November 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. V

November 2015

‘It's Not a Warm Bath’ Professors talk safe spaces

Sustainable Developments Climate Divest gets radical Also Ins

ide:

Thomas Roma, E

xposed!

Neighborhood Dogs, Off th

e

Chain!

HALLIE NELL SWANSON, CC ’16, Editor in Chief CHANNING PREND, CC ’17, Managing Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Publisher VIRGINIA FU, CC ’17, Literary Editor ALEXANDER PINES, CC ’16, Culture Editor SEAN AUGUSTINE-OBI, CC ’16, Online Editor NIA BROWN, CC ’17, Senior Editor MICHELLE CHERIPKA, CC ’16, Senior Editor SOMER OMAR, CC ’16, Senior Editor JESSIE CHASAN-TABER, CC ’16, Layout Editor ZANE BHANSALI, CC ’17, Senior Illustrator MEGAN STATER, CC ’16, Copy Editor DANIEL STONE, CC ’16, Editor Emeritus Staff Writers YASEMIN AKÇAGÜNER, BC ’17 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 MABEL TAYLOR, BC ’18 Contributors MAX BINDER, CC ’15 ELENA BURGER, BC ’18 MARIAM ELNOZAHY, BC ’16 MEGHAN HARTMAN, BC ’16 CAROLINE HURLEY CC ’19 KUNAL JASTY, SEAS ’16 NICK KENSINGER, CC ’18 JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17 MIKAYLA PETCHELL, BC ’18 BEN SCHNEIDER, CC ’17 CHRISTIAN ZHANG, CC ’16 Associate Publisher ANDREW LOSO, CC ’19

Staff Illustrator RACHEL CHIN, CC ’18 Artists CLAIRE CHEN, CC ’19 ALEXA ECONAMACOS, CC ’18 SARAH GALE, BC ’18 KATE GERHARDT, BC ’19 WALLACE KALKIN, BC ’18 LEILA MGALOBLISHVILI, CC ’16 ANNE SCOTTI, CC ’16 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 ALEXANDRA WARRICK, BC ’17 JOANNA ZOU, CC ’18 KELLIE ZHAO, CC ’19 Assistant Layout Editors BIANCA GUERRERO, CC ’17 AARON SU, CC ’19

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXI

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. V

Columns

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

Features 10 At Two Swords’ Length: A re We A Thing?

Our monthly prose and cons

Alex Swanson & Nick Kensinger Channing Prend

12 Shifting Perspective

A look at a new research project on campus, and why

PrezBo is footing the bill

Yasemin Akçagüner

15 Political Climate

Taking stock of two divestment movements at Columbia

Rachel Chin

18 Who Let the Dogs Out? Woof

Hallie Nell Swanson

20 Uncomfortable Conversations

How a language of safety impacts speech on campus

Sean Augustine-Obi

26 A House Divided

Two years on, checking up with Special Interest

Community House

Virginia Fu

theblueandwhite.org

28 ‘One Shot, They’re Dead’

A conversation with Thomas Roma

f

cover :

“Frat or Treat” by Alexa Economacos

BLUE BOOK

a

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

As part of some senior year lifestyle kick to “be a grown-up,” motivated by what is no doubt an infant’s comprehension of what it is that grown-ups do, I’ve been domesticating myself like my own nascent pet (for the wonderful possibilities of therapy pets, see our neighborhood dogs centerfold!). I cooked, once. And I reheated the remains, so twice. I bought an industrial sized jar of Skippy, which is a sign of yuppie levels of commitment.

(Speaking of commitment, see this issue’s At Two Swords’ Length, “Are We a Thing,” page 10.)

In the mornings, my suitemates and I emerge from our rooms like newly birthed puppies, eyes barely open, and paw clumsily at each others’ doors like drunk mother hens. (For more tales of domesticity, see page 26.) Come nighttime, we pile into bed and laugh about how we need to be up in four hours. Adulthood! (For a professor who thinks we need to “grow up,” check out page 20).

But I must admit, as the semester steamrolls impassionedly along and I’ve found more ways to make it seem like I have So Much Going On Right Now (come to think of it, so does Climate Divest, page 15), I find myself hearkening back to the old life—that peculiar, giddy high of poor nutrition, lack of sleep and fluorescent Butler lighting which Shamus Khan is only just learning about, as seen in our SHIFT story on page 12. When I slept, I cried to deprive myself of sleep again! There’s some cool poetry in this issue.

Am I just too old for this shit? I write this past midnight in the Butler stacks, having procrastinated far too long, and my word count is forming the outline of a swift exit. Submit to discussion board. Close laptop. Wander ButCaf looking for acquaintances to save me from being in bed at a reasonable hour. As Tom Roma reminds us in this issue’s Conversation (page 28), you can find a suitcase full of cash anytime, but you only college once.

Enjoy the issue!

— Hallie Nell Swanson

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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS Expensive kale “Boynard” The Tab School spirit at 1020 The *new* losing streak DEPARTURES The ‘dam Senior Ünderground’s 1 key Golden Nails Hats at 1020 Deantini’s sense of direction

Come Again?!

“These activists often resort to scare tactics and other behaviors that detract from the generally pleasant atmosphere on our beautiful campus. When protesters cross the line, it is Columbia’s responsibility to use appropriate methods to keep students in check.”

– Arabelle Chafé, SEAS ’18, as quoted in the Columbia Spectator

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK telephone

Columbia buzzwords travel through the grapevine, and yield surprisingly predictable results.

Frida Kahlo Frida Cash Flow Free the Cash Flow Communism

Dean Kromm NSOP Song Beer Pong Malia

Prez Bo Prez Bone Lets Bone Consent

1-800-HOTLINE BLING 1-800-CALL ON IN 1-800 COPS BROUGHT IN #DIVEST

Goldberg Standard

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

November 2015

Postcard by Leila Mgaloblishvili, Cartoon by Zane Bhansali

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BLUE NOTES

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hose of you who do not enjoy making small talk in campus elevators: look around (not at your phone). You will surely come across signs for the Office of Vertical Transportation posted somewhere near the buttons. The name sounds like something in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and the way to get there is equally absurd.

What started out as a quest to put a place to this peculiar name, however, quickly turned into a quest to confirm or deny the existence of a bureaucratic conspiracy theory. Of the four different phone numbers posted in elevators around campus for the supposed “Office of Vertical Transportation,” one is disconnected, one is the Business School, one rings and rings but is never answered, and the last connects to the main Facilities Department. The voice on the other end of this line denied any knowledge of the existence of such an office.

A fictitious OVT is an infringement on our rights as residents of New York City under Chapter 26, Section 18, Article 4 of New York City law. It clearly states that elevator inspection certificates

“shall be posted in every car” of every elevator in every building in New York City. Failing that, the records can be kept on file at the building manager’s office. But what if that office does not exist? Do we even have a building manager? Is anything real?

Before I submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the City Buildings Department, I decided to try the posted numbers one more time. The fourth number was finally answered and, when prodded, my interlocutor did in fact acknowledge the existence of the Office of Vertical Transportation. I still had more questions. “It’s in EC!” he swiftly retorted, and immediately hung up the phone.

Exhaustive wandering in East Campus finally led me to the (apparently real) Office of Vertical Transportation, in the corner-most office of the basement floor.

Its singular employee would like to clarify the “most misleading thing” about the mystery office: its name. “We really should be the Office of Vertical and Inclined Transportation,” he tells me, “because we’re responsible for escalators too!”

— Caroline Hurley

E

verybody knows that Columbia’s lawns are for decorative purposes only, bar a few heady days at the beginning of summer. Afterwards, a militarized system of barriers and inscrutable flags keeps them sequestered from students and their pesky accoutrements.

Enter Dean Cristen Kromm, Dean of Undergraduate Student Life. On the eve of NSOP 2015, an adamant Cromm greeted students leading pre-orientation programs with sermons about the lawns. This year, she insisted, they would remain open more often, and for longer into the year. She was

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Illustration by Kellie Zhao

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES

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on a quest (mostly for her dogs).

Why the sudden change? For years now, campus lawns have resembled playgrounds in Chernobyl: deserted monuments to the fun that might have been. The feared contamination is not nuclear, but aesthetic. The campus, saith the powers that be, is bejewelled by the sparkling luster of the pristine fields, watered to such an extent that unaware wanderers are doused beneath a monsoon intended to fertilize lawns too precious for traipsing undergrads.

The lawns went unmolested, but our enjoyment was— ironically—trampled underfoot.

But now we have arrived at our Promised Land.

Upon ascending the Undergraduate Student Life throne over the summer, Kromm went into negotiations with the Facilities Department to talk about lawn accessibility and, at long last, it seems a detente has been reached. The terms: one of the South Field lawns, in addition to either Hamilton or Furnald Lawn, are to be opened every day, except in the case of extreme weather conditions. Such conditions are decided by a legendary sage living within the Grove.

(The Facilities representative in question was not available for interview.)

Kromm, eager to see these assurances materialize, urged students to email or call her in the event of a lawn’s undue closure; she would forward each one to Facilities. Email by email, our Dean has promised, we will together wear down their obstinate refusal in the name of justice.

Alas, come the third week of October, the daily open lawn quota will cease to be enforced. Enjoy your final hours with the pristine, pot-holed, Sweetgreen leaf-littered lawns and tenderly revel in each other’s company. Now is the winter of our discontent.

— Alex Swanson

he largest and most accessible of Columbia’s legendary tunnels is found just off the ramp leading into Dodge Gym. A small staircase with light blue railings leads to a subterranean pathway, which bisects campus between Havemeyer and Schermerhorn. Here, deliveries of all kinds—mail, school supplies, athletic gear—are received. But if the tunnel is the university’s pulmonary vein, the Administrative Mailroom is its heart.

