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

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXII No. V

Class Struggle Graduate student unionization efforts

Keeping the Peace Turmoil in Columbia Milvets Also Inside: Gra

vitational

Waves, Hail Mary!

October 2016

CHANNING PREND, CC ’17, Editor-in-Chief NIA BROWN, CC ’17, Managing Editor ANDREW LOSO, CC ’19, Publisher VIRGINIA FU, CC ’17, Senior Editor BEN SCHNEIDER, CC ’17, Senior Editor YASEMIN AKÇAGÜNER, BC ’17, Senior Editor CAROLINE HURLEY, CC ’19, Senior Editor ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18, Senior Editor AARON SU, CC ’19, Layout Editor JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17, Online Editor LANI ALLEN, CC ’18, Senior Illustrator

Staff Writers VIRGINIA AMBELIOTIS, BC ’19 NIKHIL DOMINIC, CC ’18 GENEVA HUTCHESON, BC ’17 NICK KENSINGER, CC ’18 LENA RUBIN, CC ’18 Contributors EMMA BOGLER, CC ’17 BRETON CARTER, BC ’17 JUSTIN CHENG, CC ’20 LAETITIA DULER, BC ’18 JEAN KIM, CC ’18 CORI LIN, BC ’17 EMILY MACK, CC ’20 JASMINE PARK, CC ’20 CATHERINE SONG, CC ’19 IRINA TEVELEVA, CC ’17 UFON UMANAH, CC ’20

Staff Illustrators ZANE BHANSALI, CC ’17 RACHEL CHIN, CC ’18 NATHANIEL JAMESON, CC ’18 Artists AMANDA BA, CC ’20 KRISTINE DUNN, CC ’18 JIACHEN FENG, CC ’19 NATHANIEL JAMESON, CC ’18 SARAH GALE, CC ’18 WALLACE KALKIN, BC ’18 ANNA KAPLAN, BC ’18 MATIAS LIRMAN, SEAS ’18 JACK PIERSON, CC ’19 ANNE SCOTTI, CC ’16 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 ALEXANDRA WARRICK, BC ’17 KELLIE ZHAO, CC ’19 JOANNA ZOU, CC ’18 Social Media Manager AUBRI JUHASZ, BC ’18

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXII

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

Columns

4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 12 Verily Veritas 22 M easure for Measure 30 Digitalia Columbiana 31 Campus G ossip

Features 10 At Two Swords’ Length: Can I Venmo You? Our monthly prose and cons

Alex Swanson & David Swanson

13 Touchdown Ministry Pray for Columbia football

Virginia Ambeliotis & Cory Lin

14 Class Struggle Graduate student unionization efforts

Virginia Fu & Lena Rubin

18 Milvets Melee Facebook brawl sparks dean intervention

Caroline Hurley

24 Star Talk A conversation with Mary Putman

Nia Brown

theblueandwhite.org

cover :

“Alma-ween” by Alexandra Warrick

No. V

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR During my freshman year I tripped while walking up the stairs in Ferris and cut my head without realizing it. I got up thinking I was fine, and proceeded to my table with blood gushing from my scalp. In the course of my walk across the dining hall I got several weird looks, but not a single person said anything to me. I didn’t know I was bleeding until I arrived back at my table and my horrified friend asked what had happened. What a perfect metaphor for Columbia, I thought at the time. I was a meaningless drop in an unfeeling sea of students. Naturally, I didn’t think I would miss Ferris when I went off the meal plan two years ago. And while I certainly don’t miss the subpar pizza or navigating the narrow spiral staircase, I do miss the proximity to people that I have nothing in common with. As a freshman, everyone was on the meal plan, so Ferris was populated by athletes, CCSC reps, WBAR DJs, and campus journalists alike. Now as a senior, I feel like the circle of people I interact with on a regular basis has diminished. And yes, for the jaded among you, I know that I’m over-romanticizing the notion of Ferris as a great equalizer and common ground. But whether you blame it on the wistfulness of fall or my senior year nostalgia, I miss simply being surrounded by this wide range of people. Even if being part of a mass of students can make you feel lonely and detached at times. I came to college to meet new people and be pushed out of my comfort zone. I have definitely become complacent in this regard as I approach the end of my time at Columbia. In my last few months, I’m going to try to appreciate the people who breathe life into this university. Oh, and if you see someone bleeding from the head in Ferris, ask them if they’re alright. — Channing Prend

TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS Manhattanville Breakfast at John Jay Dinner at Diana The worst president in U.S. history Jinzo Kitchen The dab (again)

DEPARTURES Local culture Harlem Law and order Thin first-years Deluxe The dab (again)

Come Again?! “cw patriarchy professor: avocado is actually the aztec word for testicle. person muttering behind me: i always knew avocados were too straight for me.”

– Facebook group, “Overheard @ Barnard”

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

Thesis Pieces It’s October, which means proposals for senior theses are due in many departments. To give you some inspiration, we’ve culled some past senior thesis titles. Test your academic prowess by matching these real undergraduate senior thesis titles to their subtitles. Title 1. Meat Monumentalized 2. Homunculus Still in the Vial 3. At Your Feet 4. Beyond Yes or No 5. Developing Eugenic Consciousness 6. Striding Forward and Slouching Back 7. ‘The Mad and Hungry Dogs’ 8. From Stalin to the Surrealists

Subtitle a. Felix Krull as the Uncompleted Vision of German Identity b. Stormwater Capture in New York City Tree Pits c. Connecting Exhibition Practice Between the Wars in France and Germany d. The Press and Political Power in the Washington, DC Race Riot of 1919 e. Quantifying Second-Hand Smoke Exposure Among Inner-City Children f. The Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization of the Mentally Deficient in Interwar Britain g. The Slaughterhouses of Francisco Salamone h. Djuna Barnes, Posture, and the Eugenic Narrative of Linear Progress

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

October 2016

Postcard by Joanna Zou

BLUE NOTES

little known Columbia factoid is that the the tunnel complex underneath Dodge is named “The Grove.” According to urban legend, the tunnels were originally a park located at the northwest corner of Columbia that is now occupied by the Northwest Corner building and the surrounding structures. Hidden within this ironically named subterranean sprawl are two dumpster sized cardboard bins ominously referred to as “The Computer Graveyard.” The Computer Graveyard, much like name of its decidedly un-grovelike home, is a misnomer. Sitting next to a pile of empty boxes, The Computer Graveyard lacks all the the markers of a proper burial site. No headstone or inscription marks the final resting place of all these victims of obsolescence. Instead, there is simply a piece of paper supported by three garish strips of duct tape that awkwardly reads “USED ELECTRONICS FOR RECYCLING STAGING AREA.” On opposite sides of this paper are two more pieces of paper, similarly supported, that both read “ELECTRONICS PLACED IN THIS AREA ARE SHIPPED FOR SCRAP METAL RECYCLING,” then a line break and “IF ELECTRONICS ARE

USEABLE OR REFURBISHABLE CONTACT ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP 4-7046”. As the signs suggest, the graveyard contains much more than computers. Inside of the bins, there is a wide range of electronic waste ranging from decrepit projectors to power outlets to even some decidedly non-electronic items such as the stack of allen wrenches that was piled in one of the boxes. To say that the Computer Graveyard failed to live up to expectations would not be entirely true. It would be more accurate (and more enjoyably pretentious) to say that it subverted expectations. It promised haunted motherboards and decomposing hard drives and delivered a much more diverse, if less atmospheric, collection of abandoned goods. So go check it out. Maybe pick up a free allen wrench or twenty. — Justin Cheng

s Deantini gave a rousing speech at Convocation about the importance of maintaining a “beginner’s mind,” I was distracted by the shape of the fountains flanking Low Library. Underneath the large tent and peeking above the heads of quietly sniffling parents, I couldn’t discern their entire shape. From what I could see, they looked like dicks. The crusty flesh colored stone, bulbous heads, and liquid spurting from the tips skew Low’s fountains toward lewd instead of majestic. I missed the content of the subsequent speeches because I couldn’t reconcile Columbia’s postcard image of intellectual superiority with what appeared to be two penises. Despite their strange shape, the Low Fountains actually have fairly unremarkable origins. Much of Columbia’s Morningside Heights

Illustration by Anna Kaplan

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES campus is part of Charles McKim’s “Master Plan.” Grand and innovative, his campus design was met with general approval and applause; however, critics focused on two particular aspects of his proposal: the dome of Low Library and the South Court (now known as Low Plaza). After vigorously defending his blueprint, McKim was advised to send his design of the South Court to Frederick Law Olmsted, the legendary landscape architect who conceived Central Park, for a second opinion. Olmsted generally approved of the design, having only one small suggestion: the addition of simple Renaissance-style fountains. McKim agreed and immediately added round basins to his plan, inspired by the fountains in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. Although the basins were part of the original design of South Court, the fountains themselves were not installed until 1907 as a gift from Marcellus Hartley Dodge (another dead white man whose name you will never escape). So, the fountains may have been designed to reflect the majesty of Rome, but what they lend is a moment of levity to reflect Columbia. In contrast to Low’s grandeur, these fountains look like the drunken scrawls I find on the whiteboard outside my suite door every Saturday morning. I can imagine Olmsted as a young architecture student grabbing his fellow architects’ designs in class and absentmindedly scrawling dicks in the corner. Maybe the fountains are bones thrown to us lowly freshmen: a touch of the immaturity we were supposed to leave in high school. A small giggle allowed before you pass. — Jasmine Park

