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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. XXI No. IV

Orientation 2015

Survive NSOP! A worst-case scenario guide

Adulting in the City Fun ways to launder, bathe, and live like a grown-up Also Inside: Administrator Birdspotting

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, Senior 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 JORDANA NARIN, CC ’17 JOSEPH RABINOVITSJ, CC ’18 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 MABEL TAYLOR, BC ’18 Contributors ELENA BURGER BC, ’18 MARIAM ELNOZAHY, BC ’16 TAYLOR GRASDALEN, BC ’17 KUNAL JASTY, SEAS ’16 NICK KENSINGER, CC ’18 JOSEPH MILHOLLAND, CC ’17 BEN SCHNEIDER, CC ’17 SERENA SOLIN, CC ’16 CHRISTIAN ZHANG, CC ’16

Associate Layout Editor HANA BEACH, BC ’18 Staff Illustrator RACHEL CHIN, CC ’18 Artists DARYA FRAIMAN, GS ’16 WALLACE KALKIN, BC ’18 ANNE SCOTTI, CC ’16 ALEX SWANSON, CC ’18 JOANNA ZOU, CC ’18

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXI

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. IV

Columns

4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 14 M easure for Measure 18 The Travel Desk 21 Verily Veritas 30 Digitalia Columbiana 31 Campus G ossip

Features 10 At Two Swords’ Length: A re You Doing A nything Tonight? Our monthly prose and cons

Alex Swanson & Alexander Pines

Sean Augustine-Obi

12 A dministrator Bird Watching Our guide to spotting your administrators in the field

Sean Augustine-Obi

16 Where Will You Spend NSOP?! Your declassified school survival guide

B&W Staff

22 Notes from the Underground B&W Staffers break the ice and tell you what we did this summer

Mariam Elnozahy

theblueandwhite.org

23 Fight the Power A conversation with Christia Mercer

cover :

“Breaking the Ice” by Zane Bhansali

BLUE BOOK

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Hello, freshmen! (For future reference, it’s best to go with ‘first year.’) This issue should find you in your dorm (I congratulate you on your choice) as your fan cools your sweaty brow after a crowded elevator trip up to your barren and questionably stained matchstick box. Welcome to Columbia! Don’t worry if you hate it; everyone else here does too. The rhetoric of College means an immense amount of expectation sits on the young shoulders which grip (via some arms, presumably) this volume. There are expectations of you—to be a leader (Admissions decreed nobody in the Class of 2019 shall ever, ever be a follower), to make bank with that Econ degree, or to discuss Sophocles at that hypothetical cocktail party looming massive on the horizon. And there are expectations you have of this institution, which has tried, with brochures and rankings and emails and expensively produced videos, to win your heart in advance. Here’s the trick: the institution is a floating signifier, which is a theoretical phrase you’ll find yourself using as you become increasingly obnoxious during your undergraduate career here. We realized this fact last issue, when we asked Dean James Valentini what Columbia College was, and he referred us to a website. In our Conversation with professor Christia Mercer, she tells us that the Core is not a static thing you inherit, but something you create as you study it. There is no one Columbia that will build you—you build your college for yourself. It’s choose your own adventure—just look at our CU twin study (page 8), our NSOP flowchart (page 12), or our radically different takes on whether or not we’re going out tonight (page 10). While you’re making your own Columbia, perhaps you might make it better, as Professor Mercer insists we have the power to do. And perhaps you might grow to love it, madly. I hope so. — Hallie Nell Swanson

TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS A Google Maps-themed NSOP More royalty money to re-sod the lawns The $12 salad PawPrint Youthful optimism Guacamole peas at John Jay Sparknoting Song of Solomon on the Ferris staircase

DEPARTURES Noise complaints for Village Pourhouse Frat fundraisers at AmCaf Joe Ienuso effigies in Manhattanville dumpsters Print@CU Sparknoting Metamorphoses in the Lerner computer lab

Come Again?!

“...And although students and I do not always agree (nor do my husband and I, nor my children and I, for that matter)...”

– Cristen Kromm, in her Spec op-ed

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

Reorientation Guide In 2012, campus activists revived the early 2000s tradition of the ‘ disorientation guide’ for new students. Published by Student Worker Solidarity, No Red Tape, Columbia Prison Divest, and other leftist groups on campus, the guide publicizes campus activism and offers a critical look at “Barnumbia’s” role in private prisons, gentrifying Harlem, land grabbing in Manhattanville, mistreatment of workers, and miscarriages of justice in sexual assault adjudication. This year, documents found in PrezBo’s shredder indicated scrapped plans for the university to publish its own rival ’zine, a ‘reorientation guide.’ What follows are excerpts from the meeting notes... ‘THEY SAY, WE SAY’: A DIGESTIBLE GRAPHIC STATING OUR POSITION “They say prisons are bad. We say, not if you haven’t done anything wrong!” “They say we’re gentrifying Harlem. We say, we like artisanal flat whites!” “They say we called the NYPD on Black Lives Matter protests. We say, Public Safety IS the NYPD!” LIES AND SMILES: KNOW YOUR STUDENTS “Play student leaders off of each other. Make them seem like the brilliant ones for coming up with your idea. Then invite them for a fireside chat. Suckers.” REAPPROPRIATION “Oppressed groups sometimes reclaim slurs— ‘queer’ is one example. This is only OK when the group does it, not outsiders. Examples: it’s OK for us to say, ‘Fuck the deans,’ but when they say it, it’s offensive. A feature on when it’s OK to assign names like ‘Deantini and ‘Prezbo.’ Ideas on how to repurpose the term ‘red tape’—the tape restrains rapists? Suzanne to research.”

ADMIN ALLYSHIP 101, FOR STUDENTS “How to leverage your privilege as a student, without drowning out the voices of a marginalized administration.” “Staying in your lane: students shouldn’t tell admins how to admin.” “Identities matter.” CORPORATE SPONSORS? “Ideas: JP Morgan. The Columbia Lions™. Google Alphabet. Dig Inn. Tara Hill Irish Tavern. Tinder. Barnard College.” GRAPHIC DESIGN/CORPORATE IDENTITY “Consult Jim on relevant Pantone colors. N.B. don’t use Athletics font, they get touchy about that shit.” WHERE TO DISTRIBUTE? “Columbia Bookstore (put next to Columbia sweatshirts for parents). Low Library. Barnard Zine library. IRC. Lerner Ramps CPS HQ. New Ferris staircase.”

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

Orientation 2015

Postcard by Joanna Zou

BLUE NOTES

full loop on the shuttle from Columbia’s Morningside campus to the Medical School and back will take you past five different McDonald’s, 2 Empanadas Monumentals, New York City’s Only Active Mausoleum, six hipster coffee shops, including a bar that serves peanut butter burgers and avocado fries, Fairway Market, 8000 bodegas, Columbia’s incipient Manhattanville campus (“MEN AT WORK”), City College, Hamilton Pharmacy, Hamilton Pharmacy Inc., and six Chinese takeout places named First Choice Chinese Food. The 166th Street CUMC stop is located almost directly across from the Audubon ballroom, now the Columbia-owned Mary Woodard Lasker Biomedical Research Building, where Malcolm X was shot. The shuttle also makes stops at lesser known Broadwayflanking Columbia buildings, including Studebaker and Nash, as well as the McDonald’s on 125th, and Harlem Hospital on 135th and Lenox. One evening this summer, walking past 166th St at roughly 6:04 p.m., I saw a man wearing a chainmail thong and carrying a wand with a heart at the end screaming at the impressively poker-faced line of people assembled at the stop at to take their clothes off and “burn them. Burn them!” and it was the best thing I have ever seen. The shuttle timetable reports that getting from the 116th to the 166th

makeshift summer stop is a full 30 minutes, which is about twice the time the same trip would take on the uptown 1. The shuttle, presumably, allows you to avoid such sights. The CUMC shuttle looks and feels deceptively like regular MTA buses, except for its blockier shape. But the general public is not meant to use them. According to the transportation website, effective April 2012, all shuttle buses were “outfitted with a SmartTrack: Passenger Intelligence Rider Count System” which allows Columbia to “ensure that access to the shuttle bus is limited to only the intended ridership,” which is people who have taken General Chemistry. At a meeting last year about ethnicity, race and justice, students from the the Mailman School of Public Health reportedly voiced their request for the school to be closer in proximity to the main campus, presumably so they would never have to take the shuttle again. — Virginia Fu

s Columbia students meander the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, most are unaware that they are stepping on the turf of one regal creature—Phil the white peafowl, named for Phillip Foote, the former head of The Cathedral School. Phil reigns majestic over the grounds, moseying around on his talons and showing off his feathers, which span about a meter and a half once extended. Phil joined the Cathedral grounds shortly after his brothers Jim and Harry, blue male peafowls who came to Morningside Heights in 2002. Columbians will spot the three brothers most often in the spring around finals time, when they feel free