Located on the tunnel’s south side, thirty or so feet below the ground floor of Uris, the mailroom is carved out of the tunnel walls like a midcentury Petra. The massive edifice dwarfs the adorably undersized service vehicles parked in front, its light blue facade providing a cheerful contrast to the rest of the tunnel’s Cold War bunker feel. A gently sloping ramp leads into the office, where couriers and mailroom staff bustle about beneath fluorescent lights.

The aggressively white interior is much larger than it appears from the outside. It has to be: Jose Rosa, Director of Operations for Administrative Services, estimates the mailroom handles 5.31 million pieces of inbound mail every year, including 1.56 million pieces of inter-campus mail.

The mailroom is a far cry from the office of your nightmares in that glassy building on the other side of campus. Unlike its undergraduate counterpart, which processes just over a million pieces of mail (but six and a half times as many inbound packages), the Administrative Mailroom delivers directly to academic departments and offices, hence all the little vehicles. These bad boys convey administration-sustaining mail from the university’s toes at 51st Street (Columbia Doctors) to its head at 168th (the Medical Center). If you’re ever wondering what keeps this university healthy and strong, the answer lies beneath your feet.

— Ben Schneider

November 2015

Illustrations by Alex Swanson and Kellie Zhao

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Campus Characters You might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue and White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. This issue, we bring you two campus power couples who aren't couples.

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

Christina Ellsberg

C

hristina Ellsberg, BC ’16, has a wall in her room covered with her paintings of the lamentation of Christ. It’s not for the irony, she tells me, with a smile and shrug. “Nobody knows if I mess up Jesus’ face—no one knows what he looks like.” The practicing Quaker and self-proclaimed “Catholic science person” signs her emails “In science” and has a tattoo of the symbol of Saint Eustace—the warrior that forsook killing after seeing a cross between a stag’s antlers—on her arm.

She points out that it also doubles as the Jägermeister logo. Though admittedly, she says she doesn’t even really like Jäger that much.

Ellsberg, a medical anthropology major, is currently working on her thesis about patienthood and personhood across veterinary and geriatric care.

While it’s a topic that interests her, like most seniors, she’s unsure about its broader implications. “I’m not doing something that’s going to change the world, I’m doing something I want to think about for the next

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year.” But Ellsberg has already changed the world, at least as far as equine mortality goes. Having worked in barns from the age of 10 to pay for the cost of horse riding, in high school she joined a University of Pennsylvania research team that identified a way to test horses for laminitis, an often deadly condition in which the hoof becomes bonded to the bone.

Ellsberg is the leader of three campus comedy groups, Control Top, Chowdah and Low Cut, and has served as chairperson of NSOP for Barnard, for which she created a comedy/variety show event called “Bear With Us,” in which she and her friends performed stand-up routines. In the event, which she says was packed, first-years were treated to belly dancing with a Game of Thrones theme accompaniment, and “Christina’s meme hour.” She gives her experience at Barnard “five Mickeys”—the highest accolade of the metric system used to measure the enjoyability of Disney rides. She concludes, “I’ve not taken a single class here that has not profoundly altered the way I see the world.”

“Christina just gets into shenanigans,” says her roommate and fellow Control Top member Molly McBride Jacobson, BC ’16. When I meet Augusta Chapman, BC ’18, Ellsberg’s girlfriend, she tells me that Ellsberg is at that moment at a film festival in Virginia. “She was supposed to drive Bo Derek one place, but Bo Derek liked her so much she hired her for the rest of the day,” says Chapman. “All day Christina has been driving [Bo Derek’s] Lamborghini around from place to place at a film festival taking care of her dogs.”

Ellsberg says her ideal life would be “to have five different jobs and I do each one of them for one or two days a week.” These would include bioethics in research in developing nations, making the “coolest radio show ever,” a sketch show that focuses on women's comedy, and “cool films about cool things.”

She is also considering going into teaching, citing her

The Blue and White

experiences helping other students edit their work as a Writing Fellow. “It’s amazing to see how many ideas and how many areas of expertise students have,” she says, adding that she is “not totally giving up on her dream of becoming professional wrestler.” She has me touch her bicep, and indeed, Ellsberg is rather strong.

Saint Eustace flexes in solidarity.

— Nia Brown

Lucero Jorge

L

ucero Jorge, CC ’16 is firmly unconvinced of her own impressiveness. She sits with her arms drawn up against her and nervously fidgets with her hair, the physical tension only broken by occasional bouts of sharp, but contained laughter. She checks her phone every few words. She is excited to be interviewed primarily because her boyfriend is jealous of the offer. She doesn’t see why she would be a person of interest.

And yet, she’s extremely impressive. She forcefully follows her impulses, both educational and otherwise. Her answers are confident and decisive: she gives a brief, succinct, clear answer and is done.

She has strong opinions about students leaving class early, and is annoyed with the fact that as a Dominican-American she has to field an irritating number of questions about Junot Diaz. She has mixed feelings about the mission of Teach for America, critiquing the way people use the program to further their own development at the expense of others. She has to leave at 8:00.

At other times, Jorge is jarringly erratic. Her senior year of high school, she applied to 22 schools, and a few months into life at Columbia she left the pre-med track to pursue Urban Studies at the suggestion of a friend. Also because she “was dying.”

Defining the future isn’t her strong suit. But to her, unlike the majority of her peers, this doesn’t seem to be a problem. There’s a confidence in the way that she flashes back and forth between possible futures.

She says she could see herself in D.C. (“People are just less New York there, less aggressive.”) Moments later, she discusses postgrad plans closer to home in the Bronx. Her mother would prefer for her to stay close to home, and she does “really love New York most of the time.”

Jorge is co-founder of the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership (FLIP). But when we begin to discuss her work with FLIP, her answers became brief and pointed. She’s bored of the subject. “We

November 2015

were mainly just letting off steam,” Lucero clarifies of the organization’s development in spring 2014.

It started off as a conversation among friends in her Casa Latina suite—more a series of complaints than the percolation of activism. Jorge refuses to take credit, putting the development of FLIP as a concrete, public organization down to its co-founder, Mandeep Singh, CC ’15. “He really pulled everything together more than anyone else,” she says.

Last year, FLIP succeeded in starting a Facebook page to share spare meal swipes and began a widespread campus conversation about food insecurity and income inequality. But Jorge emphasized that she has since pulled away from the group, which has run into problems this semester. The group severed its partnership with the Swipes meal app, only to restore relations the next day. It also shut down its immensely popular Columbia Class Confessions Facebook page, which has been its main communication tool.

Jorge’s dissatisfaction with the group solidified over the summer. Jorge notes that FLIP was beset by problems, and she often felt that one of the group’s biggest projects last year—its book drive to create a free lending library—often fell solely to her. “Most of the time it was just me, there usually wasn’t anyone there to help me,” she says. While organizing the books during an impromptu move this summer, she hurt herself and decided that she needed to take a break from the group. She laughs. “It is senior year after all.” And with that, the discussion is over.

— Mikayla Petchell

Illustrations by Joanna Zou

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Are we I

t’s beginning to look that way. “ironic.” We hug, passionately, when we win beer We bought froyo together over the weekend. pong. We talked about an article you read in Cosmo We shared a spoon. And some tongue. I thought of during our weekly brunches at Le Monde, where I fed you while buying a short-sleeve shirt on Tuesday. It you Eggs Florentine. I chuckled at the way the yolk looked good on me but I knew it would bring out the dribbled down the left side of your chin and soiled— supple, languorous curves of your shoulders better. soiled irreparably—the irregular pattern of the bowYou gave me the password to your social media along tie I bought you for your birthday. I accidentally held with extensive instructions for whom to friend and hands with you whilst walking. And I lingered. what to message them from beyond the grave in the Anthropologically, ritualized instances of event of your untimereciprocal non-marly death; there’s no ket exchange of goods going back from that. between two actors We’ve been are reliable indicalabeled a couple often tors of emerging enough. There was thing-ness between that time picking those two actors. We out clothes for you, share so many things, equipped with matchwe must be a thing ing industrial fans, ourselves. (Feel free at Brooks Brothers. to take ‘thing’ any That girl who told us way you like here.) we’d be great togethA nthropologica lly, er could see somewhen I wear my shoes thing. There’s an art you borrowed for exhibition coming up “an interview” and that I think you’d like and there’s returned vomit-stained, when we go no girl in sight to invite—I think we wine tasting and our regurgitated ffirmative could crush it. What I’m trying to cabernet melds in the bowl, when say is, we could pull it off. after taking pictures in the mirBy Alex Swanson I know I’ve been called a comror at frat parties we share a “team mitment-phobe. But you and me are piss,” it’s love. Let’s do more than different. Girls come and go, man, but when they do cross streams. go—which they usually do—I know you’ll be right You could provide for me, bedeck me in suits there for me, snapchatting the walk of shame stamped and ties, then go to K-Town and sing “Suit and Tie” in with the high wit of the crying laughter emoji. You’re a private karaoke booth. I could lend you my necklace my rock in this world. blessed by a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas. Oh no We study together. We study together a lot. … that’s already happened. We already swap clothes Naked. We share bran muffins from But Caf most worryingly often—by the way, I need my paisley butevenings. I took you to Cannons by convincing you ton-down back. At this point, we might as well throw it was a “classy establishment.” We wear match- in the towel—which you lent me—and call us a thing.w ing shirts to parties. We both know it’s long past

A

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The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

a thing?

I

knew this would happen. Fuck. tripped over that spilled vodka cran and then grabbed I get it. We spend a lot of time togeth- your right bicep for support and we just had to stay er—studying, meals, the pressed up against the wall occasional shower. But it’s like that while I got my bearcasual. More of a friendship ings and caught my uneven of opportunity than anybreath. It’s not like I overthing else. As you’d put it thought it or anything. What in your (all too pretentious) are you trying to say?

