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By Schuyler Daffey and Madison Hu Affirmative: Professor B sits at his desk in Barnard Hall, the fluorescent luminescence of Milstein his moon. He opens his laptop, hot and fried from a long day of teaching his course titled Modernity and Novel and Mothers, Too.  On the screen are 10 essay submissions from his 15 students.  The deadline was last week. The page count was flexible. He forgets about the five stragglers for now. He keeps what his therapist calls his “thoughts of sorrow” at bay as he clicks on the first submission: Katie, a soft-spoken freshman with a lot to say about juxtaposition and tension and push-and-pulls. The subject line of the email is sparse. It reads: essay T he body follows in form. this is the essay thank you The attachment is labeled “essay1quillpenn.essay.thisisreal.epub.” Professor B hesitates—could this be a virus?  When he clicks on the attachment, he is only 50 percent sure his computer won’t crash.  The essay opens with a vague promise. In this essay, this essay will explore many things. Surely, Katie is capable of a stronger introduction. Surely, because this was sent in three  hours after the deadline, qualifying it as the earliest submission in the class, Katie had thought through her piece a little more than average. But Professor B is missing the full picture. He is unaware, of course, that the night of the deadline, Katie was downtown at a Gray’s Papaya, downing three hotdogs and two milkshakes with the power imbued upon every drunk freshman who manages to get into a club with an impossibly flexible, incredibly fake ID from Maine. Katie was with her suitemates—those sweet girls—who graciously held her phone as she gobbled up the dogs. Jennifer, the angel she is, was taking selfies with it when an email notification interrupted her flow. She showed it to Katie, who immediately panic-burped and ran straight out of Gray’s Papaya, hyperventilating and half-screaming on Sixth Avenue. She had forgotten about the essay deadline, risking a bad grade for the first time in her life.  She read Professor B’s email and fought through the virtual gates of Duo to skim his essay guidelines on CourseWorks, which he had disseminated three months prior. Write about the modern novel … mothers too … when and where … diverse dynamic experimental … Outside Gray’s Papaya, Katie got to work in her Notes app. She had been feverishly writing for what felt like 10 minutes when she realized she had simply tacked drunk musings onto a written-on-the-train poem. She resigned to accept that she would just send it anyway; Professor B did say the essay could be experimental. “Can we go to the club again?” Matt begged from the corner, entertaining a pigeon next to a pile of trash. “Yessssss!!!!!” her suitemates crooned, like the Furies.  Without a beat, they swept Katie into the nearest club, the apparently famous and super-exclusive-except-for-right-now Break Down Downtown Woo, Yeah, Hey! Club. Her Notes app glitched as splashes of vodka cran landed on her screen. She wiped, then typed, then wiped.  At 3 a.m., Katie was swept into an Uber, and her stomach did not feel good. “What do I do?????” she wailed in the car, causing an immediate drop in her overall Uber rating by one whole star.  “Here.” Jennifer, ever the angel, took her phone, typed for five minutes, and gave it back. “It’s submitted.” In the morning, Katie had no recollection of the essay. Or most of the night.  A week later, Professor B, wiping mustard from his beard in his Barnard Hall office, is left with the task of deciphering Katie’s paper. The answer? Love. Or perhaps hate.  He sighs heavily as he, yet again, marks the sentence with a big red question mark. What was Katie thinking with this? Was she thinking at all? In conclusion, there is no conclusion. The modern novel is modern and diverse and experimental. It is everything, it is nothing. Today, the novel is also modern, but it is better called contemporary.  “What does this mean??????????” Professor B screams into his head-void.  Contemporary means the present, according to Oxford Languages (Citation 1e42325).  Oh.  Maybe there is a rhyme and reason to this. Maybe Katie was operating on a level that Professor B did not catch on the first read through. Maybe this is actually an inspired piece with inspired things to say.  Thank you for choosing ChatGPT for your auto-generated essay.  Professor B’s thoughts of sorrow are back, and, ignoring his therapist’s advice, he allows them to wash over him.  He throws up a little in his mouth as he gives an obligatory F to the paper. Please,  Professor B silently begs,  please let the next essay be readable. Negative: “Damn ChatGPT,” Professor B bemoans, yearning for the days of chalk blackboards, handwritten essays scrawled in blue fountain pen, and good old honest work. He turns to his next essay, this one submitted three days late by Luke, a Sigma Chi brother who regularly watches soccer highlights in class, one AirPod in at all times. The subject line of Luke’s email is identical to Katie’s. It reads only: essay . Professor B hangs his head ruefully. There is no body text, merely a PDF which sits like a lonely island in the vast emptiness of the email. Fearing the worst, he clicks into the document.  What did the modren novel Professor B is taken aback. He rereads the title, certain that he has somehow missed something. What did the modren novel? Perhaps this student will offer a deconstructivist take on contemporary literature, he prays. Perhaps Luke is mirroring the breakdown of traditional novel structure in his deconstruction of the title! He rubs his hands together in glee, an ebullient smile forming on his lips: Luke had been focused and listening in class this entire time! He returns to Luke’s essay, crowing with delight and pride in his student. Modern novels were written from 1900 to 1940. They usualy included themes of society, modernity, and the inner wokrings of the mind. A cold, creeping sense of dread begins to wash over Professor B. Themes of  society ? This is not the work of a student who is attuned to the fine detail and expansive psychological themes of the modernist literary tradition. He can barely continue reading through all the typos, but his eyes are pulled inexorably, like a moth to the light, back to the trainwreck.  In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , the reader experiencs Clarissa Dalloway’s inner mind over the course of onde day. Like the diligent junior that he is, devoted to his studies and inspired by his fascinating classes and hardworking professors, Luke created a Word document for his essay exactly 27 minutes before the deadline. Posted up on the third floor of Butler, a Celsius in each hand, he readied himself to write an essay teasing out the nuances and contradictions of the modern novel. But he began to realize that there was one small issue: He had not cracked the cover of a single text on the syllabus.  From there, his problems only deepened. About 10 minutes into planning this essay, Luke began to receive a rapid stream of texts from his Brothers: “Dude, where are u? We cant start shotgunning til u get here” Followed by: “bro come now. mike found a keg in the basement and now we’re throwing tn. we need you here man” And ten minutes after that: “CPOME TO THE HIUOSE BROOO. ITS SOOLITICANTEVEN.” The discovery of the keg was the straw that broke Luke’s back. He could hold off no longer; his body acted as if it had a mind of its own. He was dimly aware of his hands packing his MacBook away, of shoving his books into his backpack. He surveyed his document: an introduction and two solid, mostly coherent paragraphs. He would just force a pledge to finish his essay later, he reasoned; being pledge master had to come with a few perks.  This was how, 30 minutes later, Luke found himself drinking from a keg, the age and origins of its contents unclear, upside down, his feet in the air, while his Brothers bellowed, “SIGMA SIGMA SIGMA,” in a gathered circle around him. Meanwhile, new pledge Josh, baby-faced, barely 17 years old, and four beers in, sat hunched over Luke’s computer in the corner, furiously typing his best approximation of the role of mothers in the modern novel.  Professor B is shocked to discover that the quality of the writing improves somewhat over the course of Luke’s essay.  There is still an abundance of egregious spelling errors, to be sure, but ChatGPT could not have written this. ChatGPT, at least, can spell basic words. It is cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. He gives it a C-. I need more detail next time!, he urges in the CourseWorks comments section, along with an extensive analysis of Luke’s essay, at which he is certain that Luke will never look.  Professor B screams a single sound of anguish into the night. It comes from deep within him, a hoarse, half-feral noise articulating his frustrations at the disarray of higher education, the calling to which he has devoted his life’s work now being trampled on by his students and their abject preference of alcohol to Faulkner. His scream is swallowed into the library’s cavernous depths as if he had never uttered the sound at all. With a leaden sigh of defeat and resignation, Professor B opens his next essay submission …

By Maya Lerman I had heard about Atish Saha, GS ’24, through my grapevine of idealistic film major friends long before I got the chance to meet him. Seeing him for the first time, I immediately got the hype. Atish has had his photography featured in The New Yorker , Time , The Guardian , and Vice . He’s pursued art across mediums and across the globe, and has developed a small but mighty coalition of friends at Columbia dedicated to helping him achieve his artistic vision. And achievements aside, Atish is the kind of person you can’t help being charmed by. “I’m a professional yapper,” he says apologetically; we’ve been chatting for only fifteen minutes and have already discussed topics ranging from affirmative action to the plagiarism of Indian philosophers by the West. His energy is contagious: In a matter of minutes, Atish has me passionately yapping alongside him.  If you get the chance to speak with Atish, one thing will become abundantly clear: Atish lives and breathes his art. He describes sleeping in train stations to make it to exhibits, crashing at friends’ houses, or even going days without food or sleep. For Atish, the sacrifice of material comfort is a no-brainer. A striking example of this is a piece of performance art he created, which featured him sitting inside a transparent replica of the Kaaba, a famous mosque in Mecca, while wearing a burqa for 53 hours nonstop—the duration of his mother’s labor. He tells me of the sheer vulnerability of this act, of putting his male body on display in what many would consider an emasculating manner. The performance was a personal meditation on Atish’s role as a photographer, putting himself on exhibition in the same way as his photographed subjects. “I was trying to punish myself in a way, so that I can understand the pain when I photograph someone else,” he tells me. The most consequential moment in Atish’s career was his photography of the collapse of Rana Plaza, a garment factory in Dhaka. On April 24, 2013, Atish witnessed a tragedy which killed over a thousand garment workers. “I just happened to be there,” Atish tells me as he describes the horrific scene: He felt the ground shake, saw white ash fill the sky, and watched as bodies were pulled out from under the rubble. Atish recalls he and his friends having to amputate limbs with their bare hands to rescue survivors—an experience which profoundly affected his psyche and left him unable to stomach the sight of meat for years. To combat the Bangladeshi government's attempts to underplay the death count, Atish developed a dedication to documentation. He describes feeling a profound sense of responsibility, prompting him to start a database to track the missing and dead. Atish’s favorite work to come out of the incident was a more humble endeavor: a collection of photographs of objects that he found in the weeks following the collapse, before the government closed off the area to the public. The objects ranged from the mundane (cups, pieces of clothes, vanity bags) to the nauseating (bags of hair from victims). Atish kept these artifacts in his home for months, living alongside them as they began to rot and stink, and even losing friends who couldn’t stand the persistent reminders of death. But they held profound importance for Atish, as objects that could have belonged to anyone, and that served as a memento of the intimacy of lives lost in the vastness of tragedy. In a way, Atish’s objects were more human than his photographs of death and suffering, and were representative of his philosophy on photography. “As a human being, we can actually do more than live one bodily experience through one limited body,” Atish explains. “We can actually enjoy life through multiple bodies. That pluralism, that understanding of the plurality of bodies and self, changed me a lot.”  For his work at Rana Plaza, Atish was approached by an editor of Time magazine and given a chance to show his photography. He came to America, and proudly presented his collection of photographs of objects. But Time wasn’t interested, telling Atish that the objects looked like products sold on Instagram. “They were really interested in the bizarre body parts,” Atish laments. Violence and horror sells; the poignancy of disembodied objects simply didn’t have the same voyeuristic appeal.  The interaction with Time  highlighted the dissonance between the values of the mainstream media and Atish’s personal goals for his art. Still, Atish remains dedicated to pursuing activism in his own way, defying popular narratives and embracing politicization. He offers to show me a short film he’s recently made about the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell. The video includes footage of a recent vigil held by Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace, interspersed with audio of Bushnell’s recorded message to the world. It ends with Bushnell’s haunting screams of “Free Palestine” as he is set aflame, followed by an eerie, techno rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”  The point, Atish tells me, is to show how arrangement changes the narrative. He asks if, watching his piece, I ever got the sense that Aaron Bushnell was mentally unstable. I responded that I did not, despite that being the dominant presentation of the story by American news outlets. This is an example of Atish’s commitment to docufiction, a form of documentary that challenges the notion of objective truth. He quotes a protester from the Vietnam War, who, when asked why they demonstrate, answered, “I am not doing it for the [Vietnamese] people, I’m doing it for myself so this country cannot change me.” Atish too wants to use art to question ideological hegemony from within. “You’re not watching anymore, you are seeing for the first time, even though you have looked at it,” Atish says. He describes it in dating terms: “When we say we’re seeing each other, that means you’re not just hooking up … you’re seeing  this person in the everyday, mundane, boring, exciting, unsexy, sexy, all of it. Seeing means you’re interfering.”  This interference is what Atish hopes to accomplish through filmmaking. For him, film is special in its mobilizing power—it's an art form designed for collective viewing, made to bring people together around a synthesis of sounds, images and ideas that, more than any other medium, most closely resembles life. Filmmaking is also a deeply collaborative process: To make his films, Atish has cultivated a tight-knit community of filmmakers and film lovers across Columbia’s campus; without them, Atish’s lofty ambitions would never be possible. Atish asks me if I know the word “glean”—a personal favorite of his. “I glean from people’s lives, and they glean from my life,” he tells me. Atish sees no separation between his artistic endeavors and his personal life. His friends appear in his art, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera, and are constantly shaping Atish’s vision. The way Atish talks about his community is endlessly endearing; I can see how much he cherishes them, how indebted he feels to his comrades and collaborators in his artistic process.  I ask Atish if he ever takes breaks. He laughs, as if the question doesn’t even compute. Art isn’t a career, he tells me. It’s not a job that he feels the need to take time off from. His life, his friends, his everyday experience is his art, and that, for Atish, is the greatest joy he can imagine. Atish doesn’t feel the need to advertise his art to others. “Let’s not sell now,” he says with a smile. We’re young, and there will be time to sell later. “I don’t need to be money’s bitch.” As our interview comes to a close, Atish has one request for me: “Don’t write my age,” he says with a chuckle. “I don’t want to be old.” Yet “old” is the absolute last word I would use to describe Atish. Everything about him, from his energy to his mindset, is bursting with youth, innovation, and boundless passion. Regardless of age, Atish has truly made the most of his time at Columbia—and that determined glint in his eyes tells me he’s far from finished.