Illustration by Anne Scotti

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES

to roam the grounds in the warmer weather amidst primal screams. Unlike his brothers, who prefer to keep a low profile, Phil has a large social media presence with a Youtube channel (expect peacock noises and footage of Phil as Christmas music plays in the background) and a Twitter account (@CathedralPhil), at which fans tweet pictures of him lounging majestically on the St. John the Divine steps, looking hungover or resisting Cathedral security, like the recalcitrant celebrity he is. “Just try and stop me,” he replies to a punter who calls him out for defecating on Cathedral grounds. Phil’s fame, though, leaves him exposed to haters—he often gets cyberbullied by the Morningside hawks, who seek refuge in the many nooks and crannies of the Cathedral building. The Cathedral’s adoption of the three peacocks may seem unusual, but actually celebrates Christian symbolism. Ancient Greeks believed that the peafowl’s body did not decay after death, and the peacock was adopted by early Christianity as a symbol of immortality and renewal. Last year, artist Xu Bing’s mammoth Phoenix sculpture hung in the nave; created from construction debris, it likewise gestured toward themes of rebirth. The temporary installation may have garnered a lot of attention, but it didn’t ruffle Phil’s feathers. He knows whose grounds these really are. — Yasemin Akçagüner

alking through East Campus on any given weekend night, the scene is all too familiar: music thumps from townhouse windows, punctuated

Orientation 2015

by the occasional drunken yell as freshmen you’ve never seen before wait to get signed in. East Campus was not always like this. Built in 1982, the dorm was long considered Columbia’s most luxurious—so much so, in fact, that the building has played host to both university guests and faculty in its three-plus decade history. The “East Campus Hotel,” as it was called, occupied the sixth floor of EC and provided a comfortable and affordable place for speakers, parents, and visiting professors to stay during their time at Columbia. A 2006 Blue and White review likened the 295 square feet rooms to “expensive Holiday Inn rooms, crammed between floors of partygoers.” Prior to the opening of the EC Hotel, speakers were housed at hotels off university property, where they “went wild… running up large hotel bills.” The opening of the hotel (the first guest was 1980 independent presidential candidate John Anderson) provided much needed financial relief. Even Columbia’s professors embraced East Campus. Professor Robert Gross, dean of Columbia’s engineering school from 1981-1989, chose to live in an apartment in East Campus, where he hosted his popular weekly sherry and conversation hour. But just as Dean Gross’ sherry cabinet eventually closed, so too did the doors of the East Campus Hotel. After stints in 1999 relieving a housing shortage, and in 2002 housing freshmen, the hotel was gradually repurposed. In its place came doubles for 34 students. Now, the floor consists of a mix of second years and transfer students, with the majority of the smaller, campus facing dorms taken by sophomores and the larger, Morningside Park facing dorms given to transfer students and the floor’s RA. The only remnant of the hotel’s presence is an overlooked “hotel” designation on the EC floorplan. Then again, wading through the crowd of uninvited cruisers of a weekend night, you’d be forgiven for thinking EC is best suited to one night affairs. — Nick Kensinger

Illustrations by Joanna Zou and Zane Bhansali

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 campus power couples who aren't couples. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org.

Third-Wheeling with the Warrick Twins

t one point during my interview with the Warricks, Alexandra Warrick spontaneously begins narrating her “aesthetic for the day.” She undoes her Brenda Starr, Reporter, belt and hands it across the table for me to see. Her shirt has got a “fucking cow on it,” her earrings were “swiped” from her grandmother and while some mistakenly believe that she was the one who drew on her Keds, it was actually a man from Kentucky. “Basically I’m just wearing lies, theft and deceit,” she concludes. Asked how he would describe his aesthetic for the day, Grayson answers, after a moment’s thought, “Indigo.” Grayson “can neither confirm nor deny” that he is the man pictured in the BB408 Unisex Polycotton tank on the American Apparel website. Alexandra, BC ’17, and Grayson Warrick, CC ’16, are twins. They spent seven months together in the womb of a famous ballerina, during which time Alex Warrick could be observed repeatedly kicking Grayson in the head—an experience Grayson refers to as his “brutal prenatal beatdown”—while Grayson tried to absorb Alex into his own body. Columbia represents the first time Grayson and Alex have attended the same school: the two were separated for “social development” reasons after preschool (“We distracted the shit out of each other,” says Grayson). The casual observer could be forgiven, however, for believing that the two have carefully and specifically engineered their

lives to throw you off the trail of this fact. “The first time I met Alex, I literally could not believe [that they were twins],” recalls a former Nussbaum suitemate of Grayson’s. “They showed me their Facebooks and I still didn’t believe them.” The twins themselves agree that if they were drinks, Grayson would be “a nice warm cup of hot cocoa” and Alex would be “something that fucks you up.” On campus Grayson is a COÖP leader and is on CCSC. Friends and observers joke that Grayson is the “cookie cutter model of the perfect person,” and speculate that his morning walk to class takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour due to his practice of stopping and and talking with everyone that he knows or vaguely knows. Alex, who arrived at Columbia a year later despite being the older twin by 20 minutes, is someone who doesn’t let grotesque injury stop her from making rehearsal on time. (“She showed up with her face covered in blood,” a castmate recalls. “We sent her to the nurse.”) Alex believes she was typecast in a recent theater production when she starred as “a man in a coma who constantly screamed out garbage.” A friend recalls how when she questioned Alex about her newly shaved head, Alex replied “study break,” and “kept going with the conversation as if nothing had happened.” She has made decent headway into her goal of writing for every single campus publication. “Sorry for talking to you assaulting-ly,” is how she ends the interview. Despite their devotion to two disparate spheres of campus life, the two maintain an affectionate relationship. Observers have correctly noted that hanging out with Grayson and Alex is like third wheeling with a couple whose conversation resembles “an Aaron Sorkin script on speed.” “I never understand everything they’re saying,” reports one of Alex’s CUSS costars. “Maybe if they took it ten times slower.” Alex believes that Grayson’s role in the uni-

The Blue and White

verse is to “add a warmth and a sparkle to the everyday” while Grayson believes Alex’s is to “bring an excitement never before seen.” And although Grayson believes that Alex “got all the creative genes,” the two in fact spend the interview trying to convince the other to star in their elaborately plotted ideas for absurdist CUSS sketches and Core Scholars rap videos. Last spring the duo starred in a Latenite production that ended with Alex and Grayson drawing lipstick over their faces and crying. The twins may seem different, says a friend of Alex, but “when they’re together it all makes sense.” — Virginia Fu Ben and Viv’s Excellent Adventure