English accent, one ‘fit bird’ I’m not sure how to put and you’re gone like yesterit, buddy, we’re just not comday. I just don’t think I could patible like that. I don’t get deal with that. I see the way your enthusiasm for Buddhist you throw glances across the monks. Or at least, I hope room in class—but they’re not I don’t. I’m just a little less for me. I’m no Demodocus; I into the menswear, bro. No can see they’re for the equalneed to bring up the paisley. ly pretentious anthropology It’s not like I have that much major two seats over. of your shit. Besides, why But asking about this are you even making that a now seems a little premature thing? on your part—although this I don’t care how many wouldn’t be the first time. anthro classes you’ve taken.

How long has it even been?

Philosophically, there aren’t A year? That’s nothing. I’ve even things. Time and space, known myself for 21 years cause and material, are mereand I still can’t decide whether I ly the necessary a priori categories really like country music or whether to gird the fleeting products of our egative it’s just a phase. There’s no way sense impressions. If things are I’m committing to anything without love then love always already was

By Nick Kensinger doing my due diligence. just exchange. Product for product, Yes, there was that one time fluid for fluids, exchange is not a at Brooks Brothers. Our matching trypophobia led us thing but a process, one that always already never had to purchase matching bow ties. You picked out a shirt enough solidity to be called a thing. for me, stain proofed. I know the assistant told you And anyway—I don’t think you’re even ready that we looked cute. Honestly? We did. But I bet she for this to be a thing. Two weeks ago? We were tells everyone that—I bought the shirt, after all. Let’s SnapChat best friends. Now? I don’t even know. Some not get worked up over a sales pitch. side-winking emoji bullshit. What does that even Yes, I met your parents. We had champagne mean? I have too much going on to figure this out. We together. They’re lovely. We went to that joint you are definitely not a thing. tried to tell me was classy. That girl who told us we So, this might be too soon ... but is your sister were great together? She was clearly too drunk— single?w everyone in there was! Including us, that’s why I just

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November 2015

Illustrations by Leila Mgaloblishvili

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WA L K O F S H A M U S

Shifting Perspective A look at a new research project on campus, and why PrezBo is footing the bill

By Channing Prend

“L

ast weekend I was standing in line to get into 1020…” These words could have been uttered by any number of students at Columbia, but, in fact, they came from distinguished sociology professor Shamus Khan.

Khan is conducting an ethnographic study of undergraduate student life as part of the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, a new research initiative funded by the Office of the President. SHIFT, which was launched last spring by Mailman School of Public Health professors Jennifer Hirsch and Claude Mellins, aims to study the community-level factors that influence sexual health at Columbia.

The ethnographic part of this research involves, as Hirsch calls it, “hanging out with students in

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their native habitat.” While Khan recognized that his presence at Mel’s or the Heights could seem “a bit creepy,” he maintained that there is a lot to learn from seeing the social spaces in which students interact.

Some of the questions that Khan said he considers when navigating around sweaty, drunk students include: How do people enter this space? Does anybody come here alone?

How are people acting?

How are people experiencing their contact with one another? In order to answer these questions he makes observations and takes notes. “I find it hard to talk to students in that context because I’m old and irrelevant,” Khan mentioned.

But he said that the value of these trips to bars is that they provide him with context to draw on later in oneon-one interviews.

As for his findings so far, Khan remarked, “I’ve been hanging out at bars every weekend since the start of the year and to be brutally honest, it’s not that interesting.” It doesn’t take a sociological study to discover Cannon’s sucks.

Khan clarified that he is not simply “hunting for sexual spaces.” In addition to visiting local bars on weekend evenings, he also makes observations in Lerner, JJ’s, and Butler. “Not everyone in the Columbia community goes out to bars,” Khan said.

“There are a lot of people in the library at 11:30 on a Saturday night!”

There is more to the research program than Khan furiously scribbling notes among drunk fresh-

Illustration by Kate Gerhardt

The Blue and White

WA L K O F S H A M U S men, however. SHIFT has three main components: Khan’s ethnography, a daily diary study, and policy drafting. The diary study forms the quantitative component of the research. Students are paid in Flex to fill out a daily survey with questions about many aspects of student life beyond sex such as mood, stress, substance use, and health behaviors. “We’re trying to get at the student experience from a lot of different angles,” Hirsch said.

In order to more accurately capture the “student experience,” the researchers assembled an Undergraduate Advisory Board (UAB) of 18 students who were chosen by an open application process last spring. According to Hirsch, “we had all kinds of criteria for the dimensions of diversity that we sought to maximize.” These dimensions included race, gender, sexuality, and involvement in campus groups.

UAB member Robert Holland, CC ’17, said he’s happy with the diversity of the group. “Obviously 18 people can’t represent this entire campus,” he said. “But I think they did a good job of picking people who are involved in a huge range of different things at Columbia.”

The UAB meets once a week to discuss aspects of the study with the researchers. According to Holland, this could be as broad as a discussion about campus culture or as specific as the phrasing of interview questions (“They want to find the happy medium between ‘Did you have intercourse last night?’ and ‘Do you have a bae?’”).

The UAB is also apparently used to provide party intel. During our interview, Holland got a text to the UAB GroupMe from one of the graduate students working on the project. “He wants to know what’s going on tonight,” Holland laughed. “They’re trying to meet people in a natural way that’s not like, Hi I’m here studying you on a Saturday night.”

The third component of SHIFT is what the researchers are calling “policy translation.” After collecting data for the rest of this academic year, they plan to use their findings to make concrete policy proposals to the Office of the President, which is funding the program. Hirsch said she hopes they will be finished with a final set of recommendations to the University administration by June 2017.

“We want SHIFT to make a difference at

Columbia,” Hirsch stated. “So it’s very important that we translate our research into policies that can prevent sexual violence and promote sexual health.”

What might these policy proposals actually look like? Hirsch says it’s too early to tell. “We want to be led by student experiences and what we find,” she stated. But given that the funding comes from the Office of the President, does this compromise the integrity of the research? Everyone involved in SHIFT is careful to downplay the administration’s involvement in the study. Hirsch and Khan both sternly maintained the program’s intellectual independence. “That’s the whole point of being tenured faculty!” Hirsch exclaimed.

“We’re completely independent in terms of design and implementation,” Khan said. “The body that approved our research design is the research ethics board, which treated us as if the money had come from anywhere.”

The UAB members were similarly adamant about the project’s autonomy. According to Holland, no administrators have been present at any UAB meetings. “I would not be comfortable talking about sex at 8 a.m. with Suzanne Goldberg,” he remarked.

UAB member and University Senator Sean Ryan, CC ’17, said the study’s credibility relies on this distance from the administration. “One of our jobs as UAB members is to let people know that this really is separate from the administration and that we have students on the inside that are making sure it’s separate,” he added.

Still, Hirsch did note that there are some benefits to having the President’s backing. She mentioned that the Office of the President helped the researchers get an exemption from Title IX mandatory reporting, a federal law that requires faculty members to report all cases of sexual assault that they become aware of.

Hirsch also recognized that administrative compliance is necessary to make a real impact. “We need their support in order to make recommendations that are viable, useful and meaningful to the university,” she stated.

It certainly makes sense that those involved in SHIFT would try to distance themselves from the administration’s other misguided attempts to handle sexual assault like the arts option of last year’s Sexual

“I would not be comfortable talking about sex at 8 a.m. with Suzanne Goldberg.”

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WA L K O F S H A M U S

Respect Requirement and Dining’s Sexual Violence Prevention cake. SHIFT is, however, unique because it examines the larger institutional context that influences sexuality.

Hirsch and Khan also both have aspirations to write a book about the study. Khan said he hopes SHIFT will influence the way sexual violence is discussed at Columbia and on college campuses around the country. “We’re trying to push some of the literature into a more social and organizational understanding of how things like sexual violence happen,” he said.

But how normal is it for faculty-led research initiatives to be funded by the Office of the President?

In a typically evasive response, University spokes-

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man Robert Hornsby replied, “There are a number of University initiatives, including scholarly endeavors across our undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools, that have been launched with Presidential support. Recent examples range from individual projects like Eric Foner’s research seminar on Columbia’s history with slavery to the President’s Global Innovation Fund.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of positive change that the administration is funding SHIFT, whether their intent is good PR or promoting scholarship. Ryan said the source of funding shows that Columbia is responding to the reality of this issue on campus. “I think that creating SHIFT has been the best sign of forward progress that the university has made in terms of responding to the issue of sexual assault on Columbia’s campus,” he added.

Khan is optimistic as well, but stressed the importance of student involvement. “We’re working hard to enlist as many students as possible in this process,” Khan said. “Because ultimately the recommendations are not for just the administration, they’re for the community, and they’re for the students.”

It remains to be seen how successful this program will be. But for now, the fact that we’re shifting the conversation away from individuals and towards the cultural and institutional influences on sexual violence is a step in the right direction.w

Illustration by Kate Gerhardt

The Blue and White

HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM

Political Climate Taking stock of two divestment movements at Columbia

By Yasemin Akçagüner

W

hen the University announced in June that it was divesting from the private prison industry, the decision came as a pleasant surprise. For Columbia Prison Divest (CPD), the student activist group pushing the University to divest its approximately $10 million from private prisons, it had been an arduous, yet nonetheless swift, victory. A year and a half after CPD’s campaign began in the fall of 2013, they won.

The story is rather different for Columbia Divest for Climate Justice (CDCJ)—a student group that has been campaigning since 2012. CDCJ, which aims to get the University to divest from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies, has not only been campaigning for longer, but also has more people backing its cause. And yet, they have had no luck with their campaign so far. Why the contrast?

Money might be one factor. According to an email from Robert Hornsby, Assistant Vice President for Media Relations, “As of June 30, 2015 the University’s direct holdings in the top 200 fossil fuel

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companies was about $11 million, or 0.1 percent of the total endowment.” This would seem to put climate divestment in the same league as that of prison divestment: Columbia’s divestment from private prison companies, namely CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) and G4S (formerly Group 4 Securicor), represented around $10 million in shares from its direct holdings.