V is dead at Columbia. In fact, it has been dead since the spring of 2016, when the Activities Board of Columbia officially decertified the Columbia Television Network by a unanimous vote. CTV,

October 2016

founded in 1974, was a student-run TV station that ran on Channel 37 in the closed-circuit cable TV service provided by CUIT in Columbia undergraduate dorms. Prior to its decertification, the network had an under-the-radar existence, operating as a two-person club for a semester, and as a one-man show before that. The URL for the CTV website now returns an error message, but it appears that the last time the station produced online content was in 2014, when former Vice President of Programming Hye-Jin Yun, BC ’15, released a recurring segment called “Voices of Morningside.” In the fall of 2015, a new Facebook page tried to gather students, but there is no evidence anything was produced that year. Some might say a student-run TV channel in the middle of New York was doomed to fail, but there were better times for CTV. In 2012, Spectator reported that the network would release “three standout student-written shows” in the spring. In 2006, CTV received national attention when their footage of the Minuteman stage-rush was run by several major media outlets. Yet even in its glory days, the network ran the menu screen of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” for at least a day according to an anonymous tip to Bwog back in 2011. Former Eye staff writer Joe Daly, CC ’12, speculated in 2009 that a combination of lack of accessibility and low production values, along with the vast opportunities to intern professionally in television in New York City contributed to apathy towards the network. As of today, the old television studio in the fifth floor of Lerner is used by CURecords for recording sessions. Hope springs eternal with various film clubs on campus, but with the ever-present space problem on Columbia’s campus and a growing trend towards online streaming, it seems unlikely that CTV will have a comeback. — Ufon Umanah

Illustrations by Lani Allen

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

Nadine Fattaleh

ike her light wash, cuffed jeans, Nadine Fattaleh, CC ’17, is laid back and low key. She’s soft-spoken, but with a coolness that makes you want to strain to hear her every word, as if everything she says is going to be important. She doesn’t get excited about things, not even when I ask about cats. “I love cats and everyone knows it,” she deadpans, “Sometimes I pretend to be a cat.” Nadine has an almost disconcerting ability to switch from talking about felines to capitalism to the Syrian refugee crisis without missing a beat or changing tone. Originally from Jordan, Nadine says she came to Columbia for the “wrong reason,” mostly the name, but that it’s “turned out really nicely.” She’s found a niche studying Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and Economics, a pairing where one often conflicts with the other, but in ways that Nadine believes are ultimately necessary for the humanitarian work she hopes to do. And while she says many people here are quick to dismiss Econ majors as corporate sellouts and the like, she has

enjoyed some fascinating conversations with her Econ classmates over the years. “I’m taking a class called economics of art and you go around the table and people are like ‘Yeah, I’m interested in art. I want to create art investments,’” she says. “Like, hello kid, what kind of things have you been exposed to in your life that make you think art should be an investment?” Perhaps Nadine’s most prominent mark on campus is helping to found Students Organizing for Syria, a humanitarian activist group that to aims to raise awareness for the Syrian refugee crisis. Building a club from the ground up—to address a problem that came about almost overnight—was not easy. Students Organizing for Syria has grown exponentially since those initial meetings, regularly drawing crowds to their events. By the end of October, the organization expects to launch a scholarship fund to provide educational opportunities at Columbia for refugees who have not yet had access to the United States or Europe. Despite her activist work, Nadine is not a fan of the big humanitarian organizations working on the ground right now in places like her home country. “In principle you agree with everything they do, but they’re insanely inefficient. It defeats the purpose of this work and it becomes inconsiderate to the actual culture and people it’s ‘helping.’” Nadine is so interested in how these monolithic organizations interact with refugees that she spent last summer filming part of a documentary in the refugee camps. The film will focus on displaced musicians and the culture of the camps. During her interviews, she found that the musicians talked about their experiences in a very scripted way, apparently afraid to speak out against the aid organizations. She says aid workers are “basically including them [the refugee musicians] as free labor to sing and dance at their parties and celebrations.” This imperfect system has jaded Nadine,

Illustration by Kristine Dunn

The Blue and White

and now instead of working for the same type of aid organization one day, she has changed her tune and instead plans to study for a masters in Humanitarian Studies. I ask Nadine what she thinks makes her a Campus Character. “I always thought that this would be my life,” she says. “I always thought that I would do a Bwog whatever.” When we arrived at the UTS courtyard, we walked in on some sort of wedding or event. As we got up to leave, Nadine marched right up to a woman we assumed was a bridesmaid and asked what was going on. Turns out we actually walked in on the filming of a new Netflix original series. So keep an eye out for Nadine Fattaleh and her mom jeans in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, due out in 2017. — Caroline Hurley

Rasmi Elasmar

asmi Elasmar, CC ’17, will hopefully graduate from Columbia with a concentration in Math this May (“They don’t tell you this, but you can graduate with just a concentration”) despite having put down Astrophysics, Computer Science and Math as his triple majors and Stats as his concentration back in sophomore year. Rasmi, whose first name means “formal” or “official” in Arabic, finds his name oxymoronic. “If anything, I’m the opposite of formal.” Rasmi also never goes to class, and is on academic probation this semester. “I guess after sophomore year, I gave up on academic classes as a meaningful way of learning. I’ll go to class and stop paying attention or fall asleep or something. I feel like I can teach myself better.” Yet despite his apparent indifference to conventional academic success, he’s interned everywhere from Tesla to Microsoft, meanwhile paying off his student debt financially independent from his family. Rasmi is from sunny Los Angeles, which I should have guessed from the flip-flops he was wearing on an early October afternoon at Max Caffe. He grew up in a Palestinian household but became estranged from his family by the end of high school. “I grew up with that classic first-generation problem in America where you have this culture gap between your parents and yourself. So I’m not really close to my family anymore. I had kind of a rift my last year of high school.” Rasmi is also distanced from the Arab cultural scene on campus. When I initially asked him where he was from, he said, jokingly, “I’m Palestinian. Don’t say that out loud.” Breaking off from his family also led to him disengaging with Arab

October 2016

culture at large. The hardest part of writing Rasmi’s profile is the absolute absence of a curated personality on his part. Over the course of our conversation he shared everything from his coital cephalalgia to his research on black holes. At Columbia Rasmi has worked in a number of astrophysics research projects. “We just model dark matter and the expansion of the universe and stuff like that,” he says casually of the work he does in a research lab with Professors Greg Bryan and Lam Hui. “The structure of the universe is mostly dictated by dark matter and we don’t really know how it behaves super well but it turns out you can model it as a fluid, but there are small tweaks you have to make. So we’re working on those small tweaks.” Despite his research background, Rasmi doesn’t want to pursue astrophysics in a professional capacity. “I used to really care a lot about the universe and now I’m apathetic to it. I used to want to go to grad school but it’s not for me.” Rasmi is hoping to get into civic technology after graduation, using technology for social good. “If I did a start-up thing it would have to do with making cities work better.” Rasmi envisions making NYC a fully pedestrian city with no cars on the streets and a very robust public transportation system. “Imagine all the space you could reclaim through the streets, you could solve the housing crisis.” Beyond everything, Rasmi says he would love to be a “pop scientist” and follow in the footsteps of Carl Sagan. He is certainly making the right kinds of friends for the job—Rasmi’s Instagram boasts several photographs of him with Neil deGrasse Tyson. “If I accidentally became a pop scientist, that’d be cool. I don’t know if you can just pursue that.” — Yasemin Akçagüner