A legacy contested, a legacy revived. By Cecilia Zuniga The spirit of ’68 lingers today in the dimly lit corridors of Fayerweather Hall. Pieces of its history lay scattered around Columbia University’s campus, like bits of a whole to be sewn together—or perhaps intentionally kept separate. You might feel it yourself, like a faint echo of rallying cries or chants pulsating beneath creaky hardwood floors. Undeniably, 1968 is alive  in room 301M.  On Tuesdays at 2:10 p.m., Columbia’s past meets its present. Professor Frank Guridy teaches the undergraduate research seminar Columbia 1968, where 12 students piece together the incendiary history of the 1968 Columbia student strike. Seeking to understand the protest’s causes, context, and legacies, the course paints a vibrant local and national picture of the ’60s. Sifting through firsthand accounts of protesters, multimedia anthologies, and campus archives, students excavate the University’s history of 1968 to produce their own original research on Columbia’s legacy of student activism.  301M is a prototypical history classroom, tucked away in the heart of Columbia’s history department. The building is also a historic landmark in itself. Along with Hamilton Hall, Low Library, Avery Hall, and Mathematics, Fayerweather was one of five Columbia buildings occupied by hundreds of impassioned students in a direct action takeover in April of 1968. The strikers demanded that the University halt its militaristic and racist policies, namely Columbia’s ties to the Vietnam War and its plans to construct a segregated gym in Morningside Park.  56  years later, the year has become cemented as a focal point in Columbia's collective memory, national headlines, and the generational tongue of campus counterculture. It is a novelty reference in classrooms and organizing spaces alike. Students today continually remind themselves why protest is so palpable on campus, tracing the lineage of activist culture from past to present. … In 1968, Students for a Democratic Society was an invigorated and bookish faction of Columbia organizers. Inspired by antiwar New Left ideology and looking to politicize their peers, SDS led the push against the Vietnam War on campus. The group was already a powerful voice, leading the charge to ban ROTC and CIA recruitment at Columbia . However, its fight against American militarism escalated after the 1967 discovery of Columbia’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis—an independent organization contracted by the Department of Defense to conduct weapons research. The student reaction to the IDA connection was visceral. Not only did the discovery reinforce the ever-winding tendrils of the U.S. war machine, but it also cemented Columbia’s role in innovating, manufacturing, and exporting chemical and missile warfare  to Vietnam.  A New Jersey suburbanite turned revolutionary, Mark Rudd described himself as “not political” before arriving at Columbia in the fall of 1965. But his antiwar radicalization and SDS initiation quickly followed. “When I was first exposed to these kids who had already been studying the war—not in classes, but on their own—I realized that the war in Vietnam was part of a much bigger picture, which was American imperialism.” Rudd soon rose to the position of SDS chairman.  Simultaneously, the Students’ Afro-American Society was grappling with Columbia’s structural racism. Inspired by the words of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, the Black student organizers of SAS represented another vanguard of political action at Columbia. A central tenet of SAS was their unwavering commitment to Harlem’s working-class community, which was facing displacement and segregation at the hands of Columbia’s “Community Gymnasium” in Morningside Park. Along the western edge of Morningside Park, Columbia students would have had street-level access to the building, whereas Harlem residents would have been relegated to a separate, basement-level entrance on the park’s eastern border, granted access to only a select portion of the building. It was an undeniably anti-Black affront to Harlem.  Concerted antiwar and antiracist mobilization efforts had been underway for years leading up to the incendiary spring of 1968, when SDS came into powerful alignment with leaders from SAS.  Tuesday, April 23, 1968. Noon on Low Steps. Hundreds of students gathered for the first joint protest of SDS and SAS. Newly elected SAS President Cicero Wilson, CC ’70, and SDS Chairman Rudd gave fiery speeches to a sea of over 300 students , who were eventually spurred into action. Marching from Low Steps to the Gymnasium construction site, the electrified crowd eventually rushed into Hamilton. Disrupting classes and barricading the office door of Dean Herbert Coleman, SDS and SAS crafted six demands—most notably, the call for Columbia to sever all ties with the IDA and to stop construction of the gym. Allied in their mission, students in Hamilton refused to leave unless all demands were met.  Inside Hamilton, Black student organizers were wary of the risks of the takeover. Sherry Ann Suttles, BC ’71, was an SAS member and occupier of Hamilton in the early days of the strike. “Black students wanted to be very controlled and measured in our protest,” she reflected, noting the request by SAS leadership that the white students leave the building and occupy their own. Black students stood clear about their role as representatives of the Harlem community and also worried that white students might underestimate the University’s threat of police repression. White protesters complied. Upon leaving Hamilton, Rudd and other SDS members charged into Low, some even charging into then-President Grayson Kirk’s office. The student occupation at Columbia commenced.  Nearly 1,000 students  joined in on the occupation of campus buildings. Occupying students relished in their direct action communities, laying jackets as makeshift beds and reclaiming the space as their own. Supportive Harlem neighbors brought hot meals to Black students in Hamilton, then renamed “ Malcolm X Liberation College ” by its occupants.  The administration had canceled all classes by Wednesday, scrambling to meet with faculty, create task forces, and contemplate police deployment into occupied buildings. WKCR, Columbia’s student-run radio station , paused their usual music programming, opting instead to become a 24/7 newsroom to report on the demonstrations. Robert Siegel, CC ’68, a devoted WKCR broadcaster, set up coverage stations all over campus  to provide minute-to-minute accounts of student protests for the Morningside Heights community. All eyes were on Columbia, with local and national history in the making.  On the night of April 30, the week-long strike came to a brutal finale as the administration ordered occupying students to remove themselves from the buildings. With no response from protesters, the NYPD burst in, prepared to take “ all necessary action ” to remove students in compliance with the University’s complaint of trespass. Occupying students braced themselves as the police barreled in, breaking down barricaded doors and dragging students out. Inside Low, officers violently yanked apart students’ linked arms, replacing their melodic “We Shall Overcome” with shrieks of pain and horror. Over 700 students were arrested , many brutalized with fists and batons.  The strike had come to an end, but its memory had just begun.  Nancy Biberman, BC ’69, recalled the media’s immediate characterization of student protesters as “alienated.” “It was used pejoratively,” Biberman reflects, “that somehow we weren’t willing to follow the straight and narrow, that we were just profoundly alienated, that we were somehow protesting against everything about our lives.” The institution sought to delegitimize moral and political outrage by diagnosing its students with pathological loneliness.  Columbia ’68ers were far from disaffected. A handful of students stepped foot onto campus already activists, being “ red-diaper babies ” of leftist, New Deal–era parents, or participants in ongoing civil rights organizing. “I came out of my mother’s womb as an activist because my mother was,” said Suttles, reflecting upon her predisposition to advocacy and social justice organizing. “When I got to Barnard at age 18, in 1965, we had already been—me and my sister and my mother—out in the movement.”  Suttles epitomizes the alumni push for student memory of 1968 in her documentary Black Columbia ,  which she screened at the 40th anniversary conference in 2008 and the San Diego Black Film Festival in 2009. With the directorial vision of her son Kamau, the film centers Black student organizers narrating and reflecting upon their participation in the strike. “I was witness to it, the transition from a civil type of community to just a revolutionary one, music-wise, social-wise, art-wise.” The four years she spent at Barnard left an indelible mark on her generation, with Black Columbia  as a testament to remembering.  Rudd, like Suttles, underscored 1968’s historic resonance. “Something in me said, I can’t stand by while this moral atrocity is happening.” Rudd was expelled for his role in the occupation; however, when reflecting upon his strategy as SDS chairman, he emphasized that it was not a desire but a need  that spurred action.  … January 2024. Guridy’s 301M. A student asks on the first day of class if the class would discuss current events. Guridy answers, “I don’t see how we’re not gonna talk about the present … to not talk about the present would be absurd.”  Guridy’s Columbia 1968 course is a labor of love. As a professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Department of History, as well as the executive director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, Guridy positions his history course within an interdisciplinary framework. Guridy sees his hands-on process as a “radical pedagogical act” in itself, “cause we’re entrusting the University's history in the constituency that’s the most important, which is you  folks.”  In his book-lined Fayerweather office, Guridy presented me with an array of pamphlets he kept from the 50th anniversary commemoration of 1968. With the help of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Guridy independently organized the 2018 ceremony  to commemorate the legacy of ’68. Without any tangible acknowledgments on campus of Columbia’s rebellious past, the University is seemingly predisposed to bouts of amnesia, occasionally interspersed with anniversary celebrations. In 2018, the Office of the Provost was a cosponsor, but the President’s Office did not support the commemoration.  Notably, April 2018 also saw the graduate student strike  at Columbia, wherein hundreds of students participated in a week-long walkout. Demanding that the administration recognize their student labor union, graduate organizers cited 1968 as an inspiration. Guridy underscored that “the memory of ’68 was being used by the insurgents of 2018” in an effort to frame their struggles in a broader culture of protest at Columbia. “They were situating themselves in that activist legacy.” The University’s hesitation to commemorate 1968 is a reflection of its adversarial relationship with student protests at large.  In 2008, however, the administration had vastly different stakes. President Lee Bollinger was breaking ground on Columbia’s $6.3 billion Manhattanville Campus, now home to the Columbia Business School, Lenfest Center for the Arts, and Jerome L. Greene Science Center. Gaining nearly 6.8 million square feet of campus space, Bollinger’s project was the contentious product of a decade-long eminent domain battle, widespread community resistance, and the projected displacement of nearly 5,000 West Harlem residents and businesses. His endorsement of the 40th anniversary 1968 commemoration, as hypothesized by Guridy, may have paralleled a quiet anxiety surrounding the University’s history of encroachment into Harlem. Manhattanville eerily paralleled the gym in Morningside Park, 40 years later.   Columbia’s 1968 amnesia therefore reads as willful rather than forgetful. Reflective of an opportunistic handling of its history, the administration seems to either uplift or suppress the ’68 legacy at its convenience. Commemoration of ’68 has instead become an individualized effort, resting upon those who specifically seek to engage with it. Yet the non-institutionalization of its legacy leaves it up to students to discover and rediscover its meaning.  