But that’s not the whole story. While Columbia only discloses its direct holdings, they make up merely 10 percent of the $9.2 billion endowment. No University material mentions the other 90 percent outright, but one can assume that it is in indirect holdings.

According to Iliana Salazar-Dodge, CC ’16, one of the main organizers with CDCJ, when the indirect holdings are taken into account, the entire investment in fossil fuels likely adds up to much more money than the $11 million figure. Most universities, she says, have approximately 3-6 percent of their entire endowment in fossil fuels. This could mean that Columbia could have invested around $400 million in fossil fuels when its indirect holdings are also taken into account. CDCJ, is insisting on divestment from both direct and indirect holdings, is going one step further than Prison Divest. Simply put, the stakes are higher with fossil fuel divestment. It’s a costlier decision to make.

Bureaucratic Deadlock In April of 2015, the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ASCRI), a division of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Finance and Information Technology, finally endorsed Prison

Illustration by Alexandra Warrick

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HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM statement released to Bwog, they complained of how ACSRI had not been transparent in their dealings with the group.

After rejecting CDCJ’s requests last year, ACSRI this semester announced its own proposal.

Titled “Stand Up for Science,” it calls for divestment from companies that fund climate denialism. But so aggressively asserting the existence of climate change, while arguably perpetuating it, seems like a case of cognitive dissonance. Salazar-Dodge thinks the proposal is an empty gesture. In her opinion, Stand Up for Science can’t even serve as a preliminary step for full divestment from fossil fuels.

New Strategies Divest’s proposal, but the process had been fraught with miscommunications and bureaucratic holdup.

Part of the problem is that the ACSRI membership turns over every year, which means that activist groups have to re-explain their cause to each new batch of committee members. For CPD, the bureaucratic deadlock meant seeking alternative ways of making their case.

“At the beginning of the campaign, the goal was really like, ‘We want President Bollinger to respond to us. He needs to take this to the Board of Trustees. They should be reaching out to us or at least responding to our attempts to engage with them,’” says Dunni Oduyemi, CC ’16 and one of the lead organizers for CPD, “And when that wasn’t happening, it was kind of a matter of being disruptive and not necessarily antagonistic, but just wanting to hold them accountable in public spaces.”

Using carefully planned direct actions and civil disobedience (silent protests outside President Bollinger’s classroom and staged sit-ins at Low Library), CPD engaged the administration informally, successfully combining this strategy with formal engagement through the process with the ACSRI and presentations for professors. But with higher stakes and more consequential demands, CDCJ has to tread carefully.

ACSRI rejected CDCJ’s bid back in May of 2014, claiming in their response that they rejected CDCJ’s “proposal” because it did not meet the criteria for divestment. But CDCJ members have a different story: all say that they had simply delivered a presentation to ACSRI explaining their position, but not a physical proposal to be voted upon. In an angry

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As CDCJ’s process with ACSRI remains fruitless, CPD provides a model for how CDCJ might proceed, while remaining sensitive to the differences in the campaigns. Oduyemi says that while she and many other CPD members are personally supportive of CDCJ, they don’t have plans to officially collaborate. But the strategies employed by CDCJ this year have shown evidence of some inspiration.

CDCJ has begun to explore a new approach: civil disobedience. In a protest at Low Steps on October 14, staged as Trustees discussed fossil fuel divestment at a meeting, CDCJ had students sign a civil disobedience pledge. As of October 23, 199 students have signed, pledging to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience unless Columbia commits to divestment from the top 200 coal, oil and gas companies.

The Low Steps protest, part of a national climate change day of action, was marked with NYPD presence. Activists were quick to attribute the cops to the University, but when I spoke to Jim McShane, head of Public Safety, at the protest, about why the police were on campus, he asked me the same question back. “When people see police on our campus they assume it has got something to do with us.”

McShane said. “They were on our campus and I asked them to leave. I asked them to leave three times.”

As inappropriate as the police presence was to the scale of the protest, it likely gave CDCJ a boost: 30 officers surrounding as many students is a powerful image, especially when Black Lives Matter activism has been so prevalent on campus. This was a point made by an editorial in Spectator the next day, which denounced the administration for this move—

The Blue and White

HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM even if, as McShane insisted, they weren’t responsible for it. It’s the sort of strategy that has worked well for campus activist causes like No Red Tape (when PrezBo removed their mattresses from outside his house) and Potluck’s Black Lives Matter banner, ostensibly removed from their house by the administration for reasons of fire safety. Both incidents resulted in increased rallying around those causes, and served to make the administration look tone-deaf and overtly PR-concerned. That could serve CDCJ well in getting more people to rally around its cause— though whether the Trustees will like the message is another question.

Personalizing the Narrative A main strength of CPD was in widening their conversation to center not just around the excesses of the American prison industrial complex, but to link their fight to a larger fight for social justice.

A quote from Oduyemi in CPD’s press release announcing Columbia’s decision to divest from the private prison industry clearly stated: “We targeted the university’s investments in two private prison companies, but we hope that private prison divestment campaigns ... can help us start working towards divesting from the idea that prisons equal justice, which we believe to be fundamentally racist.”

Now, CDCJ is making the argument that the impact of climate divest is the heaviest on communities Columbia seeks to incorporate into its student body by way of affirmative action. The real hypocrisy, says Salazar-Dodge, is that while “a lot of the students that they’re trying to get to be at Columbia are those who have those less privileged backgrounds,” Columbia’s investment is contributing to climate change, which “disproportionately impacts low income people of color, especially females, around the world and they’re the people that are the most impacted by climate change and the ones that least contributed to the creation of climate change.”

“I’m a low-income, Mexican, immigrant female. I’m here on behalf of my community and on behalf of students like me who are not here on this campus. And we’re here because Columbia wants diverse students. So the real hypocrisy is that they’re promoting our well being at this institution while profiting off the devastation of our communities, wherever they may be,” Salazar-Dodge says.

This claim to social justice might be more of

November 2015

a stretch for the Trustees. Given Columbia’s institutional history and relationship with the community, divestment from private prisons was a gesture of historical atonement. For Columbia—with a president famous for his pro-affirmative action stance—these issues strike a stronger chord than scientific arguments. CDCJ is smart to personalize the narrative and steer the conversation towards issues of gender and race.

CDCJ’s candlelight vigil on October 29 offers a glimpse of how they hope to do that. Titled ‘Grief and Loss in the Era of Climate Change,’ the event description invites “anybody who has a personal stake in fighting for climate justice” to “share their stories with the larger group.” The focus on sharing stories recalls No Red Tape’s sharing of survivors’ stories at its rallies, speak-outs and days of action.

The event also positions climate change as a shared personal tragedy: for example, last year vigils were held on Low for the school shooting in Peshawar, the Chapel Hill shooting, and the Nepal earthquake.

Those occasions were all marked by appeals to the administration to reach out to students who were affected. Ignoring students’ demands for divestment might be a little harder in the face of public outpourings of grief and loss.

As CDCJ looks to escalate its action in the months leading up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, the group has to walk a tightrope of confronting the ACSRI and the Trustees without antagonizing them. Asking that Columbia take the lead in divesting fully from fossil fuels, as they were the first University to divest from private prisons, is a lot to ask, but it’s not unreasonable. If CDCJ can make a strong moral appeal to the Trustees, with the support of other activist groups like CPD, they might have a shot.w

Illustrations by Alexandra Warrick

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Who Let the Dogs Out? Words and Illustrations by Rachel Chin In an ongoing series that has included campus cats and campus humans, The Blue and White now brings you a guide to campus dogs. Cut out these descriptions and photos and wander campus, panting in search of their warmth and affection.

LOSTINE, THE QUEEN OF WIEN Owner: Mae Graham, CC ’18 Dorm: Wien Hall Breed: American Eskimo dog Spotted: Longboarding in Riverside Claim to fame: Snapchat campus story Spring ’14 Age: 1 This beautiful squish nugget commands the Wien courtyard grass with noble might and dignity, gracefully acquiescing to requests to pet her imperially floofy head. When Lostine moved onto campus late last spring as Graham’s emotional support dog, she was about the size of a hand. A year later, Lostine’s puppylike energy is balanced by a level of composure and self-control not commonly seen in the college-bound. According to Graham, Lostine is “super well-behaved.” Plus, “It’s nice to come home to loving,” Graham explains. Lostine’s loving licks quickly turned into an attempt to eat my fingers.

PREZDOGS: ARTHUR AND LUCY Owner: Lee Bollinger and his Wife Dorm: The President’s Mansion Breed: Golden Labradors Age: 6 years??

Adopted??? Cloned from Prezhair??? Puppy mill??

Spotted: Wien residents report spotting the dogs frolicking in Prezbo’s garden Aside from a brief appearance at a Fireside chat in 2009, these elusive celebrities have been spotted since then as infrequently as Prezbo’s wife. In 2011, a thin, haggard-looking Arthur was photographed eating scraps off the ground during a Community Impact volunteer dinner, leading to a flurry of speculation of whether the dogs’ reclusiveness was as self-imposed as previously reported. According to a Presidential dog walker, who wishes to remain anonymous, Arthur is also given to eating his own feces. Show us the dogs, Prezbo!!!!

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The Blue and White

MAZE Owner: Aaron Hukari, Carman Residence Hall Director Dorm: Carman Hall Breed: Puggle (Pug/Beagle) Age: Advanced Adopted: Animal Haven in SoHo Spotted: on Amsterdam in the mornings Maze, who moved in last February, is known as “the Carman dog.” True to this name, says his owner, he now has “five hundred and seventy-six friends.” For Carman residents, Maze’s descents from the 13th floor likely represent the first time in Carman history that an elevator experience could be a positive one.