“O

ur goal from the get-go was to under-promise and over-deliver.” So say the new Columbia College Student Council president and VP of policy, Benjamin Makansi and Vivek Ramakrishnan respectively, of their election campaign strategy. Although an example of the duo’s characteristic dry wit (they were utterly deadpan as they suggested I interview their parents for a “pretty solid reference” and had me fooled for a moment), the motto suits them perfectly. These two new leaders of CCSC—often referred to as “Ben and Viv”—ran as outsiders in a campaign they described as “satirical.” Their campaign for the ‘Freedom, Liberty and Freedom’ party, featuring posters of the pair in wife beaters and American flag boxers, turned serious when they came up with a slim but popular platform. In a surprise victory this April, the duo managed to defeat the incumbent CCSC e-board by 50 votes. While Ben and Viv seemed a goofy novelty to many following CCSC politics, the two have been together a long time, and both are driven and accomplished. Ben and Viv met in the fall of their freshman year playing soccer in Riverside Park (“Who is this little shit who thinks he’s good?” Ben says he thought of his opponent turned running mate). Shortly afterwards, they decided to spread their love of soccer, fundraising around $20,000 to build a soccer field in Uganda as part of a project Viv had begun in high school. They spent two weeks there with the help of SigEp’s Balanced Man Fellowship. They are both brothers in Beta, and individually they each have extensive extracurriculars. Ben started the Atheists and Agnostics Society, did Sabor, and was an RA in McBain; Viv is part of CUE and was president of the table tennis club. The Freedom, Liberty, and Freedom party first came about when the two ran for junior class council.

Orientation 2015

They had been joking about a humorous campaign with their friend Sameer Mishra (also Beta, now VP Finance) who was then running for class rep. They eventually decided to run for junior class council, and lost by only 64 votes of 622 cast. The next year, to make the most impact in their final run for student politics, they decided to campaign for E-board. The process looked off-the-cuff, but was highly coordinated. Fellow Beta brothers served as campaign manager and head of security. The two tell me they still have “a stack of 450 posters still in our room that we didn’t hang up.” They instead opted for direct engagement in dining halls, a tactic which yielded mixed results. “A lot of people were willing to talk to us and engage with us, and some people said they didn’t want to,” said Viv. “My favorite was having guys tell me they went to Barnard.” Even with a campaign team, Viv put their chances of success at 30/70. Ben gave them better odds, but didn’t expect a win.Since the victory , Ben and Viv have been busy getting acquainted with the intricacies of being student leaders at Columbia. They feel the administration is willing to work with them (“We’re not going to go into administrative meetings cracking jokes and showing up in American flag tank-tops,” says Viv), and the outgoing executive board has helped them transition. The Pres and Vice-Pres have stuck to the commitments they campaigned on: posting CCSC meeting minutes on Facebook, sending out surveys at the beginning of the school year, and making “Student Group of the Week” videos. They also want to continue work on the food insecurity proposal, which would provide free meal swipes to students in emergency situations, and push for 4-credit lecture courses in all departments. Viv says he looks forward to the “legwork,” but although the two aim to keep humour in everything they do, coordinating proposals is a far cry from the hi-jinks of their campaign. “Honestly,” he says, “it does not sound sexy on paper.” — Joseph Milholland

Illustrations by Rachel Chin

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

Are you doing W

hy yes, I will certainly, unequivocally be doing After all, Allen Ginsberg, who is the man picsomething tonight—I mean, this is college. tured in the poster on the wall behind me, has a point The greatest college in the greatest university in the when he tells us “Moloch whose love is endless oil and greatest city in the universe! I’ve already read the first stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! 12 books of the Illiad! The spears were phalluses and Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! the shields were vaginas! Everybody died at the end! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!” That’s exactly what college is going to be like, right? Moloch rhymes with Wallach! It all makes sense now. I’m so excited to be here! I can’t wait to try out my new fake at Cannons! I’ve heard that Greek life is big here. I’ve (It only cost $400, which they told me is really heard that I can get into any club downtown with my cheap!) I can’t wait to go to a football game! (We Columbia ID. I’ve heard that if I want the Trustees to have those, right?) I can’t wait to figure out what the draw a portrait of my ass, I need only ask. I’ve heard good places to eat around here are! I can’t wait to pretty girls will talk to me on the 1 train only if I am learn econometrics, work an 80-hour week finance reading early Horkheimer internship, get hired full and that the “swim test” time by BCG, marry Robert is actually a cocktail party deNiro, break up with him with James Wood as the because I’m sleeping with only other attendee. I’ve Salma Hayek, lose my job heard that Drake lives in and live the life of a homeHartley 6A and the barless heroin addict in LA! tender at Cannons plays I can’t wait to write a Spec the crooked politician from op-ed! House of Cards. I’ve heard For college behooves that all tunnels lead to the us to stride into the pashuman resources division turelands of opportunity! of Goldman Sachs. I’ve To pluck the tallest shoots! heard that if I kiss the exact Of the ripest reeds! To plow spot on College Walk where Barack the field and sow the good crop so Obama and Gayatri Spivak crossed that we may nourish ourselves upon ffirmative paths I will be the first in my class to the most ambrosial of life’s sweet By Alex Swanson simultaneously achieve native prograin, Adventure! ficiency in Sanskrit and perish in a For to go out is to feel, to feel drone strike. I’ve heard that if I kill is to be humane, and to be humane my roommate and dump his body into the Hudson, charts us in celestial alignment with all the wishes Columbia Housing will provide me with two thera- and fantasies of our creator. To go out is to reach peutic nutella kittens and a complimentary air condi- towards immortality! I can’t wait until strippers are tioning unit. I’ve heard that there’s a dorm where all doing shots out of my bellybutton while I ride a the rooms are sinks. I’ve heard that the housing lot- white tiger through a rainbow of a thousand dreams tery is Russian Roulette with drones. I’ve heard that (that’s our mascot, right, strippers? Or rainbows?). the work-study students are unionizing and the ghost Everything is going to be so dope!!!! College!!!! of Said haunts Uris Café. I’ve heard that I can join the So, to answer your question, of course I’m revolution, or at least Teach for America. There’s so doing something tonight. Why do you think I stuck much to do!! your towel in the crack under our door?w

The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N G T H

anything tonight? O

f course I’m not doing anything tonight. 209 the hottest club in New York on a Saturday Look, I get it, you’re going out, expand- night—we’re a school full of people who only learned ing your horizons, basking in the sweaty glow of our how to be productive, not happy. very first week of college, but what even is “going Can’t you see that by being so concerned with out,” anyway? Aren’t we all “out” in some manner constantly doing things you’re just a tool of the sysof speaking—out of our parents’ nests, out of our tem? FOMO, YOLO, [insert more acronyms], they’re comfort zones, out of clean underwear even though all symptoms of the same disease: capitalism. And we’ve only been here for a matter of days? What even when we talk about going out and ‘doing stuff,’ we’re is the difference between spending an evening in this really just talking about producing: you downed this cinderblock hell and the booze-spackled frat house much vodka, you got this many phone numbers, you across the street? were out this late and spent this much money. But Going further, none of this is experiI’m not sure what the ence. You are not your preoccupation with Instagram follower “doing things” is in count, your number of the first place. We Facebook friends, your spent the last thirteen Foursquare check-ins. years of our lives doing Sitting alone in your things to get into a room and pretending place where we’ll have that the flakes of paint to do more things, chipping off the ceilall to get a job where ing are stars is just as we get to do things enriching as going out for the rest of our sad and Snapchatting pholittle lives. Fuck that. nies in your OL group Is reading and annotatabout the Cool New ing the Iliad in its entirety before York Thing They Didn’t Do—all the first day of Lit Hum really going of the anxiety you’re feeling about to land me that amazing job in needing to go out was manufacegative finance/investment banking/law in tured by The Man, man. Even Nicki By Alexander Pines four years? (Obviously not, because Minaj, queen of my heart, throws a every third word is “nipple.”) Must I shout out to Myx Moscato in “The “network” with drunk 18-year-olds for the next four Night Is Still Young.” It’s all a lie! hours to get a jumpstart on my LinkedIn follower So no, I’m not doing anything tonight at all. count? I refuse. I am going to bathe in the fluorescent sheen of this You can tell I’m serious about this, that’s why Carman double and try to achieve a truly blank state I made sure to put up my framed Fight Club poster of mind. That’s true resistance. That’s fighting the above my bed as soon as I moved in. I know you think power. I’m a rebel, damn it. So what if my sheets are you have some try-hard poser for a roommate, but Egyptian cotton and I’m wearing a two thousand dolTyler’s on to something: “Advertising has us chasing lar watch? And you know what, I don’t need friends— cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy hell, they know that even if I did get invited to a party shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of his- I wouldn’t go. That’s probably why they didn’t invite tory, man. No purpose or place.” Why else is Butler me.w

Orientation 2015

Illustrations by Rachel Chin

Administrator Bird Watching Words by Sean Augustine-Obi Illustrations by Joanna Zou Some say Columbia’s admin are inaccessible. We say they’re just camouflaged and hiding in trees. Here’s our guide to spotting your administrators in the field.