Ted Schmiedeler, CC ’26, is one such student. The station manager at WKCR and a history major, Schmiedeler emphasized the ever-beating pulse of 1968 in WKCR’s studios today. The station made the move toward financial independence after 1968, embracing its nickname of “The Alternative.” Program Director Georgia Dillane, BC ’25, pinpointed WKCR’s sharp cultural turn post-1968: “Even though it feels so long ago, it was such a pivotal moment in the curation of our ethos that it doesn’t make sense to let it go.” Scribbled on crinkled pieces of paper and whispering through headset sound waves is the tethered legacy of 1968. WKCR’s historic role in ’68 exists largely by word of mouth, passed down orally in programming training and audio clips. For this, Dillane expressed gratitude, commending the programmers’ intergenerational efforts to preserve this fragile history. Today, WKCR continues to propagate the memory of ’68 with its coverage of ongoing student protests. … Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023. 4:30 p.m. at the Sundial. Proudly wrapped in keffiyehs, hundreds of students gather in a sea streaked with red and green. A low drumbeat clamors, an impassioned voice commences the chant, and the crowd takes a collective breath.  Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine have resurrected the spirit of 1968 at the Sundial. Demanding Palestinian liberation, solidarity, and an immediate end to Israeli apartheid and genocide, JVP and SJP refuse to back down despite relentless administrative hostility. Senior administrators suspended the two student groups in November, citing a contested event policy violation. The policy was revised unilaterally  without University Senate input.  SJP and JVP’s suspensions ignited campus, and the Nov. 14 protest was an electrifying moment of campus-wide support, with Dar (the Palestinian Student Union), Student Workers of Columbia, and the Black Students’ Organization standing in firm solidarity with SJP and JVP. Since November, Columbia University Apartheid Divest —originally created in 2016—has resurged on Columbia’s campus with the support of over 100 student organizations. Calling for Columbia’s economic and academic divestment from Israel, CUAD is the students’ vanguard for collective liberation.  Students see and feel  the administration’s antagonism. Since October, protest days have been accompanied by a hyper-militarized police presence, with zip ties fastened to uniform belts as high-flying drones loom in the air. The NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit sits outside of Columbia’s gates surveilling phone waves, and masses of police officers litter  the campus.  The campus, however, is not any safer. Suppression and hostility abound, as counter-protesters hurl Islamophobic comments at student organizers, many of whom  face disciplinary hearings and suspensions for protesting. Doxxing is vicious and incessant, as dozens of protesters have seen their faces plastered on trucks traversing Broadway. Harassment—by Columbia’s own professors —persists inside the classroom and online. Earlier this semester, the NYPD brutalized dozens of students at a February protest, following a chemical skunk attack  on pro-Palestinian protesters.  Lea, BC ’26, a member of JVP and SJP who chose to go by only their first name, sees this excessive mobilization of the NYPD as a fear mongering tactic. “They have been doing that since ’68,” they told me, “especially with Arab and Muslim organizers, targeting them and making them feel as though they could not organize.” Columbia’s criminalization of students is not a new tactic, nor is it disconnected from their diagnosis of “alienated” students in the ’60s. In suspending SJP and JVP, the University made vague claims to their use of “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” vilifying the groups while refusing to clarify the “rhetoric” in question. “They can’t afford for us to be loud,” Lea remarked.  ’68ers are aware that their history is being relived on campus today. “The parallels are enormous,” Rudd remarked. Just this February, he spoke at a teach-in organized by Asian American Alliance in solidarity with CUAD. “From Việt Nam to Falastin” interwove the colonial legacies of Vietnam and Palestine while tapping into the persistent antiwar ethos at Columbia. Rudd was elated to see a room full of politically energized students taking action in support of Palestine. “It’s a moral imperative,” Rudd told me. “It’s exactly the same now.” The ongoing student movement has also taken inspiration from a variety of activist legacies at Columbia, including the 1985 student strike for divestment from apartheid South Africa. As the first Ivy League school to do so, Columbia now proudly exalts  this legacy. It was precisely this activist history which drew Cameron Jones, CC ’26, to Columbia in the first place. A Queens native, Jones had worked on a variety of grassroots campaigns for local and state politicians before stepping foot on campus. He is now an organizer with JVP. In the wake of Columbia’s unilateral suspension of JVP and SJP, Jones expressed his disillusion  with Columbia’s dubbing itself as a cosmopolitan and global campus for free inquiry and robust academic debate. “What we see in reality,” Jones explains, “is they’re suspending student groups, they’re changing event policy, they’re canceling events that talk about Palestine. So it very much seems like there’s a double standard when it comes to Palestine.”  Despite relentless pushback, pro-Palestinian student voices remain strong, evident in countless teach-ins, sit-ins, poetry readings, and kite-flying events. Support across campus is widespread, and more notably, intergenerational. Lea, alongside fellow organizers, met consistently in the fall with a group of student organizers from ’68 who are now calling for Israeli divestment. Grateful for the inheritance of this knowledge, Lea expressed comfort in knowing that their movement is not alone. “We want to make it known to people that an entire generation has already gone through this,” they told me. “It’s not the first time and it also won’t be the last.” The student movement for Palestine today is not a tenuous manifestation of 1968. It is an unbridled force in itself, evoking Columbia’s historic culture of activism, while remaining distinct in its purpose. Herein lies the beauty of 1968’s amorphous legacy.  Columbia is an institution reconciling with its undeniably fractured past. It is an administration trying to forget, with alumni refusing to let them. It is passionate history professors forging a bridge of memory, with spirited students demanding its remembrance. We process our history, a collective gasp for recognition, for reconciliation. 1968 is a legacy excavated, borrowed, recycled, manipulated, and sometimes buried.  But it persists. It breathes.

By Sager Castleman Two well-dressed people were walking out of Colm Tóibín’s office in Philosophy Hall when I arrived, more anxious than I had been in a while. “They’re just from London to talk to me about James Baldwin,” he told me as he sat back down, not helping my nerves. But then he turned to look at me with his twinkling eyes and asked in a gentle voice how I was, and, almost miraculously, I felt myself starting to relax. When he asked me questions about my life before and after our interview, they strangely didn’t feel like small talk. Instead, they revealed his love of stories, which he seemed to always be listening for. When I told him how my parents met, his face lit up and he said, “That could be a novel!”  A prolific novelist (his 11th comes out next month), writer  for the New York Review of Books , and the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities, Tóibín may be the most engrossing person I’ve ever met. He alternates between glimmering smiles and pensive looks into the distance, little jokes and phrases that made such a strong impression on me I wanted to pause the interview and write them down. We talked about his popular Ulysses seminar, the relationship between his characters’ consciousnesses and his own, and why the humanities degree is more important than anything else.  This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. … The Blue and White: Do you think that being a novelist influences the way that you teach? Colm Tóibín: Yes, it does. I’m always interested in the idea that the next chapter—of any book, but in particular of a book that people have awe about, such as Ulysses —is unwritten, and has not been written yet, and that a strategy will have to be developed by the author to write the next episode as a result of the last one. So all the time you’re imagining the book unwritten, and you’re also thinking about the book as a set of untidy processes, a set of solutions to problems. You’re trying to think, “What is the problem here that this section is a solution to? Why is the writer doing this here?” This is one way of looking at a text as though it is entirely written by the writer, as an act of will, as a set of strategies. And this may be a different way of reading a text than other writers who would put it in historical context, or see the book as belonging to the reader as much as it does to the writer. But in the way that I view it, writing is a set of decisions made in a single moment by a writer for strategic reasons, or, often, as a mistake.  B&W: In that perspective, would the most important thing be understanding the writer’s intentions? CT: No, because if you’re trying to figure out the writer’s intentions, you enter into the realm of speculation. What you’re doing is you’re seeing how, say, in Ulysses , the next episode is a response to the previous one on the part of the writer. For example, in Episode 3 of Ulysses , you realize there’s no future, it’s about Stephen Dedalus’s mind, it’s filled with obscure references to his mind, it’s so informed by what he’s been reading as a philosophy student in university, and you realize that at some point the author has to be aware that Episode 4 is going to be entirely different. You realize that there’s something happening, that there’s an energy in it that’s so intense because he  knows  it’s going to end soon, that the next episode is not going to be a continuation of the style. But it’s not about his intentions as much as the problems that arise sometimes, like “Why is there this particular level of intensity here?” or “Why is the energy fading?” or “Why is the opening of Episode 4 so bright, so filled with interesting detail, and so filled with the naming of very particular things, whereas in the previous episode there’s no object that doesn’t have huge resonance or symbolic [meaning]?” So “intention” is too imagined, it isn’t like that. B&W: Of course that [approach to literature] is connected to writing because it’s what you do when you write. But I feel like there’s another level to that in that the writing you do is often itself doing that for another writer. CT: No, I’ve only done that twice. So “often” is not true. B&W: But also in some of your poems, like with Gerard Manley Hopkins. CT: No one has read my poems. B&W: I read the whole book. CT: You did not! B&W: Yeah. CT: Well, you’re alone in that. B&W : That was actually my favorite one in the book. CT: Oh, the Hopkins poem! You know, he did make that visit. It was the only time I could find that he connected in any way with literary life in Dublin. He went across Stephen’s Green from the Jesuit House, which is on one side of the Green, to the studio of Yeats’s father. B&W: I read that poem shortly after I took a class where we had read a fair bit of Hopkins, and it occurred to me that what the class was doing and what you were doing in going into his head seemed related—they were both trying to understand the writer beyond just the work. You did that twice in your novels, and the  New Yorker profile  of you said you do something similar in your book reviews, that you “ assimilate your subject to the point that the writer in question begins to sound like one of your own characters.” What motivates you to go so deep into these artists’ heads? CT: You drift into everything if you’re a writer—maybe in other ways too, maybe in life—but as a writer, you drift. Something occurs to you and it doesn’t mean anything, but you stay with it. I never take notes. If you take notes you lose something. If you’re going to forget something you should forget it. But something stays in your mind and it doesn’t do anything. At first I was going to write the sort of book I wrote about Elizabeth Bishop. Bet you haven’t read that? B&W: No. CT: Ha, gotcha! I’ve written a short book about Elizabeth Bishop, it’s not fiction, and I’ve just written another one about James Baldwin, they’re little critical books about reading their work. I was planning to do that with Henry James. I really was, I had all sorts of structures for it, and it just moved on its own into being a novel. Part of the reason is that I had written a previous novel called The Blackwater Lightship . It’s set in Ireland and it’s got six characters over seven days. They’re all locked in this house, and they’re all arguing. There’s a lot of tension, a lot of making tea, a lot of rain, it’s miserable. When it was over, I thought, I never want to do that again. I never want arguing people, I never want rain, I never want tea-making, I never want any of that sort of religion, recrimination, I don’t want any more of that. And then there was only one solution, really. It was Henry James. There were duchesses, Florence, grandeur—just get me out! Then I started to work on it. I think the problem is that James comes to us in so many guises, and he could be very very funny in conversation. But I couldn’t deal with that. I wanted to show what people are like when they’re really alone, just work with that. And it was nice work, not to be writing about rain.  