessarily true of you, it may be more true than you realize, or it may also be simply something you are surrounded by. I think the way we got to this point is pretty simple to a first approximation, although there are other complexities. About 50 years ago, the elite private universities, which had been bastions of WASP-male privilege—Columbia included—radically changed their admissions practices in a fairly rapid period of time to open up access to previously marginalized groups, including women, Jews, Catholics,

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and students of color. [They developed] a different conception of what they were looking for, emphasizing intellectual excellence in a way that they quite frankly hadn’t before. What that really did was fire the starting gun of what we call “meritocracy.” And since then there’s been an ever-accelerating arms race for the kind of credentials that are needed to get into a top private university. Someone wrote very recently, I can’t remember who off the top of my head, that “students are engineered to the specifications of admissions committees.” I’m hardly the first person to talk about this. Nicholas Lemann, who was the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, wrote a great book about the SAT called The Big Test, where again he talks about risk aversion and empty ambition. The main thing that I’ve seen, as I read about this and talk to students, is a difficulty in generating an autonomous sense of purpose—basically a difficulty in becoming adults, which means being morally autonomous in the sense that you can make choices for yourself. That, and a corresponding, ever-increasing, level of anxiety. People talk about the mental health crisis on campus ... it’s a real thing. It keeps getting worse. B&W: You write that nearly half of college students report feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, or depression. Do you think that anxiety is a direct result of the admissions process, or is it the pressure-cooker environment when students get here?

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N WD: No, no, it’s just as bad in high school. It may be worse in high school. There are lots of mental health statistics about high school, and those statistics are worse in affluent communities and in private high schools than they are in the rest of the country and in public schools. What does that tell you? It’s about this ridiculous pressure that you guys are under, and not to work hard. There’s something deeply meaningful about work if you’re doing it because it’s something you want to do. But when you’re doing it for reasons you haven’t chosen, for reasons you might not understand, think through for yourself or accept on your own terms, then you’re like a rat in a maze. B&W: You’ve said that Excellent Sheep is a letter to your twenty-year old self. You graduated from Columbia in 1985 and came back to Columbia a couple months ago to speak. I’m wondering, as Columbia students are going to read this, would we even recognize the Columbia student of 1985? Would they recognize us? What do you see as the difference between us? WD: There are huge differences. On the one hand, the system already existed and was already in the process of acceleration. On the other hand, the quantitative differences have become so great that they’ve become qualitative differences. There’s no question that I would never have gotten in to Columbia with the kind of high school record I had in 1981 ... Ever! Of course, if I were applying today, I wouldn’t be the same person I was. I would’ve gotten with the program. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a young person. Your first stage of young-adulthood, which is developmentally, intellectually, psychologically so important ... so many important things are supposed to happen during that time … and it’s all shut out because you’re just hitting the vocational benchmarks. That’s a huge problem. B&W: Is this problem being driven by elite colleges in particular, or is the problem a society that no longer values that type of education? What’s actually driving this trend? WD: There are a lot of moving parts. Since I published the book and I’ve gotten feedback from the world in all kinds of different ways, I’ve realized even more than I did when I wrote the book how much

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of what I say applies not just to non-elite colleges but to primary and secondary schools, and in other countries. American higher ed is this incredibly prestigious, coveted, global cultural brand that elites in all other rising economies like Brazil and China and Korea and India are aspiring to. So the impact of a limited number of college admissions officers is quite profound. B&W: You’ve written that students have become the “clients” of universities. WD: Clients, customers, consumers … and a lot of this was forced on universities. There were deliberate public policy changes in the seventies that helped to do this. Instead of giving money directly to the schools it was given through the students, and then students made their consumer choices, which was coupled with the beginning of a drastic long-term defunding of not even just public higher ed, but also public funding of scientific research. Universities are reacting in predictable and understandable ways. They’re just really unfortunate ways. B&W: I’d love to go back to the student part of this. Part of me thinks it’s because the stakes are so high now ... maybe it’s just a more competitive world. We have the lowest levels of social mobility and highest levels of inequality in a couple generations and it feels like it’s a winner take all world. You get out of college and you see that all the money is in the same jobs, and all the internships are in the same fields. How much of this do you think is the economy, and the fact that students are just reacting to monetary incentives? WD: It’s complicated, but the short answer is it’s not. And the reason I know it’s not is that this didn’t start in 2008. This acceleration has been happening in good times and bad. There was a Reagan boom or bubble in the ’80s, Clinton’s high tech boom in the ’90s, then Bush—maybe it was all a bubble of debt but it certainly looked like this ridiculous unending prosperity—in the 2000s. This acceleration has kept going in every single decade since the seventies. So no, this is not about students responding to the new realities of the last seven years. A lot of this is status competition. I would also say that I think students at places like Columbia have a very distorted picture of what

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N their life chances are.

get something commensurate out of it,” I’m willing to say yes you should, but it doesn’t follow that that something is measured entirely in money.