LEE BOLLINGER Eminus dominus Likes: Free speech, territorial expansion, autocracy Weaknesses: Things that are inhibited, feeble, and closed shut; salary audits Location: One of his many Global roosts

SUZANNE GOLDBERG Visiri praeses Likes: Legal scholarship, blogging Weaknesses: Title IX, The Varsity Show Can be found: At a screening of “Straight Outta Compton” in Miller Theatre

The Blue and White

JOHN J. VALENTINI Maximum maximum Likes: Chemistry, screensavers, campus trivia Weaknesses: Mattresses, cover photos Can be found: Panhandling outside Lerner Pub

DEBRORA SPAR Corporum feministus Likes: (Barnard) Quads, (Housing) quads, libraries without books, Having It All Weaknesses: Fire Can be found: Teaching Zumba to the board of Goldman Sachs

ROBERT KASDIN

CRISTEN KROMM

Cheney abscentia Likes: Budgeting, bureaucracy, bonuses Weaknesses: Sunlight, being on the record Can be found: At Johns Hopkins

Gaudium bellum Likes: Small children, quoting Socrates, fire safety Weaknesses: Alcohol, concerts, shoes Can be found: Holding office hours after campus tragedies

Orientation 2015

M easure

for

M easure

Lithosphere Maybe the problem is scale. I can’t manufacture age or enormity; they aren’t in me. I can read, but barely. Modes of expression crawl over each other like ants in the ground, each one bearing poison to the colony, resolute as the knowledge of pain before it reaches home. I rely on aesthetics so imprecise they are rendered best in earth: this ripple of mountains, dark sleeves of road, cross-sections of sediment and weather, lights crowding any temporary city. Or, in opposite, the earth that parts to swallow a woman, a cow, the gap shorthand for the fear that grips. Reverence for beauty is itself abhorrent; these are instincts familiar in equal parts. Yes, we can synthesize. Truthfully, I am compelled to. But we aren’t earth. We don’t know what we make.

The Blue and White

M easure

for

M easure

Accretion Manipulation of substance: glory, suspension, stasis,the satisfaction of arrangement rippling through the body. Stillness: marble cut into blunt steppes, dull with grit, anchored by cable bolts. No life but sound in the quarry, a thrumming whine, mechanical shovels bleating dust as they burrow. Wheels shed pebbles in waves; water pools bright and shallow; wind thrills through newly-formed pits unassuming in all but magnitude. Beneath, though, movement hot and frantic: insistent substitution, modifiers overflowing, potentials swarming insensate, the enormity of reason in language throwing shadows on its ecstatic utter lack. To think I wrote all my life, when in fact I was only tracing, my body reaching, to gloss. â€” Serena Solin

Orientation 2015

Where Should You Spend Your NSOP? Words by Sean Augustine-Obi Illustrations by Wallace Kalkin and Rachel Chin New Yorkers have long had the privilege to happen upon chance encounters with greatness: Alec Baldwin on a rainy day in Union Square, Jay-Z on the train to a show, Bill Murray crashing a party in Bushwick, and so on. But Morningside Heights is home to a better, furrier kind of greatness. Without further ado, The Blue and White presents the best and brightest cats of the neighborhood.

Start Here!

Are you ready to make YES friends?

Stay in your dorm? NO YES

NO ALONE PLAYING LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

Go to a Carman party NO hosted by a guy in your OL group? YES

Explore the city? YES NO You get a text from an upperclassman who went to your high school. Go to his pregame? NO

LLC ICE CREAM SOCIAL

Someone from your hometown NO on your floor wants to go with you! She’s a pro at holding her liquor. Believe her? YES

ST. LUKE’S EMERGENCY ROOM 16

You play a round of jungle juice pong. He tells you all the cool kids do it, but you’re not feeling good. Your partner asks NO “Are you okay?”

YES

Turns out he’s in AEPi and the pregame is for an YES AEPi party, bail after one drink? NO

REMEDIAL CONSENT EDUCATION TRAINING The Blue and White

Downtown 1 train isn’ t running! YES Walk? NO

You go to the Heights and buy your first margarita. A cute guy wearing a tank offers you a drink. Take it? YES NO

You’re really tired and it’s only 109th! You decide to YES go to Cannon’s instead. Test your luck with your fake? NO You wake up the next day hungover, late for your Under1Roof session. Thanks to your roomate your room smells like weed. The RA knocks on your door, and you’re headed to an...

KORONET’S After a few more drinks to lower your inhabitions, he asks you to go back to his place. You’re ready for some action and are about to make out with him when he takes off his shirt to reveal a large stoplight painted on his chest. Suprise! You’ll spend the rest of the week in... Orientation 2015

After a few shots, you’re feeling confident. Spot a cute girl. Ask her to dance? NO YES

You awkwardly grined against her for three minutes, then pull off a whip/nae nae. You can tell she’s impressed. YES Take her back to your place? NO

OJA DISCIPLINARY HEARING

You go back to her room in the Quad and hook up. She’s no where to be found the next morning. Looks like you’re in for some quality time at... THE SULZ SECURITY DESK 17

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

Many Columbians are Morningside shut-ins. Fortunately, The Blue and White’s crack team at The Travel Desk is not afraid to get on the subway. This time: a laundromat that’s also an arcade; a bathhouse that’s also a mob hangout; a house that’s also haunted. We go so you don’t have to.

Good Clean Fun By Elena Burger

iven what I know about Eastern Europeans and saunas, I initially have certain expectations of the Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village. Perhaps I’ll see a shady business deal underway, or a woman cloaked in rags singing folk songs about her dead son while doing laundry by a giant, frothing vat. A stray penis, perhaps, would be poking out of a white robe or floating by like tumbleweed. If you want to see penises, do NOT go to the Russian & Turkish Baths. Instead, I’m greeted by a genial dude in an NYU T-Shirt who tells me that I pay for “all services” at the end. “All services” include a generous helping of borscht and the various treatments the bathhouse offers. (The website calls the Platza Oak Leaf massage “Jewish acupuncture” and adds that “a specialist will scrub you (actually beat you) with a broom.”) The only thing that indicates the baths have any connection to their namesake is the Ruble bill in the “Tips” jar on the entrance table. But something tells me this student isn’t saving up kopeks for his Bubbe back in the motherland. The Turkish Sauna Room is empty and smells minty, two qualities that strike me as wildly hygienic. A very large man enters and sits across from me, one rung of seats above. This feels vaguely confrontational but I let it slide, mostly because my own naked

body is beginning to slide. I am very sweaty at this point, and also wondering where the towels are. He offers me one of his stash. “They do so much laundry here!” he says, by way of explanation. Towels obtained, I enter the Russian Room, where an old man performs sun salutations on a wicker yoga mat, and there is a mild smell of corn. The two bearded men there tell me they are “like, junior regulars. Three or four years. There are some guys who have been coming here a lot longer.” As if on cue, the large man from the Turkish Room enters. “He’s one of them,” says Smallbeard, a veteran of thirty years. Large Man and Beardies all begin to regale me with the story of how, in 2000, the Russian & Turkish Baths was busted by the police. “Money laundering?” I ask. (Is that what Large Man meant before by “laundry?”) No, they say. Female massage artists were giving happy endings to clientele and providing other sexual favors. When a police officer who frequented the bathhouse died, the operation no longer enjoyed de facto legal protection. Now, the bathhouse only hires male masseuses. “You can feel the difference,” laments Large Man, “even when they’re rubbing your head.” In the hallway near the pool, I begin talking