B&W: I   did   read the book about Henry James. Does the description of the writer’s consciousness that you have there come more from research about him or more from your own experience as a writer? CT: I’ve written all these books and a lot of people haven’t read any of them, and it’s good, because no one had read an earlier novel I had written called The Heather Blazing . And there’s that same idea of this very solitary male figure haunted by certain things, and I could just give him any number of experiences and see what would happen. I don’t know where this comes from, it’s hardly autobiographical, but it’s an exploration of someone using an intense system of the third-person intimate, where everything that’s seen, noticed, felt, and remembered is through this particular consciousness in a very intense way. But if you break it for a second you lose it completely, and therefore there’s no author. The beginning is a form of self-suppression, and then once the suppression has been done, you begin to use each sentence as a response to the previous one, where you’re trying to refine things, you’re trying to vary the sound and tone of the sentences, but what you’re more intensely doing is trying to move things along as slowly, gradually, and imperceptibly as possible. You’re following this particular consciousness that is skilled at silence, repression, and is much happier alone, so that the relationship to other people, to memory, is fraught. And you just work with that. It seems to me that it’s something that I do almost naturally. It’s certainly not chosen. Once James moved from being a critical “reading Henry James” book to being the novel, then I didn’t really have to do anything. The research didn’t really matter. Yeah, for a few days I might read some letters or some biography, but the books were just there, the main thing was here. [ Points at laptop. ]  B&W : But where did it come from? CT: Self. B&W : So your conception of Henry James is very related to your conception of yourself. CT: Yeah. B&W : Would you say that’s true with a lot of your fiction? CT: Yeah. All of them. But in ways that I don’t understand. If I did understand, I don’t know what I would do, because it would be just clunky, plain efforts to disguise yourself, make yourself a woman, make yourself in the 19th century, and it’s not like that. In other words, I don’t know when I’m starting that I’m doing this, it’s only halfway through that I realize, “Jesus Christ, here I am the second time with Thomas Mann. Family of five, second brother. More athletic older brother.” I really didn’t realize with Mann—the dead father, the moving out of your own country to other countries, the melancholy homosexuality. And all of it makes its way in some way into the fiction. And sometimes you’d do anything to stop it. “Don’t give me another dead father.”  I’ve just written another novel, it’s coming out next month, and it’s my first novel in which someone doesn’t die. I didn’t plan it, you can’t plan that. There was a woman in Australia buying a book I had written who said to me, “How many people die in this one?” I didn’t know what to say to her. I ended up saying, “Quite a few, but I hope that’s okay.” She wasn’t blaming me or anything, but in this new one there’s nobody, and I don’t know what that means. Maybe it’s that I’m getting old and I can’t write as freely about those things as I once could. B&W : It’s an oversimplification to say that there’s a biographical connection between you and these writers, but there seems to be some kind of connection. Do you think that that was part of what drew you to them? CT: Yeah. B&W : What was that process like for Henry James and Thomas Mann? CT: The process begins during a two- or three-year period when I’m 18 or 19, when I start to really read their stuff. And for some reason those books really, really—I don’t want to say spoke to me, but I just wanted to read more of them. I wasn’t thinking about “speaking to me” and I wasn’t even dreaming about writing about them. I was just a reader.  I’m reading them in the ’70s, but when you get to the ’90s, there’s a big change that has occurred with both of these writers. Because of the publication of some letters and the publication of a number of biographies, James’s homosexuality has become much plainer. And elements of his life, of his secret life, of the solitude and hauntedness, all of that become much clearer. With Thomas Mann, the diaries have appeared and the diaries change everything, because you get to see that his erotic dreams are homoerotic dreams. And also that his politics cannot be as easily trusted as being liberal, or even his support of democracy by 1914.  So you’ve got whole new ways of looking at these people, but also I have started to write these pieces for the London Review of Books  where I would become intensely engaged with some writer for an essay over a period of a month or two, where I’m reading everything and trying to find a new way to look at these works. I probably did three pieces on Thomas Mann for the London Review of Books , and I did a few pieces on Henry James in the same way. Out of that came some sort of energy, and I won’t do a third. I don’t have a third. If I had a third I’d do a third. If I felt the same way about Virginia Woolf I’d write a book about Virginia Woolf, or Edith Wharton, but I just don’t have it.  These two were there, and I wouldn’t dream of saying that I have a personal autobiographical connection with them. These are two of the great towering figures in my world, and it’d be like some guy on the street corner telling me that he’s like Bob Dylan because, “I sing, he sings.” But it’s not that as much as I couldn’t do any more than give them this melancholy response to experience and this wavering attitude toward feeling. So I put all of that in, and if there’s a blueprint for it it’d be the first 50 pages of J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg  about Dostoevsky trying to identify his dead son in a morgue. The writing, the getting into the actual shivering nature of the character of the book—I felt that this was real, this was alive, this was there. This wasn’t a dry literary game. This was filled with life.  B&W : Let’s go back to the class for a moment, which you’ve been teaching for several years now. Why Ulysses ? Why not someone like James? CT: I’ve taught James, but I felt like I needed a big new project. So it struck me that I could probably bring something to Joyce here that no one else in the department could do. Not only by dint of being Irish, but by the fact that I’ve done a lot of work on the related areas of social change, or of the cultural context in which Joyce was brought up. Not just that I went to the same university, but that I’ve been reading around all that all my life, and I thought I could bring something to it. I also thought that for me it would be completely new, that while I was reading Henry James and Thomas Mann in that intense way I described, I wasn’t reading Joyce like that then. So Joyce has been a gradual process, and it becomes more and more exciting. I’ll be 69 next month, so it’s nice having something to be excited about. Certainly I’m excited about reading more and more, rereading the book and reading commentaries on it and thinking about it and trying to get the class going on it. B&W : You mentioned commentaries, but I know that you don’t assign literary criticism in the class. Why not? CT: The idea is that our job in one semester for undergraduates is to read the book, to come out by the end of April with this book read. That takes a lot of energy on the part of the students, and if you start saying, “So-and-so’s commentary on this comes from a postcolonial perspective or a feminist perspective or a Lacanian reading of the book or a historical context reading of the book” you’ve got to slow the class down. And there’s enough going on in the book to read the book. If in the future anyone wants to go and start reading commentary—and there’s a lot of really good commentary—then people can go and do that, but for these 14 weeks we’re going to concentrate on reading the book. And by reading the book I mean literally turning the pages and saying, “What’s happening here is that he has moved from there to here. And look who’s with him. Now Buck Mulligan has been at George Moore’s house in the previous episode, and Stephen was not invited to that party. And crucially, what Joyce has to do is make sure that Stephen is not invited to anywhere in particular so that he can drift in the city.” So it goes on like that. And what you want in the end is an essay that doesn’t use anyone’s criticism, that is the student’s own.  B&W : What do you think about creative writing as a subject, and why don’t you teach it? CT: I did teach it for a while at Stanford, and at Princeton I was in both the creative writing and English departments. It’s very easy to do because you just read someone’s story and work out ways that they might rethink it. What you’re really doing is suggesting that revision is really important, and that maybe there’s another way of looking at something. And there’s some cruelty there, because of course someone has put so much work into something, and it’s done in public. So someone’s whole heart and soul has been put into something and then you have to take it asunder. And there are other times when you don’t do that because something is so good and so perfect and so instantly brilliant. And that’s happened a few times, where I’ve simply said, “Look at this!” And you realize that someone has it, just has it. And that’s the strangest idea, that someone has it, and with that person you can work.  You see, I think there’s a problem because if you add up the number of people doing postgraduate work in creative writing in America now and the number of books being published, there really is [a disparity]. What I presume is happening is that you’re training teachers, editors, people who will move into the whole industry of the written word. It’s a curious dynamic, because often when I’m working I don’t know what I’m doing, and certainly when I was starting in Ireland, the idea of showing your work to a group of students and hearing what they liked about it—none of us would have done that.  B&W : I feel like that could apply to postgraduate education in the humanities generally, where there are a lot more people doing it than there are positions in academia. What do you think about that, and do you see yourself as part of academia? CT: There’s been a decline in the number of jobs available to PhD students, and you could look at the statistics there. But the other one is different, the other one is the undergraduate arts degree, the humanities degree. If it’s creative writing, you want to be a novelist or a poet. But with a humanities degree, you merely want to enrich your mind. You’re not training anyone to be a teacher, an editor, a lawyer, or anything else. It’s merely the lovely business of spending three or four years, when you’re at your richest because you can take in books better than you can at any other time, of having the opportunity to, without any specific career in mind, study things that are really vitally important, which is called culture. I can’t see this as anything other than ideal, and what we should all aspire to. And for me, when I did it, it was an extraordinary period in my life that gave me everything. And therefore I want to do anything to it other than make it dull. It is what’s important. What else is there?