Illustration by Matias Lirman

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Can I Y

es, of course, I don’t want this type of transaction the dimly lit Western Union festering off an untragoing on my Dad’s card anyway. Cash would also versed exit from Times’ Square and shiftily passing work, but it’s so cliched these days. Besides, cameras over a crinkled, well-loved manila left over from are on the rise. Those NYC link weird-things have your UWriting days just to wire $29 into your other ruined the haven of the street corner, and, to be hon- account. Gone are the days of misplacing your liquid est, lingering outside of Dig profits in the pockets of variInn to complete our transacous chinos only to find them tion just doesn’t have the same stolen from the soggy pile of charm as it used to. No, Venmo neglected laundry rent from works just fine. the washing machine in retribJust make sure, when utory anger. Gone are the days you Venmo me, to make the of change. description cryptic. I don’t But let’s get to the real want there to be a noticeable point of Venmo: how it makes trend or blatant description. me feel. I like—nay, love—the Some non-distinct foliage power of having a constantly or chilled-out smiley will do growing pool of virtual cash up the trick. That’s what my last in the cloud. It’s always fun to few business partners have look at the numbers just sitting done and I think it’s worked there. Occasionally I’ll whip out great. Nothing suspicious out the app on the subway just about an ever-growing forest to conspicuously trawl through of generic shrubbery blosmy transaction history. (I never soming all over the old Venmo pay). Occasionally I’ll leave my newsfeed. Indeed I think it’s phone locked when a notifiquite festive, especially around cation announcing my recent Christmas time. And the affirVenmo profits comes my way. mation it gives me is just beauMy dollars—so intangitiful. You might think integrating a ble yet so beautiful in their incorfinancial service with a social media poreality. So up-in-the-air, so ripe ffirmative platform might be a weird or danfor spending! Money multiplying By Alex Swanson gerous thing, but it just works. Any eternally in her profits, ever-pregold sucker can post a picture of an nant like the rats beneath my feet. artfully-branched tree on Instagram or Facebook and Venmo, the rock upon which I found my fiscality! scrape up a few likes. The challenge, my friend, is to You, good sir, the congregation listening to the good achieve double-figures in the Venmo sphere. You’re word of VENMO! Pray with me, beseech the coinlooking at a true social media polemarch. Sip it in. less God that I worship, beg for his salvation, cry out And let’s not forget the ease of Venmo. Gone the sins of your dollar-billed self, and purge your are the days of cash withdrawal and depositing, inner soul from the grittiness of—I shudder to even of awkwardly lining up at Citibank intermittently say it—the cash economy. Venmo me and live, dear itching yourself among the other first years who friend, Venmo me and thrive, Venmo me and feel were duped, at the cusp of NSOP, into setting up an the weight of the world pass through you only to be account. Gone are the days of taking the 1 down to detached from it. VENMO ME!w

Illustration by Lani Allen

The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Venmo you? D

id you really think I would even consider that not update people constantly about my son that was offer? It’s people like you who have desecrated born two days ago. If they want to know about James, the society I once cherished. You know what I love? they can enquire. And I will certainly never describe It’s not puppies and it’s not women: it’s cash, cool the nature of my financial interactions with the touch breezy cash that seductively wrinkles around your of a finger upon a pad! I would rather slit my wrist finger. You ever felt a crisp, clean bill straight out of with a crisp $50. the press? I have: it was lit. Bring back the I frame particular notebarter, bring back the worthy notes, ones that exchange. Bring back are just so pure, ones you some vestige of a vaguely can use as a ruler, measure social world. Since when your goddamn drywall did an emoji become an with. I look upon their acceptable form of greetframed glory. Minutes, ing. If you side-down wink hours, all time stills as I at me, I will end you. I stare into that glorious divorced my wife after she eye in the pyramid, into blew a kiss to me online. the soul of Benjamin. How difficult is it to blow But you wouldn’t an actual kiss? It’s not. It’s understand that, would fucking not. I’ve tried it. you? You’re one of those People like you tainted neo-millennial wankers her, Venmo tainted her. that I see way too often Venmo is the cockroach I these days. One of those shall stamp on, the baby displaced, whiny nerds I I will drop, the bullshit I used to shove into lockers. refuse to wade through. Now you’ve made a comeThis world needs a back and it seems you’ve somehow hero, and I am that hero. Cash is my egative acquired klout enough to pervert lance, coin my shield. Come at me, By David Swanson the minds of a whole generation. come at me with your useless pixYou’re nothing special, hiding els and your fancy, obnoxious talk behind a black mirror, staring at a about how easy you’ve made life. goddamn screen all day. You haven’t made it easy; you’ve just allowed idiots I look up, I look ahead. People notice my glare to exist, given them an opportunity to thrive when and get out of my way. You know why? Because I hold they didn’t even deserve the chance. Fortune favors my power in my wallet. I radiate power. From my the bold; Venmo favors the incompetent. You’ve wallet. Heh. And I can see you cowering too, sinking allowed idiots into our society. Watch as they tear it ever further into that cushy prison so you don’t have to paperless shreds! Why can’t you just like cash: it’s to rely on good old-fashioned people skills to get you treasure, manifest treasure, damn you. It’s something through life. I hate it. I hate you. I will not engage in you can hold and cherish, like the pelt of a freshlyyour petty culture, tweeting about my fucking break- slain beloved lion from a well-known national park. fast in the hope that I get a few likes that might make Enough: save your penniless proverbs for the peasme feel like somebody out there gives a damn. I will ants and go to the ATM before I smite you.w

October 2016

Illustration by Lani Allen

V E R I LY V E R I TA S

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS

In which our hero broods in the park

levated by the spirits of juniper trees and the coming dawn, V.V. slipped into his light coat and stepped out into gray fog. Blowing in from the Hudson, autumn had eclipsed the glorious stone grounds, and struck terror into scantily clad Greeks, who stumble forth from their inebriated stupor of late night copulation and indulgence just as Bacchus descends from fawn-infested Mount Cithaeron, drunk off the cackling cries of the chorus and the swirling saunters of the satyrs. Padding westward on hallowed brick, he trudged toward the grand Hudson. Here, in these dawn-drenched hours, he turned his shallow collar against the chill of Paris’ hubris. If only he were not as foolish as the doltish lover of Achilles, he would have remained in the bosom of his own domicile to mourn his ill-fated love affair. Instead he ventured forward, furrowing brow and clenching fist, tempting malady for to envisage sweet noesis. Why must beauty turn against sagacity, allowing itself to wilt in the dim light of lesser intellects? Why must he tremor, lonesome in the cold, while his fair inamorata warms herself against the pallid flame of another? Stealing down the steps of Riverside Park, he braced his juddering fin against the frigid bar. Ah ῥοδοδακτυλος Ἡως—Rosy-fingered dawn! Shielding himself from Hades’ rumbling updrafts, he approached the darkling waters separating his beloved isle from the unspeakable terror beyond. He adumbrated her svelte figure in the shadowy edifice of memory, disporting himself through spurious recollection of her gentle caress. As he trudged, our hero soothed himself with the Paean of the lesser bard: “A belt of straw and Ivy buds,/ With

Coral clasps and Amber studs:/And if these pleasure thee may move,/ Then live with me, and be my love.” But! Alas! These pleasures do not move his love! So, arriving at the bouldered shore, hunkered against the wind, he watched light on rippled water as it coursed away from him, stranded, like those at Aulis, awaiting good portent in the pursuit of love. Rolling a cigarette between thumb and forefingers, he noted a young dyad and their infant passing along the walkway. Bright plumes of blood rush to their cheeks as the child chortled in its perambulator. Oh! How he wished to be so innocent and plebeian, to loll in the joys of blind, naïve adoration! He lit his cubeb and dashed back towards the blessed chapel of erudite reverie. How the doctrinaire has fallen; how, in our great and prime volition for enlightenment, we have deprived ourselves of the common pleasures. He swore to abdicate such indecorous strivings. “To home,” he said to his charioteer as he ascended the sloped precipice. “Dear providence, I can bear no more of this bourgeois suffering.” Yet, even as he entered his exalted domicile, shedding his outerwear and pouring himself a flute of tonic and spirits, he could not help but lament for the loss of his dear Helen. Though she could not perceive his longing, his pained and vain advances, she loomed, a specter in his immortal soul. Who then devised the torment? Night fell again but this time, V.V.’s heart felt different. He dropped his half-finished cigarette into the Hudson and walked out of the exhibit, out of the museum, into the real world. He met the Sun’s sempiternal gaze with relief.w

The Blue and White

H A I L M A RY !

Touchdown Ministry The Blue and White meets the chaplain who services Columbia’s football team By Virginia Ambeliotis and Cori Lin

t takes a lot of people to run a football team—more than any other Columbia sport, in fact. And while the program boasts a large staff to meet its athletes’ needs, coaches often enlist the services of outside volunteers to provide students with even more support. In recent years, this network of volunteers has included a Christian chaplain. The decision to bring in a Christian chaplain to fulfill the spiritual needs of some players may seem odd given Columbia’s lack of a religious affiliation. Yet Bryan Scott, special adviser to the University Chaplain on athletic life, emphasizes that it is not meant as an imposition on students and is strictly a volunteer position. “There’s no money involved,” he says. “The privilege [they] have is more or less access: email, an ID card, access to buildings.” The office of chaplain is not a permanent fixture of Columbia’s football or other athletic teams. Coaches or team captains create a position if they see the need. Scott served as a football chaplain from 2004 to 2005, at which point Columbia hired a coach who didn’t prioritize the role. The office was resurrected in 2015, when the football team brought in Jim Black to perform chaplain duties. Black is not employed by Columbia but by Christian Union, an organization focused on developing Christian leaders at Stanford and all the Ivy League schools. (The “Mission & Vision” page of its website states “At present, these eight [sic.] very inf luential universities export spiritual darkness into our culture through secularized leadership. It will take prayer, effort and financial resources to reach these future leaders for Christ”.) Black joined Christian Union’s Columbia ministry in 2011, where he directs a ministry on campus called Columbia Faith in Action. In years since, this role has afforded Black “really beautiful relationships” with students, many of them athletes. After the news broke that Al

