November 2024 Masthead
Editorial Board
TARA ZIA, CC ’26, Editor-in-Chief
JAZMYN WANG, CC ’25, Managing Editor
SAGAR CASTLEMAN, CC ’26, Deputy Editor
GEORGE MURPHY, CC ’27, Publisher
ISABELLE OH BC ’27, Web Editor
DERIN OGUTCU BC ’27, Web Editor
LUCIA DEC-PRAT, CC ’27, Crossword Editor
PHOEBE WAGONER, CC ’25, Illustrations Editor
KATE SIBERY, CC ’26, Layout Editor
SHREYA KHULLAR, CC ’26, Literary Editor
Senior Editors
ZIBIA BARDIN, BC ’25
ELI BAUM, CC ’26
CHRIS BROWN, CC ’26
SCHUYLER DAFFEY, CC ’26
STEPHEN DAMES, CC ’25
JOSH KAZALI, CC ’25
MAYA LERMAN, CC ’27
ANNA PATCHEFSKY, CC ’25
SONA WINK, BC ’25
Staff
Staff Writers​
BOHAN GAO, CC ’28
SAYURI GOVENDER, BC ’26
MARIANNA JOCAS, BC ’27
AVA MORRISA JOLLEY, CC ’25 M
AYA LERMAN, CC ’27
AVA LOZNER, CC ’27
GABRIELA MCBRIDE, CC ’27
LILY OUELLET, BC ’27
ROCKY RUB, CC ’26
EVA SPIER, BC ’27
VIVIEN SWEET, GS ’25
DOMINIC WIHARSO, CC ’25
ANDRE WILLIAMS, CC ’26
CECILIA ZUNIGA, BC ’26
Staff Illustrators
​​INES ALTO, CC ’28
EM BENNETT, CC ’26
EMMA FINKELSTEIN, BC ’27
LULU FLEMING-BENITE, BC ’25
BEN FU, CC ’25
KATHLEEN HALLEY-SEGAL, CC ’28
KATE HENRY, CC ’27
SELIN HO, CC ’27
ELLIE HODGES, CC ’26
ETTA LUND, BC ’27
OONAGH MOCKLER, BC ’25
DERIN OGUTCU, BC ’27
ISABELLE OH, BC ’27
OLIVER RICE, CC ’25
FIN STERNER, BC ’25
JACQUELINE SUBKHANBERDINA, BC ’27 LI YIN, CC ’26
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Table of Contents
Letter from the Editor by Tara Zia
Bwecommendations by The Blue and White Staff
Blue Notes
The Rupture of Low Plaza by Sona Wink
Buffering Blogs by Stephen Dames
Essays
Speak Weltfish, Speak Pasternak by Eva Spier
A Pedagogy of Unrest by Maya Lerman
Measure for Measure
Backtrack by Gracie Moran
Feature
The Shadow of Power by Chris Brown
The Conversation
Caroline Miller by Anna Patchefsky
Campus Characters
Faith Cheung by Dominic Wiharso
At Two Swords' Length
Did You Grasp the Lecture? by Schuyler Daffey & Ava Lozner
Cover by Ben Fu / Centerfold by Ines Alto, Lulu Fleming-Benite, Kate Henry, Etta Lund, Kathleen Halley-Segal, Li Yin / Postcard by Selin Ho / Insert Illustrations by Emma Finkelstein
“Between staying and going we told a story / that passed openly into the fold of symbolism. / Our chance rested on nothing more than this tight endowment / and, regrettably / we spent all our funds in payment of this story.” - Ahmad Shamlu
After leafing through a copy of Ahmad Shamlu’s “Once upon a Dark Spear” a few weeks ago, I found myself struck by this poem, “Between Staying and Going.” I reread the poem over a week, unsure what kept pulling me back. I pored over different lines, each one generating new questions: Are the stories we tell merely symbolic, passing into the “fold of symbolism”? What funds must we expend in payment to tell them?
It was the title that struck me most as I began to wonder what it means to exist between staying and going. The act of writing about our campus and college lives feels necessarily transient, situating us between staying and going. While we may flit through our college lives in a matter of years, the institutions that underpin them and the stories we tell about them will persist. We must go on, but they will stay.
In this issue, our writers situate themselves between staying and going. They wrestle with their brief occupation of this present moment at Columbia but also acknowledge how it is shaped by institutions, forces, and ideologies that stay. Chris Brown situates the University Senate’s current crises of power against the backdrop of decisive moments in its past. Anna Patchefsky speaks with Caroline Miller, former New York magazine editor-in-chief and Columbia professor, about the evolving role of media in U.S. elections, the future of print journalism, and her experience teaching Columbia students about both.
To exist between staying and going also requires a constant processing and retelling of events by professors, students, and administrators alike. Maya Lerman speaks to professors about the pedagogical and political decision of whether or not to reference protests in their curricula. Eva Spier discusses the story of former Columbia professor Gene Weltfish, analyzing how the institution that once shunned her now touts her legacy. Both reveal that while the stories we tell may pass into the “folds of symbolism” when first spoken or penned, they are not lost to it. The words of these professors linger in everything from student syllabi to declassified CIA files, reached for eagerly by our writers in this issue. They echo in our classrooms, heard, and reheard, differently by each generation of Columbians. Perhaps therein lies the necessity of telling them.
I, too, feel that I am between staying and going as I near the end of my time as editor-in-chief. However, quite unlike Shamlu, the little funds I have spent in payment of the stories of this magazine were not done so regrettably, but instead gratefully. I hope that they are received by you all as such.
Wishing you a good month,
Tara Zia,
Editor-in-Chief
Letter From the Editor
Bwecommendations
Media we think you would enjoy – but likely not as much as The Blue and White Magazine
Tara Zia, Editor-in-Chief: Cesária Évora. “Sodade.” Ahmad Shamlou, Born Upon the Dark Spear. Sunday night dinners.
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Jazmyn Wang, Managing Editor: The Cure, “And Nothing is Forever.”
Sagar Castleman, Deputy Editor: Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper. Murdering your darlings.
George Murphy, Publisher: A.S. Byatt, Possession. Khruangbin, “Mariella.”
Kate Sibery, Layout Editor: Wilco, “Sky Blue Sky.” Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. Making cranberry sauce.
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Chris Brown, Senior Editor: Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. Dandadan. Impressionism. Trying sushi for the first time.
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Schuyler Daffey, Senior Editor: Zach Bryan, “Deep Satin”. Clips of Patti Lupone on talk shows. Listening to Mariah Carey in early November.
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Stephen Dames, Senior Editor: Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 15, verses 79-87. The 2024 NY Mets. Acorn Squash.
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Josh Kazali, Senior Editor: Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories. Clifford Brown, Study in Brown. Radishes.
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Maya Lerman, Senior Editor: Patti Smith, Just Kids. Victor Jara, Manifesto. Harlem Arts Stroll.
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Anna Patchefsky, Senior Editor: Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon. The Beatles, “Golden Slumbers.” Accutane.
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Sona Wink, Senior Editor: Women in Technology, “Your Woman.” Crunchy peanut butter. The Diplo- mat, Season Two (Netflix).
Zoe Gallis, Staff Writer: An American Werewolf in London (1981).
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Sayuri Govender, Staff Writer: Lianne La Havas, “Sour Flower.” SWEAT Tour. Fiona Apple, When the Pawn…Coppelia Diner.
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Marianna Jocas, Staff Writer: Serge Gainsbourg, “Marilou Reggae.” Sasha Gordon.
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Ava Jolley, Staff Writer: The Cure, “A Fragile Thing.”
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Gabriela McBride, Staff Writer: Karima Walker, Waking the Dreaming Body. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet. Grass stains on your jeans.
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Lily Ouellet, Staff Writer: David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue. Heist movies. Games of Trivial Pursuit.
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Rocky Rub, Staff Writer: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
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Eva Spier, Staff Writer: Charles Aznavour, “Les deux guitares.” Marble halva on a toasted sesame bagel.
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Dominic Wiharso, Staff Writer: Uncrustables. Ellie Goulding discography. Family Guy funny moments compilation on TikTok.
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Cecilia Zuniga, Staff Writer: Sinéad O'Connor, “Famine.”
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Ines Alto, Staff Illustrator: Look Back (2024). Tatsuki Fujimoto, Look Back. Karaoke.
Em Bennett, Staff Illustrator: Thursday, “Understanding in a Car Crash.” Paris is Burning (1990). Nervous Gender. Tall socks. New tattoos:
Ben Fu, Staff Illustrator: Decision to Leave (2022). bod [包家巷], “Please Try To Be Patient With This.” George Jackson, Blood In My Eye.
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Jorja Garcia, Staff Illustrator: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024).
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Selin Ho, Staff Illustrator: Al Green, “Dream.” Eating a cheese danish.
Etta Lund, Staff Illustrator: Burt’s Bees pomegranate chapstick. Laying face down in the grass. Carrot cake.
Derin Ogutcu, Staff Illustrator: Saadet GüneÅŸi (1970). The Sugarcubes, “Tidal Wave”.​​
The Rupture of Low Plaza
Grappling with the aftermath of spring arrests, in Uris.
By Sona Wink
I remember the feeling I got when I first visited Columbia and looked out upon the central plaza of campus from Low Steps: the gallant sweep of the open lawns; the dazzling façade of Butler; the pink brick and mint-green copper details of Hamilton and Pulitzer. It was a feeling that tipped the scales in my decision to apply here. The buildings were beautiful, yes, but more importantly they represented values that I was inspired by: a commitment to learning for its own sake, to an intellectual tradition dating back centuries, and to the pursuit of living ethically and truthfully. In the Neoclassical architecture, I saw an institution that sought to transform young people into upright, thoughtful adults.