The quest for fusion energy in Columbia’s Plasma Lab. By Sona Wink In Everything, Everywhere All at Once (2022) , a cosmic donut (more specifically, a bagel, but bear with me) possesses a gravitational pull so powerful that the protagonist must do everything in her power to steer clear of its magnetic tug. Unbeknownst to many, a cosmic donut of Columbia’s own sits in an unassuming nook in Mudd; much like Michelle Yeoh in Everything, I found myself inexplicably pulled toward its center.   Columbia’s Plasma Physics Laboratory houses the HBT-EP Tokamak , a machine that creates plasma in the shape of a donut. Lucia Rondini, CC ’23, worked at the Lab this past year and took me on a spontaneous Tokamak tour in the fall. As we wandered the Lab’s cavernous halls, Lucia explained how Columbia’s Tokamak is tiny compared to ITER , the world’s largest (yet still non-operational) fusion reactor and the result of a multinational megaproject. To my eyes, however, the HBT-EP looked massive (it takes up a space about the size of a Hamilton classroom) and dazzlingly complex: a patchwork of tubes, wires, see-through plastic, and metal panels weaving toward a rotund central organ.  The closest I get to danger in my academic career is reading about wars that happened 100 years ago; in the Lab, students operate a machine that creates a lethally hot plasma. The space is peppered with signs reading “DANGER” that Lucia brushed past with total ease. Professor Michael Mauel, who has worked in plasma physics at Columbia since 1985, put the job of a Tokamak operator this way: “We’re taking a ring of hot gas at 100 million degrees, and we’re spinning it a couple centimeters from the walls, which are basically at room temperature.”  Picture the Sun’s churning core : a place so hot and so pressurized (27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 times denser than gold) that around   600 million tons  of hydrogen nuclei collide and fuse each second, producing helium atoms. The resulting atom has less mass than the total of the initial two, and the excess mass becomes energy. We experience this fusion energy on Earth as sunlight. Tokamaks recreate the conditions inside the Sun to create fusion energy: Under extreme heat and pressure, hydrogen gas turns into plasma, wherein nuclear fusion takes place. Plasma is electrically charged, so Tokamaks confine it using magnetic coils. Fittingly, the name “Tokamak” is a Russian portmanteau for “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils” (“toroidal” means “donut-shaped”).  Physicists have been working on the Tokamak for over 70 years in a quest to turn fusion energy into a viable source of power for society at large. Classified research into fusion began in the United States in the 1950s . Finding that fusion (unlike its more popular brother, fission) was too technically challenging to make bombs with, the U.S. and the Soviet Union mutually declassified their fusion research in 1958 at the Atoms for Peace  conference. In the late 1970s, crises in the Middle East disrupted U.S. access to petroleum, precipitating an energy crisis and a wave of worry about the availability of fossil fuels. Fusion energy came into the national limelight along with other early forms of renewable energy as potential alternatives to fossil fuels.  Much of the Lab’s infrastructure dates back to this initial burst of national interest in fusion. The space has, until recently, seen minimal renovation since its mid-century inception. The rooms, which feed into one another, are lined with metal cabinets painted a dusty gray-blue; the floors are plasticky and gray. Bits and pieces of machinery are scattered on every surface: a constellation of bits of metal, frayed coils of wire, tools, and doctoral dissertations. Whiteboards dot the walls, bearing physics equations scrawled in every color of Expo marker.  As I walked through the Lab with Lucia, I noticed that while the vast majority of the space maintained its ’70s charm , there were some   modern renovations. I chatted about the changes to the physical space of the Lab with Lucia and Rian Chandra, a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics who has worked at the Lab since 2017. Chandra described how the refurbishments, which include new carpets and a conference room, are physical manifestations of a renewed wave of interest in plasma physics.  The climate crisis has precipitated a quest for renewable sources of energy, and fusion presents an attractive option: It has the potential to create significant amounts of energy without emitting carbon into the atmosphere, and it lacks the radioactive risks of fission. Today, the level of commercial and public excitement about fusion energy is comparable to that of the 1970s. In the spring of 2022, the White House held a summit titled “ Developing a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy ” where it rolled out several massive funding programs for fusion research led by the Department of Energy and encouraged private sector investment in fusion. In one such program, the DOE invested $46 million  in eight private companies seeking to build fusion power plants. In winter 2022, scientists in a national laboratory in California accomplished a major milestone when they produced net energy gain for the first time in fusion’s history. (They used a process called inertial confinement , which involves shooting lasers into a small cylinder. Tokamaks use a different process called magnetic confinement.)    As national interest in fusion has bloomed in the past three years, so has the Lab. Professor Carlos Paz-Soldan joined Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics in 2021 and has harnessed the national wave of interest to grow the Lab by acquiring grants, starting new projects, and expanding the Lab’s student population. Prior to 2021, Paz-Soldan estimated that there were few to no undergraduates working at the Lab; now, there are roughly 30.  Lucia and Chandra explained how Paz-Soldan and his colleague Professor Elizabeth Paul, who joined the department in 2023, are younger than many of the other faculty in the department and have ushered in a “project-oriented mindset” to the Lab. Today’s burst of interest in fusion is characterized by a practical goal: bringing fusion to the grid, i.e., turning fusion into a reliable, cost-effective, self-sustaining form of energy that can be converted into electricity and used by society at large in place of fossil fuels. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone here who doesn’t have climate change as their primary motivator,” Lucia told me.  How long it will take to bring fusion to the grid is the subject of dispute. A 2023 report  by the Fusion Energy Association made the optimistic claim that “25 companies think the first fusion plant will deliver electricity to the grid before 2035.” Paz-Soldan explained that he thinks “time and money are interchangeable” when it comes to developing fusion reactors, and that given enough investment in private development, the 2030s are a reasonable projection.  The recent boom in private sector engagement in fusion is new, but academic interest in plasma physics is not. Mauel has worked in plasma physics at Columbia for nearly 40 years; while governmental and commercial interest in fusion energy has waxed and waned, academics like him have held steady. Chandra expressed admiration for Mauel, his advisor, who “came up in the field at a time when bringing fusion to the grid was not really something we were going to see in our lifetime.” Indeed, when I asked Mauel about his projection for when fusion would become a viable source of energy, he told me, “I just cannot begin to imagine that.” Mauel’s keenness for the beauty of plasma was more than evident when I spoke with him. As he explained magnetic fields to me, he suddenly swiveled away to pull up a video. What to me looked like a gyrating purple blob tinged with orange was, in fact, a very important phenomenon in plasma physics: a disruption, which occurs when the plasma donut wiggles too much and touches the Tokamak’s walls. Mauel’s narration turned the otherwise abstract video into an action movie. “You might be able to see some glow, purple … It’s wiggling, it’s wiggling,” he whispered. Suddenly, the blob expanded with a flash. “WHOA! Isn’t that amazing?”    Disruptions like the one in Mauel’s video pose a major challenge to physicists: They are one of the major barriers blocking fusion’s introduction to the grid. From a goal-oriented mindset, these disruptions are nuisances. To Mauel, they are delights. “If we can understand and prevent this sort of disruption phenomena,” he told me, “then fusion will be reliable and provide an electrical source. But you can probably tell from my reaction that what I’m most interested in is how cool  that is!”

On Columbia’s Black literary magazine history By Muni Suleiman The 1970s were a meditative time for Black literature. If the ’60s were a revolution advocating for Black social consciousness and political change, Toni Cade Bambara, among other Black writers, referred to the ’70s as a “ retrogression ” and a time of “healing, study and self-development” alongside revolution.  The decade would witness the start of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and Black literature, like Alex Haley’s Roots , reaching the mainstream through climbing bestseller lists. Toni Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye would be published in 1970, and Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (later retitled “Looking For Zora”) would be published in Ms. Magazine  in 1975, highlighting Hurston’s underrecognized contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. Callaloo , the longest continuously running Black American literary magazine, would be established in 1976. And in the fall of 1979, Black students at Columbia and Barnard would make their own Black literary history. Running for about a decade, Black Heights was the first and longest running Black literary magazine at Columbia. The exact end date and reason for stopping publication remain unknown. Other publications such as The Black Student  (only a 1966 issue survives), The Black Experience: A Record of Summer Forums  (1968), and Black Forum  (1972–1973) predated Black Heights, yet these publications were short-lived and did not label themselves magazines. Black Heights  joined the ranks of other developing Black literary magazines at predominantly white institutions such as The Drum   (1969–1988) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Diaspora  (1976– 1982 , 1990–?) at Harvard. The Crown  and Marigold Magazine , both founded in 2023, are Columbia’s active Black publications. The Black literary magazine remains an elusive form for scholars. Mary Fair Burks, TC ’75, highlights two reasons : Black publications often were not differentiated from each other until the late 1800s, and several have been lost to time due to institutional and scholarly neglect. A rare Black literary magazine to merit scholarly attention is Fire!! (1926), founded by the Niggerati literary group of the Harlem Renaissance, which included writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, BC ’28, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. Named in the revolutionary spirit of igniting conversations about topics such as queerness and colorism, Fire!! lived up to its name. The magazine garnered poor reception from Black elites, concerned about how those then taboo topics would hurt their image, and was a financial failure; its physical quarters burned down after its first and only issue.  Scholars agree that Black American literary magazines have importantly charted changes in the Black American identity, recording discourses and cultivating community. The challenge is finding them.  Much of my time here has been spent with undergraduate literary magazines. As co-editor-in-chief of Quarto —the literary magazine of Columbia’s undergraduate creative writing department—I’ve collected collegiate magazines at festivals and read copies of Quarto  dating back to 1950. It once felt like I couldn’t be more surrounded by literary magazines. It was all the more frustrating, then, to call into the archives for Black literary magazines and receive little to no responses. Eventually, I localized my search to Columbia.  In my four years at Columbia, the University’s understanding of its Black literary history has felt constrained to (mainly) Hughes, (sometimes) Hurston and Audre Lorde, LS ’61, and (rarely) Ntozake Shange, BC ’70, and June Jordan. The University has remained unwilling to acknowledge how it served as a source of strife for these writers. As the first Black student at Barnard, Hurston faced significant challenges with residential life. Racism was also an insurmountable factor in Hughes dropping out of Columbia—His autobiography The Big Sea  opens with him throwing his Columbia books overboard while on a ship to Africa. Much like Hughes’s books off the coast of Sandy Hook, Black literary culture at Columbia has felt scattered and diasporic, compared to readily identifiable and categorizable white literary histories. As a fellow Black English major once asked over lunch: “Where are our   Beat Poets ?” She didn’t necessarily mean that we need Black writers on campus to walk the same path as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsbeurg, CC ’48, and Lucien Carr. In the literary spaces I’ve been in at Columbia, the “Beats” frequently act as a shorthand for a concentration of white literary talent on campus. If a Black student wanted their own Beats, what would they say? Would they be the Niggeratis who, like the Beats, succeeded in spite of the University? Where is the collectivity and cogency in Black literary history here?  Black students at Columbia in the late ’70s asked similar questions. Black Heights’  founding Managing Editor Clarence Waldron, CC ’79, JRN ’80, introduces its inaugural issue as a “showcase of the finest literary and artistic talents nurtured on our Morningside Heights campus,” intended to restore the lost and beautiful heritage of “the great heights of success that Blacks have achieved in the arts.” Its arts reviews and original poetry and prose were penned by students and alums across all undergraduate schools; the inaugural and 1980 issues also featured poetry from Joe Soto, a Barnard security guard. To say that Black Heights ’ inaugural issue did well would be an understatement. Months before she would speak at Barnard’s 1979 commencement, Toni Morrison participated in a February fundraiser and sat for an interview with the magazine. Waldron identifies Morrison as the first major Black literary figure to take a vested interest in the magazine’s development. Other supporters, per Waldron, included poet Gwendolyn Brooks and actor James Earl Jones, and Shange contributed the inaugural issue’s opening poem.  Students began to treat the magazine as a space to wrestle with similar sociopolitical questions as we do now: What makes art Black? Is Black art inherently political? What type of Black representation is good representation? Does that even matter? A prime example of a piece asking these questions is the essay “Black Theatre: Where Do We Go From … ?” in Black Heights ’ 1981 issue. The essay, written by Jeanette Toomer, BC ’79, is also a prime example of how such conversations cycle through time: her essay shared the same themes as a piece I wrote for this very magazine  two years ago. This inundated me with a particular sense of deja vu. Forging unity within the Black Columbia community was key to Black Heights ’ early success, with its first four issues each dedicating pages to endorsements from the Black Students’ Organization, the Barnard Organization of Black Women, and the National Society of Black Engineers of Columbia.But with “the tide of the country, the tide of Columbia, the students really wanted to hit some hard-hitting news,” said Waldron. In his memory, that is what Black Heights  soon became. “That’s fine, but I started it just to be an arts and entertainment magazine.”  