October 2016

Bagnoli would be leaving an extremely successful coaching career at the University of Pennsylvania for Columbia, Black wrote him a quick email thanking him for coming and offering his help if needed. To his surprise, Bagnoli responded the next day and asked if they could meet. After a short conversation, Bagnoli asked Black to become the volunteer chaplain for the team. Black now attends practice once a week and spends time with “a large group of the guys” afterwards. They gather in a circle, pray together, and share what’s going on in their lives. They meet again prior to pre-game meals. “We’ll read a part of the bible together and talk about it, about how it might apply to their role on the team, and then we’ll pray in that context,” Black explains. On Sunday nights he holds bible studies that normally draw between fifteen and twenty players. “It’s a really remarkable amount of guys who are involved.” In addition to these duties, the chaplain often meets with players one-on-one. Disentangling athletes’ sense of self from their performances is usually a focus, but conversational topics pertain just as often to coursework anxieties, disagreements with coaches, internship and job prospects, dating woes and the like. In this regard, Black’s work not only consists of being a spiritual mentor, but also “just being a friend.”w

Illustration by Jiachen Feng

FULL SMIRK

Class Struggle Inside the Best Union in the Best University in the Best City in the World By Virginia Fu and Lena Rubin

n late August of this year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that student Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) at private universities are employees and therefore guaranteed the right to unionize under federal labor law. The day after the ruling, Columbia’s Provost, John H. Coatsworth, sent an email to the University community announcing the NLRB’s decision and affirming what Columbia has repeatedly argued in court for more than a decade: that unionization might result in a litany of “drawbacks.” “I am concerned,” Coatsworth wrote, noting that he was also speaking for many faculty and administrators, “about the impact of having a nonacademic third-party involved in the highly individualized and varied contexts in which faculty teach and train students.” In an interview that took place this October, deep in the bowels of Engineering Terrace, SEAS Dean Mary Boyce echoed these views. Boyce said she was “stunned” to hear that graduate students at Columbia were attempting to unionize. Especially worrying to Boyce was the prospect that the mentoring relationship between graduate students in the lab and faculty mentors, which she describes as a unique, family-like relationship, may be endangered. “We ask, who’s your academic mother or father, who’s your academic grandfather or grandmother? There’s this sense that there’s this academic tree that you are a part of, that is part of who you are going forward, a relationship that extends after you leave Columbia,” Boyce explained. “It’s certainly not a transactional relationship.” “[For graduate students] this is a discovery phase, this is a deep dive into a new field. I just don’t understand how you can regulate something that is really a very individualized experience, that is a student learning to become a scholar.” “So my question is—and I think this is a pretty deep question—what does the United Auto Workers have to do with that experience?”

“M aybe some stuff’s different now.” Like many people who try to form unions, graduate workers at Columbia have not the found the process easy. Following a NLRB ruling that gave NYU students the right to unionize, Columbia’s graduate students began their first unionization effort in 2000. Students gathered cards and petitioned the NLRB. Administrators fought back hard against the union, prompting local politicians Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton to write a letter to Columbia’s then President George Rupp, urging administrative neutrality. A secret-ballot election to recognize the union was held, but votes were impounded following a Columbia appeal. In 2005, after a series of strikes, the ballots were destroyed as a result of an NLRB ruling that reversed its earlier position. Today, Columbia’s would-be graduate worker union (somewhat unimaginatively dubbed Graduate Workers of Columbia or GWC) is again seeking to join UAW Local 2110, which represents Barnard’s contingent faculty and NYU’s graduate workers. In an interview this September, the Local’s president, Maida Rosenstein, drew parallels between the current effort and the first organizing campaign she participated in as a clerical worker in the Columbia History department. “First, they actually delayed through litigating the unit for many years. We started organizing before 1980 and we didn’t get union recognition until 1985. Delay, delay, delay. Then when we had the election itself, the university ran an anti-union campaign,” Rosenstein recalls. As of the writing of this article, a date for the vote has not been set. If the majority of workers included in the bargaining unit, which includes around 3,000 PhD, Master’s and undergraduate teaching assistants, research assistants, course assistants, preceptors and graders, vote yes, Columbia will become the second private university in the country to recognize their graduate worker union.

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FULL SMIRK Skepticism Months before the most recent August NLRB ruling, guessing that the Obama-appointed board’s sympathies might run against them, the Provost met with several department chairs to discuss the legal ramifications of the anticipated decision. “Once a vote has been scheduled, faculty become managers in the legal sense,” explained English department chair Sarah Cole, “In any labor union situation there are a lot of things that are illegal [for managers] to do, such as intimidating or surveilling students, or making promises.” Cole reached out to the Provost office to ask if anyone could speak to the “labor-leaning and good natured” faculty of the English department. “I just wanted to make sure that they understood what they can and cannot say.” Cole was “pleasantly surprised” when the Provost himself responded to her request for a presentation, which she saw as “a sign of how serious the administration is taking this.” Prompted by a faculty member, she also invited pro-union grad students to make their own presentation--not English graduate students since they would be too “close.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, English faculty had “labor-leaning” things to say about the Provost’s presentation, which followed closely the material available on Columbia’s Provost-sponsored unionization website. To Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, the Provost’s presentation, seemed like a “propaganda meeting, rather than an informational meeting,” and confirmed his sense that “a university like ours… is effectively a corporate university, technically nonprofit but behaving like a profit-making corporation where labor questions are concerned. They would, in other words, adopt a pose of as much neutrality as possible while fighting the union tooth and nail as they have fought in the courts up to now.” Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, believes that the Provost presented “the worst case scenario.” Claims that a union would interfere with academic issues, she said, should be treated with “skepticism,” since in student contracts such things “have been carefully kept out of the oversight of the union.” While the majority of the graduate student unions exist at public universities, where state laws typically prohibit the intrusion of unions into academic affairs, Howard imagines such concerns would

October 2016

only become a problem if “we don’t do what other universities have done.” “I think the administration should not be making the worst case scenario. That seems to me foolish.” Cole, however, offered a different impression of the presentation. “It wasn’t alarmist, [the Provost] was not taking an alarmist tone.” “The first thing he says is it’s not going to be the end of the world as we know it if graduate students unionize. We’ll work with it but here are the reasons we feel they shouldn’t.” “You A re Us and We A re You.” To the question of what role faculty should play in the unionization campaign, GWC has a firm answer: none. According to the GWC-UAW website, “[Faculty] should refrain from making any comments on unionization, as whatever they say may influence a graduate worker’s opinion since they are our supervisors.” Howard iterated her support for this policy. “I have the very strong opinion that we should stay out of this, because of the power relations we have with graduate students,” Howard said. “We teach them, we mentor them, we help them get jobs, and we cannot be telling them whether or not they should vote for a union.” A graduate student from the Latin American and Iberian Cultures department, who asked to remain anonymous, agrees that the policy makes sense. “Our relationships with our advisors are not going to change at all. The issue is not trying to change the relationship between advisors and graduate students but between the administration and the students.” While the administration sets graduate stipends and benefits in the humanities, in the sciences

Illustration by Anna Kaplan

FULL SMIRK and engineering student research assistants are often supported by grants secured by faculty members. EGSC President and PhD student in Biomedical Engineering Emily Moore thinks it’s plausible that the ruling may in these cases change the relationships between graduate student RAs and their PIs, making them more transactional. “When PIs start viewing students as employees, they start keeping tabs on how many hours a week they’re coming, how many vacations they’re taking. [They start thinking] is the work they’re producing justifying the money I’m pulling out of this grant?” Even in the humanities, the ruling has prompted some faculty to reconsider their relationship with graduate students. Karen Benezra, an assistant professor in the Latin American and Iberian Cultures department, notes that she has become more conscious of the kind of work she’s asked students to do, such as “translations, where students are not paid and the symbolic payback on their CVs might not be really great.” Other faculty have gone further and pushed back against their designation as “managers.” At a town hall meeting held in early October for SEAS students and faculty, a Mechanical Engineering professor argued to the crowd, “We are not employers, and you are not employees. You are us and we are you. Our careers depend on how you’re doing so we’re going to make sure you’re satisfied.” To Benezra and many others, however, the argument that unionization will fundamentally change the relationships between faculty and students rings false. Graduate students might have noticed that they already sustain an economic relationship with the University. That the University, apparently, has not noticed this might conceivably have inspired some of these students to attempt to form a union. “Competitive Pressures.” Carlos Alonso, the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who replied to our interview request with an email consisting of the words “Full Smirk.” in slightly larger than usual font (he later clarified that he meant to send the message to “a friend, in response to another message”), expressed the view that unionization is “not necessary.” Alonso is currently working on a book on the commodification of culture, which has tradition-