According to Hukari, Maze has perfected a level of chill that most of us can only aspire to. His slower pace makes the middle-aged puggle “the perfect dog for a residence hall,” says Hukari. It was likely Maze’s mellow disposition that compelled him to a fit of impassioned tail wagging and barking when I knocked on the door. Maze spends his alone-time during the day “skittering,” according to his downstairs neighbor.

AVON BARKSDALE ROBERTS Owner: Associate Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences SK Roberts and Dr. Greer, Assistant Professor of Political Science (at Fordham University) Dorm: Schapiro Hall Breed: Beagle Bark style: ROOROO / ROO/ AROOROOROOROOROOROO Moved in: this October Adopted from: ASPCA Barksdale harbors no connections to fictional drug kingpins: his name comes from his habit of endless barking, whether he’s announcing himself or protesting his owners’ leaving the house.

They insist he is silent while they’re gone, but what does anyone know of the secret life of Barksdale? A hunting dog by breed, he’s never so much on a walk as he is tracking, often several trails at once. He wanders the wilds of Riverside in perennial quest— searching. Waiting. Barking.

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U N I N H I B I T E D , R O B U S T, A N D W I D E - O P E N

Uncomfortable Conversations How a language of safety impacts speech on campus

By Hallie Nell Swanson hangs like a “Damocles sword over everyone’s head.”

Strange Bedfellows

T

his summer, a series of articles released in mainstream media outlets attacked college students for their allegedly coddled, fragile little egos. Kids these days, went the dominant narrative, want to wrap themselves up in safe spaces and trigger warnings to avoid ever having to deal with life’s realities.

From The Atlantic to The New York Times, pundits raised concerns that students’ demands to feel safe inhibit freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus.

But these are two different, legally independent, things: freedom of speech refers to individuals’ speech protected by the First Amendment; academic freedom to faculty’s independence in terms of who they grant tenure, what material they teach, and how classes are taught.

Despite some controversy over an op-ed in the Spectator by the Multicultural Academic Advisory Board suggesting that Core preceptors could benefit from compulsory training sessions to make students of certain identities feel safe, the academic sphere by the accounts of professors has not been the site of any official censorship. But as one adjunct in the Humanities put it, given the job security of contingent faculty like him, the threat of such an episode

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Recent subjects of calls for speech to be stopped on campus on the grounds of safety are two seemingly different groups: the Marching Band (CUMB) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

In Spring 2014, SJP put up a banner in a space on Barnard Hall which they had been approved to use. The banner read “Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine” and included a borderless map of Israel and Palestine. Seffi Kogen, GS/JTS ’14 and former president of Hillel, wrote a Facebook post describing how the banner stopped him from thinking of Barnard as his “second home” and describing his peers’ “emotions that ranged from annoyed to distraught.” He urged alumni and current students to email Debora Spar to pressure the administration to take it down, and in the comments, students shared the names, emails and numbers of the relevant administrators. In response to the hundreds of complaints, the banner was taken down the following morning.

In another case, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests near campus in December 2014, administrators within the Office of Student Engagement held a town hall to discuss student grievances. One complaint was that Orgo Night would exacerbate black and brown students’ feelings of unsafety at this time. In response, former interim Dean of Undergraduate Student Life Todd SmithBergollo and former Dean of Advising Monique Rinere (both have since left Columbia) met with the marching band to encourage them to cancel the event. CUMB refused and the show went on, though Barnard’s administration got Public Safety to stop the band from its custom of performing in Barnard Quad afterwards. Since that imbroglio, Admissions no longer refers, or allows students to refer, to Orgo Night as a Columbia tradition in any Admissions communications.

Facilitators at Under1Roof, which is coordinated by students and administrators in Office

The Blue and White

U N I N H I B I T E D , R O B U S T, A N D W I D E - O P E N of Multicultural Affairs, presented a scenario this NSOP in which Orgo Night was referred to as “a semesterly comedy routine and campus ‘tradition,’ [in which] a student organization consistently mocks issues surrounding race, gender, queerness, and other identities, marginalizing many members of the community.”

In both cases, the opponents’ feeling of unsafeness was the only appeal they needed to make. The question of whether “stand for Palestine” is antiSemitic, or whether Orgo Night’s anticipated speech would be racist, was irrelevant. In a Spectator op-ed that ended “Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” Dunni Oduyemi, CC ’16, and Tracey Wang, CC ’15, said administrators “should have cancelled [Orgo Night] outright.” Calling it “literally the creation of an unsafe space,” they concluded that “our safety is not up for negotiation.” Hillel’s statement on the banner incident asserted that banners that “make many students on campus feel unsafe” are “problematic.”

Kogen wrote an op-ed stating he was “proud” of “Barnard’s decision, choosing to value its students’ feelings of security and well-being above one group’s attempt to force a political statement.” Safety trumps free speech.

A Need for Safety The discourse of safety that underpins these incidents, says a professor who preferred to remain anonymous, is part of a “larger cultural phenomenon” that is “endemic to our culture at the moment.”

She put parents calling faculty in the same category: “When I was a student the idea of my parents to call the faculty member to claim that my child had not been treated properly ... it would have taken a pretty extreme incident, let’s put it that way.”

The university, she says, is part of a consensus that “everybody now has an identity that can be injured,” making administrations “vulnerable” to claims by “certain—not all—groups.” While keen to point out that the examples of Hillel and Aryeh, and the Black Lives Matter activists who protested Orgo Night, are “doing very different kinds of work,” she stressed that the logic used by both groups emerges from the same “political formation.”

In this formation, she says, the identities we bring to the classroom must not just be “respected,” but “protected.” When political views become fused with a sacred, ostensibly inviolable identity, expres-

November 2015

sions of identity-based unsafeness can stand in for a dispute with the content of speech.

This discourse is not limited to disputes between student groups representing different identities, but increasingly extends to the classroom. “I think trigger warnings are precisely the articulation of a politics that comes from an identity,” says the professor. In April 2015, this was eloquently expressed in the op-ed by the OMA’s Multicultural Academic and Advisory Board, titled “Our Identities Matter in Core Classrooms.” “Students need to feel safe in the classroom,” wrote the board, “and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities.”

Dangerous Spaces Yet the idea that “students need to feel safe in the classroom” strikes many professors as repugnant to the purpose of teaching. While stressing that he works over “months” to make his classrooms places “where people could express themselves” (“‘This is a safe space’ is not just something you can write on a syllabus,” he says. “That’s ridiculous”), Professor Manan Ahmed rejects the idea that everyone should feel comfortable in his class. “It’s not a warm bath,” he says. The adjunct goes further: “If we just talked about the safest things in the world, like milk and biscuits and yogurt, then it would just be totally pointless, and they shouldn’t even come to college.

They should leave.”

“Fuck that,” says Anand Venkatkrishnan, GSAS ’15, who taught classes in his time at Columbia and campaigned with the Graduate Student Union, when I float the oft-uttered maxim that the classroom should be uncomfortable, or feel unsafe. He says it’s

Illustrations by Claire Chen

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UNINHIBITED, ROBUST AND, WIDE-OPEN

precisely because life is dangerous that the classroom should be safe.

But as the anonymous professor points out, the current crop of professors feels otherwise about how education should engage with the world. “I don’t think it’s just that we’re old and insane,” she says.

“It’s a generational divide that comes out of a very different understanding of both what politics and intellectual life should be.”

“Good god, it so upsets me,” says Todd Gitlin, a professor in the Journalism School. “How are people going to learn what the world is like? Isn’t this a question that one settles when one is twelve years old? ‘I don’t want to know.’ Yeah, there are a lot of things I’d like not to know. But grow up.” College should prepare you for the dangers of life, he says, not protect you.

“Many of us would think that’s what we’re here for, to induce people to think in new ways about things,” says Bruce Robbins, a professor in the English department, who directed a film, Some of My Best Friends are Zionists, in 2014. For the film, he interviewed playwright Tony Kushner, who was at Columbia as an undergrad. Kushner told of how in his CC class, the teacher got into a conversation that was critical of Israel.

“He said he was horrified,” says Robbins. “He wrote an angry letter and so on. Probably in today’s climate he might have gone to some dean or tried to get his instructor in trouble.” But in fact, says Robbins, “It was the beginning of critical thought for him.” That’s why, says the anonymous professor, it’s important to ask what one means by feeling unsafe.

“Is it really a realistic assessment of the situation, or it something you might want to critically rethink?”

No One Can Challenge Your Feelings But in the prevailing discourse, feelings can’t

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be argued with. “My mother says no one can argue with your feelings,” says Robbins. “She probably means that in a slightly different way,” he says, but the issue is that the only way to respond to somebody else’s feelings are to agree, or to appeal to your own.

“I worry about feeling as something that stops argument, that makes it impossible to continue speaking,” he says. “I don’t think anyone can say that my feelings are sacred.”

When “having a disagreement” that “challenges what you were brought up to believe is the right thing” becomes equated with making students feel unsafe, says the anonymous professor, “the whole point of a liberal arts education collapses under the weight of that accusation.”

“It’s true that no one can challenge your feelings,” she says, but “it’s also true that feelings don’t come naturally, that we learn to have certain affective responses to certain kinds of things. Even one’s affective responses—panic, fear, feeling unsafe, they didn’t come out of nowhere. They’re produced. That’s the truth for all of us, in a complicated way.” She gives the example of national lobbying groups dedicated to eliminating pro-Palestine speech on campus. Such groups have periodically organized online petitions against Columbia faculty. (In a recent report by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Columbia/ Barnard tied with UCLA for the highest number of instances of “accusations of antisemitism used to deter advocacy for Palestinian rights,” thanks in part to national groups like the David Project and Canary Project.)