The first indication of Black Heights ’ increased politicization emerges in the editor’s note by Derek H. Suite, CC ’85, JRN ’87, in the 1982 issue—the first to explicitly address political tensions at Columbia. Referencing the absence of a Black Studies department, the lack of Black faculty, and looming financial aid cutbacks, Suite asserts that “it should come as no great surprise that the tone of the literature in this issue of Black Heights” is “understandably more cultural, more political, and perhaps even more militant than in any other previous issue.” Still, that issue’s theme was unity, and the subsequent address, written by Stirling Phillips, CC ’83, notes “a tough year for the magazine.” Despite political turmoil, “it is vitally important that we as Black students push to preserve our cultural heritage and history” through “literary expression and excellence.”  Subtitled “Apartheid At Home,” the fall 1985 issue is much less occupied with literary excellence and much more engaged with writing as documentation. The issue, which consists of journalistic articles, photographs, political cartoons, and only one poem, instead draws parallels between Black life at Columbia and in apartheid South Africa. The magazine explored what it means to advocate for Blackness across the diaspora: Its pages are filled with coverage about divestment rallies, activism for a Black Studies department, and the Columbia clerical workers’ strike. Editor-in-Chief Winston Grady-Willis, CC ’87, promised that despite the issue’s deliberate limitation of literature, there would be a literary anthology and an issue with both news and literature later on. If either materialized, they are lost to time.  If the 1985 issue endorses Black activism in any form deemed necessary, the 1987 issue’s opening work, Raphael Smith’s “Essay on Student Activism,” critiques the status of Black political life at Columbia by the decade’s end. “I feel that the conflicts in ideology and the attempt to create one solitary Black voice of the black student body without being sensitive to the diverse needs of the Black students is counterproductive,” Smith, CC ’90, writes. “As students we have to open a forum for dialogue amongst ourselves, discussing the issues which are most personal to us as Black men and women.” The literature in that issue seems to operate as the “more personal and humanistic” forum Smith advocates for. It also might have been the last of its kind for the foreseeable decades. Black Heights now resides in a small manila folder in the Barnard Archives and Special Collections, alongside a container housing other small college publications of Columbia’s past. Three issues, 1979, 1982, and 1985, are digitized; Barnard holds seven in total. At least two issues, 1984 and 1986, and the cover for 1987’s issue remain lost to time. According to Martha Tenney, director of Barnard’s archives, some copies were gifts from the class of 1980, others are mysteries, but most were a 2022 donation from former Black Heights  Editor-in-Chief Anita Harris, BC ’80.  If I had dug into the archives just two years earlier, I would have missed a critical period in the history of Black literary culture on campus, which has hardly felt comprehensive. I’m not the only one who has this impression— The Crown refers to itself as Columbia’s first Black student magazine in its promotional materials. Black Heights ’ archival absence, despite its significant tenure and general positive reception, hints at the University’s neglect of its Black literary history.  Even when he launched the magazine, Waldron wasn’t certain that Black Heights  was the first Black literary magazine on campus. “We didn’t have the research to double check it,” he said. What was important to him was that he had identified an absence at Columbia: the infrastructure and lexicon to talk about Black art on campus.  Call it a graduating senior’s burden, but I’ve been thinking about how what I write at Columbia will contour the future. Most of what I’ve written for The Blue and White have covered aspects of the Black experience here unarticulated by other publications, driven primarily by the question “If I don’t, who will?” It never really felt like an active decision to write in this way. These were my experiences. It was my life as a Black student here. Someday, some student might go searching for The Blue and White ’s archives much like I did with Black Heights , looking for archival answers to experiential questions. I had assumed that finding a collection of Black literature at Columbia would provide a cohesive literary lineage, easily categorizable in its intents and influence. Not collectivizing the Black voices in Black Heights , however, allows us to consider the manifold manifestations of a Black student body trying to find where they belong. The beauty of Black Heights resides in the second half of Waldron’s original statement: its ability to shed light on lost and forgotten Black literary heritages. Black Heights  and its context have since become part of the lost and forgotten. The digital era has only helped highlight the potential significance of print magazines. But the importance of a print magazine lies in its indeterminate impact, how it can circulate between hands for decades and its acute sense of its temporality. The complexity comes in that something so tangibly and materially real can also be ephemeral. Reading through Black Heights , I felt the joy of being able to hold these stories, these histories even, in my hands. Black Heights  contains a record of interpersonal and institutional conflict, but its existence also holds an implicit promise: to cherish Black expression at Columbia in a society that would otherwise allow these distinct stories to be forgotten or erased.  In my eyes, a lot of the hope for a Black literary lineage at Columbia comes from a desire for assurance or healing that Black creatives were seeking in the ’70s. Or perhaps it lies in some type of sign that, despite the sociocultural conflict that Black students might experience at a PWI, we will make it through with our voices intact. In reaching for and holding these issues of Black Heights , Black Heights  is holding me too.

Tracing the histories of a cosmopolitan sculpture. By George Murphy When Dr. Jin Xu was hired as an associate professor in the Department of Art History last year, he discovered that his position came with the unexpected perk of access to Columbia’s art properties collection. As a historian of Chinese art, he was particularly interested in the Sackler collection (yes, those Sacklers), which includes a wide variety of Chinese stone sculptures that have received little scholarly attention. Of the sculptures, he found one especially fascinating—a Northern Qi work from the Xiangtangshan Caves in Hebei province, known to scholars as the “Monster Panel.”  Xu requested that the sculpture be moved to his office so that he could study it more closely. As he examined it, he realized that previous scholars had erred in their analysis of the sculpture’s origin. Scholars previously posited that the “Monster Panel” and six other similar panels had been carved out of the walls of Xiangtangshan at some point in the early 20th century. However, as Xu notes in Orientations magazine, it was clear that the sculptures had originally been freestanding due to their weathering and some other small clues. This discovery may not have been particularly extraordinary by itself, but its implications were. Drawing on photographs and measurements of the Xiangtangshan Caves that he had taken before arriving at Columbia, Xu was able to demonstrate that the panels were a perfect fit for the dimensions of one of the burial chambers at Xiangtangshan, thought by scholars to potentially be the final resting place of the first Northern Qi emperor, Gao Yang. If so, this would mean that Columbia is in possession of something extraordinarily rare: art from an ancient Chinese imperial tomb. My first impression of the “Monster Panel” was of its fearsome energy. The panel depicts a figure with the body of a Hellenistic strongman and the head of a yakshi , the primal nature spirits which abound in Buddhist art. Carved in high relief, the monster is imposing, with bulging muscles, sharp fangs, and a general aura of barely constrained fury. Interestingly, despite potentially being an example of art produced in an imperial workshop, the Monster Panel is not necessarily a reflection of visual motifs exclusively indigenous to China. The creature’s muscular body is an import from the Sogdians, an Iranian people influenced by Greco-Roman aesthetics; its scowling yakshi  face, meanwhile, originates in Indian Buddhist art. Clues like this, Xu told me, demonstrate that the Northern Qi conception of the afterlife was not  “specifically a Chinese paradise.” Instead, it is a cosmopolitan object, a crystallization of cultural collisions between East and West. We don’t really know what the “Monster Panel”’s last millennium looked like—maybe it drifted through the collections of different Chinese families for generations, or maybe it lay in some field or attic for centuries, completely forgotten. At some point, it left China, and after migrating through the Western art market, it ended up at Columbia, where it was removed from the public eye. In other words, a once entombed object has been buried once more, only this time in the vaults of the University’s art collection. In this sense, the fate of the “Monster Panel” isn’t unique. Columbia’s Art Properties collection  is massive, containing objects ranging from ancient Greco-Roman pottery to Persian decorative objects to rare early daguerreotypes, most of which private collectors donated more than fifty years ago. However, few people even know that the collection exists. This stands in contrast to the collections of other universities, such as Yale and Princeton, which are permanently displayed in campus museums and receive a great deal of scholarly and press attention.  It’s not fair to say that Columbia’s collection is completely locked away. Students and faculty can request access to objects from it whenever they like, and parts of it are displayed around campus and in the Wallach Gallery on occasion. However, I can’t help but wish that there was a more permanent place on campus to appreciate and learn from the Art Properties collection. Art history majors are not  the only students who can benefit from exposure to art—imagine Lit Hum taught in front of the collection’s Greek vases or materials science classes that use objects from the collection as case studies. Xu’s discovery of the sculpture’s origins reveals the possibilities that arise when art is removed from the archives.  Access to artworks like the “Monster Panel” is an enormous privilege, but how much does that matter if nobody knows that privilege exists?

A tribute to the timelessness of Columbia’s lawns under the eye of the 2024 solar eclipse. By Chris Brown Author’s Statement: Ten days following the event depicted in this piece, the NYPD arrested 108 students protesting on this same lawn. Words fail to adequately capture the magnitude of this; it is impossible to express the feelings of seeing your classmates and peers removed in zipties as hundreds watch. I wrote this piece as a celebration of Columbia’s community, to highlight the times every year when we come together in peace to enjoy the beauty of the world.  For more than 50 years, Columbia students have been on the front lines of activism. Protest unites us; it is our culture, and it is in the fabric of our being. The South Lawns are our space, our center of community, and they deserve to be safe; the right to protest must be encouraged, not suppressed. When the story of Columbia’s spring 2024 is told, the solar eclipse will not make an appearance. Columbia is now in the eyes of the world. But I hope that I can remind us of the strength of our community, and that our presence on the lawns is not new. April 8, 2024, 12:44 p.m.:  The weather forecast shows the first sunny day of spring after a week of torrential rain and wind. With it also being the day of a once-in-a-generation cosmic event, I have no choice but to skip my class. Setting up on the lawns, armed only with my soccer ball, backpack, and a pair of eclipse glasses, I watch as the first wave of people emerge onto Columbia’s green oasis.  For just a few weeks every school year, when the presence of students and nice weather overlap, the South Lawns become the beating heart of Columbia. The green ocean to Low Beach’s marble sands, they’ve been a meeting point for hundreds of classes of students since the Morningside Campus opened. They’ve seen Lou Gehrig home runs , classes, protests, festivals, birthday parties, picnics, and any other activity you can imagine happening at a college. But today they’re the seats to a once-in-a-(college)-generation watch party, and I’m one of the first ones here. 1:48 p.m.:  A little more than an hour has passed since I got here, and the Lawns are beginning to fill up. Joined by friends on various picnic blankets, I see a Lit Hum class seated in a circle to my left. To my right, the first Spikeball net has made its way out. Aside from the freshmen discussing Virginia Woolf, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who isn’t skipping class to be here. Maybe the pull of the eclipse is too strong; maybe nice weather is irresistible. In the sky, there’s no sign that anything is abnormal. 2:43 p.m.:  The moon has begun to visibly trace its path, and a glimpse through the tunnel vision of the eclipse glasses shows that it has already eaten into a fourth of the Sun’s territory.  But beyond the world inside the eclipse glasses, there is no indication that today is special. If anything, it’s timeless. The activity on the lawns doesn’t represent an exception, but a rule: When provided with nice weather, Columbia students will crowd South Lawns. This could be any spring day in any year, and only the retro-futuristic cardboard sunglasses give away the date. 3:02 p.m.:  A glimpse through the glasses reveals the sun almost halfway covered, and the weather starts to cool as the moon’s interference fades the mid-afternoon light. But this cold isn’t enough to scare people off the lawns on a day they’ve waited so long for. Every year, South Lawns gets an influx of people enjoying the last gasps of summer and the first weeks of fall before the chill starts to set in. But once the cold comes, they stay empty for almost the entire year. Only a major snow will bring people onto the lawns with the same joy during the cold months, and only for as long as the snow lasts before collecting dirt and turning brown. Everyone retreats inwards, and the heartbeat of campus becomes subdued. A week ago, I walked across an empty campus on my way home from work; today, campus is thawing out. 3:25 p.m.:  The eclipse reaches its apex, the sun little more than an orange crescent shining behind the near totality of the moon. Everyone on the lawns pauses their soccer games, their conversations, their homework for a brief moment to watch. In the past, many cultures saw eclipses as a sign of impending doom, an apocalyptic event. But right now, this one unites. 3:40 p.m.:  Just like that, this moment in history is over. The moon retraces its path back across the sun, the warmth and light return to normal. Everyone returns to what they were doing before. Some leave. The event will mark another in the list  of solar eclipses visible from the United States. But hidden within that line, “April 8, 2024 (Total)”, is all the joy and community of Columbia’s lawns, a permanent representation of what spring brings to this campus every year. 5:00 p.m.:  It’s time for me to repack the few things I brought, collect the glasses scattered on the ground, and give up my claim to the spot that belonged to me today. For one day, I was able to make part of the lawns mine as friends (and celestial bodies) moved around me, coming in and out through the day. In my mind, there’s a promise that I’ll return, but with work looming and the Lawns’ closure impending, it's impossible to know if this may be the last day of its kind this year. 7:20 p.m.:  Walking back from dinner, I see the last stragglers left as the sun begins to set, taking advantage of every minute that the lawns remain open. Come mid-April, like clockwork, they will close once more as Columbia readies itself to send off its seniors at Commencement. The flags above South Lawns will show red and the grass will hide beneath tarps and chairs. But for a moment, this year and every year, Columbia defrosts. The moment may be a month, a year, a week, a day. It may be transitory, melding into the memories that become the “college days.” But it will always come.