Contrary to my expectations, my collegiate fate lay largely in Uris. Last semester, I had back-to-back classes in the building twice a week; between classes, I wandered its Escher-esque abutting stairwells in an over-caffeinated haze. People mock Uris’ brutalist façade, but I focused my ire on its interior: It has the ambiance of an airport and a layout rivaling the Labyrinth of Knossos (Uris’ equivalent of the Minotaur is a sophomore in a suit who wants to tell you about his crypto startup).
The admiration I felt for Columbia and its campus naturally waned, but did not wholly falter, as I got to know the place. I learned that the student body was, by and large, frustrated with the administration; I learned that they had good reason for feeling this way. I learned that the architectural grandeur that stirred such excitement in me was, in large part, a well-constructed illusion: The buildings are designed to look centuries old, but the oldest (save for Buell Hall) were built in the 1890s. Still, I felt awe when the sprawling plaza opened before me at night, twinkling with light from the Great Hall.
This spring, something broke. Perhaps it was always broken and I was naïve not to notice it. On April 19, I received a text that President Shafik had allowed the police onto campus. I rushed towards the lawns from North Campus. Low Plaza sprawled open before me; that day, it resembled the Roman Colosseum: What must have been thousands of onlookers swarmed the perimeter of the East Lawn and formed several thick rings, all facing the unfolding scene. At first, the plaza was quiet—the communal sense of shock was palpable. The silence erupted into din as police officers began methodically arresting student protesters.
I used to believe that University leadership was fundamentally committed to a project of molding students into adults who actualize theory in practice and allowing room for us to experiment and make mistakes along the way. This changed in April, when I saw my peers dragged off of campus in zip ties, punished for acting upon their values via peaceful protest. I felt that something fundamental had been breached: an unspoken bond of trust between the student body and the University's leadership.
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Months later, the breach is still palpable; it sits thick in the air. The administration keeps track of us via card scanners, security guards, and hundreds of new cameras. My chest tightens whenever I enter the quad; it has the claustrophobic feel of a pressure cooker. Being constantly watched does not cultivate an atmosphere conducive to learning.
The central plaza looks cheap and false to me now, like the Italian Renaissance pavilion of Disney’s Epcot: an over-the-top spectacle designed to distract us from the brutal underlying churn of the University’s financial interests. The frequent installations of bouncy castles, donut giveaways, and mini golf on the lawns this fall—attempts to win back our trust, perhaps—only heighten the resemblance of campus to an amusement park.​
I still do not like Uris, don’t get me wrong, but I have come to appreciate its honesty. Like Columbia, it is impersonal, massive, and unabashedly preprofessional. It is a factory for accruing knowledge: Thousands of students churn in and out of its walls by the hour, absorbing information and leaving. Uris’ façade proclaims no values; it moves no one. It has gray carpets, white walls, and industrial bones. Its library houses no books. It is a far more accurate representation of Columbia than Hamilton or Butler.
And yet, within its brutalist walls, I have watched world-class philosophy, comparative literature, and history professors give mind-blowing lectures. In Uris, of all places, I have been moved to tears by a lecture about Tolstoy, spent hours learning about Marx, and sat next to curious, passionate friends. Uris is a microcosm of the University itself: a massive, profit-oriented structure, riddled with contradictory aims, that nonetheless contains inlets where curiosity flourishes.
I feel bitterness following the events of the spring, but I would be remiss to let it color my entire student experience. I have found the curiosity, academic rigor, and uprightness that I originally sought not in a certain type of building, nor in University leadership, but in professors and peers. Somehow, despite the draconian landscape of campus, there still exist pockets of atmosphere conducive to learning; they are created by dedicated professors and appreciated dearly by students.
Illustration by Fin Sterner
Buffering Blogs
Seeking the stories within student-run websites.
By Stephen Dames
In an anonymous comment on a May 11, 2008, Bwog article titled “Reminder: Pillow Fight!” we find an encapsulation of what websites like WikiCU and CULPA mean to students at Columbia. As the commenter puts it, when a WikiCU article is created,“an institutional memory is formed.”
While perusing these websites is, like some other chronically-online Columbia students, a favorite pastime of mine, I didn’t find this quote by chance. On the contrary, this comment can be found in several more public places. What was just an offhand joke about the creation of a wiki page for the short-lived Columbia Spring Pillow Fight (when, the week before finals, organized teams faced off at midnight on the South Lawn) is now a student-written self-definition for WikiCU found at the top of the “About WikiCU” page. The comment was also included in a 2011 Blue Note in this magazine, which coincidentally was published online by Bwog, the site where the comment was originally written.
Illustration by Selin Ho
Like layers of sediment built up over the generations, the collection of websites, forums, and blogs that make up the student-run Columbia websphere is dense, labyrinthine, and continually decaying. This decay manifests itself most clearly in the look and feel of the sites themselves: broken links are common, the user interfaces often feel clunky if not downright unusable, and active users seem to be increasingly scarce. Each site references the others for assurance and backing, and most follow a similar historical trajectory with brief periods of intense interest mixed with longer stretches of inactivity.
Following the rise and fall of the 2000s blogosphere, both WikiCU and CULPA (the most notable examples of the current student websphere) have followed a near-identical course, with each of these sites, at different times, either fully breaking, needing new admins, or being taken over by other, more established organizations. CULPA, for instance, is now run by Spec’s “Product and Engineering teams,” while WikiCU had to be revived in a 2020 “Wikithon” run by Bwog. Other sites like the Columbia Shallot (CU’s take on The Onion) or Off Broadway (a blog for study abroad students to document their semesters off campus) have ceased to exist altogether.
But within this cycle of death and resurrection, these webpages do something that no school administration or more established student group has managed: They preserve not only the history of student life at Columbia, but the rhetoric and sound of it.
While it’s interesting to read tidbits about M2M—a fondly remembered late-night Japanese grocery store and restaurant formerly located at 115th street—or Professor Gayatri Spivak’s 2004 Introduction to Comp-Lit & Society Class—described by one CULPA reviewer as a “A TOTAL NIGHTMARE AND [AN] UTTER DISASTER”—curiosity is not all these sites have to offer. And while the posts on these websites are often useful—it’s always good to know what dorms have long-standing rat problems or which professor is “both an idiot and pretentious, a deadly combination”—the reason they have stood the test of time is that they are constituted by and in the voice of students.
The humor, tone, and personality of the posts are what stand out most to the long-time reader, with the added bonus that, as they are written by students undergoing similar experiences to most of us, the inside jokes and witty observations in the posts are often intelligible even decades after they were originally written. Some sites, like the now-defunct Bored@Butler (at one point one of the most active online forums at Columbia), have even been known for having notorious users with cult followings. Though B@B—as it was colloquially known—was originally an anonymous message-board, it rebranded in 2011 with “personalities” which allowed users to enter any name and then be known by it on the site. The type of cult users this new feature attracted were often not benign, with misogyny and racism rampant on its webpages in the 2010s. It also became known as a place to find others interested in clandestine sex (especially, as the name indicates, within Butler itself).
While each of these sites had its own personality, the typical sound of the posts on these forums evolved and shifted along with the student population. For instance, a CULPA review from 2005 has a distinctly different feel than one crafted in 2020, and WikiCU articles from certain Columbia “eras” have distinct writing styles. But there are continuities too. The humor, for instance, remains remarkably similar, with WikiCU’s trademark dry, sarcastic, and often self-aware tone transcending any one user—a trademark that one could say is the stamp of the too eager-to-fit-in new New Yorker. In the article on Famiglia’s, for example, one can read that “Famous Famiglia is a pizza restaurant on Broadway at 111th St. It's famous only in the Warholian sense.”
It often feels like these clunky old sites are filled with ghosts in the machine; the voices of students whose silly opinions, dirty jokes, and embarrassingly poor runs for student council have lasted far beyond their own four years. So even when these sites decay, as they have a penchant to do, something close to care or meaning is preserved in their buffering webpages.
In a funny way, this fact isn’t lost on the admins of these sites, despite their frequent statements that their websites are, in fact and for the final time, "back." In an article titled “Blogs” on WikiCU, there remains a not-too-recently edited list titled “Inactive Blogs” that serves as a memorial to Columbia sites of old. These defunct 2000s era blogs include oddities like an anonymously run site titled Hash Browns … and Toast! as well as more serious examples like Professor Jenny Davidson’s Light Reading.
But, what stands out most beyond their dated titles and broken links (and the fact that there’s a record of them at all) is that this page doesn’t focus on outcomes. It doesn’t care about why some sites continue existing and others don’t, or, at a macro level, on who did what after leaving Columbia. Instead, it focuses on something radically different: what we, the students, did, said, and sounded like when we were (as the oft-quoted line from Dazed and Confused goes) “stuck in this place.”
Speak Weltfish, Speak Pasternak
The Choice We All Make: Campus Politics and Self Definition.
By Eva Spier
— — —
“The remaking of life! People who can reason like that may have been around, but they’ve never once known life, never felt its spirit, its soul. For them existence is a lump of coarse material, not yet ennobled by their touch, in need of being processed by them. But life has never been a material, a substance.” – Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
— — —
Until I took my seat in 457 Schermerhorn Extension on Oct. 9, I had never seen so many anthropology professors in the same place at the same time—that is, well-dressed academics donning colorful glasses and casually slipping into different languages. That was my introduction to the current day’s anthropology department, the seven-decades-ago iteration of which I was intimately familiar with. We were gathered on account of a shared interest in Gene Weltfish: an adjunct professor who lectured at Columbia from 1936 to 1953, and the woman Professor Brian Larkin was going to talk about.