B&W: Meaning? WD: Meaning they’re going to do fine. It is true, for some of the same reasons that all of these changes have taken place in higher ed in the last 40 years, that we are increasingly a winner take all society. I say in the book that you may have to make tradeoffs. Fulfillment may come at the cost of a certain amount of wealth and status. But it’s also true that a big part of the reason social mobility has slowed is precisely because the meritocracy has figured out how to reproduce itself through selective, private higher education and its admissions offices. On the one hand you say kids want to get into an Ivy League school because they’re worried about social mobility, but on the other hand those are the kids already at the top. And remember, when social mobility slows down, it means that if you’re born at the top, it’s easier to stay at the top. B&W: There’s this other thing, though, which I can’t quite put into words. Columbia costs $64,000 a year. I know you don’t like the term “return on investment,” but when you pay $64,000, it seems almost irrational to me not to expect to earn that back. The price is somehow telling you something about the value of your degree… WD: Well, I think you’re making a good point. I haven’t heard anyone put it that way, but I have no doubt that a lot of people feel it to be that way. College is this very high priced financial transaction, even if you’re not paying for it personally and aren’t taking out loans. You feel like there has to be some kind of financial payoff that’s commensurate with the financial investment. I think it’s understandable and I think it’s very unfortunate, because it just reinforces the idea, which has also been in ascendency for about 40 years, that all values can be measured as monetary values. That you are a function in the market as a consumer and producer, and anything else of value doesn’t really exist. So if you say “I’m spending all this money for this education, I should really

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B&W: No, but then I think to myself, how much would I pay for this experience if I didn’t get that degree at the end? And I don’t know what that number would be, even if the experience were what you say education should be. It seems like that number represents that intangible thing. WD: I would actually say that that thing is not just a “thing.” It’s the thing. I’m not going to say it’s worth anything you pay for it, but I can’t imagine anything that’s more valuable, because it is the central thing. It affects what you’re going to do with your life and how you’re going to do it. It affects the quality of your relationships. It affects how you are going to continue to grow. So it not only affects the person you are at 22, but also the person you are at 42 or 62. I agree that it’s really fucked up that we’ve reached the point where it has to happen in this container, and that it's gotten so incredibly expensive. B&W: In the time we have left, I’d love to develop some fixes. If you were to create your own college, if you were to pick your own students, your own professors, what would it look like? What would the curriculum look like? WD: I hesitate to answer this for a number of reasons, partly I’m not very good at constructing solutions. I’m better at pointing to problems. Partly because I don’t think there’s just one solution. Partly because I don’t the ultimate solution has to do with constructing a different college. To me the most important thing is for the affluent to decide, once again, to tax themselves to pay for high-quality free public education. I’m also hesitating because I don’t want to be glib, and I don’t want to say it would look like Reed College, which is actually I think a pretty impressive place in a lot of ways, and I wouldn’t have been aware of it if I didn’t live in Portland. It’s really rigorous,

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N they have a pretty traditional Great Books curriculum, and students work really hard. They have as little free time as they do in the Ivy League, but it’s because they’re in the library all the time. The academic standards are incredibly high, partly because there’s no grade inflation. And the school doesn’t cooperate with U.S. News, so it refuses to play the game. And as a result it’s probably fifty or sixty places lower in the rankings then it would be otherwise. It’s like seventysomething, and it would easily be in the top twenty if it actually reported its numbers. But I also don’t want to say every school should be like Reed. I like Great Books curricula, but I’m not sure they’re right for everybody. I loved teaching Lit Hum when I was a graduate student, but I hated having students in the class who didn’t want to be there. I would want professors who were incentivized to teach. B&W: At the risk of sounding elitist, is this the kind of education that every college student needs, wants, or would benefit from? WD: Yeah that does sound elitist. It’s OK of me to say that because I’m often accused of being elitist. That question often comes to me, and especially from people in elite colleges. Let me first of all point out that a lot of students at elite colleges don’t want this type of education. So really they should back off on the arrogance about that. Let me put it like this. The heyday of public higher education was the 1960s because there was a huge higher ed boom after the war and the GI bill flooded campuses with students. We were literally opening a new college every week for like 35 years. Public funding was rolling in. The University of California was free. It was precisely then, when the middle class and even the working class was beginning to go to college, that the percentage of humani-