By Lucia Dec-Prat and Ava Lozner Illustration by Ellie Hodges Affirmative When I chose my first-year dining plan, I knew what I wanted: meal swipes. Forget about Flex or Dining Dollars, there’s nothing like a heaping plate of dining hall food. Especially today. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Friendsgiving, and I made three juice boxes at the Inner Child event. But today’s event is new, fresh, and wholly invigorating. This pushes the boundaries of themed dining. Today’s meal is not just a plate of food; it’s a curated lifestyle experience. I could tell this event was special from the moment I walked in and saw all the dining hall staff wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle masks. I knew the food was delicious when I spotted vats of Beyond Meat mussels, emanating steam and exuding an aromatic odor of abundance. I could barely contain my excitement when I saw Chef Mike’s action station covered with a monumental Lithuanian flag and serving ambitious meat dishes. Yum. Two earth-shattering, life-changing, palate-provoking plates later, I was back for more. My next stop: the salad bar. Nothing hits the spot quite like beef gelatin tzatziki after a long day of FroSci homework. I adorned my gooey dip with shallot-infused vegetable oil and a portion of glistening fusion salad with  ambiguous cultural heritage. This is global citizenship. I’ll be honest: I’m not entirely sure what the theme is. All I know is that this nitro cold brew froth perfectly complements my birria-style risotto. How did they know “Wiggle” by Jason Derulo is my favorite song? I’m getting off track. Walking past the cardboard cutout of Liza Minelli, it dawns on me that this event is too ineffable, too ephemeral, to be labeled. Tonight’s event is a performance piece. It’s an implicit criticism of our generation’s obsession with categories. Columbia Dining has done it again: they’ve taken another bold political stance and created a legendary themed event. I am ideologically challenged, physically satiated, truly and completely content. As I shovel the raspberry cheesecake french toast sticks, carefully Jenga-stacked , into my mouth, I take out my phone. “Today’s meal set the standard for menu design and execution. The event of the century. Thank you Columbia Dining!” Satisfied, I hit submit. I hope this one makes it onto the good reviews TV screen. Columbia Dining, you made my day. Negative God, if you’re up there, can you end this once and for all? I forgave the radioactive mac ‘n’ cheese. I braved the rancid Friendsgiving stench. But mussels? Since when did Chef Mike and his perverted little menu planners start experimenting with aquatic cuisine? Half of those slimy oblong mollusks didn’t even have any fucking insides. What am I to do? Suck on the shells like some sort of bottom feeder? That’s the problem with this institution. They hand you Fish Stink™ so poignant it feels almost offensive and expect a tearful “thank you” for the opportunity to suckle at their barren, merciless teat. I digress. Or at least that’s what I would say if I’d stopped in my tracks and whipped a full 180 the second I laid eyes on those “mussels.” What I saw next was possibly even more mortifying, and provoked a question that has been dry humping my brain ever since: What the hell is a “Pig in a Bikini”? Pigs in a blanket, sure. I can get it. They get cold sometimes!!! Everyone does!!!!!! Wrap yourself in a fuzzy little blanket, hammy queen!!! But why the fuck would I want a Pig in a Bikini sliding down this here gullet??? And believe me, they’re not fooling anyone. Bikini, my ass—the breaded bathing costume in question has been fashioned out of two skimpy bands of soggy croissant dough that seductively slide off the second you try to snatch one of those piggies up with a pair of serving tongs. It was after I plopped the second Pig in a Bikini on my plate that the thought occurred to me: what on God’s green earth is tonight’s dining event? I frantically scanned John Jay’s dining hall decorations with the hope of gleaning some answers, but  was met only with the haunting grin of a Liza Minelli cardboard cutout that I had managed to plant myself in front of (I thought I was in line for the action station). Behind me, a kitchen staff member in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mask yelled “HOT! HOT! COMING THROUGH” before ramming into me with the tub of white, creamy liquid he was trafficking through the crowd. Like Moses or a rock, I stood, parting the seas of John Jay’s teeming crowd as I puzzled over throughlines that would unite the tomfoolery I was witnessing into a comprehensive theme. I had started feeling uneasy after the explosive diarrhea stint that followed Dairy Appreciation Day. Then came the Bring Your Pet to Work Day incident, which involved a certain employee’s pet bird shitting into the vat of lentil soup. I won’t even mention the Anything But Beef event.  How had I failed to put the signs together until now? The themed meal madness had progressively gotten further out of hand and there was only one explanation for it. Chef Mike was power-hungry, and he was only growing bolder. He had abandoned the notion of theme altogether. This was too far. There was no theme. No cohesive ambiance. There was no event. Only chaos. There is little comfort in this cold, cruel world. I thought I could come to John Jay for some solace. But I was wrong. The dark thoughts started to creep in. What if you’ll never be enough? You don’t deserve to be here. Everyone knows what you did in the 6th floor Butler bathroom at 11:53 p.m. on December 2, 2023. I couldn’t take it anymore. Staring down at my plate of empty mussels and beef gelatin tzatziki, I felt a tear chart its course down my cheek and a pit form in my stomach. But wait — what’s that? A voice rises over the dining hall shouting words whose meaning I can’t quite grasp, but that I feel like I have known forever. It sounds like … salvation. Soon, all of John Jay is enveloped in the beautiful noise of a synchronous, monotonal chant. My confusion dissolves. I grasp the hand of the girl next to me who had gagged on her fusion salad moments earlier. She is shaking and crying, praising Lord Mike along with the rest of us. I realize my entire life has led to this moment. I am one with every single soul in this dining hall. I was born to praise Him. Live Laugh Lord Mike. Live Laugh Lord Mike. Live Laugh Lord Mike…

By Renny Gong It’s my mother’s birthday. I call her to say, I’m gonna dress like a slut tonight. We switch to FaceTime so I can show her the fit. I’m so proud of you, she says. I’m supposed to meet up with friends inside, but when I walk in, I see you almost immediately, so I spin around and leave. Outside, shivering in the cold, I call M, but she’s already inside—maybe it’s too loud—so I call C, momentarily forgetting that she lost her phone last week. I want to call mother, but it’s her birthday, and I don’t want to soil her special day with this, so I call J, and then R, and then L, but nobody picks up, so I walk and walk until my face numbs, until I am so cold my fingers stop bending the way I want them to, until I am in Hell’s Kitchen, or maybe Midtown West, who knows. Some bullshit motherfuckers might even say Chelsea. It starts to rain ice. I duck into a bar called Clock and Crane—warm lighting, bottles of whiskey on the wall, lesbians everywhere. A man sits in the corner eating a massive chicken finger sub so structurally unsound that tendies fall out with every bite. Two Tequila Pineapples please. Strong and I’ll tip you more. I try talking to the bartender, but I can’t really follow. I keep saying, “What?” That distant hum grows louder—your half-smiling face through the crowd, those white pants I’d never seen before, that shirt I once held up to my face and sniffed until my breath ran out, the nape of your neck, the unfurling of our mattress, your sleeping form, the afternoon sunlight coming in. M calls, but I don't pick up. M calls again. Sorry, I text. Forgive me. I might be a while. Look me in the face, bartender. Now, Two Vodka Crans please. Strong. The next morning, I am doing okay. I am happy, even. I ended up in my own bed, that’s good. I write. It’s alright. I get lunch with M. I apologize. It’s all good. I try my best to learn how to strum a guitar and sing at the same time. I fail miserably. I make three hundred dollars. This is a lot of money. I am proud of myself. M says that we should go out. I think so, too. We go together, so she can keep an eye on me. M is so good to me. I cannot believe how good she is to me. On the train ride downtown she keeps an eye on me. In the club she keeps an eye on me. A girl falls on my shins. The biggest bouncer I’ve ever seen tries to get her out the door. She says, I’m fine. I’m fine. “Stop thinking!” M yells at one point. She slaps me across the chest. “Just for once, will you have some fun? Here, drink this.” “I’m not!” I yell. “I’m not.” I drink. In line for the bathroom, I see you through the crowd. I see your friends, too. The bathroom is single use, thank god. I heave, but nothing comes. The sharpest loneliness is to cry in a new place. I hold on to the walls, wishing for a solid thing. I want to be home. No, I want to see someone, anyone at all. I try to think of something else, something that might press me in on all sides, something M said maybe, something mother said, but instead I think of that time you bit my lip so hard you drew blood and how nobody will ever bite me as hard and now the dude outside is banging on the door. Outside the club, the cold takes me by surprise. I call mother. Happy Birthday, ma, I say. It’s late where you are, she says. Are you outside? How much did you drink tonight? I didn’t drink at all tonight, I say, which is true, except for five bodega Fireball shooters, which by the way, if you didn’t already know, those things are like the scam of the century. They come in at 16.5%, so you’re basically taking little sips of wine. What unbelievable mockery of the shooter experience. I make my way to the train station and transfer at Times Square. I take it all the way to the end, to Flushing, where mother lives. I knock on her door. Surprise! She cannot believe it, jumping up and down and hugging me so tightly. Ba! Look who's here! Ba stumbles out of the bedroom and has a big silly grin on his face. His glasses are kind of lopsided. Oh, you knew! mother says to him, and he smiles even bigger. Yeah, I told him beforehand, I say. Just to make sure you guys weren’t gonna be somewhere else. Look! I brought wine! And cake! We sit down at the wobbly-ass table and I say, ma, there’s something else. Oh, enough with the surprises, she says, and they both lean in. I’m seeing someone, I say. A healthy pour for the three of us. You know how they say you’ll know when it happens? Well it happened. I laugh at how stupid I sound. I push through. What is it that they say? I could die right now. Oh, don’t say that, she says. No, ma. I promise you. That night, I dream of the two of us in a dark room, laughing, talking again. Your mouth again. Complete relief. And upon waking—if you called then, I would have said, yes, yes. No, I would have kneeled in front of you and said, again. In the morning, I get out of the train station and you’re waiting for me. I’m so happy to see you. I have never felt happier, actually. We walk together the whole day. We pick out a plant for our apartment. We live together. We go to the stationary store. We sit at a nice cafe. There are so many things I have left to say to you still. At night, I leave my room. It’s nice out. Today will be better. I am getting better. I call mother. It’s her birthday today. She says don’t do it. How do you not understand, ma? I can’t stand another day of this. There’s nothing here anymore. I need to get out. I’m sleeping on the ground, ma. I’m cutting myself open. I’m screaming now. Baba interrupts, gets on the phone. Stop yelling at your mother. And okay, but you can’t do it when you’re angry. Calm down for a few days. Think about it. Really think about it. If you do things in the heat of the moment, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Mother takes back the phone. She says don’t be a bitch. She says I love you. She says give it some more time. She says thank you for the birthday gifts. I show the bouncer, the biggest bouncer I’ve ever seen, my little paper bracelet, so I can go back inside. You’re waiting for me at the door, with flowers, with origami paper, with a knitted scarf, with green, the color green, with so much contempt in your eyes, with your hand on my tummy, telling me shh, shh. I kneel, like I said I would. It’s my mother’s birthday. I am calling her. This time, it’s different—I’m somewhere upstate, in an open field. What do you see? she says. There’s a dog. My dog, our dog, angry, feral, wet, gnawing on a bone. What else do you see? she says. There’s nothing else. So I say nothing. And she says nothing. We stay like that. Tell me something, I say finally. Will I ever find a way out of this? I feel so bad for her. She is trying so hard to say the right thing. I don’t know, she says. But what if you don’t? Find a way out of this, I mean. I think about this with my eyes squeezed shut. I think about this for a very long time. I am still thinking about this. Well, then I don’t want this, I say. I don’t want an open field. I don’t want something nice. I want it all back, just once more. I wait for her to say something. I hear nothing but wind. Mama? I ask. Are you still there?