ally been viewed as existing above and beyond the requirements of the market, and its implications for Latin American cultural discourse. According to Alonso, competitive pressures with peer institutions constitute a “built-in mechanism” for making sure that graduate stipends and benefits “are always being enhanced.” “The kinds of issues that the union would bargain or argue for are things that we already do as a matter of course,” Alonso said. However, graduate organizers believe that many of the benefits that have been “enhanced” in recent years have only come about as a result of unionization, or at least the threat of it. The Senate has it on record that graduate stipends were increased in 2013 specifically to be competitive with NYU and its newly recognized graduate union. “I’m a sixth year, and I have never seen that kind of email,” said Jason Resnikoff, a graduate organizer and PhD student in History, referring to university-wide email the Provost sent in July, promising a 3.7 percent increase in stipends. “We know that GSAC [the Graduate Student Advisory Council] has been asking for years for an increase in child care subsidies and an increase in parental leave,” said Resnikoff. “It was only when GSAC combined with [GWC-UAW] that we got a 100 percent increase in child care subsidies and four more weeks in parental leave.” Likewise, Resnikoff believes that the University wouldn't be “scrambling” to replace their dental insurance if GWC weren’t “using this as a perfect of example of why we need a union.” (In his presentation to the English faculty, the Provost stated that the insurance had been cancelled by Aetna, Columbia’s health care provider, and that the University immediately found a replacement. Abler and Resnikoff, who gave the pro-union presentation, argue that free cleanings at the Dental School and a discount on emergency care do not constitute a dental plan.) “Nuclear Deterrence.” At a town hall meeting in early October, Dean Alonso and Vice Provost and Senior Vice Dean of SEAS Soulaymane Kachani, reiterated the view that “market dynamics,” in addition to their “commitment to bringing the best students” to campus “explain our benefits and stipend [increases].” “We have worked tirelessly over these past few

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FULL SMIRK years to enhance those benefits and we have done it long before any union was here on campus. We have a very selfish reason to do this, which is that we want to create the highest rated doctoral program. We want to attract the best and brightest students and we cannot do this if our students are not very happy with their experience… So we are all in it for the same purpose and our incentives are aligned,” explained Kachani. Forming a union in such a collegial atmosphere, Alonso warned, would be akin to adopting a strategy of “nuclear deterrence.” “It’s a weapon the union gives you, which is that you can step away from the table and refuse to continue talking, and you can use the economic weapon of the strike.” “What you need to ask yourself is whether you need that kind of leverage or whether using that leverage is unequivocally going to be to your benefit.” While no graduate student we talked to professed a fear of nuclear annihilation, Mel Abler, a graduate organizer and student in the Applied Physics Department researching nuclear physics, sees unionization as an antidote to the sense of precarity many graduate students face. “To me a lot of this is preventative. It just takes a lot of what we have and says, this stays.” Abler, who is from Wisconsin, saw her family’s income “crushed” in the wake of Governor Scott Walker’s 2011 curtailing of public sector unions. Since then, she has believed that “your work conditions should be enshrined in a legally enforceable way.” “This is not a poor institution,” adds Resnikoff, the History student, “We have a nine billion dollar endowment. We’re not trying to bankrupt the place where we work, we want to have a meaningful say in the option to have dental care. I’m a thirty year old man.” As Resnikoff sees it, “The university does not work without us, and I think that gives us a right to have some say over not only our own conditions but the general structure of how the school should run.” “We appreciate this school. They say they want good things for us, but to say that is one thing and to live the lives we live...is another.” The people currently making these decisions, Abler notes, likely haven’t been in her position for several decades. “It’s really easy to forget some of the worse parts.” “And,” adds Abler, “Maybe some stuff’s different now.”

October 2016

“Full Smirk.” Misleading statements such as those concerning strikes fuel the impression that Columbia is waging a union-busting campaign. When asked why the University was fighting against the union, most graduate organizers again agreed that the answer has to do with “power.” “They have the power right now. If we have a union we are going to be in charge of that power. They don’t want that. They will have to sit at another seat at the table,” said the student from the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department. Officially though, University officials are just expressing their concern; they argue that their recent statements are only perceived as “union-busting,” because their silence on the matter in the period leading up to the ruling left “a void in terms of the arguments against.” Yet it would be difficult not to notice that this University and its various schools, as well as the well-endowed peer institutions with whom a certain amicus brief was jointly filed last last year, might have a few interests, financial or ideological, that the crushing of a fledgling graduate union might serve. The claim that graduate unions, which exist at more than 60 universities across the country, represent an intrusion of economic relations into a hallowed and idyllic academic sphere is, at best, out of touch. At worst, these claims betray a cynical disregard for student working conditions, an issue that, if taken seriously, might conceivably further the University's basic mission of teaching and learning. “Competitive pressures” don’t seem to be doing the job and faculty and administrators find themselves both far removed from their time as graduate students and beholden to a complex array of interests. When we talked to Sarah Cole, the English department chair, she testified to “the larger conditions of being a graduate student, which is one of vulnerability, being at the mercy of the administration and the academic job market, living on extremely low stipends.” Still, Cole recalls that when she walked out on strike at Berkeley in the 1990s, holding a UAW sign, she was “ambivalent.” “That was sort of the thing to do,” she remembers.w Emily Mack contributed reporting.

WA R A N D P E A C E

Milvets Melee Looking at how inner turmoil in Columbia Milvets led to dean intervention By Caroline Hurley

olumbia University Military Veterans is an organization whose activities and inner workings are largely unknown to anyone outside of it, especially to students from the other three undergraduate colleges. This privacy is much of the reason why the deans of the School of General Studies were able to take over the club last spring, with little to no notice of anyone else on campus. Complete upheaval in the form of a Facebook group brawl led to the removal of the executive board and emergency election of a new one, all supervised by the school’s deans. According to a former member, one of the executive board members at the time posted a picture in the Milvets’ closed Facebook group of himself with Hillary Clinton in December of last year. Some in the group felt this aligned the club with Mrs. Clinton, or that the executive member had used his position on the board to meet her. These perceptions ignited a powder keg of political enmity, causing the vets to splinter into factions. But politics was only

the match to the fuse, as the entire community would discover over the ensuing few weeks, as brewing discontent with the executive board boiled over. Or some might say exploded. Milvets was formed in the 2003-2004 school year, when GS only had about forty veterans enrolled. Currently, according to School of General Studies Dean, Peter Awn, there are about 430 veterans enrolled at GS, which make up 23% of the entire GS student body, a huge growth from when the club was founded. The group’s purpose is to provide resources and support to military veterans on campus. Much of those resources come in the form of career fairs and support from an alumni network. Dean Awn says the founding members are “some of the most active alums working with the student veterans.” Milvets currently holds events about once a month in addition to weekly board meetings and general body meetings. Events in the past have ranged from resume reviews to speakers to company recruitment. The club includes members of every branch of the military from an array of service backgrounds, as well as veterans from other countries’ militaries, and non-veteran students. Membership is open to any Columbia student and is contingent only on joining the mailing list. A Monolithic People Group The conditions that led to the complete meltdown of the CU Milvets last semester were present before the club was formed, even before the seventyyear-old School of General Studies was founded. Much of the animosity amongst club members was a product of rivalries between different branches in the military which translated into disagreements that outlived these veterans’ service. Though there is a certain commonality that comes with serving your country in any capacity, someone who served as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan likely experienced different challenges than someone who served in the Navy as a surgeon

Illustration by Lani Allen

The Blue and White

WA R A N D P E A C E in Germany. These different experiences sometimes manifest as differing levels of respect for fellow servicemen, based on the capacity in which one served. This is certainly not to say that every member of one branch of service dislikes every member from another—that is hardly the case. But the feelings existed in a small but vocal minority of members of Milvets. One former member described the club as a “monolithic people group,” meaning that the club’s structure and treatment by the administration regards every veteran’s experience equal, irrespective of the capacity in which they served. Current Communications Director of Milvets, Mark Franklin GS ’17, confirms that veterans can have a “fundamentally different experience” from one another in the military, but he does not consider this a bad thing, or a weakness for the club. “There’s no tension, there’s no animosity or anything like that, it’s just a different experience and there’s value to having that depth of experience,” Franklin says.“We’re all here to learn, to get an education, to go on to the next chapter.” Other Milvets members, both former and current, strongly disagree with Franklin on this point. They point to the hard feelings that exist between different branches of service as one of the issues at the heart of the removal of the club’s executive board at the beginning of last spring semester. Peter Kiernan, GS ’17 and the former Vice President of Milvets, explains, “Veterans who fought in combat don’t like being represented by somebody who didn’t.” But Kiernan is quick to stress that this issue is “a problem the veteran community needs to deal with,” and “not what people on the outside should see.” Tension between service branches is certainly not the only reason the Milvets community fractured in December. The club was increasingly burdened with functioning as a support group for veterans, especially when it came to mental health services. “Columbia has CPS, but they’re not trained in dealing with PTS (post-traumatic stress) and veterans’ issues,” says Kiernan. Franklin adds, “You come into a very stressful environment like Columbia, with varying degrees of emotional trauma. That institutional stress can sort of trigger things and aggravate underlying conditions.” Of the embattled executive board’s managing of the issue Kiernan elaborates, “We went out of