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

The Blue and White

T H E T R AV E L D E S K to other regulars, all middle-aged, and attract a bit of a crowd. It turns out that in the ’70s and ’80s, mob members would meet in the sauna to plan hits in the nude, assured that no one had planted a wire on them. Colin Farrell and Russell Simmons used to be regulars (we can only scour Rap Genius for clues to Def Jam signing artists under the steamy auspices of the Turkish Room). There was once a more open swinger culture at the baths too, which somber Large Man says has vanished. “You’re here in the day—all

the adults are here. At night, all the young people come. The girls come in their groups, the guys in theirs. There’s no mingling. Your generation, you guys all have your phones, your selfie-sticks. People used to come down here and meet strangers. Things are different now.” For the first time that afternoon, I feel selfconscious. Millennials. We ruin everything.w

This Old House

By Channing Prend

urning off 160th Street onto the cobblestoned Jumel Terrace, I catch my first glimpse of the Morris-Jumel mansion. The stately, white-columned house sits in a small garden on a hill looking south toward distant midtown skyscrapers and the New York harbor. This Washington Heights home holds the distinction of being Manhattan’s oldest house. Built in 1765 by British Colonel Roger Morris, the mansion has welcomed notable guests such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Today, the house is open to any visitor willing to pay the $3 admission fee. As I get closer to the house I notice the chipped paint and rotting wood on the facade. The windows are shuttered and the front door is closed. Is the house even open today? Ascending the steps up to the front porch, I feel like a trespasser. I half expect a crotchety old man to emerge from the house, rifle in hand, telling me to get off his property. Just as I am about to abandon my attempted visit, I notice a sign taped to the weathered wood. “Esteemed Guests: Please use the doorbell on the left side of the front door for admission to the museum.” I ring the doorbell and wait anxiously. After what feels like several minutes, I hear the sound of a lock unlatching. The door opens a crack and an old woman sticks her head out. “Can I help you?” she croaks. “I’m here to see the house,” I reply. “Oh okay,” she says, seemingly surprised. “How did you hear about us?” I follow her into the dark house (18th century wooden shutters cover the windows to protect the furnishings from sun damage). This, along with the lack of other visitors, gives the

Orientation 2015

house an eerie vibe. Ruth, the docent, tells me that I am free to explore the building, but appears behind me every so often to relay a factoid about the architecture or mention a historical event that took place in a particular room. Somehow, she is able to sneak up on me despite the creaky floors, and each time she materializes, I have to catch my breath. Ruth apparently hears this, commenting, “You’re rather excitable, aren’t you?” After making my way through the house, I stroll through the garden and nearby streets, which are lined with wooden row houses and imitation oil-lamps. The faint sound of traffic on Harlem River Drive is the only reminder that I am still in New York City. The Morris-Jumel mansion is surprisingly unassuming for a National Historic Monument. You won’t find any Revolutionary War reenactments or foreign tour groups. “If you want to see people all dressed up making fools of themselves,” says Ruth, “go to Boston or Philadelphia.”w

Illustration by Alex Swanson

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

Money Laundering

“T

By Nia Brown

RY OUR GOURMET VEGETARIAN WASHING MACHINES AND VEGAN DRYERS” begs a poster that fronts Sunshine Laundry, the Brooklyn laundromat known for its collection of pinball machines. When I enter, passing a mechanized fortune telling monkey I’ve seen at every bowling alley arcade ever, I notice a row of at least ten pinball machines folded and stacked on washing machines down the narrow aisle. A staff member explains that the laundromat is currently “under construction.” They are adding a full-service bar in the back. On the ceiling is a mural of an idyllic blue sky, featuring white clouds and trees bearing Tide detergent. The scene is interspersed with floating dachshunds blissfully folding their laundry, pushing carts full of clothes and playing levitating pinball machines. I must be in the Sistine Chapel of laundry. A flier on the wall with some FAQs tells me that the laundromat keeps clothes soft by only employing people with soft hands. Apparently, it smells so good in here (it actually does) because they’ve “strategically removed all windows.” They purchased 500 gallons of Tide because “the dog has sensitive skin.” The resident dogs, who reportedly wear Louis Vuitton collars, aren’t here tonight, but the dog motif is completed by the several statues that, though uncoordinated in their aesthetics, were somehow harmonious. Such must be the place’s theme. I put my coins and clothing into one of the washers at the end of the aisle next to

the palm-leaf topped staff bodega, before trying my hand at the other machines. The automated voice of the Theatre of Magic pinball machine, one of five still standing, tells me “I have the magic,” and I proceed to lose on all three tries in mere seconds. Fuck Theatre of Magic. Determined to redeem myself, I try Medieval Madness next, and do markedly better. I knock down a wall and unlock a drawbridge. The plaster figure of the castle spasms and lights up, to the irritation of the man pairing his socks nearby. So yeah, fuck Theatre of Magic. I play the rest of the machines and call it quits after cringing at the creepy display art of a Wild West themed machine. Peter Rose, Sunshine Laundry’s owner, is the brain behind these innovations. With the bar he’s installing comes yet another creative, albeit more intoxicating, preoccupation for patrons waiting for their laundry, in case it wasn’t enough of a trip already. Rose seems to find the empire he’s built sufficient—he doesn’t drink.w

Illustration by Darya Fraiman

The Blue and White

V E R I LY V E R I TA S

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS

In which our hero loses his fake

erily sat up in bed, his hair disheveled, trousers thrown across the room. He had awoken in a fog, and his memories from the previous night were hazy. His cheek was damp with the spittle of his bedfellow, a man he fancied a burlesque dancer and whose school he’d mistakenly heard as “Bard,” but had actually been a protracted, unseemly yawn. It was a Sunday, and VV arose at an hour that could pass for teatime across the pond. Dusting off his tweed jacket, he checked his pockets. Gadzooks! A hole in the stitching, and his coinpurse nowhere to be found. “Perhaps I shall retrace my steps,” VV thought. His wanderings had brought him to 1020 the previous night. As he strolled down Amsterdam, VV stopped short when he overheard an extraordinarily stupid statement from the patriarch of a family dining at the Hungarian. “Excuse me, madame. This gooseberry pie contains no goose,” the tardy bruncher said, snapping his fingers at a waitress. Hopefully such idiocy was not genetic. Alas, seconds later, their infant child toddled toward the street, chasing a trash bag that would surely suffocate it. VV stepped in the way, handing the child a cigar fresh from its casing to play with. Brimming with self-satisfaction, VV entered the bar. The floor was still sticky from the merriment of the night before. After pondering a few moments, a solution dawned on him, and he ripped up unused pages from his pocket almanac to shield the soles of his Oxfords. “Pardon me! Would you happen to