While trigger warnings can also be seen, like these organizations, to produce feelings of fear—the idea that trauma is just around the corner—the anonymous professor is also keen to note that the call for trigger warnings comes more from students, and does not have national lobbying behind it. But that, she suggests, influences which groups find the most success with using the language of safety and trauma.

The adjunct calls it a “rhetorical jackpot.”

Administrations, says the anonymous professor, are “sensitive to that larger phenomenon” of a language of safety, and the administration themselves uses it all the time. The problem, she says, is that while every group can use this language, some find more success with it than others. “Only certain groups do we really worry about, or listen to, or feel like there needs to be an immediate response. And that has to do with lots of things, but one of them is

Illustration by Claire Chen

The Blue and White

U N I N H I B I T E D , R O B U S T, A N D W I D E - O P E N privilege—and donor money.”

This is not to say that this is all about cynical lobbying. The professor points out that while an appeal to safety may work as strategy, it is also “genuine. It’s become a language and a way which one imagines one’s own experience.” Not only can any group speak the language of marginalization, it’s also perfectly possible that students feel “unsafe,” even when they are in positions that do not experience the same structural discrimination.

Whose Safety?

The call for safe spaces or trigger warnings is often associated with, and leveraged to protect, historically marginalized people: women, people of color, and queer and trans people. But in the opinion of Robbins, “the rhetoric has turned out to be dangerously flexible.”

When Robbins has encountered free speech issues on campus, he says, it has been “very much within the same issues as Kushner.”

“Students with a very very strong sense of entitlement to be only told things which are similar to what they have been told” will “assume that they are victims of racism.” Racism, he says, is a term that is given the importance it’s given “partly for other reasons and other people, and frankly better reasons.” Those aren’t the people using it.

Everyone interviewed for this article with anecdotes about students objecting to class content on the grounds of safety and identity were representing not those positions but positions Ahmed calls “majoritarian”: political science majors, for example, who resist his reading in CC of the European Enlightenment texts as “participating in, framing and allowing for colonial violence to come into being,” he says.

Prospective philosophy majors will say, “I feel marginalized in this class because everyone is going on and on about colonialism and I don’t care,” he recalls.

Allan Silver, Professor Emeritus and a special lecturer in the Sociology department, says conservative students have come to him: “They tell me they feel aggressed against, they feel suppressed. I’ve had sincere Christians tell me that they feel persecuted.

That’s outrageous.”

Venkatkrishnan calls this phenomenon a “question of application”: we simply need to be able to distinguish between true and false allegations of marginalization, by analyzing the structural privilege that groups hold, for example. But such a move would require subverting the whole rhetoric of safety, which takes no account of truth whatsoever. An appeal to safety thus has the quality of shutting down speech.

Silver calls this “the tyranny of the subjective.”

Speaking Out There’s another level too: criticisms of the logic of safety are also vulnerable to it. The adjunct would never publicly declare that he has no desire for his class to be a safe space, lest he be charged with making students feel unsafe as a result. That could be fatal. As Robbins put it, when unprotected adjuncts make up 70 percent of the national university workforce, “for people who do most of the work in the universities in this country, academic freedom is an illusion.”

The adjunct makes the point that contingent faculty like him feel they lack the institutional protection to express their frustration with the prevailing discourse of safety. Even tenured professors aren’t exempted: Robbins tells me his colleagues have told him not to talk to me; the anonymous professor is anonymous so as not to “wade into more controversy.” In these circumstances, says the adjunct, it’s up to students to speak out.

According to the anonymous professor, beyond debates on “the lines of whether it’s being misappropriated by people who are privileged from people who aren’t,” this discourse of safety requires a “more rigorous and critical interrogation.” It’s not that only certain groups should use it; it’s not that the administration needs to listen to it less selectively. Clearly, there are problems inherent in this way of understanding the world, where feeling is the only metric.

As the anonymous professor put it, recourse to safety is “becoming the way out of all sorts of conversations.” Not just conversations, but critical arguments. And we need to have arguments.w

“Prospective philosophy majors will say, ‘I feel marginalized in this class because everyone is going on and on about colonialism and I don’t care.’”

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M easure

for

The Chain of Day and Night

Ars Poetica

God has ignited the fire showing him nothing – in every direction around him is space and only space in his winding heart he thinks amazed that the splendor of eternity’s beginning has been snuffed already

I somehow manage to filter out all the inconsequential events in my life and call the rest “art.” I am the poet-in-residence on this plane.

Wherever you are, you live there, unless you are dead. For some reason “dying” doesn’t work like “sleeping” even though they are the same. My grandfather cannot come to the phone because he is adead. I put on weight and call it art. If I did the things I say I did in my poetry, it would not be poetry. That’s because it would be “performance art.” With work, I, too, can be pop music.

Some art jumps out of my hand and rolls around on the floor. I shout “hell no, I won’t go” but I have somewhere to be after this. I get a lot of head when I am in the shower.

Is poetry like photography where you get a bunch, pick a few to eat, and digest them with your name on them? It’s up to other people to label my feelings, I don’t do that.

Far away man has drawn back in surprise a flame revealing itself to him but every direction is space and only space in this way, imagination has deceived him the beginning, in one moment, has become the end Nothingness is raging against this reflection a breath, another, has made its shift reality’s mirror has shattered so now anyone exclaims “what is this? what is that?” space and only space, space and only space —Miraji (1912-1949), Silsila-e roz o shab, translated from the Urdu by Meghan Hartman

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M easure

—Max Binder

The Blue and White

V E R I LY V E R I TA S

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS In which our hero takes the long walk to Schermerhorn Death was nigh. There was no other answer.

What was this pitiful ordeal? Could it be nicotine withdrawal? Perhaps the first pangs of his transition into some sort of mythical creature­—vampire? Werewolf?

No, not likely. Sucking on the end of an unlit cigarette, V.V. pondered prostrate on Low Steps.

Swarms of ordinary people rushed around him, some with backpacks, some with name tags, some with cameras; all hideously normal.

“This is reality,” he droned mentally.

This piercing sun, the gum on the sole of my shoe, the smell of sweet potato and dog crap wafting through the air, this is life. As his eyes fluttered delicately to a close, he took a mighty gulp of the putrid air and sighed.

Respite was brief.

He heard piercing sirens ricocheting through campus from Amsterdam. The ambulances, whose desperate calls accented every word of his professors’ lectures and every student’s quip across the quad, bore the burden of life and death, herding the sick and weary to the attentive care of the doctors and nurses at the hospital. V.V. imagined it might feel nice to be truly infirm, lying on a cot in the back of a moving vehicle. The coarse cotton sheets would be warm and clean. V.V. longed for the men in white coats to take him away. An extralegal joyride to sweet, sweet morphine.

Just as he reached the apex of a blissful fantasy about being carted away from mediocrity in the majestic arms of a handsome EMT feeling his heart through a stethoscope, a terrifying specimen of the human species, swaddled in athletic gear and fresh-

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faced to the point of impropriety, threw him a smile and raised her eyebrows in a gesture of comradeship.

Before he could look away, her piercing, white teeth caught the glint of the sun and incised his eyeballs with a burst of UV rays. A gust of wind rushed through her ponytail and picked up a hairball that landed, obtrusively, on V.V.’s trouser leg. As if he were in desperate need of an exorcism, she launched upon V.V. an avalanche of unsolicited advice, support, and anecdotes about the cool class she’s taking and her roommate’s love life and how much she misses their mom and how it seems like it will be an early winter.

“I don’t care!” V.V. screamed. “I don’t know who you are!” As the girl’s face transmogrified from eager to crestfallen, V.V. grabbed his satchel and his lucky umbrella and made a mad dash for Schermerhorn.

V.V. arrived at the ’Horn just in time for the in-between class rush. A stream of backpack-bearing drones burst from the circa 19th century doors and descended down upon him. Oh, Mc. Kim, Mead, and White! he eulogized. You could never have envisioned a future where Division I athletes and massive IVF babies would be barreling through their quaint wooden doors every half second for eternity. Bracing himself for the physical assault of dozens of ravenous students beating him from every side with their bags and limbs, he attempted to channel Moses’s strength as he parted the Red Sea. But he had no staff. At least, not any wooden ones. V.V., tossed asunder, uttered a prayer, and went in, permanently altered from his brush with humanity in the form of the nearest bimbo in leggings.w

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COMMUNITY [SIC]

A House Divided Two years on, checking up with Special Interest Community House

By Sean Augustine-Obi

D

epending on who you ask, the housing arrangements known as Special Interest Communities, or SICs, have different reputations. For first-years facing the potential doom of living in a Wien double, they’re a way out. Spectator columnists have cited them as a panacea for students’ feelings of isolation on campus, in the same vein as residential colleges at Harvard or Yale. And budding conspiracy theorists have speculated that SICs are universitybacked attempts to replace Greek life. But a look around a typical floor lounge on a typical night at SIC House—where ADI House, Manhattan House, Creative Commons, and Wellness House call home— reveals something much like a regular dorm, its residents seemingly having opted into more of a marriage of convenience than a model of convivial cohabitation.

Though SICs have existed for several years, the notion of a building comprised solely of them is a more recent development. In Fall 2011, in response to rising undergraduate enrollment, the university converted a brownstone on 113th Street called the Convent into a dorm with 78 beds for SICs. Instead of entering the housing lottery, students would apply to form a community with the expectation that they’d foster its well-being through events and collaboration.

students the feel of a frat house without the potential controversies, and putting to rest the perennial dialogue about lack of community on campus. Thendean of Student Affairs Terry Martinez was particularly keen on the SICs idea, according to reports which say she pushed it through.

Five groups were chosen to live in the house, but not without controversy. Given the perceived goals of the project, it was counterintuitive to reject applications from large organizations with pre-existing social scenes like CIRCA, and completely close off applications from well-behaved frats who had missed the cut for the three vacated brownstones earlier in the year. Phi Gamma Delta, for example, had solid philanthropy and community service credentials, and no major disciplinary violations in past years—a far cry from the drug bust. “This makes absolutely no sense,” said a well-received comment (one of 103) on the Bwog post announcing the decisions.