October 2016

our way to fill that need. We created a mental health liaison. But this is not stuff that students should be doing. We were filling a gap that we were over extended on.” Dean Awn believes the blowup was more a function of growing pains than anything else. “It devolved last year into an issue that looked like it was about personalities, but I would argue it was that we hadn’t thought through the evolution of Milvets,” he says. The group grew exponentially since its founding, and it became difficult to represent the increasingly diverse body of members. The executive board “became very directive in how they approached the community, which caused a certain amount of backlash,” says Awn. In addition to the over-extended board, a large, diverse general body brings a wide-ranging spectrum of political opinions to the dynamic. Staunch conservatives, hardcore liberals and everything in between belong to the club. Many of these factions became angered when executive board members seemed to be increasingly supporting one political ideology over another, not as private citizens but in their positions as Milvets leaders. Additionally, some members felt that the executive board was using their positions to promote their personal political agendas and aspirations. “That was part of the reason the board turned over,” Franklin explains, “things got political.” Behind the K eyboard What started with the picture featuring Mrs. Clinton exploded into an unmediated melee. Over the course of winter break, club members began taking to the Facebook group to air any and all grievances about the club, mostly harsh criticism of the thenexecutive board. Kiernan, a member of the executive board under fire, said, “The coup was a small group who strongly disliked the president.” The president at the time was Brian Adam Jones, GS ‘16. The hate that led to Jones’ and his fellow leaders’ resignations was launched from a distance. “What was most shocking about the drama with Milvets,” says Kiernan, “was that it happened over break, so there was no way to address the issues in public, because they just spiraled out of control while we were away. It was a function of people having too much time on their hands and people who really hated the e-board. And this was all behind the keyboard— nobody was here at Columbia.”

WA R A N D P E A C E At the height of the conflict, an anonymous group of members released a fifty-three-page PDF document obtained by The Blue and White titled “Crimes Against Community”, rife with screenshots from the private executive board group chat. Among the messages are evidence of board members setting up a fictitious nominations process and misusing Milvets resources to boost engagement on their own Facebook pages. Facebook group infighting only escalated after the release of the document, and “it came to the point where alumni and corporations started to hear about it,” said Kiernan. Employers who recruit from GS contacted David Keefe, Senior Assistant Dean of Veterans Initiatives. They felt that the situation had gone too far and asked Dean Keefe to step in. “After things had digressed for about three weeks, I got a phone call from the Advising Student Dean Keefe [sic] and he said ‘You have to resign. If you don’t resign, the administration will no longer support you in anything you do.’ Which was a big issue because we were expecting $30,000 for our military ball,” says Kiernan. Kiernan resigned from his post as Vice President, and the rest of the executive board members still remaining after the group chat leak followed suit. Dean Awn describes the situation a little differently, not mentioning any alumni or corporations playing a hand. Rather, the deans suggested that it would be best if the leadership stepped down. “The deans didn’t go in and say ‘Oh this is horrible we’re going to shut you down.’ We said ‘You have a quasi-rebellion from some parts of the community. Don’t you think now is the time to gracefully exit, have elections, get a new team in place and have them finish out the year?’” Awn recalls. For the most part, he says the executive board was receptive to the suggestion of resignation. He affirms, “Were we involved in the conversation? Absolutely. But was it the deans saying you have to resign? Absolutely not.”

edented. The Activities Board at Columbia, the governing board which oversees Milvets, says that they cannot remember another time in their eighteen-year history that this has ever happened to one of their student groups. Similarly, the Student Governing Board, which oversees political, religious, activist and identity-based groups on campus and was founded out of the 1968 protests to give students more control over their groups, says they also cannot name a single time deans have interfered in group workings in their recent history. Current SGB Chair Karim Nader says, “ [Dean involvement] is extremely rare since any group would go to SGB Adjudication before going to administrative bodies.” Nader also points out that this past semester, the undergraduate governing boards (SGB, ABC, IGC, and GBB) formed “an intergoverning board adjudication process through Undergrad Student Life making that even less likely.” The new adjudication process creates a structure for conflicts to go through student mediation before administration intervention, but it did not exist last spring. The Milvets intrusion sets what could be a dangerous precedent for student groups on campus. Kiernan says that it was “alumni and an angry group of students” who “forced the hand” of the dean’s office. But forced or not, what does it say to other student groups when one of the largest organizations on campus is swiftly dismantled and reassembled by administrators? Dean Awn denies that the dean’s office forced anything. “Would we have quote ‘forced them out,’ no I don’t think I could’ve gone that far,” he says, “But would the whole thing have fallen apart? I think most probably and they knew that and that’s not what they wanted.” He explains that Milvets is a “unique operation,” and the resolution of their drama last semester does not set any sort of precedent for other student groups on campus. Because Milvets is predominantly made up of GS students, the GS administration was already closer to Milvets than any other student group. Indeed, many Milvets do not seem to mind

“Were we involved in the conversation? Absolutely. But was it the deans saying you have to resign? Absolutely not.”

K eeping the Peace Regardless, this level of involvement by the dean’s office in a student organization is unprec-

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WA R A N D P E A C E the involvement of the deans. Kiernan does “not necessarily think it was a bad thing,” and one Milvets member who wishes to remain anonymous says, “The deans did a good job. They did what they’re supposed to do” and have made Milvets the “gold standard of veterans’ groups.” Pressing On The Milvets organization certainly seems better for the administrative involvement. Franklin believes the club has moved on from the schism, both due to the efforts of the deans and the reenergized body of the club. “People got sick of the drama and were sick of hearing about it,” he says. “The membership of the club – either they’re brand new people who don’t know about this history, or the people that were there were sick of it and just wanted to move on.” Franklin stresses that the hiring of Dean David Keefe in the fall of 2015 has been instrumental in fostering continued conversation and support between the administration and Milvets. “The administration support has increased significantly,” he continues, “We work very closely with [Dean Keefe] and have weekly meetings with him. I think the administration has done a very good job, especially with the growing number of veterans.” Whether this closer relationship is a direct result of the melee or simply due to the creation of Dean Keefe’s position is unclear, but Dean Awn affirms that the relationship is “much more comfortable” and that it allows for “easier access from both sides.” Milvets is taking a new approach to programming this year, offering fewer, but more focused events, typically about one a month. Franklin says the “coolest thing” they have planned is hosting a Ted Talk. The topic will be “Warriors and Scholars,” and will coincide with the Milvets Ball, which is returning this year after being cancelled last year. Franklin says the programming is based on what members want to see, and that the executive board is trying to take more of a supporting role as

“facilitators, not administrators. And I think that’s where the future of the organization lies, in facilitating members to do whatever they want.” The new executive board is also trying to work more with other veteran’s organizations, especially the Ivy League Veterans Council (ILVC), which Franklin referred to as, “the primary group [Milvets] engages with.” The ILVC was actually founded by Kiernan, the former Milvets Vice President, in 2015 with the goal of getting more veterans into the top undergraduate colleges in the country. According to statistics cited by Kiernan, veterans make up only about 1% of the student population at the top fifty schools in the country. Kiernan believes this disjunction comes from two issues: “one is that vets getting out of the military are not adequately informed on higher education. And on the other hand, schools don’t know what to do because they don’t have any veterans.” Because Columbia has GS, they have a system in place for admitting and supporting veterans, but there is no standard for other schools to follow. The ILVC aims to create a standard that schools can implement, including flexible admission, flexible enrollment, and integration into undergraduate classrooms. “The core focus is exactly that – trying to work with various schools to come up with ways to create a model that would welcome a significant number of veterans at various institutions,” says Dean Awn, who believes much of the problem with getting veterans into elite schools stems from an admissions process that focuses on the quantitative more than the qualitative. CU Milvets, as one of the current ILVC member organizations, is working with the council to help change and create such standards. When asked if CU Milvets has moved on from the issues of last semester, Franklin says, “I think we have, it feels like we have.” He does point out that the club learned a hard lesson when it comes to online interactions. “We’re very visible and we’re very conscious of that visibility. You forget just how many eyes are on the organization sometimes, but it’s important to not forget that.”w

“We’re very visible and we’re very conscious of that visibility. You forget just how many eyes are on the organization sometimes, but it’s important to not forget that.”