Even before I tossed my sweater to claim a front-row seat, I knew a lot about Weltfish. I knew that she was an academic during the Second Red Scare—a time when anything other than a stark denunciation of Communism was doggedly investigated. And I knew that when Weltfish was persecuted for her left-leaning stances, Columbia’s trustees considered her a political liability. She knew that her academic work was irritating the University, which wanted to keep a low political profile, but continued to engage in transgressions that rendered her culpable by association.
I kept coming back to Weltfish’s life and work not because I saw her as the pinnacle of moral clarity and success, but because of her temperament. Welfish faced adversity that she might have been inclined to shy away from, and she did it with a pedantic sense of duty. For example, she publicly agreed with the Soviet Union that the United States had used chemical weapons in the Korean War. She participated in organizations that supported racial equality and women's rights that were flagged as anti-American because of their criticisms of capitalism. She was subsequently dismissed, blacklisted, and left unable to find an academic post for the next eight years.
At first, her treatment struck me plainly as a frustrating incongruence between academia and free speech. But the longer I thought about it, the more her case prompted personal concern. In early adulthood, especially as a college student, you will undergo shifts of a nature which send tremors through your sense of self, and inspire the impulse to wrestle your life into something stable—something compact and heavy enough to place squarely into the palm of your hand and examine. Color will slowly ache into things and slowly ache out of them. You will fall in love, move into a new apartment, experience injury or illness, family members will pass away, and these changes slowly and invariably split and refract the fabric of your world. I regard this impulse to tame life similarly to how I imagine a lepidopterist regards catching a moth and tacking it to a specimen board. It is to want to take the broad collection of your lived experiences, tastes, and inclinations and force them into something coherent.
To try to stop these shifts would be misguided. And, until now, I suspected that you had to react to them with a stubborn sense of self. Especially given that certain expressions—whether aesthetic or interpersonal or political—will inevitably find friction in the surrounding world. I approached Weltfish’s life with morbid curiosity, because it seemed to suggest that these stubborn reactions might not always pay off. When unpopular opinions bring about a grand and worthwhile struggle, they are dramatic in a way that is easy to encourage and celebrate. But Weltfish was politically unpalatable in a way that wasn’t supremely transgressive, and so she paid a large price for her beliefs with few ensuing concessions. As Professor Larkin began, I necessarily considered Weltfish with this framework.
Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner
Weltfish started teaching in the anthropology graduate program in 1936, upon invitation from Franz Boas; she herself had studied in the same program a few years earlier. She taught on a year-to-year appointment, a common arrangement which allowed the University to hold onto faculty without long-term commitment. However, given how long Weltfish was employed, the renewal of her contract was seen to be automatic. She was an active teacher, researcher, and adviser, and her department pushed for her to be promoted, better paid, and put on a permanent contract—much to the irritation of the administration. She taught anthropology, linguistics and archaeology until October 1953, when she was told that her contract would not be renewed. A week later, she appeared before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
Professor Larkin’s lecture makes it clear that there were two objects of particular scrutiny in Weltfish’s case: the pamphlet she co-wrote with Ruth Benedict called “The Races of Mankind” and her position as President of the Congress of American Women. “The Races of Mankind” was written to combat Nazi theories of racial superiority by arguing against biological differences in race. Because the USSR attacked racial inequality as evidence of the injustice of U.S. capitalism, anyone pursuing issues of racial equality ran the risk of being suspected as a communist. The Congress of American Women was similarly listed on the roster of subversive organizations in 1946, and three years later the House Committee on Un-American Activities declared that it was made up of “primarily a hard core of Communist Party members and a circle of close sympathizers.”
Five months after being questioned, Weltfish’s contract was terminated in a process that was almost humorously opaque. Weltfish was never officially fired because she was never officially a professor. The University claimed that the termination was unrelated to her political views, but rather due to a change in hiring policy. Out of the 30 faculty members affected, Weltfish was then singly named in the press release announcing the University’s “policy change” that lecturers would not be renewed after a certain period of time. Students and faculty were outraged by this because it hung Weltfish out to dry in public. The University’s claim completely falls apart in light of a memo from the provost, Grayson Kirk, to the president, which explained how hiring policies would shift as a means of ousting Weltfish. Kirk made it clear that the connection between Weltfish and Columbia had to be severed. He offered two paths: to dismiss Weltfish publicly, or to refuse to renew her appointment. He endorsed the second option, arguing that her direct dismissal might prompt unwanted attention both internally, from her colleagues who insisted that she was a good scholar and a capable teacher, and externally, from those who might accuse the University of taking arbitrary action for political reasons. The second route would ensure that her elimination from the faculty would not be “the subject of as violent an internal storm ... as if we were to take direct and summary action in her individual case alone.”
Some details in Weltfish’s FBI file make it abundantly clear why she was suspected. For example, in 1948 she was mentioned by name in a message from the Polish government published in the Soviet press. She is listed as having written a congratulatory message for the “thirty first anniversary of the Great Socialist revolution” in her capacity as president of the American Women’s Congress. Others are decorative in comparison. A letter addressed to the FBI in 1949 (from a confidential sender) reads: “I should also like to call to your attention a Dr. Gene Weltfish, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, New York City. She is in definite connection with the Communist Party here. The direct influence that she exerts over her students makes her doubly dangerous.” The mystery author includes no argument—only evidence of unease: “It is with greatly disturbed feelings that I write this letter.”
My considerations of political unpalatability were decisively redirected by Weltfish’s obituary in the Aug. 5, 1980 copy of the New York Times. It reads: “A funeral service will be held at the Riverside Chapel today at 10A.M.; a reception will follow at Columbia University.” Despite having been the source of severe turbulence in Weltfish’s life, after her death the University assumed a different kind of memory for her, one in which her career was not interfered with, in which new hiring policies really had nothing to do with politics. While Weltfish’s life was a testament to unwavering conviction, her memorial represents an active subversion of this—a capitulation to convenience. What makes the University’s posthumous embrace of Weltfish so difficult is that it discourages the very process of engaging with the world authentically. I thought it self-evident that it is more meaningful to react to things thoughtfully and seriously, regardless of how admired they are, than to condemn things when they are unpopular, and then turn around and endorse them when the landscape changes. Columbia’s treatment of Weltfish is in direct conflict with what I think students should be encouraged to do at university—if anything, it is an education in deterrence.
The entire point of living—of being human—is to go through this process of engagement and self-definition, even when it’s painful or unfavored. I don’t think this is something that is limited to people. Universities run uniquely tangentially to society: a position that has the possibility to be extremely productive as long as it engages with the regular world enough that it is not alienated from practical affairs, but remains at a sufficient distance so that it is not engulfed by them. All so that cleavages in national politics can be carefully examined and understood rather than reacted to brusquely. The termination of Weltfish’s contract fused the University to national churn, in a way that could have been avoided.
The inevitability of finding aesthetic, interpersonal, and political friction in the world doesn’t have to be demeaning. Instead it can be a thrillingly serious endeavor. I take this phrase from Pasternak, who writes in Doctor Zhivago: “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious! Why then substitute it for a childish harlequinade of immature inventions, these escapes of Chekhovian schoolboys to America?” Although there is a difference in content—in this novel Pasternak details, with stunning precision, the first years of the Bolshevik Revolution—he pertinently recognises that it’s supposed to be difficult to engage with the world, it’s supposed to be serious. To neglect this, by gently nodding one’s head in whatever direction it seems to be publicly well received, is almost to neglect personhood. In addition to the annals of academia and free speech, Weltfish’s posthumous vindication sets a bad precedent for human behavior.
By the end of Professor Larkin’s lecture, every chair in the room had been taken; some sat on the floor, others leaned against walls, heads poked in from the corridor. I sat there and—instead of the overwhelming clarity I had hoped for—I wished that I could know more about Weltifish’s private life, so that I might be able to assert that, although she was publicly persecuted and even besmirched after death, she had had a rich inner life and personal focus that was only possible because of the small ways in which she had expressed herself seriously. But Weltfish had to decide to draw the line alone. But maybe the very opacity of Weltfish’s inner life and personal motivations is the best lesson for us. Will we pursue our ideas, unpopular as they may be, with fierce independence and live the consequences? Or will we quietly and subtly modify them, adjust them to the intellectual fashions of today, even if they are not our deepest convictions? The latter is easier; it aligns with the crowd and attracts those coveted PhD slots and professorial appointments. It is our decision and ours alone, not to be informed by anyone, even by Weltfish.
A Pedagogy of Unrest
Professors on protest and Palestine in the classroom
By Maya Lerman
Illustration by Derin Ogutcu
It’s the first day of the semester, and I feel lost in contradiction. On my way into campus I pass a contingent of protestors, clad in keffiyehs, urging students to skip their classes and join their “picket line.” I swipe my ID. Minutes later, on the steps of Hamilton (Hind’s) Hall, my mind becomes awash with images and sounds: swarms of police, a student being thrown down the stairs, desperate calls for a medic. If you hadn’t witnessed that scene you might have mistaken this for an ordinary academic building—if not for the watchful Public Safety officer by the door. After climbing the stairs I sit down in my first class of the year: Contemporary Civilization, a hallmark of Columbia’s pedagogical mission.
Something feels wrong with this picture. I came to Columbia to learn; why would I skip my classes at the behest of protestors? Then again, I wonder what this place—with its checkpoints, guards, and oppressive sense of manufactured calm—could really teach me. Part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, Contemporary Civilization (or CC) purports to foster critical engagement with politics, yet as I entered the classroom I felt, instead, like this was an attempt to hide from the political turmoil outside the gates. Then my CC professor says something in passing that gives me further pause. He poses the question: “Is studying at Columbia a moral decision?”