Orientation 2015

have a tab open by the name of V—?” Verily asked the barkeep. He looked Verily once over, then a second time. Scowling, he slammed a receipt on the table, motioning for him to sign. VV paused, straining to remember the name on the ID he had presented the previous night, a passport he had won from a Traveller in Monte Carlo. “I must have lost it at her apartment,” he mused. As he doffed his hat to the security guard at the Barnard Quad gates, VV called the host of a pregame, inquiring as to his belongings’ whereabouts. The two were not well-acquainted, which provided for an uncomfortable exchange. Yes, yes, the fellow with the accent who insisted on the vermouth digestif. No, he hadn’t seen the corkscrew anywhere, but he knew of a speciality store that sold the most delightful knick-knacks. His patience grew thin as he described the lost item. “My fake,” he finally admitted to the bemused maiden. “Aren’t you over 21?” she pried. VV had reached his breaking point. “Yes, but an educated man of Columbia has other needs for a Monacan passport! I am a man of the world, a scholar. I would take the Demilitarized Zone over the the DMV any day.” Though she could not see him over the phone, he did an about-face with a flourish. As he walked back to his dormitory, thinking of the offending license nestled in his steamer trunk, VV’s expression became stern. He supposed he would have to start telling people he was actually from St. Louis.w

INTERNMENT

Notes from the Underground

B&W Staffers break the ice and tell you what we did this summer

worked in the London PR department of ‘a major international auction house,’ which is the language used to refer to the two others who snap up the best stuff. But employees stay upbeat with that English attitude that makes everything seem like a farcical old play. Nipping down to the supermarket to buy materials for a caprese salad is a lunchtime ritual; my colleagues debate vigorously the relative merits of the 89p (‘fibrous and wooden’) and 99p (‘stringy but yielding’) avocados. A press release for an antique table is written and saved as “Horrid Table.” The sound of a phone descending would be gleefully followed by the words, “What a ghastly woman!” or “What a tiny man!” or, once, “Die in a ditch!” We had fun. I told people I liked the auction business because at least it’s dealing in tangible things. The business model, and the main houses, were established in the eighteenth century, and there’s still something rakish and buccaneering about it. “If you like things so much,” said an Oxonian I told this, “why don’t you go work in a factory?” The restaurant that just opened in the salerooms gets surprisingly good reviews, and is nominated for a prize called Young British Foodies, which my boss refers to consistently as “young, black, and fabulous.” Everyone briefly daydreams about doing away with the auctioneering thing altogether and “just making it a brasserie.” “Or,” counters another colleague, “let’s just make it a bank.” —HNS e spent most of the summer reading Gawker and getting blocked by media Twitter. I got a lot of free soap and ice cream, so it was like Fight Club, except I gained weight instead of being injured. There were some good quotes: “Bankers love Iceland...they all go to Iceland and snort cocaine.” “I’ve never read Marx, but I think Malcolm Gladwell is genius.” “I enjoy learning about corporations.” I saw a fully nude homeless man in Port Authority while drinking a can of Bud Light Lime from a cup at Au Bon Pain. —SAO

was an RA for high schoolers at a pre-college summer program. We followed the same curfew as the students and were required to be sober except on our one night off every three weeks. On my night off, I took some coworkers out for a birthday party. Her less than sober musings included: 1) “You are so tall! Never let anyone tell you that you’re not tall!” (to another coworker who is 6’1”) 2) “I did not pray for this! New York just needs some Jesus in its life!” (she is not religious) 3) “Why are you guys so damn shady?” (as she tried and failed to adjust the blinds) Also, one of the students jerked off into his roommate’s sheets. It took the roommate three days to notice. —AP e worked at a start up this summer. I was not entirely passionate about the company itself, but it paid well, I got to work from home (i.e., watch TV while making spreadsheets), and my boss was desperate for interns. This last one is important because I was highly unqualified for the position. Sure, I have “marketable skills” and “English majors can adapt to any job position,” but I didn’t really understand the work that I—or the company for that matter—was doing. This was not for lack of trying, but it’s hard not to be lost when your boss constantly says things like “disruptive technology” or “omni-channel consumer experiences” or, “You’ve got to be the first to make it so that you can win it.” (What exactly is “it”?) Part of me wondered if this all was techy lingo that I had just not been exposed to, but most of me wondered if he actually knew what he was talking about—the phrases could really mean anything. I found myself using this terminology whenever I explained my internship to people. Sometimes I would follow it up with a shrug and a conspiratorial “whatever that means,” but there were a few times when the person with whom I was speaking took that as a sign of humbleness and was actually impressed with the work. Seriously, though: has no one read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”? —MAC w

The Blue and White

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

Fight the Power A conversation with Christia Mercer By Mariam Elnozahy Christia Mercer, Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, has been at Columbia for 20 years, and served as chair of Literature Humanities from 2010-2014. In June, she helped organize the Radical Pop-Up Schools initiative in Harlem, offering free discussions and lectures. She teaches Lit Hum in prison as the first professor at Columbia to volunteer in the Justice-in-Education Initiative, sponsored by Columbia’s Center for Justice, and has written about these experiences, and in favor of prison divestment, in the Washington Post. On campus, she is also involved in the student group FLIP (First Generation Low-Income Partnership). Her Twitter bio (@christiamercer) describes her as a ‘sometimes activist.’ The Blue and White: My first question is: Why do you invest so much energy in rethinking education systems? CM: One of the things that is very moving to me is the fact that there are two institutions in the US that have the vast majority of people between the ages of 18 and 22. One of them is higher education and the other is the prison industrial complex. For those of us in the university in that age group to not think about that other institution is to miss something important. I’m concerned about the fact that the Core Curriculum at Columbia is about the transformation of ideas and literature in Lit Hum, and in political thinking in CC, and so little time is spent thinking about people who are powerless, both in the books and also in contemporary American culture. Geraldine Downey—who’s in the Psych Department and is one of the main organizers of the Justicein-Education Initiative—came to me about including topics about justice in the Core. As a result of the Justice Initiative this year, instructors in CC will be encouraged to focus on issues to do with justice. But it’s true that our position as privileged people and the way we fit into American culture is not given enough analysis.

Orientation 2015

B&W: You wrote an article in the Washington Post about teaching the Oresteia in prison versus at Columbia. One set of students sees themselves as the rightful recipients of that knowledge and one has been denied it. How can you make sense of and traverse these two spaces? CM: One of the assumptions generated by the discourse of higher education is that we are the inheritors of this tradition and are given it and have to treat it with great care. But for me what is the most powerful thing about the Core, and I really pushed this when I was chairing Literature Humanities, is to make it clear that we’re not inheriting anything that’s a given. We are asked to create our own version of the past, and these books that are considered great because they’re books that every subsequent generation has talked about. For example, there’s something about the Aeneid that has struck a long series of generations of readers. The problem is those readers are almost always privileged white guys who have often read the books from their perspective of power and privilege. It’s only really in the USA in the 20th century when the opportunity has thrust itself upon us to critique these books from the perspective of less powerful people. So one of the

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N incredible things about the Aeneid or the Oresteia is that it’s really about power and justice and revenge, and how women are forced to negotiate the power dynamics they’re left out of. A book like the Oresteia is perfect for prison. Because it’s about exactly the topics that all of the people who are incarcerated, especially women, are most moved by. In a way that I hadn’t even foreseen, it was a perfect thing for them to read. The success of teaching the Lit Hum books in prison makes it clear that those courses are not for the privileged few, they’re for everyone, and that’s something that we should be more aware of when we teach our core courses. We should recognize that our interpretations and analyses of them should be based on the perspective of our students while taking them seriously. Every generation has to recreate the Core and we’re just coming up with a new interpretation that’s more radical and more appropriate for our times. I learned from my incarcerated students that a group’s experience of power, violence, and justice deeply affects its readings as well. B&W: Do you have any specific anecdotes about the differences between teaching incarcerated students and Columbia students? CM: As soon as you walk onto Columbia’s campus you carry with you the years of experience of being active learners. And the thing about my incarcerated students is that almost all of them have been very seriously abused. They’ve had to keep their heads