October 2016

M easure

for

M easure

Images what stuns you what tears into you these images that make your eyes bleed i canâ€™t imagine going through without having in my possession the sight of you on monday mornings your face open and floral, pressed into cotton every small death you may have endured melting snow and my back coiled from you in bed, knowing what the light can do to you, mythologized creature, unforgiving thing silent night beneath contaminated skies pure story of your touch that is forever ungiving, too private and close to grief so i turn away from you, over again like dead leaves sinister rivers that flow incorrectly â€” Laetitia Duler

The Blue and White

M easure

for

M easure

The Meaning of Trees (for Ben Parker) “Bible” than in “tree,” I have not grasped it. My god is not of substance. My god is an absence which I have kept locked up, forgotten among memories of poor acoustics and the unknowable mysteries of the booming voice; there were several voices, they came at me from all quarters, they told me to repent the crime of my humanity, they used words I don’t understand, they told me to stay awake, not to sleep at night, not to sleep but in the embrace of God—which I interpreted and practiced by falling asleep in church—to dream incessantly, to speak, not to voice, to voice, not to speak; I learned about angels and aspired to become one, I hardly spoke or ate, I practiced my flight on the swings, I spread my fingers against glass and willed rain into my lungs, if only I could have drowned by God’s work I could perhaps come to understand why it is that leaves bud on my arms in spring, why birds come to perch in my branches, why I grow cold each year and disappear, why we grow crooked and lined with age, why love of life seizes me only so long as there is light by which to see my fragile veins and brittle bones. — Jean Kim

October 2016

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

Star Talk A conversation with Mary Putman By Nia Brown Mary Putman is an astronomy professor and researcher at Columbia, as well as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Astronomy and Astrophysics. For her outstanding work on the formation and evolution of galaxies (like our own and otherwise) and star formation among other concepts, she has been awarded a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. The Blue and White: You once described your research to me as looking at what fuels galaxies and galaxies that eat other galaxies, do you want to explain more? Mary Putman: Yes, so what I look at is how galaxies get more fuel to form stars. So a star like our Sun is a second generation star so it formed from when our Milky Way galaxy brought in more fuel, it was able to form our Sun and this process is ongoing. Our galaxy forms about a Sun per year, maybe a little bit more but the equivalent of a Sun a year. The way i t does that is by bringing in more hydrogen gas, which is the main fuel for star formation. So I look at how that process happens and it happens both from streams of gas that come in from the intergalactic medium as well as what you are remembering, our galaxy will eat smaller galaxies. We can map that process using telescopes that can see little galaxies being shredded by bigger galaxies. B&W: Yeah, and I saw you worked with GALFA, the

program mapping neutral hydrogen. You want to explain why hydrogen is so interesting here? MP: Yeah it is a big survey, it uses the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, it was the largest single dish telescope but now the one in China is open so technically that one is bigger now. So why hydrogen—it is the most abundant element in the universe. It was formed in the Big Bang and everything heavier than helium and a little lithium and beryllium was actually formed later in stars, so hydrogen was there from the beginning. It is still the most common by far throughout the universe in terms of the elements. Because it is so abundant, there is an atomic transition that hydrogen makes naturally that we can detect with our telescopes. It emits a very distinct wavelength of light. B&W: So a lot of your research seems to be concerning the beginnings of the universe and you received a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship which is for outstanding research broadly relating to NASA Cosmic Origins Program’s goals, so why is this question of where humans and the cosmos came from so interesting for you? MP: You know the idea of humans not knowing about their environment is a little interesting—I mean why would you not want to know? I think it is natural human curiosity that you want to know something about your environment and that goes everywhere from New York City to our Universe as a whole. Just trying to understand what is going on up there, there are so many open questions and all we get in astronomy is the light to interpret, you get to apply direct physics but you also get a certain aspect of creativity in terms of explaining and coming up with ideas of what is going on.

Illustration by Amanda Ba

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N B&W: When explaining science to people, I feel like it always comes back to that, trying to explain where we come from—very broadly throughout all sciences. MP: Yeah that is the other aspect, what is the origin of Earth, of humans, but each thing builds on the next. To have Earth, you need to have our star the Sun, to have our star the Sun, you needed to have the Milky Way galaxy, to have the Milky Way galaxy, you had to form the universe and have structure formed in the universe. You need each of those steps to really understand our origins. B&W: So your research, galaxies eating other galaxies, that is a metaphor and in popular science and science writing in general I think we rely on metaphors a lot. A lot of the time, different groups, different writers end up reusing the same metaphors, do you think that could potentially limit people’s understanding of the concepts—always using the same metaphors? MP: That is an interesting question. You are correct in particular when they try to publicize science, they’ll use metaphors that are very limited. A classic metaphor that is used that is very limited is trying to understand the expansion of the universe using things like the surface of the balloon—dots on the surface of the balloon that get further away as the balloon expands being celestial objects. That is only two dimensions when in reality, the universe is four dimensions—at least. So you are always going to be somewhat limited by making analogies. In terms of alternatives, I am not sure, because we need to be able to speak a language that everyone can relate to—which is an ongoing problem in the sciences. We have a lot of jargon and we’ve went through at least eight years, usually more like ten years, of schooling to learn all the physics and the astronomy. So it is always going to be a challenge. More visuals are great, I think people are picking up on more interactive visuals that can help. B&W: Your research uses a lot of simulations, does that seem to help when explaining things to people? I know that is how a lot of research astronomy is done in general. MP: I think so, the movies take a lot of explaining as well, it is a real art to figure out how to do those well so that people from a wide variety of backgrounds

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can look at them and see what is going on. I think if anything it helps just because people are drawn to that—it is moving, it has color. Also, the simulations are key throughout astronomy, just in terms of interpreting our data. The data gets so complex, in particular because I work with gas, which has so many hydrodynamical effects that can happen. The simulations help a lot. B&W: I think a lot of the times, and I once worked for an online popsci start-up publication, what gets “clicks” in writing about astronomy are stories like “this signal might be from aliens,” though all of those recent incidents have been just from man-made electromagnetic sources so it is just interesting when people share those articles but don’t know about something like LIGO which is way more important and newsworthy in the field of astronomy. It has been called revolutionary actually. MP: Yeah it is amazing they have actually detected gravitational waves. Well, I guess an alien has more of a potential direct impact whereas something like gravitational waves are a little bit like “oh is that going to affect me? No, not at all, ok, next” whereas an alien could potentially fly into your neighborhood or something, I don’t know, maybe that is why. B&W: Yeah, the theatrics and excitement of it. MP: I mean we can always try to stretch things to link to those kind of natural interests of people, no matter what. Like this formed because this formed and what not. B&W: Well, going back to LIGO, it has been considered as adding another dimension to our understanding of astronomy, that we can detect and potentially measure gravitational waves, past light and other electromagnetic sources. How do you see that expanding and what could be the next dimension of being able to measure and understand space? MP: Gosh, I feel like that’s something that if I knew the answer to, I’d get a Nobel Prize. I’m pretty sure the people that proposed gravitational waves are getting a Nobel Prize. Of course the gravitational waves are exciting, though with that we are a little bit limited in which objects we can study yet. That doesn’t diminish how exciting they are, though there is a

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N limited set of people that can study those, in relation to their objects, right now.

B&W: Ha, well I suppose I was just referencing the movie.

B&W: Yeah so what kind of access do the researchers have to apparatus here at Columbia and what is the protocol for different teams at different institutions using each other’s telescopes and equipment?

MP: No, don’t worry, you are totally right. The human part of it is mainly for inspiration. It was the same thing with the moon, you can get a lot more done by sending these rovers. And given the cost benefit, sending rovers will get you further. But the whole exploration aspect, I think you can’t beat that. For me, it does sound very exciting if someone is actually willing to [go to Mars] and someone is willing to pay for it. I’m not sure I am excited enough to say that the government should spend that much money on it. I like the idea of these private organizations getting in the game and doing that. [Government funding for Mars exploration] unfortunately would affect a lot of our funding, because it is not necessarily separate from what goes to NASA. That could pull a lot of money away from a lot of other things being researched. I am a little nervous about that. Otherwise it is exciting and would do a lot in terms of people’s interest, kind of like what you said about aliens. A human going to Mars—the whole field would get a big push from that.

MP: Well that is a very big question, we could be here a while. Well, in terms of what Columbia has access to, it is a little odd compared to its peers in that it doesn’t have access to more [equipment]. This is something we are working on, to get involved either with one of these large surveys coming up and in particular access to a larger telescope, so [we’ll have to] propose to [observatories] to observe our objects. There are two telescopes down in Arizona that we are a part of. The model for getting involved in these kinds of things has changed over time just because the costs have gone up so high. Now that we are going to 30 meter optical or the millimeter ray down in Chile with so many dishes—it is billions of dollars. Now with some of the big optical telescopes, they’ve tried to get different university consortiums together. Funding from the government keeps getting narrower and narrower. B&W: I think earlier this year, President Obama tried to propose around 18 billion more dollars funding for NASA and that seemed spurred by, looking at a lot the rhetoric, Charles Bolden reaffirming it is a primary goal of NASA at this point to improve the Orion manned-spacecraft program and try to go to Mars. But that no doubt has been affecting what the National Science Foundation can give out, too, right? MP: So that is how I do a lot of my research, I get these three year NSF grants from the government, that is how I pay my graduate students and collect my data. B&W: Do you have something to say about why going to Mars is so important? I know this is not really related to your research but I ask that question a lot, I don’t think I necessarily see that much exciting or practical gain of a man going to Mars but I think that has been particularly emphasized recently, in movies as well as in current discussions and programs. MP: Well if it was a woman, then it would be exciting. I wouldn’t be too excited about a man going to Mars.