However, as the membership and culture of the house has taken shape, the idea that it might once have been intended as a social hub has been forgotten. Now, the community has different, more inwardlooking aims.

Unconventional Housing

Two years on, the communities in SIC House have a muted presence on campus. “When you mention SICs, no one really knows we exist,” said Wellness House coordinator Steffany Moreno, CC ’17. It’s no EC. This lack of recognizability in part led to a 2014 Spectator editorial calling for SIC vitality to be more rigorously assessed. It argued that SICs have the potential to be “instrumental parts” of the community beyond their residents, but should be held accountable for how their space is used, like Greek organizations. Current guidelines for SICs are significantly less stringent than those for fraternities, and only mildly stricter than those of, say, the LLC: the SICs in SIC House are required to register

While the brownstone presented a practical solution to Columbia’s space woes, it also served well for public relations. Two years prior, a drug bust thrust three fraternities into the international spotlight and led to their expulsion from their houses. By using the Convent to house SICs, administrators could kill two birds with one stone: providing

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Strange Bedfellows

The Blue & White

COMMUNITY [SIC] and host three events a semester, attend a two-day orientation, recruit enough members, and draft and abide by set community standards to maintain their standing.

But asking SICs to be held to the same standard as Greek chapters is a false equivalence. The editorial ignores that the latter enjoy the backing of national organizations, collect membership dues, and have been an established part of the campus social scene for decades. SIC House, meanwhile, is still in its infancy, and its budget reflects that. And while both SICs and Greek houses have a similar number of occupants (about 10-15), Greek organizations benefit from counting non-residents among their membership whereas the number of members per SIC stops at the number of beds available.

With this in mind, it’s hard to imagine an SIC House event getting enough attendance to take campus by storm. But why would it need to? With Greek membership at 15 percent and continuously growing, it seems that students interested in the social aspects of fraternities and sororities already have communities to fill that niche. According to many SIC House residents, the SICs’ strength lies in how they serve, and strengthen, their own small communities, rather than campus at large.

To Moreno, Wellness House is simply a family that supports each other—like the ideal form of a Greek organization, without all the pledging rituals to get there. Fitting the needs of its constituency, Wellness House shunned large parties, instead opting to host wellness-themed study breaks alongside Metta House and Active Minds. “We wanted to create an environment where we could have an open and honest conversation about wellness,” she says.

“That’s really all it is.” And that’s hard to do in a frat basement on a Friday night.

For ADI House manager Evan Tarrh, CC ’17, the SIC space also functions as a hub of creativity. “It’s motivating to be surrounded by people that share your interests,” he says.

In October, Tarrh organized a House Hack Week where members spent a few hours each day to

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develop programs that would benefit life in the house.

Hostel Conditions?

Though most of the communities in SIC House have thrived, the project has not been without its setbacks. ADI House expanded to the first floor of the building, only to reverse the decision a year later in favor of keeping all their members in the same space.

Pre-Health House, which resided on the second floor from 2013 to 2015, was disbanded in April after being unable to fill their beds. Rumors abound that other SICs, too, have struggled to get enough members to sustain themselves.

With Pre-Health House gone, this summer the administration decided to fill the first two floors with transfer students.

These transfers aren’t assigned to any one community, though Moreno and Tarrh said they’re welcome to attend SIC events.

Since transfers here tend to hang out mostly with one another anyway, perhaps putting them all together to create a kind of transfer-interest microcommunity makes sense. But the move does call into question the sustainability of the SIC model.

While it’s true that the number of applications to each SIC fluctuates each year—meaning Pre-Health House could have just had a rough year—the transfer influx seems to suggest that not enough students are interested in forming new SICs to justify expansion of the model.

Where does that leave SIC House? Perhaps it’s just the wrong solution to a very real problem. The lack of “community” in a typical collegiate sense is an issue bemoaned by students and administrators alike.

But as the SIC House adventure demonstrates, often administrative goals don’t line up with what students on the ground actually want. Where social clubs saw an analogue to a fraternity house, administrators saw a way to curtail frats’ monopoly on brownstones.

Where administrators saw an opportunity to program community development, the students who would eventually reside in the house merely wanted an environment that felt like home. And that’s just what it is—for now.w

Illustrations by Sarah Gale

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

‘One Shot, They’re Dead’ A conversation with Thomas Roma

By Virginia Fu Thomas Roma is a photographer and proud Brooklyn native. He has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and his work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York City. At Columbia, he teaches both undergraduate and graduate photography classes and serves as the Director of the Photography Department, which he founded. Roma’s CULPA reviews promise that “you will leave the class at least once crying,” and encourage you to take his class, but only if you are prepared to join a cult of personality or “want to do something meaning ful with your life.”

Thomas Roma: Were you assigned this interview or did you want to do the interview?

The Blue and White: I was assigned and I also want to do the interview.

TR: Is [The Blue and White] online or do you have a tree-destroying print and ink issue?

B&W: We kill trees to print our issues.

TR: I hope you shoot them first.

B&W: We generally do.

TR: Good. One shot—they’re dead.

B&W: You’ve published 14 books of photography. What was your favorite project that you’ve done?

TR: Favorite is a difficult word. I’ll answer the question instead of giving you a 15 minute lecture on the word. In 2014, I published a book with my son, Giancarlo—he was CC ’13—called The Waters of Our Time.

B&W: What did you like about doing the project?

TR: Again the word “like.” I’ll tell you why it was satisfying. The form of the book is an homage to a book that was published in 1955 by a great writer

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named Langston Hughes and a great photographer named Roy de Carava. The book is a masterpiece. It’s called The Sweet Flypaper of Life and it’s not as highly regarded as it should be. In it, there’s a story in the voice of an old woman recalling her life and making a decision that she had to keep living because there was more for her to do. In our book, my son wrote in the voice of an old woman recalling her life and came to the conclusion that we’re all going to be swept up in the waters of our time. It’s the opposite but the two can be true at the same time. It’s about internalizing a contradiction, that life is worth living, but we don’t have much to say about it. The picture on the cover was from the first roll of film I ever shot. This physically tiny book encompasses my entire life in photography.

There’s one other funny thing I feel like mentioning because your iPhone is here. Roy deCarava was upset by the book. He was a Guggenheim Fellow which was a huge accomplishment, and he wanted his book to be a real book of photographs with these big pictures but the only thing he could get published was this little thing— many photographers want big coffee table books. If you look at that book you’ll see that most of them are no bigger than the screen on an iPhone. But what happened in the world of contemporary photography is people are used to seeing small pictures on their phone. So in a way, this thing that’s old is very new and people don’t

The Blue & White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N have the time to buy big photo books. We used for publicity a picture of the book being held in one hand.

So there, it’s bigger than an Apple thing.

B&W: Do you own an iPhone?

TR: My phone is not only not a smartphone, but I think mine is particularly stupid. I own it out of great sympathy for it. I take care of it. I just got this one. My last one was even dumber. My last one, to do an “s” you had to hit it four times. It’s maddening. Especially when you’re angry. A lot of times when I’m texting, I’m furious.

B&W: Who do you text angrily?

TR: Usually it’s a note to self.

B&W: How did you become a photographer?

TR: This is an interesting thing and don’t hate me for saying this, but I never became one. I stayed the same person. But I knew I wanted to photograph—this is a story I’ve told so many times, and always slightly differently. I got into a car accident and suffered a brain injury. I was confined to a chair. I had a blood clot. This was 1969. I just couldn’t watch television.

Reading made me sleepy. Photographing was all right. My older brother came to visit me and he had a camera. I had never seen a 35 mm camera in person.

From then on it was like slipping on a banana peel. It was like I was in the hands of fate. So I left Wall Street when my family was on very solid financial ground and I could take the time. I moved out of my mother’s home. I thought, let’s try not having to work 80 hours a week.

I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but I have to have surgery in the next couple months because of the brain injury, all those years ago. I have nerve damage that has finally gone too far which damaged my right eye. Right now I’m looking at you and I see double.

My right eye doesn’t track my left eye anymore. When I photograph I close one eye and everything is fine.

But it’s exhausting.

Part of why I sound the way I do is brain damage. I slur my words. Some people are charmed by it.

It’s the deaf, mostly, who are charmed by it.

But I left Wall Street and made a commitment. I left with tears in my eyes. I was treated well there. I was respected.

I was valued for exactly what I was capable of doing.

That’s a hard thing to walk away from. But it was my time to do it. [at this point, we switched rooms] You can have the nice chair. I’m used to suffering.

B&W: Do you suffer for your art?

TR: I was being glib. I’ve had a charmed life. I enjoy my life. I absolutely do not suffer.

“In Italy, the parent will say to the child, ‘Buon divertimento.’

‘Good diverting yourself.’

From what?

From your own mortality?

Well art does not divert you.”

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B&W: Do your students suffer for their art?

TR: That’s possible. To be serious about it for a minute, Columbia is a competitive environment. People had to compete just to attend Columbia. The students here, I’m talking about all four undergraduate schools and the graduate schools, everybody has worked hard just to be able to take the class. I don’t take that for granted. I have an enormous amount of respect for my students. You go to the library at one in the morning—people work hard around here. So it’s almost like there’s nothing I can do about it. They are going to suffer. They’re the ones who are accustomed to suffering and thinking there’s a competition, even when there’s not.

B&W: Is there not a competition?

TR: The work of art making is personal. The goodness—the usefulness of a work of art—starts with it being useful to the artist. So, someone else—a professor or a critic—coming along and saying something is

Illustrations by Zane Bhansali

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N not useful is moot. It has nothing to do with anything.