What interested me about this question was less its elusive answer and more the context in which it was asked. Spoken by a member of Columbia’s faculty, in one of Columbia’s famous Core Curriculum classes, inside a hall that had been occupied by student protestors and raided by the NYPD, a loaded sentence in itself took on new meaning. The choice to ask that question—a question that demanded even the briefest inquiry into a context outside the immediate text of our classroom discussion—fascinated me.
In the political war on our campus between student activists and the administration, there is a third party, operating in a gray area between these opposing forces: professors, who are often split between their allegiance to their students and their fealty to the institution. As I ventured to understand how we, as learners, grapple with the inevitable coalescence of our education with the political reality we find ourselves immersed in, I began by seeking the perspectives of these educators.
For philosophy professor Fred Neuhouser, the resolution to my quandary lies outside the classroom walls. In class, he doesn’t address the protests at all. This hardly means he is silent on the issue: Neuhouser helped lead an unsanctioned teach-in held by Barnard faculty on Barnard’s undemocratic restrictions on free speech, where he spoke about the legacy of the 1968 Columbia protests and how campus repression has worsened in the decades since. “The teach-in was important because there are so few opportunities to talk about political events,” Neuhouser remarks. Student attendance was high, suggesting to him that “students want to have these conversations.”
The administration criticized such demonstrations as disruptive, but Neuhouser believes that’s part of the point. “I think it’s possible for disruption to be educational,” he says. “Learning about the power in institutions and their motives is important.” While Neuhouser in no way belittles the academic learning environment, he recognizes that there is some education an institution won’t give you. Protest, often portrayed as separate from and perhaps even “disruptive” to learning, may fill that gap. The events of last spring have left the student body more aware not only of Palestinian politics and history, but of the pernicious functions of the university, the media, and the American government.
When I press him on his and his department’s pedagogy as it relates to protest, Neuhouser states that the philosophy department is not in tune with current political realities before adding “maybe it should be.” Neuhouser’s aside presents a genuinely perplexing dilemma. There is certainly weight to the criticism of teaching texts detached from their ‘applicability.’ But, as, my CC professor would say, there will always be more context to discuss; sometimes, we just need to focus on the text in front of us.
This is largely the approach taken by Christopher Brown, a professor of history whose viral speech condemning Minouche Shafik’s decision to bring the police onto campus has made him a figurehead of academic freedom. Brown knows his students could easily look him up and probably guess his politics from his public statements, but that doesn’t mean he wants to bring his personal politics into the classroom. A guiding principle of his is to make students comfortable and avoid creating the illusion of favor and punishment based on political alignment. This has meant skirting discussions not immediately relevant to his courses, including those surrounding campus events and Middle Eastern politics.“That doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions, but I have a job to do,” he says.
Christia Mercer, a professor in the philosophy department, takes a different approach, believing that teachers are obligated to provoke students to be aware of their place in an inherently political world. In the opening slideshow of her Philosophy and Feminism class, Mercer juxtaposed two images: one of the paintings of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in Butler; the other a picture of Alma Mater stained with red paint, taken earlier that day. Mercer used the contrast to situate the course in academic and activist traditions. In this vein, she seems eager to apply theory to practice, making a point of referencing Foucault—an author included in Philosophy and Feminism—to describe the securitized nature of the campus lockdown.
Yet despite her candid consideration of campus unrest, Mercer reveals she is not as uncensored as she’d like to be. She fears her lectures being recorded and shared without her consent, describing a colleague who, after being doxed, received no protection from the University. “Discomfort is necessary to learning. If you don’t stir things up you’re not doing your job,” she tells me. “I feel less comfortable doing that now because I don’t think Columbia has our back. They want us to do our job but won’t protect us when we do.”
Despite differing slightly on how they conceive of their role as educators, Brown and Mercer share a growing fear that the administration is not willing to stand up for its faculty and, accordingly, have been wary of their classroom demeanor. I ask Mercer how she would handle a class discussion explicitly mentioning the genocide in Gaza. She answers immediately: She would never talk about Gaza. Perhaps this contradicts her conception of the educator as a provocateur. But, to her, the subject is simply too triggering, with too much potential for misunderstanding and anger.
Columbia’s newly created Task Force on Antisemitism provides little guidance on the matter. In their second report, the Task Force published a brief section of varied comments from professors, largely from the Master’s of Public Health Program and graduate student union. The Task Force did not respond to my requests for clarification on how classroom conversations can be conducted with student safety in mind.
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​In my conversations with professors, the very word “Palestine” is like a black hole—our discourse inevitably orbits it, but all parties involved seem to agree that getting too close would spell disaster. Gaza, it seems, represents a rupture, and addressing that rupture head-on is a near insurmountable task. And so, professors talk around it—Brown via the independence of higher education, and Neuhouser via the history of protest movements. As I converse with members of Columbia’s faculty, I find myself falling into the same avoidance. It’s easier, after all, to ask about Columbia’s repression than to meaningfully speak about what it is they are trying to repress. As my CC professor puts it, “Teachers are trained to talk a lot. But we can’t say everything.”
If anyone is willing to call out the political weight of this rupture, it’s student activists. This October, I attended a protest against the gentrification of Harlem outside Columbia’s gates. Though not directly related to Palestine, the intersections of the issues and of those who care about them are evident. Signs read: “From New York to Gaza, Stop the Displacement!” Protestors cover their faces with keffiyehs. Hagen Feeney, CC ’26, takes to a megaphone and turns Columbia’s Core Curriculum into a call to action: “Columbia, we demand you pay what you owe Harlem in full if you give a shit about the real Core Curriculum!”
For Feeney, the texts we read bear directly on our political lives. Thus, his conception of a “real Core Curriculum” is one which aims to make us more informed and active citizens in the “real” world, and being an active citizen means challenging the institutions we take for granted—Columbia included. Professor Mercer, former chair of the freshman-year Core class, Literature Humanities, understands Feeney’s sentiment. “Literature Humanities is transformative if taught well,” she asserts. “It should cause people to see themselves in the world in a more nuanced way.”
Among the educators I spoke with, the one most willing to embrace the “transformative” power of the Core Curriculum was Jehbreal Jackson, my former University Writing instructor and a PhD student without the protections of tenure. Early in the semester, Jackson shared a ceasefire petition as a resource for students who felt inclined to sign. Jackson’s justification for their choice resembles the model of education proposed by activists. “The ceasefire petition was in alignment with being a citizen,” they explain.
Following the sweep of Hind’s Hall, Jackson fostered a frank, student-led discussion of the climate on campus. “The narrative that we were fed was that we were arresting students for the safety of the students,” Jackson says. “But I heard the contrary: that the encampments were where people felt safe, and not with the police and security presence on campus.” Jackson tied the frustrations of the students to the course’s source text, How Scholars Write, which teaches reading in terms of “scholarly problems,” or moments of tension in a text. The “common understanding,” as the UW curriculum puts it, was the media circus surrounding our campus; the “complication" was the counter-narrative of community safety found in the encampment. Jackson remarks, “One could not have desired a more relevant and urgent way to say, ‘This is why we are practicing these skills in this class.’”
While not all classes bear so directly on politics, and legitimate concerns surrounding student comfort and institutional repression render this approach challenging, it’s hard to deny the appeal of drawing from campus life to understand class content. Still, whether educators choose the classroom as a site to explore tensions between our politicized experience and the ideal of unadulterated education, one thing is for certain: The tension is all around us, and we, the students, have the capacity to learn from it either way.
With an administration unwilling to protect its faculty, external pressure from Congress, the demands of student comfort, and the threat of doxing, perhaps there is power in things both said and unsaid. Though Neuhouser does not speak of protest in class, a subtle and subversive curricular change may speak for itself: He tells me that he added a work by Franz Fanon—famous for his theorization of decolonial violence—to his Political Philosophy curriculum. Neuhouser says he has no plans to link the text to any current event. But when asked if he had Palestine in mind, he responds plainly with “yes.”
We read Foucault, and think about campus surveillance. We read Fanon, and think about the Palestinian resistance. A professor refers to Hamilton as “Hind’s Hall” on the syllabus. Students wear keffiyehs to class and sport political stickers on laptops. Aloud or unspoken, we question if studying at Columbia is a moral decision.
In his interview my CC professor flips the inquiry to me, the student: He asks if I think he addressed the protests with his question. I think about it and reply yes, I did think that. He gives no confirmation that my reading is correct. He says only this: “Students are smart enough to figure it out.”
Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner
Backtrack
By Gracie Moran
No need to search my helices
to find my creator, just see me right here
in this rotten mood, inhaling
like I want to defeat the air, seeking out
the ugliness on the train platform.
At the crown of the stairs, a big man
sings Frankie Valli on the offbeat
and I remove my headphones
pretending to be annoyed by him, neck
compulsively craned to hear
his wayward voice as it plays
hopscotch through the tunnels
of this industrial island.
Now I miss the Catskills.
Actually, I miss Laney,
a sugar maple blonde no taller
than some summer-fed rye.
How she took me under her wing
when I was too young, how I sat
in the bathroom waiting
as she did things I’d never heard of
to a city boy in the next room.
How we held each other like we were slow-dancing
in the pews at her first kiss’s funeral.
We were only sixteen and seventeen if you can believe it–
you were, too
if you can believe it.
The man’s bad singing stops,
the backing track remaining
like stagnant holy water in the side chapel.
I imagine he went quiet thinking
of an old buddy, too.
Predictably, it is a struggle to come back
into the body, the one
where the express train
tickles heels through shoes
as it rumbles up to us,
where we can see
the conductor’s School of Athens pointer
out the window, guiding.