B&W: Most of, or entirely, what you look at, is so far away and it does depend on our own capabilities and instruments what we see and what we miss. Can we tell what an atmosphere [on an exoplanet] is from the radiation and color it gives off? MP: Yeah, you look for spectral lines, the different elements, the different energy levels between the electrons jump around—there is a distinct signature for the elements and molecules. We are pushing the limits for that in terms of planets right now. B&W: Speaking of the limits of what we can see and understand, your research, involves dark matter, you want to explain, to start with, the current understanding of what it is? MP: Anyone who works on galaxies has to think about dark matter on some level just because it is the dominant component of the galaxy, it is probably 90% of the mass of a galaxy. For what I do, it dictates the motions of the gas because how something moves relative to something else is dependent on how massive the two bodies are. If you add a lot of mass from this dark matter, then stuff is going to move faster.

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N The current thinking is that dark matter is cold, which means it is a relatively massive particle and that it doesn’t move super fast. With that cold, dark matter, the way structure forms in the universe, is you start with small things and build up to larger things. So that also has implications on my research: it predicts there should be lots of these small, dwarf galaxies, the building blocks of larger galaxies, and we haven’t found a lot of those yet. With galaxies, most people tend to focus on more massive galaxies and what they do, not the little dwarfs. B&W: Massive things tend to give off more energy, so they are just more easily detectable I imagine. MP: Yeah, exactly, that is one reason why they have been the focus before, you see them more readily. The dwarfs are harder to find. B&W: And it may be more exciting to write about grand things like “supermassive black hole does this” or “super giant star collides with this other huge object.” Are a good number of astronomy papers open source? MP: All of them—well not all of them—almost all, we were one of the first fields to develop this kind of [open] archive, it is called Astro-ph that everyone puts their papers on now and it is all open source. [Papers] are published in journals that cost money but as soon as [a paper] is accepted, and sometimes even as soon as it is submitted, it goes into this other archive. So that is what most of us look at every morning, the Astro-ph listing for the day.

B&W: Is that less fun, maybe? MP: Yeah, I think you miss something not going to the actual instrument in terms of the experience and learning. Though obviously it saves time. I think you might get better data overall, there [are] trained people taking it, otherwise often you make some mistakes initially, right, because you have never used that [equipment]. Those kind of mistakes are exactly why the operators are doing this right now because some of these facilities have gotten so expensive, they just don’t want to mess around with an astronomer learning how to do it. B&W: Are there sci-fi, movies, representations that you really like or don’t like for various reasons? MP: In general I like sci-fi a lot, a good sci-fi is always a movie I’ll choose to go to. Or a book, I am reading one now, a Larry Niven book. Bad sci-fi—I actually think it is funny. Something like Deep Impact, you roll your eyes but it is kind of funny too, you almost enjoy it in another way. I guess the ones I don’t enjoy are the ones that get too violent, which today is most of them. B&W: The NASA Near Earth Object program, that is monitoring things that are around us and in various sized orbits around us, we can reasonably know that there is nothing about to hit us. MP: We have a pretty good handle on what is going on out there with the big ones, so I think we are pretty safe.

B&W: For apparatus and labs you directly deal with, what is it like, it is more virtual now right? Over correspondence and the computer?

B&W: Maybe one more question, people like Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, underrated, overrated, or rated just the right amount?

MP: So when I was a graduate student, I would go to a telescope once a month when I was doing a large survey and we had to go and get the data but now they have moved to a model where they have telescope operators collecting most of the data for telescopes. So it can be somewhat rare now that graduate students, or I, go to the telescopes. Now we put in the proposal and if we get the time, [data] is taken by the telescope operator and sent to us on the computer and we analyze it on there.

MP: Ha, oh, that is an interesting question, I guess that depends on who is rating them. Those types of people are amazing in terms of what they are able to do for science and getting it out in the community. I mean they do get tremendously big heads and they could be a little arrogant. But I don’t know, it is O.K. I don’t have to deal with them personally so I’m not that worried. I’m just really impressed with being able to communicate science to the public like that.w

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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. Hey President Bollinger, We hope you’re doing well! We wanted to invite you to our weekly potluck this Friday. It’s a really nice way to relax after a long week and we know this is a really stressful time of the year for everyone. It’d be great if you could bring some food—a little pasta, some stir fry, or whatever—but if you can’t, no worries, there’ll be plenty to go around; it’d be great just to have you there. Yours, Potluck House Dear Potluck House—Thank you for the invitation. Unfortunately, I will not be able to join you on Friday, but I send my best wishes as you and your housemates begin this new semester. Sincerely, Lee Bollinger e ...this is why the beast’s puppets (lizards/zombies) are of One Mind... The situation is so serious at this point that the antichrist is literally both presidential candidates, so much so that they even share the same federal tax address (Donald Klump and Shillary Cuntin), so much so that they rigged the primaries against Bernie just because he was trying to legalize weed, “The Tree of Knowledge”... They tried to turn me into a puppet by killing me and reanimating me in an Emergency Room. To put it into perspective, they not only tried to do this to me, but they killed and reanimated my grandmother as well when she was recieving cancer treatment-just for inheritance money... forcing people to take Risperdal, which not only attacks your dopamine receptors (cannot get high off marijuana while using), but causes female breast growth... I have screenshot evidence of notable rap artists “breaking character” and exposing themselves as devils.

e Monday, September 26th, 2016 Clinton V. Trump. At Mel’s. Sound ON. No matter whose side you are on, you know it’s going to be a debate for the books. And the best debates deserve the best drink specials. From 7pm to close, come to either Mel’s for our normal Monday night specials: $4 drafts and 50¢ wings PLUS $3 Deportation and Pneumonia Shots AND $5 Drinks The Wall Smashed Blackberry Let’s make America Drunk again. e I was very discouraged in the beginning because I didn’t know how to start the college essay at all, but the editors at MSES organized my ideas very well and suggested additional sources that helped me through the first and the final drafts of the essay. I learned a lot while working with MSES in terms of improving my writing skills. My biggest concern was figuring out how to explain my complicated academic background into a unique, impressive essay, but MSES helped me explain how I adapted to new environments and how these transitions affected me as a student. I got accepted to most colleges I applied to–among these are New York University and Wellesley College. I strongly recommend MSES!w

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CAMPUS GOSSIP SHAKE YOUR MONEY MAKER Overheard outside Philosophy: “If you want to raise a Jewish family, you can’t just make forty or fifty thousand dollars a year.” e Former SEAS University Senator Akshay Shah has begun blurbing ads for McKinsey on Bwog. e The EcoReps made $40,000 at the Green Sale. e In the Harpers issue from March of this year, a graduate student in Sociology urges faculty and students to band together to confront university administrations who increasingly run their schools like corporations. “Administrators and the lawyers and consultants they hire,” she writes, “aren’t sitting idle. They are working hard to protect the brands of the institutions they work for and the security of their endowments… [they] have been opportunistic in playing up whatever side of these conflicts suits them, assimilating outrage at campus sexual assault and claims to free speech with equal haste.” A Columbia employee who read the piece and who identifies as an administrator found the article offensive. Not all of us administrators, she insisted, harbor “sinister motives.” SMOKING GUN Turmoil in several class facebook pages has erupted over the suggestion that smoking be banned on campus. e Seen on the CC ’19 page: “I’ve been compiling a shortlist of Blue Bins that are actually really quiet and don’t create a lot of noise in motion, ideally so next time you check out a bin, you have the opportunity to choose a bin that isn’t deathly loud. Just gauging interest, would anyone be interested if I made a page for it with frequent updates on it?”

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e Overheard in the dorm: “Can I take one of these Emergen-Cs?” “Yeah, take some more hits too.” e Barnard President Debora Spar incorrectly stated that Gloria Steinem had gotten plastic surgery in her New York Times article “Aging and My Beauty Dilemma.” Steinem apparently saw the piece, as the Times later published this correction: “An article last Sunday about one feminist’s waning opposition to cosmetic surgery overstated what is known about whether Gloria Steinem has used some of the cosmetic procedures mentioned. While the writer believed that she had, Ms. Steinem says she has not.” e Senior Night got moved to Mel’s, which is rumored to be less strict than Bernheim when checking IDs. Good luck finding seniors at Senior Night. e Last year, the body paint of dancers participating in Anchor Splash, Delta Gamma Sorority’s headline philanthropy event, caused Uris pool to turn green, rendering it unusable for a week. This year, the event was held in Roone Auditorium. ACQUIRED TASTE JJ’s Place has a 5 star rating on yelp. One of the reviews consists of a JJ’s themed rewrite of the lyrics to “No More Parties in LA.” John Jay Dining Hall on the other hand, has only 3 stars. One disgruntled reviewer called the entrees “bland and loveless.” e Barnard alum Martha Stewart is starring in a new VH1 celebrity competition cooking show with Snoop Dogg called Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party. The teaser for the show has Martha and Snoop dancing and popping champagne to Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode.”w

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