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ties majors was at its peak. Why would these kids who supposedly only want to go to college to better themselves and climb the economic ladder and take specific, practical subjects major in English and Philosophy? Because people do! I don’t think that everybody should go to college, and I don’t think that everybody wants to. But I think that the people at the few most elite schools, just like they think that they’re the only good schools in the country, also think that they’re the only students who have intellectual appetite. The truth is that this notion of a liberal arts education, for the purpose of not just vocation but life, was essential to the American idea of education for citizenship. This is Dewey, right? So I think it’s a function of our own time that we now believe that only a very select few are interested in or capable of enjoying the kind of education I described. B&W: The reason I asked that question is because we have people all the way up to the president saying “No, this isn’t the model we want. We want people in STEM, we want vocational schools, we want engineering, we want tech, we want you to graduate with a job.” WD: I think it was really inexcusable, horrible, pathetic and indicative that Obama went to a college in Ohio, I don’t remember which one, and said, “Hey kids, don’t major in Art History.” Even our democratic, maybe liberal, certainly intellectual, humanities-oriented president is saying stuff that, in its ultimate intent, even if not in its language, is no different than what Scott Walker tried to pull in Wisconsin when he tried to rip out all that language in the state university charter and just say, “The purpose of the University of Wisconsin, one of the great public institutions, is to train jobs for the state workforce.” That is neoliberalism in a nutshell! And

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N that is the logic of neoliberalism applied to education. Victorian England could not do a better job thinking of society in terms of predetermined class. I don’t know if you remember that quote from Woodrow Wilson in my book: “We want one-class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class […] very much larger […] to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks.” That’s not what America was, but it’s what we’ve become again. B&W: Will social reform in this country will lead to education reform, or do we need to start reforming colleges before we can create a society that has these values again? WD: I think the only real answer is it’s not either or. What you’re fundamentally trying to do is to change the mindset of society. I was a senior in high school the year Ronald Reagan was elected, so I’m just old enough to have seen this entire phase play out. A decade before Reagan’s election, the idea that the values he represents would become ascendant and even consensus values was unthinkable. There was a bipartisan consensus called the liberal consensus. And it was about a lot of the things that we’re talking about in the way society saw itself. It was about what we owed to each other, and what the job of government was. That’s what really we have to change, and we have to not be shy about saying that. We need to talk about the larger philosophy and to reclaim the notion of a public. Your generation is actually tuned in to try to make the world a better place in a way, I think, that hasn’t been true of any generation since the ’60s. But you also seem to have lost faith in the public, or to never have had faith in the idea of the public. You want to do it through private means. You’re a very libertarian generation. And you think that public solutions don’t work. And I think that’s problematic in practical terms, but I especially think it’s unfortunate in ideological terms.

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The real thing we need to do is not have 12 private universities at the top of the heap. We need to not have an artificial scarcity of educational resources. Eventually corporations are going to want to hire the best people and banks are going to want to hire the people they think are going to make the most money for them. I want my surgeon to be as smart and skilled as possible. But we’ve created a system where that sorting has largely happened by the time you’re 18, and in fact, by the time you’re eight. And it’s not just unfair, but it’s an enormous waste of our collective human resources. That’s one of the the big reasons that the WASP aristocrats decided to betray their own class by opening access to these universities. The country needed it. It needed all those other people and what they could contribute. B&W: By the time this interview is published we’ll be a few weeks away from commencement, so I’d love to hear your brief, tweet-like, 140 character commencement speech to all the seniors reading this who are going out into the world. What would you say to them? WD: [Laughs] Oh my god... B&W: It’s a tough question, I know. WD: Especially because I much prefer to address people before they get to college. I would say that if they’re really going to make a better world, which you guys all say you want, then you may need to give something up. You may need to sacrifice a significant portion of your own advantages and especially your children’s advantages. It can’t just be a matter of good intentions and trying to do good. I think real change is not using your position of privilege to help others. It’s probably going to require undermining your own privilege, or at least the system that’s helped create it and is supposed to help you pass it on to your kids. It requires a much bigger sacrifice than just sacrificing your time and giving away some money.w

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May 2015

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DIGITALIA COLUMBIANA These excerpts were culled from documents left on Columbia’s lab computers. We encourage our readers to submit their own digitalia finds to us, via email, at bwgossip@columbia.edu. From the “personal” section of a résumé: • Served as a medical model for ultrasound anatomy workshops in USA, South America, • Played guitar for 13 years; lead own band. • Aspire to qualify for the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil for Fencing (Epee). • Hobbies – Electronics, electric guitars, building amplifiers e Levi-Strauss (how I became an anthropologist) final paper proposal Levi-Strauss’s how I became an anthropologist is the primary source that I have chosen to work with for the final paper. I just started my close reading of this text and plan to pair with the Susan Sontag reading and really decipher the themes of this class. I will focus on anthropology and the creation of knowledge about the other based on the primary source and using other readings to include “Africa” as the primary example. Also the idea of homelessness e Masterpiece 1. Michael Jordan freethrow line dunk --> air jordan (jump shot,dribble) 2. Christopher Norlan Instertellar (combine with science but not a documentary depicted a space where people coudn’t visulaize, or maybe visualize in people’s dream) 3. Brugel 4. pollak 5. Picasso Michael Jordan’s Freethrow line dunk also demonstrates that the moment of his flying motion in the