It’s all a wonder, to be
noticed and helped in concert
alongside strangers who all look
like someone I know, this place
where ugliness can be rendered
familiar and even charming, where
the horrific proof of life
seems to wink at us just so
we blush,
we breathe.
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The Shadow of Power
A selective history of the University Senate and Columbian democracy.
By Chris Brown
“What we know is that there is a gap between the process that the University administration should have taken and the process that it did take,” Vice President of the Student Affairs Committee Minhas Wasaya said in a statement to the University Senate at their monthly meeting in November of last year.
Without permission from the Senate, the University had updated its event policy after the initial wave of protests following the Oct. 7 attacks. With only a minor change in wording, the school had unintentionally pulled back the curtain; it had acted against the wishes of its main representative body, and there was little they could do about it.
According to its website, the University Senate is a “policy-making body” that considers “all matters affecting more than one Faculty or school.” There is little that the hand of the Senate doesn’t touch; Columbia’s university statutes mention jurisdiction over curriculum, budget, academic freedom, and student life.
The Senate was a body forged by protest. Out of a 1968 shockwave that had destroyed faith in an administration whose decisions seemed arbitrary and unaccountable, Columbians yearned for representation. The proposal for the Senate, the discussion of which took up nearly the entirety of the Spectator’s February 1969 issue, was both a chance to restore confidence and “a painstaking and serious endeavor to build for the future so that we may more fully realize the idea of a university.” It was a win and promised a democratic future for the Columbia community.
Columbia’s Senate is unique in its composition. Faculty senates are not uncommon across the country, but direct election of faculty and students to the same body seems to exist only here. The Senate promises that the students, representing one-fifth of the body, have an actual hand on the steering wheel. The faculty is the only group with more representation in the Senate, but it is students, with the short time they have been allotted, that act as the primary engine for change and legislation. The students are the beating heart of the legislative process for all Columbia policy.
Democracy in a university is a strange concept. Everyone is familiar with the idea of a student council: elected representatives who interface with the administration on behalf of the students. But it is no secret that student councils exercise no power over the day-to-day running of the school. The Senate itself is a unicameral body, and in theory, it is intended to be the first and last stop for any changes affecting the experience of students or faculty at Columbia.
The Senate, while being the main policy-making body of the University is at all times “subject to the reserve power of the trustees.” WikiCU wryly refers to this power as “Royal Assent.” Broadly, the Board of Trustees will approve any legislation passed by the Senate, and it will become university law. However, even the first line in the University statutes that established the Senate stipulates that it is “subject to the reserve power of the trustees.”
The power of the trustees looms over every decision that the Senate makes. The University President, who acts as both the head of the Senate and a sitting member of the Board, is a reminder of this at every meeting. By paying tuition and choosing to study here, every student at Columbia nominally assents to this power. We are, after all, consumers of a product that the trustees are offering us. But it is this threat that often leads the Senate to refuse certain items, even when the student body appears unanimous about their necessity.
The times when our democracy backslides into oligarchy may be rare, but with the Senate’s name in the news more than ever, it is worth looking at some of its most controversial moments. The records of these moments are currently being digitized, and for the first time giving Columbia students a chance to re-examine their past. Gazing into the archives for a few examples shows just how thin students’ claim to power is and how tenuous the Senate’s role in preserving it has been.
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From the beginning, the Senate was fraught with tension: It took the entire 1969 school year for a proposal to be approved, and the trustees delayed voting on it three times. The Senate’s original proposal to be the final judicial and legislative stop on all University matters had been vetoed. Even still, the revised proposal that changed it into the current policy-making body was passed with 90% of the vote in a referendum of students and faculty. Frustration with the trustees’ refusal was so strong that balloting for the first set of University Senators occurred before the trustees even formally approved the body formally. The trustees finally approved the Senate after the school year, planning for it to convene the following fall.
When the Senate opened for its first session in the fall of 1969, the student body eagerly awaited what monumental change would come out of the great democratic shift. Many were disappointed that it was almost nothing. One of the very acts of the nascent Senate was an official condemnation of the Vietnam War, which, fittingly, the trustees never endorsed.
Not only did this refusal to endorse the Senate’s resolution serve as an early warning that the Senate was not all-powerful, but the Senate’s first full year revealed a trend embedded into its very nature. Students are impatient; each of us only has four years to enact whatever change we want to see, and most senators only get a single year. Tenured faculty can spend decades fighting for changes, but there is no time for students to wait on the slow bureaucracy that the administration represents. Students were already condemning the Senate’s lack of institutional change two months after it opened its doors, and by the spring of that school year, one of the original senators had resigned, calling the Senate a “magnificent hoax.”
From the first moment, there was concern that our new democratic body was nothing more than window-dressing for an administration that could still engage in the authoritarian practices of its past. It now had an additional tool, with the Senate operating as a democratic veneer over the actions of the trustees and the administration. Like a monarchy, they often don’t need to cancel legislation overtly, only stall; students only have four years, but the administration is eternal.
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Jumping a decade forward, perhaps the most explicit refusal of the trustees to assent to the will of the Senate and student body happened in the early ’80s: their refusal to allow the University to divest from apartheid South Africa. The year 1985 is a somewhat neglected chapter in Columbia’s lore, never operating pride of place above the massive protests of 1968. However, it is here where the now teenage Senate entered its first full-scale fight with the administration.
There had already been rumblings of a controversy over South Africa in the early ’70s. Reviews of University finances had started as the War in Vietnam ended, and by 1977, the trustees themselves had agreed to allow the Senate to review the University’s finances. But, to the students, this initial wave of trustee morality was actually another distraction for their ulterior motive: bringing former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into the Columbia fold as a tenured professor.
Kissinger—who was under investigation at the time for his potential role in covering up the overthrow of the left-wing leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, while he was secretary of state—had been offered a position by President William McGill. There was immediate backlash from students and faculty, who saw this as a turn towards the exact same kind of politics that the children of ’68 had protested. Faced with protest and a petition of over 900 signatures read before the Senate, McGill and the administration held their ground, but it ultimately did not matter, as Kissinger turned down the job in the summer of ’77.
In this context, the first seeds of the Senate pushing for divestment from South Africa began to sprout. After protests shook the University and McGill at the end of the spring ’78 semester, the trustees agreed to work towards removing Columbia investments from holdings in South Africa and preventing future investments in the country.
But the story of the Senate and South Africa had only just begun. McGill had been replaced as president by Michael Sovern, CC ’53, LAW ’55, one of the original pioneers of the University Senate. After a four-year lull, a new generation of students brought back the spirit of the ’77 and ’78, this time demanding total divestiture by the trustees. In 1983, the Senate passed a resolution calling for total divestiture with unanimous support, even as one trustee called it “a fairly futile gesture.”
And it is here, after the Senate had acted on what its constituents wanted, that the question of what democracy at a university means came back into focus. “Senate Viability,” an op-ed published the week after the resolution passed, stated that “if the trustees do not agree to total divestment from holdings in South Africa,” they will “prove once and for all that the University Senate is a worthless, frivolous entity.”
The trustees decided to try to prove the op-ed right, and delayed voting on the resolution for as long as possible. The spring ’83 semester ended without a vote, and it wasn’t until July that the trustees finally convened and outright rejected the resolution. The Senate was dually plagued by disappointed resignation and outrage as the calendar turned and the fall ’83 semester began. The rejection by the trustees left an existential crisis for the Senate, now facing its first major example of the limits of its power. The Spectator dedicated an entire issue to proposing another set of changes to university governance, including the addition of a student and faculty member to the Board of Trustees. Once again, the students felt disenfranchised by their representative body.
The Senate spent the year having a committee draft another report on why the trustees should divest and managed to convince them to declare a freeze on new investments at the close of the ’84 academic year. This policy was almost immediately reneged before the next school year started, only fanning the flames of a student body that already felt disenfranchised.
The Senate was forced into a choice: They either had to agree to approve the trustees’ caveat-filled freeze plan, which had already been reneged on once, or return to their initial call for total divestment. They chose to stick to the trustees’ line and vote for the former. After this call, the dam of protests finally broke loose, and students occupied Hamilton Hall again, just as they had 17 years earlier. The Senate, created to end the need for that form of protest, had been left unable to do anything, faced with an unhappy student body and an unwilling set of trustees. An article titled “Columbia is not democratic” voiced the exact same concerns that had been voiced in 1970: “The trustees did not like this idea, so they told the Senate to go to hell and refused to divest.”
The following fall, the trustees finally voted for full divestment after a third report from the Senate. But by then, it was too late, and the Senate had once again suffered a blow to its reputation. Public opinion had once again outpaced the ability of the Senate to respond, and frustration grew again. Like the original generation of students at its initial founding, it was again glaringly obvious where the true power lies.​​
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​After the crisis of 1985, the next decade passed in relative quiet. The University Senate faded into the background as another piece of Columbia’s administrative machinery. Gone were the days of fiery, prolonged protest; Columbia had moved into a quieter age. The threat to the Senate was no longer trustee refusal but general apathy. In 1995, the Spectator expressed concerns about the threat of “casual members” of the University Senate, worried that the casualness of senators would leave the body toothless in the face of another real conflict between the students and administration.
This toothlessness and red tape came to a head as it took the Senate a full decade to create a cohesive and comprehensive sexual misconduct policy. The first task force on the subject convened in 1994, and it released its first report two years later in 1996. But it wasn’t until three years later that the Senate released its recommendations for updating the policy.