down often to make it. Often they’ve been caught in criminal circumstances because they’ve just been trying to navigate the horrors. And then they get in prison, where the whole attitude is not to be an agent. I was immediately struck by how difficult it would be for someone like me, or anyone of us here, who’s used to analyzing and critiquing—I could easily imagine some CO [Correctional Officer] to go jump in the lake, or some other stronger language, and that would get me in trouble. You critique the wrong CO’s argument and you can wind up in solitary confinement. So what’s really important about the class that I taught in prison is to create a space where students feel comfortable being agents and active learners. The difference is not so much in insight. Of course our students in prison have not had the opportunity to develop their reading and writing skills as much, but they’re astonishingly morally insightful, partially because they’re older and they’ve suffered more. B&W: I wanted to talk about campus activism, and the relationship between professors and students with regards to social justice initiatives. Do professors respond to activism? How should that relationship work? CM: What I’ve learned over the past few years is that even progressive faculty are not as eager as I think they should be to know about the details of students’ lives. And I don’t mean like what’s going on in the dorm room. I mean the ways that Columbia mistreats—does not treat students as well as it should. Often faculty kind of think certain activities should be left to the students, and we miss the fact that students could benefit from a little advice from what we’ve learned over the years. With faculty it’s like, ‘Let’s just talk about things, we’re academics after all, let’s have another panel conversation about justice.’ Panels are good, but they’re just people talking to one another. Often, it’s like preaching to the choir. And at one point we need to act. Faculty don’t recognize that by acting they can help students in some profound ways. But I also learned, actually in a panel discussion in April, that students think that professors know a lot more about their lives than we do. You come into my class for 2.5 hours a week and even if I’m just giving a lecture there’s an assumption that professors just know students, if not the individual than the kind of community. And we don’t know any-

Illustration by Zane Bhansali

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N thing unless you tell us. I was really changed when I started chairing Lit Hum. It became very clear to me the degree to which students are really taken advantage of, if not abused in certain ways, at Columbia, and nobody knows it except the students. The admin isn’t going to do anything, at least under the current regime of Jim Valentini—I think Peter Awn is a great guy by the way, but Jim Valentini is obviously no longer capable of catering to students. An important example, and something I wrote about in a piece for the Washington Post, is that low-income students are misled to believe they won’t have fees when they do. They’re led to believe that they will have money to live when they won’t. Very few faculty members know how bad things are because nobody tells them. Students have finally begun to speak out— including to Dean Jim Valentini who seems incapable of hearing what they say. I do believe Jim Valentini means well, but he just doesn’t get it and the people who are now advising him are as blind as he is to the relevant issues. Students have told me over and over again how clueless he is, even those who have tried to work with him. So no wonder so few students gave to the senior fund last year. Students—especially Muslim students and students of color—rightly feel that no one is listening to them. Students are eager to act and should, but I would like to suggest that they get support and institutional knowledge from faculty. If faculty don’t encourage students and support students, then I think certain progressive activist projects are not going to be as successful.

week, and yada yada yada, and how if there’s a student in our class and she’s facing difficulties, we could get easily help. We were like, “Wow, are they organized!” The very next day there was a preceptor sitting on that couch you’re in now, talking to me about a student who was having a meltdown—a low-income student’s brother had just been arrested. I don’t remember the details, but it was gruesome. We tried to find a number on the website she could call, and it was a really nice website with attractive pictures and bios of all the pleasant people who worked there but there was no information about where to go or what to do if you were an instructor and worried about a student. I was just furious, but we were out of time at some point. I went home that night around 8:30 and called the emergency number that we had been told to call, and was put on hold with a bunch of people until finally we found a woman in Texas who said she was representing Columbia and Bernard. She mispronounced it. That’s such a good example of how everyone at Columbia means well but nothing is executed properly. And students should just make a fuss about that. Or Suzanne Goldberg [the President’s special advisor on sexual assault, appointed in Fall 2014]. The first meeting she had with a lot of survivors and other people in the fall at a discussion sponsored by IRWAGS, she’s been special advisor for a few months and is proudly telling us all about the work she and her staff had done to make it easy for survivors of assault to get information and advice. She says we have this 24 hour, seven days a week blah blah blah, all you have to do is go on our website. I went on my phone and typed in “sexual assault” to the Columbia website, and I pulled up a PDF that was several years old. Because when they say 24 hours a day seven days a week, I know not to believe them, I learned my lesson from psych services. I raised my professorial hand and announced that their advice didn’t seem to be available at that very moment, and she said, Well it’s on the page entitled “Sexual Respect.” Really? You or a friend has just been assaulted and you’re supposed to find help on a page called “Sexual Respect”? It’s absurd. So who is this for? It’s for Suzanne Goldberg and her well-intending clueless assistants and the administration! And all it takes is a faculty member

“A book like the Oresteia is perfect for prison.”

B&W: Students also cycle out every 4 years, and professors have the privilege of institutional memory and could therefore do so much more. CM: There should be a structure. An institutional model should set up where students apprentice the next generation of students. Admin is counting on the fact that students are really eager and have a lot of ideas, and by the time they listen to what they actually have to say and do all the grunt work surrounding that—they graduate! and they’re gone. When I was chairing Lit Hum, the psych service people came over and talked about their services and how great they were and how they’re 24 hours a

Orientation 2015

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N like me to join the students to say this is not acceptable. When students and faculty get together things change. I really bonded with faculty over this new set of regulations that puts the onus on faculty and takes it off the administration. I said I’m not following these regulations, and I basically told the people, “So fire me, because I’m a senior professor”—what are they gonna do. What we’ve decided to do, instead of flouting the rules, we’re gonna circumvent them legally. We’ve both become ministers of the Universal Church, which protects us. If we’re ministers we don’t have to report anything. Anything a student reports to a minister in confidence is confidential. What we’re doing now is staging a protest where we’re gonna try to get a bunch of faculty to become ministers so that we don’t have to follow the rules. And by the way, those rules aren’t legally requ i red — Su za n ne Goldberg admitted in the fall that they’re interpreting Title IX in a way that they don’t have to do. They’re saying that Title IX requires this when it doesn’t. But if you get faculty and students talking to one another they can join together to change something that is inappropriate and bad for students.

In terms of students beginning at Columbia, it would be really great for them to know that activism is one of the great parts of Columbia’s history. Most students don’t know that the apartheid divestment campaign at Columbia was profoundly important. Columbia was the first university to divest from South Africa in the 1980s. It was led mostly by students of color and it was a project that engaged a lot of students. And Columbia was a leader in the nation. The recent Black Lives Matter movement here and the Student Prison Divest stand as examples of the energy on campus that is recreating Columbia’s history. Compared to our peers, as the deans like to say, there’s a lower endowment, but there’s an amazing history of activism on this campus—and Columbia students ought to own that. I mean one of the reasons Columbia doesn’t have a huge endowment is because in the past they let in poor students, in the ’30s and ’40s they let in Jews—My God, Jews!—in Brooklyn. Princeton didn’t let Jews in until the ’60s or ’70s. There were poor people who couldn’t give back a lot of money, but they became activists in ’68 and in Apartheid. Students should know and read about the history of activism that cuts through Columbia University.

“It became very clear to me the degree to which students are really taken advantage of, if not abused in certain ways, at Columbia, and nobody knows it except the students.”

B&W: And it kind of feels like a less isolating place. The people in positions of power—administrations and professors—feel very distant for us students. It seems like the only place you can go and be productive is in the basement of the Intercultural Resource Center with everyone’s phones switched off so nobody’s tapping into the conversations. There’s a culture of intimidation that goes beyond just policy— a huge fear of surveillance and feeling like you’re being watched. You become so focused on evading the administration that it becomes circuitous. CM: So the thing is you have to create ways to feel protected. And how can you feel protected? Well, you get some pretty powerful faculty and maybe even have a couple friends from the law school—I can name some names now but I won’t—and people who would be very, very eager to be a part of something.