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air and double clutch before dunking were a moment of masterpiece. Throughout his career, he showed a lot of movements that no basketball players could perform. He convinced people that basketball can be an art as well. But in 1988 slam dunk contest when Michael needed a perfect score to beat his opponent Dominique Wilkins, he showed this free throw line dunk. This was actually performed by Julius Erving in 1977, but the hang time in the air, the flying motion and unprecedented double clutch while performing that extremely difficult performance turned into a masterpiece that no one else after that night try to perform the exactly same dunk. e Wives were the most important women in Qing China because they were a part of the family, but even from the position of the state, non-wives played important roles. The separation of the sexes was a key principle; female servants who were attendants to wives made this separation possible by acting as intermediaries between cloistered women and the outside world (Mann, p. 28). They served the state by protecting the virtue of wives, and by extensions, the honor of the family. Concubines served society by bearing sons for men whose wives may have failed in that regard (Mann, p. 54). Even courtesans and prostitutes benefitted society, as sources of entertainment or as distractions for bare sticks, even if these roles weren’t considered conventional or respectable (Mann, p. 55). In a society dominated by wives and mothers, and ruled by families, it might be easy for one to overlook the non-wives, without whom society would have been off balance, and the very foundation of the Confucian state would have been threatened.w

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CAMPUS GOSSIP POWER LUNCHERS A note posted outside of Vine reads: “SORRY, WE HAVE TO CLOSE BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE GAS DUE TO NEXT DOOR—OLLIE’S FIRE. SORRY AGAIN FOR ANY INCONVENIENT. MGT. VINE SUSHI” e CUCR is switching their pizza from Famiglia to Dominos, starting next semester. Change is inevitable, it would seem. Meanwhile, at their election, CUIDs were checked at the door by a student bouncer. e LET THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME A student’s Class Day award was revoked for their role in the planning of an unofficial Bacchanal event. e Potluck House’s Facebook account was reported as not being a real person, causing it to be deleted. Word on the street is it was the doing of a rogue conservative. e $400 went missing from the desk of a board member of Columbia’s American Medical Student Association chapter during a party. Leadership became convinced that someone at the party had stolen the cash. Party attendees were encouraged to chip in to cover the costs. Healthcare! e Overheard at Liz’s Place: “If he fails me, I’m going to appeal it and he’s going to get fired because he’s an adjunct.” e CRIES FOR HELP When a student complained about a problem set in his econometrics class on the class Piazza, Professor Christopher Conlon wrote a 300-word response. Notable excerpt: “Sometimes the questions on problem sets can be difficult or vague. More often than not this is deliberate.”w

May 2015

A message from a poor soul who lives adjacent to the wrestlers in Ruggles: “Please send help. The beer pong tournament next door has been going on for 12 hours now. The beer is running six inches deep here, and steadily rising. The chanting is only growing louder, I hear ‘CHUG, CHUG, CHUG’ even in my sleep. We do not know when it will end, or if we will survive.” e An ADP member stole a painting from St. A’s at their most recent party, themed “State of Nature.” Noble? Savages? e RÉSUMÉ STUFFERS A selection from Kappa Alpha Theta, Sigma Nu, and Alpha Epsilon Pi’s board titles: Human Resources Director, Exchequer, Chief Education Officer, Scribe, Chief Marketing Officer, Archivist/ Historian, Master, Chief Executive Officer, Eminent Commander, Chaplain, Lt. Commander, Marshal, Alt Panhellenic Delegate, Lt. Master, Ritualist, IT Director. e Before a 2018 CCSC member arrived at Columbia, a New Jersey newspaper wrote: “When [the student] of Englewood goes to Columbia University [...] he will be well armed in the fight against Apartheid Week and similar efforts to delegitimize Israel.” It ends: “[He] said that although the year-long internship has ended, his affiliation with StandWithUs [slogan: Supporting Israel Around the World] continues. ‘Now the alumni coordinator will help me with any programs I want to host on college campus,’ he said.” Cool. e A U Senator (and Lion Laundry client), on why he thought he would win his election: “I’m a white gay male.” e Time...it passes!

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The Blue and White