This delay did not go unnoticed by the student body. On the eve of its 30th anniversary in 1999, the Spectator called the Senate “sweeping in scope, miniscule in influence.” A petition titled “We Waited Three Years For This?” was presented to the Senate the same year, revealing the students’ damning perception of the Senate. It had become an inert body, unable to pass even the most basic legislation for its constituents. The Senate had been dreamed up as a panacea to the University’s problems, a broad-sweeping body that could react to any problem, and now general apathy had rendered it largely irrelevant. In 2005, still looking for more on the issue of sexual misconduct, the Spectator asked: “If the University Senate has a meeting and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
This is where we found the University Senate in 2023—a body with power that had waned, left to send emails that mostly went ignored.
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The University Senate has returned to the forefront of the news cycle in recent years at Columbia. Once again, it has come into conflict with administrators on behalf of students and has been forced out of the stupor that it had been left in after the firestorm of ’85. The Senate is still as limited as ever; it cannot force anything on the University that the trustees oppose.
But even if participatory democracy in a university is illusory, that does not render the Senate useless. The Senate is as close to a democratic institution as we have at this school, and even if it is only a shadow of the power that it could have, there is still room to make use of the Senate as an institution. It is the closest that we get to interface with the administrators that run our school, the closest we get to working alongside faculty toward a common goal, and the first site for many of the student body’s grievances. The Senate is only as strong as the people who populate it and the student body that it represents; we have no choice but to continue to make our voices heard.
Illustration by Em Bennett
Caroline Miller
By Anna Patchefsky
Caroline Miller was the editor-in-chief of New York magazine from 1996–2004. Her job was to tell the story of New York at the turn of the century—a narrative that included the rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani, the boom and bust of dot-coms, the expansion and contraction of Wall Street, and, of course, 9/11. When Miller and I sat down to talk a few weeks before the 2024 presidential election, she brought some of the magazine’s old covers. They depicted the wide range of a New Yorker’s cultural preoccupations: the development of new neighborhoods like the Meatpacking District, the competition to get into the best preschools, and John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Bessette-Kennedy. Three of the covers are from 9/11. After that Tuesday, the landscape of the city was changing, and Miller was funneling the atmosphere into the magazine’s glossy folds.
The covers of the magazines address the question: What do New Yorkers care about? And why does the rest of the country care about what New Yorkers care about? New York, it seems, is always at the center of the country. So then, are its politics.
Miller is currently teaching Journalism and Democracy: The 2024 Election, an American Studies seminar offered in national election years. The class gathers a plethora of Columbia’s poli-sci and journalism–inclined students. Miller started teaching the class in 2012 in response to journalistic disruptions of the digital revolution, polarization, and the disaggregation of big legacy players.
Illustration by Li Yin
The connection between journalism and democracy is enshrined in our constitution and permeates the foundations of American society. Ideally, journalists enable the electorate to make informed decisions. In a political landscape riddled with misinformation and division, Miller’s class addresses the challenges that journalists face as their mission becomes increasingly difficult to perform. At the precipice of the 2024 election, we spoke about the evolution of New York City, the decline of legacy media, and, of course, its effects on the present political moment.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Blue and White: What was it like the first time you taught the class?
Caroline Miller: The first time I taught the class was 2012, the year Barack Obama was reelected. The most dramatic year, not surprisingly, was 2016. Students in that class had grown up with Barack Obama as president. I think they had an idea that the president was a kind of father figure. When Trump won, the class was so upset. And as a much older person who has lived through many administrations, I saw that my students had a hard time seeing that this would pass. It was very painful.
BW: In your syllabus, it says that journalism has never been more contested than it is now. Has that line always been on there? It seems kind of like the perpetual moment we are experiencing.
CM: Yes, I would say that the role of journalism has become more difficult every year. This is because of the trends that undermine the business basis for it—with Google and Meta sucking all of the advertising money from newspapers, magazines, and online news sites. But the larger thing that has made it worse is the declining belief in the fact base. Now, there is a huge number of people openly defiant about what the facts are, and who will say on the table “I don’t believe in facts.” And the disdain for expertise. And the disdain for science. And just the disdain for government. Even if you are talking about a FEMA worker who is delivering water and food, you don’t want that person in your neighborhood because they are working for the government. That makes it very difficult for journalists to do their jobs, which is to get people’s information so that they can vote in a responsible way.
BW: That is a concise way of phrasing the job of a journalist as producing a vote.
CM: Democracy is based on the notion that people are competent to make decisions for themselves. For that, they need information.
BW: Is it the role of a journalist or of a huge media company, like the Times, to make sure there is actual truth or facts?
CM: You are asking a really big question. The way the media handles facts is one of the things that I have seen since I started teaching the class. I’ll give you an example. When Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, he said that Mexicans are sending rapists and murders across the border. The mainstream media was floored. What do you do with that kind of claim? That was 2016, and there was great reluctance to use the word lie. They would say something was a misstatement. If there was fact checking, it would be in a separate story. What we see now is that fact checking is part of the story. You could argue now that it is too much of the story. The facts are checked in the headline—it is part of the narrative.
Many journalists would like to claim they are being impartial. But it gets more and more difficult when you are saying “this isn’t true, you’re wrong.” And people who are Trump supporters believe that is just opposition. It is tough to try to be credible. The other big change is that more people do not really want news that is neutral. They want news that reflects their values and their beliefs.
BW: It seems like the class is unique in that people really are coming to discuss politics, at least in some sense, from very different backgrounds. What have you found about the way they relate to each other?
CM: The students really listen and support each other. I am happy to have a range of backgrounds. We have several students who are from the Deep South, and that is very helpful to explain what we are seeing in the press. We have a range of political views, but we are not arguing the merits of the candidates—we are talking about the coverage of the candidates, and the media produced by both candidates: advertisements, TikToks, and posts.
BW: I can’t imagine the TikTok effect was going on much when you started teaching the course.
CM: Well, social media was starting to be a factor. Facebook was starting to be a factor. I remember in 2012 assigning a story from the Washington Post that was about a woman who had gone to jail for threatening Barack Obama. She was probably 65 and had gone online and met all these other people in Facebook groups who shared her views. She was extremely happy to have this community and got more and more radicalized.
BW: Have you seen coverage of the election cycle change in relationship to different forms of media since Biden has dropped out?
CW: The tenor of the coverage has changed a great deal. Journalists like news and don’t like it when races don’t change. And so the dramatic change was pretty exciting for everyone, and it fed a great interest in the election, which journalists love. They had a whole new set of stories to write and new characters in this drama. So it was certainly exciting. And it made it feel like we are in a race. They don’t want a lopsided contest.
BW: Not at all. The excitement is interesting. I noticed that in the class there’s a lot of writing—students are revising and editing in the way that journalists may be more inclined to than students are.
CM: Students in the class write a series of essays that I think of as media analysis or criticism. And every piece is revised after I read it, put in comments, and we discuss it. I know it’s a little unusual, but students usually appreciate talking over what they’ve written. First drafts are rarely as good as they can be, and I think people usually enjoy seeing their piece get better. And, as an editor for so many years, prompting a writer to make something sharper or more compelling is my idea of fun.
BW: Can you talk about how you found yourself at New York magazine?
CM: I started at New York magazine in 1996. But I've been working in journalism much longer than that. I didn’t do journalism in college. I went to Stanford and I taught school for a couple of years. I kind of fell into journalism. I was living in upstate New York, and a friend of a friend had this little weekly newspaper, and he got a job at a real newspaper in Washington. So another friend and I took over this little paper called the Newfield News, circulation 700. It was a weekly paper about a farming community outside of Ithaca. We put it out for a couple of years.
BW: What kind of stories did you cover?
CM: It might be about a school board meeting, a town project, or someone’s salt and pepper collection. We did everything from reporting and photography to layout and driving it to the printer. Then I went to the Ithaca Journal as a reporter. A small newspaper is a great place to start, and that's one of the things that’s tragic about the death of local newspapers in this country. That newspaper was my graduate school. One day I’d be sent to cover a trial, and the next day a plane crash. Every day, there was something different. You’d cover town board meetings and human interest stories. And then one day, I was complaining that the editing was bad and that someone put a stupid headline on my story. The managing editor said, “Well, if you think the editing is so bad, why don’t you do it?” And so I became an editor—at several newspapers and then several magazines.
BW: What is it about magazines that is different from newspapers?
CM: A good way to think about it is that a newspaper is horizontal: It’s meant to cover all the things that people who live in a particular geographic area might want to know about. It’s got sports and food and news and culture and everything. One of the effects of that is that I might buy a newspaper for the fishing news, but I’m also getting the national news—and the international news. It’s an abundance. A magazine is for a particular interest group. It’s for people who have something in common. Sometimes it's an age group—like Seventeen magazine, where I was editor-in-chief for several years, is for teenagers. But it could be for people who are into needlepoint or for people who are into sports. And so, for instance, New York magazine doesn’t try to be for everyone in the city, but is for New Yorkers and other people who share a kind of high information psychographic—people who are early adopters. They like new things. They metabolize ideas quickly. They’re interested in new fashion and new food and art and real estate—how other people live.
BW: A fast pace.
CM: All kinds of new ideas. So a lot of people subscribe to New York magazine who don’t live in New York because they feel like New Yorkers. And they’re interested in what New Yorkers are thinking about and doing.
BW: How have you seen the identity of New Yorkers change?
CM: I arrived at New York magazine in 1996. The Yankees had just won the World Series. And it was a great time to be in New York. New York was booming. Wall Street was flush. Dot-coms were raking in start-up money. Crime was way down. Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor, looked like a presidential contender. It was a very optimistic time. But I was also there four years later, when there was the dot-com bust and a recession. The air came out of this balloon and the stock market crashed. There were a lot of magazine covers about living with less and people being depressed. In seven years, I saw a lot of ups and downs.