B&W: In an article you wrote on the Radical Pop Up Schools initiative, you quoted DuBois saying, “The function of the university [is] above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.” Last year, Nicholas Dirks argued that the University should be a place for “civility” and “civilized” discourse. Do you see civilization as a goal for the university? CM: While Dubois is wonderful, the word civility bothers me—but I think DuBois was using that word in the context of a letter to a young black woman who has foregone her commitment to education, so I think the idea there is that the only way for a child of recent slaves to do anything is to think in terms of being ennobled. For me, I wouldn’t use the word civility

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N and I wouldn’t use the word civilization. I want to think about how each generation can commit itself to the best of its community—whatever that means, and we could debate that. I think some students would say—perhaps too many Columbia students would say—is what that means is perhaps making money, having a fast car or a nice penthouse. I would hope that students who came out of my Lit Hum class would have been able to learn how to critique that, at least superficially. Columbia students in my mind are committed to imagining a better world and their contribution to it. And Columbia in particular, unlike Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford now, really has this noble history of committing itself to justice and its goal has been often reimagining justice. I think Columbia students are so inclined, we just need to actualize that potential. B&W: We being? CM: All of us. Students, faculty, administrators. Honestly, what we need is a dean of Columbia College, and leadership at the College, who understands the potential of Columbia in this way and is willing to listen to students and encourage this proper reimagining of our futures. The trustees are a group of people who have made a huge amount of money, and a lot of them are good guys, but they’re often people who went to Columbia College, and they really mean well but they want what’s prominent or sexy, and they want to be able to promote Columbia. One of the reasons I wrote the Pop-Up schools article the way I wrote it is because I want the trustees to see that and feel good about themselves for supporting that decision. If students knew how to tap into them and push their buttons, then more money would be spent for internships for low-income students, for example. All kinds of money will come out of the sky. I know these trustees, and I actually talk to them a lot and get lunch with them occasionally. Those kinds of people would love to talk to students, but students can’t complain. They don’t want complaints. They don’t want faculty complaining. So the

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rhetoric has to be that Columbia has to be a leader and an innovator and blah blah blah. It’s really important to get the presentation right, especially when we go to the deans. I think that there is a really important contradiction to point out, which is that all of these Ivy-type schools are very committed to having a diverse set of students in terms of ethnicity, class, geography (I think it’s important to have people from farmland Ohio) because it changes the conversation, and it makes the conversations better when people have really different takes on things. But despite this commitment to diverse student bodies, we just completely abandon the low-income, firstgen students who want to come here when they walk through the door. I know from a couple of my own students who receive absolutely no support from their family that they could not pay fees that suddenly appeared when they arrived on campus. They almost had to leave Columbia. There are students who run out of meal-card swipes before the end of the semester because they have to consume all their meals on campus, and who select courses based on the cost of books. A sizable percentage of the 120 students in my Philosophy and Feminism course last fall confessed to be humiliated when they arrived here by how much pressure was put on them to spend more money than they had. It is wrong to attract students and not help them navigate life here more easily. Since the deans ignore the problem, it will only be solved when students and faculty pressure the administration. B&W: This is The Blue and White’s Orientation issue. Do you have any parting kernels of advice for new students? CM: Just to realize sooner how much power students have when you face a stupid Columbia problem—and you will. My main words of wisdom would be you have a lot more power than you think, and all you need to know is how to organize and know how to wield it.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. Ever since the Trivia Night email I sent out a few months ago when Trivia Night became FDA approved, the number of legal trivia users has greatly increased. As a result, new and disturbing side effects are coming to light. Therefore Trivia Night now comes with a new warning notice: If Trivia Night causes an erection lasting longer than four hours, seek immediate therapy. I’m glad you like trivia night but you shouldn’t like it THAT much. See ya Tuesday. PAUL e CAT CARE In your home VISITS $20 COLuMBia ALuMnI PEACE OF MiND EXCELLENT REFERENCES RESPONSIBLEPET care@gmail.com e Having spent three summers working at the City of Malibu Department of Parks and Recreation, I bring an understanding of working in a fast-paced office setting. While assisting the development of the Quarterly Recreation Guide, I honed my skills in proofreading, copyediting, and designing. I took charge of editing and publishing the children’s book The Legacy of Mali (upcoming), a project that paired a local children’s book author and the Department of Parks and Recreation to create a children’s book about a new city park, Legacy Park. e To enjoy the weekend, I go to a football game between Prep and my neighborhood. During a play, my prep friends chant, “That’s alright, that’s okay, you’ll

be working for us someday.” Having deep bonds of friendship on both sides, I’m shocked at the thoughtlessness of my classmates. Part of me feels ostracized, but another part of me wants to fix things; I fiercely lecture them on how wrong they are about my home. With my neighborhood friends, part of me wants to ignore what the football fans had to say, but a subtle fear that they may be right grows in my heart. I am moved and start tutoring my neighborhood friends with my used test-preparation books and showing them the social skills I learned from Dale Carnegie. I also start sharing books on body language and charisma, fascinating guides to lucid dreaming, and my favorite thrillers from Stephen King. I do this simply because it’s what friends do. e As part of a new program, Daniel Liss, a Junior in Columbia College, will be responding to questions from Furnald residents this week. Mr. Liss studies Computer Science and Economics. He is also the founder of GradesatCU, former Alumni Affairs Representative for the Columbia College Student Council, and a present board member of the Columbia Consulting League. Beyond Columbia, Mr. Liss is a philatelist and builder of model boats. He looks forward to your questions, which should be directed to askdanliss@gmail.com. Sincerely, Rupert Baxter Secretatry -Daniel Liss <askdanliss@gmail.com) to askdanliss Our apologies, Secretary is not spelled secretatry.w

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CAMPUS GOSSIP BURYING THE HATCHET Recently graduated (and gainfully employed) members of CCSC criticized incoming President and VP Policy Ben and Viv over Facebook for not intervening when FLIP was forced to move books out of the IRC due to a “fire hazard.” When approached for comment, a representative from Ben and Viv’s office stated that the two were busy hanging a “RUSH BETA” banner on the outside of the Satow Room. e Two years after a controversial SJP banner was taken down from the front of Barnard Hall, a smaller Black Lives Matter banner was hung in a window of the same building. We eagerly await statements in response from every student group. e MISAPPROPRIATION OF FUNDS A Columbia student attempted to sell a 5-lb. bag of flour in the Facebook group “Free and For Sale” for $20. e Infighting has arisen in activist group No Red Tape over the highly-touted “Enough is Enough” bill. In addition to funding rape crisis centers with $4.5 million and increasing reporting requirements on sexual assault for New York colleges, the bill also gives $4.5 million to the State Police to create a special victims unit. Although NRT pushed for the bill, it received criticism from anti-incarceral activists for supposedly funding the police state. e COMINGS AND GOINGS The Columbia Daily Spectator is rumored to have experienced a few shake-ups on its Managing Board, with its campus news editor, Eye editor-in-chief, events director, and digital features editor reportedly stepping down, and two new “assistant managing editors” ascending the ranks.

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Paul, who hosts Trivia night at 1020 on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m., works for the NYPD. The man who hosts Trivia night when Paul is out of town is Paul’s partner. e High schoolers staying in Carman for the summer program were forced to use the underground service entrance due to ongoing construction. One resident from a prominent international school reported that the doorway smelled “gross.” e NO RED TAPE Someone covered the new cameras installed on College Walk with blue tape. e The Lit Hum syllabus shake-up which saw Ovid’s Metamorphoses removed from the list, among other changes, was apparently caused by anxiety over whether students would insist the work come with trigger warnings. e Executive Vice President of University Life Suzanne Goldberg is looking to replace the outgoing Rules Administrator. Among other things, this would make her title longer. e OLD HABITS DIE HARD A much-loved former University Senator left his job at McKinsey to run for city council in his hometown. Who said student government doesn’t prepare you for real life? e A frequent Spec opinion contributor on the executive board of pro-Israel group Aryeh wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Barnard’s new admissions policy. In it, she referred to Caitlin Jenner as “the former Bruce Jenner” and used “the transgender student” in place of any pronouns. e Meeting with the trustees...it’s easy!w

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