B&W: So according to the Tumblr—do you know what Tumblr is?

TR: I don’t really know. But I think you’re going to say this website—what is it? “Shit my photo teacher says.”

I’ve never seen it. I’ve never laid eyes on it. I was told about it. And I’ve been told there are direct quotes that I couldn’t possibly have said and I’ll tell you why. There are words that I would never use. I have an intense relationship to words.

There are words that being given back that I know I could never utter— and there are a lot of words like this by the way. But in spirit it’s probably very accurate. I know I didn’t say it but I support people saying I said it.

Times have changed. There were things I would say and do for effect that no longer work.

There are things that people appreciated then that people would never appreciate now. I’ve been teaching full time since 1982 and I must change with the world. I do try to adapt.

B&W: What would you say is “the role of the photographer in contemporary society?”

TR: Let me tell you what I do. I photograph as often as possible and then when I take a picture it means I have to develop film. And that takes a lot of time and commitment. My darkroom is on the third floor of my home and the chemistry is very heavy. I have to carry everything up. Everything has to go up and and then it goes down the drain.

I would say I was probably never a practicing contemporary photographer. By the time I started, even the lens I used in 1971 was made before World War II when there were great advances in optics. I was never up to date.

“The work of art making is personal. The goodness —the usefulness of a work of art— starts with it being useful to the artist.”

B&W: You’ve said it’s more satisfying to teach here than at an art school. What’s the difference?

TR: Here’s the difference. The expectation of having a life in art—it does wear on me sometimes. I worry that students have an unreasonable expectation. I worry that faculty and administration might not be clear enough about how difficult it’s going to be.

People talk a lot about tuition. I come from a family that did not have extra money, but the money is the least of it. As an undergraduate you’re spending four years of your life. You’re not going to get those years back. Money—you could win the lottery, you could have a rich relative die, you could find a suitcase on the train. There’s no finding those four years again.

I founded the program and I insisted there would not be a photography major. So because of that I could breathe in my classes. I look out at my students and see people who are engineers, philosophy majors, econ majors—great, the econ majors are great—their eyes are open.

B&W: Do you have any advice for the aspiring artist?

TR: We make art for others. I don’t consume my own output. I look at other people’s photographs, I read other people’s novels. I am very interested in

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The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N other people’s songs. Do it for others. If that’s the carrot on the stick and you’re the mule pulling the wagon you’re going to be all right.

But if the goal is self-satisfaction you might be satisfied and then you’re going to stop pulling the wagon. I believe in a life in art. I believe that art is necessary that it’s not there to entertain or divert us from our path. In Italy, the parent will say to the child, “Buon divertimento.” “Good diverting yourself.” From what? From your own mortality? Well art does not divert you. In fact, it focuses you. If you see Othello, you will not turn away from the problems that face us. So live to be an artist. It’s a great way to live. Every so often you get a glimpse that people are better off for what you’ve done.

B&W: So, to go back to what you said, a good photograph is one you look at and you think about death.

TR: No. So a useful photograph...I want to make things that are not going to get thrown away. A useful photograph reminds us of the things that are worth remembering.

Something happened to me in school—I was very young, and I think it was no later than second grade—the concept of the lowest common denominator. This was a revelation. I started thinking about it in everything. I started thinking about it walking home from school. What’s irreducible? Over and over and over again I had this lowest common denominator idea. That’s how I practice photography. I’m look-

ing for the thing that is momentarily true enough that I could make a picture that I could hold on to.

B&W: What are you working on now?

TR: There’s actually an exhibition of photographs from my new book, In the Vale of Cashmere. The photographs were made in an area of Prospect Park called the Vale of Cashmere. This is a place that’s been known for at least for four decades for men who are romantically inclined to go and meet each other.

B&W: So, like a bus station bathroom, but in a park.

TR: It’s an idyllic, beautiful place where people can go and have communion. There’s a great essay that accompanies the book that describes a kind of public cruising situation and the reasons for it. The show’s up at the Steven Kasher Gallery until December.w

Interested in writing or illustrating for The Blue and White?

WE WANT YOU! Drop by our weekly meeting Mondays at 8 p.m. in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel.

Or, email editors@theblueandwhite.org.

November 2015

Illustrations by Zane Bhansali

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

Interested in writing or illustrating for The Blue and White?

WE WANT YOU! Drop by our weekly meeting Mondays at 8 p.m. in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel.

Or, email editors@theblueandwhite.org.

Sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University.

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

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

Book Culture 536 West 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Monday-Friday 9am-10pm Saturday 10am-8pm Sunday 11am-7pm 212-865-1588 Book Culture 2915 Broadway at West 114th Street Monday-Friday 9am-11pm Saturday 10am-11pm Sunday 10am-10pm 646-403-3000 bookculture.com

November 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.

PLEASE NOTE: For those of us who partake in distracted walking (examples: reading emails or surfing the internet on the handheld, and/or severe daydreaming, during locomotion) and/or have been around long enough to otherwise become creatures of habit, the women’s and men’s restroom locations have swapped! (the former ladies’ room is now the men’s room, and vice versa). Due to this creative alternative ergonomic, the ladies have gained two additional convenience stalls, as the footprint of former men’s room is bigger; in times of heavy traffic, this hopefully translates into shorter lines for the ladies, without decreasing the service level of the fellas. Here’s to happier restrooming on the first floor. e Received: Oct 11, 2015 7:22 PM Subject: Annotated bibliographies In five people to see if I wanted so what do you like to eat e Received: Sep 11, 2015 1:47 PM I’m sending a corrected set of assignments or W3450/G4450. Please let me know if any corrections need to be made. Otherwise, these great plans seeking at least three weeks before your talk…The first few talks are obviously an exception, but I will schedule as many extra meeting as needed repairs for their talks.

Feel free to suggest reading about a particular topic with which you are familiar before our first meeting. If not, I will be happy just some. e Received: Sep 11, 2015 2:14 PM I’m embarrassed to say that the note I just sent was an unedited product of my first attempt to dictate a message using some new software I’m trying. The following is what I thought I dictated.

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I’m sending a corrected set of assignments for W3450/G4450. Please let me know if any corrections need to be made. Otherwise, please plan to see me at least three weeks before your talk…The first few talks are obviously an exception, but I will schedule as many extra meetings as needed to prepare students for their talks.

Feel free to suggest readings about a particular topic before our first meeting. If not. If not, I will be happy to suggest some. e Received: Sep 22, 2015 at 3:56 PM I would like to order two items that should be sent to me the following address:

With the approach of our first seminar (on September 30) [...] e Received: Sep 22, 2015 3:57 PM Subject: Error Please ignore the first line for my previous message. e The debates and controversies surrounding the language of social difference, such as race or ethnicity, were no less polarizing or contentious in Antiquity than they are today. Ancient literary texts provide outlines of these concerns in ways that could be imagined as “Barbarian Lives Matter” or “Sojourner Lives Matter” in their own times and places. e I hope you are well! I am in charge of finding amazing candidates to work at Success Academy Charter Schools, the leader in education reform in NYC. Some of our most talented teachers and leaders are Columbia graduates. I was really impressed with your leadership and involvement with The Blue and White. You are exactly the kind of candidate that can make a real impact as a teacher!w

The Blue and White

CAMPUS GOSSIP ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE Senior Ünderground, aka CCSC, promised a drink special of $5 for 5 beers. People braved the line for 30-45 minutes only to find out that the promised price was a typo, and the actual price was $15. The following day, members of the Senior Ünderground listserv received an email from an organization called Senior Aboveground, which, despite claiming to be “legit as fuck” and “on the roof of Low,” has not done anything beyond that initial correspondence.

Rumor has it that Senior Aboveground is actually Senior Ünderground’s repressed, self-hating Other, trolling itself. e At a recent meeting of the Core committee, members received instruction that it was important to cut down the number of Core adjuncts, lest they—shock, horror—unionize. e At the top of the 9th inning during game four of the Mets-Cubs series, Mel’s drowned out the game with its usual Senior Night playlist. Enraged, a passionate fan in Mets regalia accosted the bartender for trying “to turn this place into a nightclub.” The orange and royal blue clad masses joined her ardent protest, and the bar-goers cheered triumphantly when the music was turned off. Apparently people take the idea of Mel’s being a sports bar really seriously. e CLASS ACTION When Professor Jason Barr asked his Urban Economics class how he thought 19th century Americans commuted, one student was eager to answer. “Chariots!” she exclaimed. e The Office of Undergraduate Student Life video shown at this year’s NSOP, featuring several administrators in a lip dub to Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York,” has been removed from Vimeo “as a result of a third-party notification by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) claiming that this material is infringing.”

November 2015

Columbia’s lawyers, the Columbia General Counsel, are available 24/7 lest a disaster befall the institution. Call their emergency hotline anytime day or night, and a member of the GC will be there. e Perhaps tired of saying “it’s on the syllabus” in response to student inquiries, Joseph Howley, an assistant professor in the Classics department, decided to hide an Easter Egg on the syllabus for one of his courses, instructing students to send him an email with a picture of Alf, the 1980s garage-dwelling alien from the eponymous sitcom, with subject line “It’s Alf!” e WHERE YOU LIVE “Pith,” the restaurant in Hogan that your mom may have called you about after seeing it in The New Yorker, is reportedly being investigated by the NYC Department of Health. e Students living on the fifth floor of Plimpton were asked by Res Life not to put feces in the trash bags.

The Columbia football team makes up the majority of that floor. e East Campus residents celebrating a 21st birthday went one step above a twerk wall and installed a stripper pole in their living room. e The University is currently seeking funding upwards of $1 million to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts while the faculty—who have not earned sabbaticals— sojourn at a mythical, new Columbia global initiative, the Center for Ideas and Imagination. e The lactation room in Carman was briefly under construction. It has since been reopened to the public. e Columbia...making it great again!w

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

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