BW: You were editor-in-chief of New York magazine during 9/11. How did you tell the story of New York?
CM: 9/11 was obviously the biggest story that happened when I was at the magazine, and the most difficult and painful. The challenge of trying to do justice to this overwhelming experience in a couple of days—9/11 was a Tuesday and the magazine closed on Friday—was really very painful. But we felt grateful to have something to do that felt like we were contributing something, by trying to channel how people were feeling, what was happening, and finding the stories that we could tell. The mood in the weeks and months after 9/11 was constantly changing. Every day, people got up and said, “Who am I today? Who are we today? Is it okay to go back to the theater? Is it okay to have fun? Is it okay to go out? How do you process something that’s that disturbing?” And, of course, it was still smoking down there. Many people were staying with friends uptown. Everybody was struggling to deal with it and to try to articulate what it meant or who we were going to be now. And how is our idea of romance affected by this?
BW: I haven’t heard that one.
CM: Six months after 9/11, we did a cover story about romance after 9/11. Before 9/11, New Yorkers were infatuated by Wall Street. Wall Streeters were kind of heroes. They were the it guys, making insane amounts of money and retiring at 35. Then, there was this storyline that after 9/11, our values were going to change. Were we going to be interested in different kinds of people?
BW: Firefighters.
CM: Do you remember the famous photograph from the end of World War II?
BW: The kissing one with the nurse?
CM: Yes. We redid that in Times Square with a firefighter and a model. The model was Melania Trump.
BW: Wow.
CM: Another haunting 9/11 memory came from the fact that our office was on the 13th floor of 444 Madison Avenue, a building adjacent to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. So from my office, I was looking down at the top of St. Patrick’s. After 9/11, there were funerals at St. Patrick’s practically every day for weeks. First I would hear the bagpipes, and then the organ, and then people singing hymns. Some days there was more than one funeral.
BW: It’s interesting that the sonic world was kind of changing at the same time. But you also published a book on photography after 9/11?
CM: Of course, there were a lot of photographers down at the Trade Center site. We called it the pile. There were thousands of pictures of the ruins, which were heartbreaking and actually really beautiful. The structure of the Twin Towers had cathedral-like shapes at the base, so there were these towering shards of Gothic cathedrals, and smoke, and people covered in ash. We had three days to put out the magazine, and we could only run a few pictures. When we were finished, there were photographs all over the floor, hundreds and hundreds. My husband Eric Himmel was the editor-in-chief of Harry Abrams, an art book publishing company. So we got together and published a book of photographs. It sold out 60,000 copies in a couple of weeks, and we donated the proceeds to a fire company that lost most of its men.
BW: I’m thinking about how important New York stories and the New York press is for the rest of the country. Today then, what is the importance of New York for American journalism?
CM: New York leads the country in many ways, and is resented by the country in many ways. When I was at the magazine, we used to joke that if people hate New York City so much, we should secede and join Europe. But New Yorkers are different from a lot of other Americans. They’re more cosmopolitan and more diverse than a lot of places. A lot of trends and ideas and creativity filter down from New York. Now New York is being described as this crime-ridden, disgusting hellhole. And I think that’s a projection that isn’t really fair.
BW: That projection almost seems as if it’s part of the election cycle itself.
CM: Right. Well, it’s something that the right wing has tried to capitalize on to suggest that liberals look down on you, despise you, and think you’re stupid. It’s a tribal kind of thing.
BW: I was wondering if you could talk about what’s happening to journalism outside this city.
CM: What’s happening nationally is that small newspapers are dying. First the classifieds died because they moved online to Craigslist. And then, as the internet got bigger and bigger, Google and Meta scooped up most of the advertising that used to sustain them. You know why they were able to do that, right?
BW: Because online an advertiser knows what I’m looking for.
CM: Yes. Our data is being used to allow Meta and Google to just suck all the advertising out of not only print publications but also online publications. A very large percentage of small newspapers have already closed. A lot of them that are still left are what I call ghost newspapers. When I worked at the Ithaca Journal, there were more than 60 people in the newsroom. And now there is one. A lot of papers will have three and they work from home. Many of them have been bought up by private equity firms interested in milking them until they die. And so there isn’t a place for people to start in journalism.
BW: So how do you start in journalism?
CM: Some people get started by going to graduate school in journalism or in the field that they would like to be covering as journalists. A lot of others do it by publishing their own thing—starting a blog, a site, a podcast, or YouTube or TikTok videos—and getting a lot of attention. Then, a newspaper hires them because they have a following. They bring their readers to the paper. And there is often a revolving door. They launch a site, then they work for the Times, then they go back out and start something on Substack. Then they come back and work for the Washington Post. There’s a lot of coming and going between the big publications and people who become stars.
BW: Do you think that the rise of celebrity journalists has changed the way journalists write the actual stories?
CM: Certainly. When people leave places like the New York Times and go to Substack to start their own thing, they’re liberated from Times editing and protection from mistakes, but also the kinds of things that you are not allowed to say at the Times. Does that lead to more mistakes, or make them more extreme? It can. But it is interesting to see what people do when they’re let loose.
BW: Do you feel, regardless of the outcome, as if the relationship between journalism and democracy will continue to change after the election?
CM: Oh, I think we’re in a lot of trouble. If you have a whole country in which large parts of the country are defying information and knowledge and competence and expertise, what happens next? We’ll have to find out.
Cartoon by Isabelle Oh
Faith Cheung
By Dominic Wiharso
Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal
We slipped into Watson Hall undetected by her in-progress senior thesis class. Faith Cheung, CC ’25, should have been with the rest of her classmates, but that day she had skipped a group critique with Professor Jon Kessler in favor of a dollar oyster happy hour at Elis Wine Bar. The only reason we decided to stop by at all before her amuse-bouche was because I insisted on seeing her studio space. We maneuvered the fluorescent, labyrinthine building for a while, until a descent down a flight of industrial stairs led us to our destination. Her studio was bare. There was nothing on the white walls; the only sign of life was a metal pot filled with dead leaves and a wilted dracaena house plant.
You wouldn’t know Faith was a prolific multi-media artist from the looks of her studio alone. But her apartment tells a different story: Decorated with her large-scale wooden sculptures, her bedroom is adorned with her drawings, prints, and photographs. A sign on her bedroom door reads “Sculpture II Installation - DO NOT ENTER.” The space, sparsely lit with warm lighting, felt more like her real studio. It was frenetically organized with contact sheets and in-progress collages strewn about her desk. Her newest body of work, however, was noticeably absent. “I'm happy it got thrown out,” she remarked. “It would hurt a lot to see that every day."
​
Faith was referring to a monumental yet haunting life-sized shelf construction made of wood and draped with plaster-soaked burlap that looked like white gauze. Composed of four tiers, the structure was simultaneously solid and brittle. The shelves were ornamented with the symbolic residue of a transient relationship: plaster molds of her hands and dried rose petals. She laments how, this past spring, she was in a directionless relationship that she describes as a “purgatorial space that you just start to leave pieces of yourself around.” For Faith, the sculpture was a home to hold attributes of him that she couldn’t part with, like a memorial to harbor all of the detritus of a complicated relationship.
Making art was never the plan. “For the first 18 years of my life, I was more or less passively denied exploring any passions of my own,” the computer science major claimed. Faith’s first foray into art was with the oboe which, like many East Asian children, was forced upon her by her parents. Despite being obliged to pick it up, she found herself deeply moved by the beautiful solos she performed. Being part of an orchestral whole and contributing to the swell of music affirmed her affect-driven interest in art making. Classical music, however, was never her true passion. It wasn’t until she moved to New York that she found dance music—her true love.
The kaleidoscope of grungy clubs, neon lighting, and bass-driven dance music swept Faith into the nightlife scene in Brooklyn. There was a physicality to these spaces—where sonic movements were transformed into corporeal motions—that captivated her classically trained sensibilities. She recalls how the “social aspect of a bunch of people working towards something greater” made her come alive. I pressed her, wondering why she had to leave Morningside Heights to find these cheap thrills, and she joked how it had a “Lewis and Clark ass vibe.” As she rushed after the promised dazzling gold nuggets of perfect DJ sets and attractive young creatives, Brooklyn was the Western Frontier, her personal Manifest Destiny.
The exclusivity of these nightclub clubs, however, has troubled her. Since being elected as Bacchanal co-president for the 2024-2025 academic year, Faith has confronted the inherent power dynamics of music spaces. Music is beholden to clique-based, aestheticized scenes, where self-image determines one’s admittance to clubs, rather than genuine interest. I wondered what her ethos was in choosing artists for the Spring Concert. Do you choose blockbuster acts, or do you opt for a more eclectic lineup? How can you get both frat bros and indie snobs on board? Faith promised herself that she is going to put all of her wants aside because, at the end of the day, nobody cares who she wants to see. “If I really want to see them, I’ll buy a concert ticket.”
This year coincides with Bacchanal’s twenty-fifth anniversary, and the pressure is mounting for them to host the crème de la crème of spring flings. Unlike the traditional model of two openers and a headliner, the Bacchanal e-board is considering a longer line-up to incorporate a diversity of genres. Bacchanal is allotted five hours annually to put on an orgiastic spectacle of day drinking-induced bacchanalia, but unlike her predecessors, Faith wants to fill all five hours with non-stop musical acts. It seemed like an all too ambitious plan for an event with a tight budget. However, Faith assuaged my fears, noting that the money depends on the whims of an overly bureaucratic CCSC, and that this year we were in luck because she and Mariam Jallow, the CC ’25 class president, are “good friends.”
Faith began as a part of the press team for Bacchanal her sophomore year where she was introduced to Dennis Franklin, CC ’23, then Bacchanal concert chair. Bacchanal hosted music events throughout that year, including a rager at ADP which Faith transformed into a promotional video for the organization’s social media. Her work caught Dennis’ eye, and from there, they started going out together in the Wild, Wild West of Brooklyn raves. This friendship blossomed into a creative partnership which has now materialized into Level III: a sonically focused, multimedia collective. A recent profile by Office magazine, details its humble Columbia-apartment party origins and the evolution into a club-party-throwing, radio-show-hosting, editorial apparatus. Still, producing imagery for the democratically oriented group, Faith has remained true to her Bacchanal roots
.
Level III’s mission has stayed consistent since its inception, and it aligns with Faith’s own belief in removing the barrier to entry for music spaces to democratize the party. “I respect Dennis so, so much. Like, he's genuinely one of my role models, and the way that he does it, I think is a really great example of that.” Faith sees Dennis as the mastermind behind the scenes, with a harmonious mix of DJ and venue selections that synchronize to create the most memorable nights. It is a place of no inhibitions, no hierarchies, and no self-consciousness that unites disparate groups across the city. As the collective becomes more mainstream, Faith is working on designing its Apple Music graphics so that the aesthetics can go “hand in hand with the music.”
Given Faith’s impressive artistic resume, it may come as a surprise that creativity hasn’t always come easy to her. Faith and I first bonded in Sculpture I where we first got our footing with wood-working, metal-working, and plaster. The progression in her art practice has been so apparent to me, and I wondered if these changes were part of her technical maturity or if her work has taken on new, ideological dimensions. Faith concurred, adding that “I think before in Sculpture I, it was definitely a vibe where you're kind of like, okay, I'm using a woodcutter for the first time.” But now, the metaphysical wall between her objects and her ideas has fully come down. What was once straightforward material handling and investigation has now become a full expression of her creativity without any medium-related constraints.
Faith is now developing a new body of work in her senior thesis, incorporating ideas from her site-specific sculptural explorations. Her sights are set on an amalgamation of moving images, soundscapes, projections, and sculptural interventions that allow her to flesh out the embodied quality of installation work. These concepts were born from a Sculpture II installation she created to mimic closed-off religious spaces, which she dubbed “cathedrals.” Set in a Prentis bathroom stall, she wanted to elicit contemplative moments of shame, where one has to sit with one's thoughts, allowing the artwork to assume the role of a confessional booth mediator. In an attempt to transcend the classical composition of painting, she has found her voice in sculpture
By the end of the semester, when the public is finally invited to witness the new artwork made by the seniors in the visual arts department, Faith’s studio will be full of new work. Perhaps the potted dracaena will be incorporated into a new installation; or maybe the space will be entirely unrecognizable, the walls covered up with photographs and projections. No matter the end product, I am sure that those who want to brush shoulders with New York City’s burgeoning creative class should make the pilgrimage to see where Faith is taking her work. And if you’re lucky, as I was, she will offer a cup of hot green tea.
Cartoon by Ellie Hodges
Did You Grasp the Lecture?
By Ava Lozner and Schuyler Daffey
Affirmative:
Gemma scarfs down the remainder of her John Jay omelet and sprints towards Hamilton Hall. Her gargantuan backpack, filled with the entire CC syllabus, thuds against her spine as she scurries up 5 flights of stairs. A rapid scan of the classroom reveals that her usual seat, directly in Professor Ratcliffe’s eyeline, is occupied! Only one seat remains empty, tucked into the back corner, next to…Chad. She shoots Chad a frosty glare to convey her distaste for his lack of smart business casual attire, inadequate participation in class, and general demeanor.
She berates herself for being distracted by her classmate’s inadequacy and turns her attention to Professor Ratcliffe. She slides her chair forward for a better view, then begins to grin widely, bobbing her head vigorously at his words. She is determined to demonstrate her insightful analysis of the cave metaphor and the ways in which it resounds in a 21st century context after having spent her entire weekend in the Butler 4th floor stacks reading Plato’s Republic. But she is so focused on nodding attentively that she only just realized the room has become silent! What was the question Professor Ratcliffe just posed? Something about first impressions of the book? The cave? Gemma launches her hand, rocket-like, into the air, smacking another classmate in the face in the process.
“I was struck by Plato’s examination of collective and individual will; he forces us to reflect on whether we are complicit in this societal ignorance in his cave analogy; there is something ineffably potent about this idea. Indeed, I found myself grappling with this notion of what truth even refers to - is it an objective, definitive idea, or is it merely a widely held conviction, and how should we go about differentiating one from the other? Plato also introduces the idea of philosopher kings, who he affirms will not participate in subterfugacious acts and abuse the powers of the state, an idea which struck me as contrasting significantly with some Hobbesian ideas raised in ‘Leviathan’, along with how to create an ideal state, evoking some advanced - contemporarily speaking - ideas of gender equality, which also really captured my attention… and if we take into account Karl Popper’s critique of the Republic, there is certainly much to be said on this sort of dichotomy in his invocation of–”
” – Gemma, Gemma remember to breathe,” Professor Ratcliffe interrupts, “you’ve certainly given us…much… to think on. Now, would someone else like to expand on the cave analogy, and this idea of knowledge or truth? How might we view this allegory through the lens of education?”
Gemma hoists her hand into the air, smashing a different classmate in the face this time, while nodding vigorously. Yes! Professor Ratcliffe can definitely see her nodding! - but Professor Ratcliffe looks past her! She wonders what Machiavelli would do in this situation. (She leaves The Prince under her pillow every night, hoping its realpolitik lessons will seep into her brain, equipping her for her junior summer on The Hill, position as a White House aid, followed by law school, and her eventual bid for the presidency) As Professor Ratcliffe continues to look past her, Gemma begins waving her hand increasingly frantically in the air - remembering to smile, no wider than that - but it doesn’t make a difference. To Gemma’s chagrin, he chooses... Chad? Not Chad! to respond to his question.
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Negative:
“Afternoon, everyone. I’m sure we all spent our weekend deep in thought about Plato—I know I did. How are we feeling with this one? ... Alright, mixed reviews. Some of us haven’t made it out of the cave yet, it seems … hahaha. Well, as with all of the other books on the syllabus, we could really spend an entire semester just on the Republic. But alas, the Core office—”
[2:10:46 p.m.] https://open.spotify.com/
Chad’s AirPods connected
“Welcome To The Party” - Pop Smoke
“... Plato is quite the character to tackle in a handful of classes, so let’s get started. I’m excited to hear all of your thoughts. What were your guys’ first impressions? … Yes, Carter—”
[2:11:03 p.m.] https://chatgpt.com/
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“... so yeah, I thought that was interesting.”
“Interesting point, Carter. Hmm … Would you elaborate a bit on your point about the forms?”
“Yeah, um … there was, for example, the section where he talked about, like, for example, the bed and the chair … and there were different—”
[2:13:25 p.m.] https://open.spotify.com/
“R.I.P.” - Playboi Carti
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“... and I was wondering what you all thought about his idea of these individuals who have made it out of the cave and are reaching towards divinity, as people who are supreme—”
[2:23:55 p.m.] https://supreme.com/pages/shop
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“I got the chance to read a couple of your discussion posts before class. Lilah brought up an interesting—”
[3:15:39 p.m.] https://courseworks2.columbia.edu/discussion_topics
Plato Day 1 Discussion
[3:26:44 p.m.] https://chatgpt.com/
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[3:30:31 p.m.] https://courseworks2.columbia.edu/discussion_topics
Plato Day 1 Discussion
“I was struck by Plato’s examination of collective and individual will; he forces us to reflect on whether we are complicit in this societal ignorance in his cave analogy; there is something ineffably potent about this idea. Indeed, I found myself grappling with …”
[2:44:58 p.m.] https://open.spotify.com/
“Way 2 Sexy (with Future & Young Thug)” - Drake, Future, Young Thug
[2:45:38 P.M.] google.com
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“...in subterfugacious acts and abuse the powers of the state, an idea which struck me as contrasting significantly with some Hobbesian ideas raised in Leviathan—”
[2:51:24 p.m.] https://www.nytimes.com/games/connections
[2:59:46 p.m.] google.com
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[3:01:44 p.m.] https://play2048.co/
[3:02:22 p.m.] https://open.spotify.com/
“PUFFIN ON ZOOTIES” - Future
“I like the direction we’re taking. Plato touches on the philosopher kings—these people who have emerged from the cave and see the truth—and talks about the duty they have to bring this knowledge back down into the cave to govern the people of the city. I wonder what you all think of this … Someone who hasn’t spoken today …”
Fuck.
“Chad? What were your thoughts on this passage?”
Fuck.
“Yeah … um … I actually was writing down some of what I was thinking on this … Let me just …”
[3:05:34 p.m.] https://chatgpt.com/
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​
“Yeah… so… uh… sure thing, here’s a summary of Plato’s thoughts on – oh, uh… Plato’s Republic, written between 380 and 375 BCE… uh… oh: Plato believed the philosopher king must utilize their knowledge of the forms to lead their civilization justly, similar to the allegory of the cave, in which Plato details the obligation of those who have emerged from the cave and seen the light to return to spread their knowledge to those who are still inside of it. Consequently, Plato argues, the kallipolis will have the most just leadership possible, as its leader will be the person within the city who has gotten the closest to grasping the divine concept of justice through their devotion to the study of the forms.”
[3:09:19 p.m.] google.com
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Illustration by Emma Finkelstein
Cartoons by Sona Wink
Postcard by Selin Ho