Atrocity is not such a self-evident thing. By Sagar Castleman Bruce Robbins isn’t your ordinary English professor. Although his dissertation was on Victorian novels, what he writes, teaches, and talks about is very concerned with the contemporary political world; his literature classes are usually either contemporary (“World Literature Since 1965”) or political (“The Political Novel,” taught with Nobel Prize in Literature winner Orhan Pamuk). In large part, this is because of his longtime interest in atrocity, both in literature and the world. His most well-known class is “The Literary History of Atrocity” and his book Atrocity: A Literary History comes out next year. I sat down with Professor Robbins to talk to him about this interest. We discussed how decades of thinking about atrocity have shaped how he sees the Israel-Palestine conflict, why he thinks art has an obligation to engage with atrocity, what he thinks is responsible for the decline of the humanities, and the problem with Peter Singer. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Illustration by Ellie Hodges … The Blue and White: What drew you to teach “The Literary History of Atrocity”? Bruce Robbins: What drew me to teach it is something more personal than intellectual. My father was a bomber pilot during World War II and I grew up thinking of him as a war hero. He had gone off to fight fascism and the Nazis, and that seemed pretty cool to me. It was only very slowly that I thought that there were between 500,000 and 600,000 civilians killed by Allied bombers in German cities, and that didn’t seem to be thought of as an atrocity by Americans, even though, come on, killing civilians. We really frown upon that. So I thought atrocity is not such a self-evident thing. The formative moment for me politically was the American war in Vietnam. There was an awful lot of bombing and killing of civilians by the United States in that period. I think for a lot of people, Vietnam made it possible to look back at World War II with slightly different eyes. We had thought of it as the Good War, but it wasn’t the Good War from every point of view. One of the really popular novels of that period—it came out during the Vietnam War—was Slaughterhouse-Five, which is one of the books on the syllabus. It’s the book that called bullshit on the Allied bombing of German cities, because Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when Dresden got bombed. So a lot of things came together for me. There was a literary side of it and there was a personal side of it. There were things that I was trying to figure out about me and my family. At the same time I realized that there was an interesting set of literary questions, or literary-historical impulses, that I was intrigued by and was trying to make sense of. B&W: I’m curious about the personal example of your father. I feel like that’s a case where the mainstream American response would be something like, “That was very tragic and maybe could have been limited in certain ways, but it was also necessary for the greater good.” Do you buy the idea that atrocities can be justified in certain cases? BR: Because Oppenheimer was such a big cultural phenomenon recently, everybody’s gone back to thinking about Hiroshima. You can make the same kinds of arguments about Hiroshima: “How many American soldiers had their lives spared because there was no invasion of Japan, blah, blah, blah.” There’s been lots of conversation. But you know, the war was gonna end anyway, they just wanted to make a display of force to the Russians who were coming from the other side. Anyway, it seems to me that the case has become clearer because of the use of the atomic bomb. That really is an atrocity. Not everybody would accept it, but I think it’s easier to get people to say, “Not only did they drop it, but they dropped it twice, and hundreds of thousands of people were dead, pretty much all civilians.” And this may not interest you, but most of the people who have studied the Allied bombing of Germany have come to the conclusion that it didn’t hasten the end of the war, that it didn’t impede German production of war materials, that it didn’t have an effect on German morale. So the necessity argument doesn’t really pan out. I’m talking about historians now, not me. I read them for what they have to tell me. B&W: In general, do you think that something being an atrocity means that it should have been avoided? BR: I use the term as something that has to be avoided. For example, I think that what Hamas did on Oct. 7, 2023 counts as an atrocity. But the point that I want to make is that I can say it was an atrocity and that the Palestinian cause is just. I think I can say both those things. I don’t support what happened on Oct. 7. I do support the Palestinian cause. So the fact that atrocities were committed does not mean that the cause for which they were committed was not just. B&W: I read the remarks that you gave at the New School in October about this. You talked about how both Native Americans and colonizers committed atrocities, and the question of the justice of each cause in that case shouldn’t be determined by who committed atrocities. I want to avoid getting too theoretical, but I’m curious what you think the relationship is between committing atrocities and justice. BR: The scale is important. To take the Gaza example, you had the terrible things that were done on Oct. 7, and then you’ve had terrible things that have been done every day since then. So the proportion there is very different. And those have been atrocities too. And of course they’ll say they’re all in response to Oct. 7. That doesn’t seem like a plausible argument to me. One of the words used is “disproportionate.” That some kind of response was going to be made, maybe even was justified. I’m not sure I would go that far. But this is a disproportionate response. There are a lot of factors that have to be taken into account if you want to talk about the justice of a cause. As far as Israel and Palestine are concerned, you can’t start on Oct 7. B&W: Since you’ve spent so much time thinking about and studying atrocity, it must be interesting to watch that come into the mainstream discourse. I feel like people are talking about things like civilian casualties and bombings now in a way that they weren’t before. BR: I hadn’t noticed a difference, to be honest. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of atrocity talk for some time now. One of the things that I discovered is that the word atrocity was used more in the 19th century than it has ever been used since. It was used a lot about executions by the guillotine in the French Revolution. It tended to be used in England about things that the so-called barbarians would do to colonizers. So a lot of it was very, very self-righteous. And one argument that I would make is that people were not very inhibited in using the word atrocity in the 19th century because they couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever accuse them of committing atrocities. It was all the bad guys who were doing it. B&W: It seems like it’s the opposite now, where everyone accuses each other of committing atrocities. BR: Yeah. Which is frankly better than it was in the 19th century. B&W: How do you engage with literature through this lens of atrocity? BR: One of the major questions that I asked myself—and this clearly comes out of Vietnam, and it comes out of my Jewish identity also—is when and how and why did it become possible for people of Country X to accuse their own country of committing atrocities against someone else. I looked into the literary record to see when that started, why it started, and who did it. That was just a new question for me. It’s the self-accusation part [that interests me]. One hypothesis was that you really couldn’t do it until after 1945. In the 1970s, the Marxist critic Raymond Williams was interviewed by editors of the journal New Left Review. And they said, “Raymond, you love the great social realist novels of the 1840s. And they’re great, but there was a world-historical atrocity that was committed during the 1840s a very, very short distance away, and they just didn’t notice. That is the Irish famine, which happened on Britain’s colonial watch. A million and a half people dead. There were evangelical Christians who said, ‘This is the hand of providence.’ They were free-market evangelical Christians who said, ‘You don’t want to mess with the market by handing food out.’ And they just let them starve. And if the great literature of the middle of the 19th century couldn’t even notice Britain’s responsibility for a million and a half Irish dead during the famine, why do you like it so much?” This was really hard for me because I was trained as a Victorian, and I love those novels. It was a very painful thought. So I asked myself, if it wasn’t happening in the 1840s in the great social realist novels, when the hell did it start happening? And I thought, maybe it can only happen after 1945—knowledge of the Holocaust, the anticolonial movements bringing to people’s attention the terrible things Europe had done in its colonies. Is it possible that the whole literary record is just empty of any kind of scruples about murder? So I wanted to look, and I’ve looked and I have a mixed result. There are some incredibly wonderful moments, and there’s an awful lot of stuff that is not so wonderful to remember. I’ve been making a scrapbook of sorts of interesting literary snippets in which atrocity gets recorded, registered, and described. B&W: It seems like there’s a literary history question of when this engagement happened. But I feel like there’s also a question that the interview brought up, which is whether literature has any obligation to engage with atrocity. It seemed like the interviewers were saying that it does. Do you buy that? BR: Wow. I suppose it would only make sense to say that there’s an obligation to people who are artists now. I can’t tell people in the past, “You had an obligation, you blew it.” You don’t accomplish very much by saying that kind of thing. If I were a creative artist now, I would say straight, “There’s an obligation.” I mean, you want to belong to your time in a strong way. You have the same kind of moral obligation to register what’s going on in your time, and atrocity is part of that. Do I judge the literature of the past for how well it did that? I mean, I try not to throw it out. B&W: The idea that contemporary artists should be thinking about the current world and maybe the worst parts of the current world is really interesting. Have you read Sally Rooney’s book Beautiful World, Where Are You? BR: I haven’t. I read the other two. B&W: There’s a scene where one of the characters is in a grocery store and she suddenly starts to feel dizzy from thinking about the degree of exploitation that went into getting these things right here. BR: Oh, I gotta read that. B&W: And the character is herself a novelist, but she writes romance novels, and she says something like, “If I tried to write about this, I wouldn’t be able to write about romance because it would overshadow everything else I wrote about.” And I think to some degree that applies to the social realist novels of the 19th century. I’m in a class right now on Jane Austen, and I feel like keeping the reader engaged in these intricate social situations relies on not bringing in anything darker. Even just a murder plot can overshadow and take our attention away from the social relationships. I don’t know what you think of this, but it feels like in order to keep an audience interested in something that’s objectively trivial but is the novelist’s interest, it relies on excluding atrocity. BR: That’s so interesting. I don’t think that it’s impossible to write novels that will integrate the kind of thing that Sally Rooney was saying, “I can’t write about and still have an audience.” Sally Rooney hasn’t done it much, which is interesting given the kind of political statements that she’s made. But I think other people have done it better. She’s talking—and I’m really interested in this—about the global capitalist order, and how that is behind the fact that I have a pen in my hand or a sandwich. Can you become conscious of that? I think someone like Jamaica Kincaid is really good at that. Just looking at an object in front of her and seeing through it. It’s what Marx would call the defetishizing of the commodity, seeing the social relations that brought it into being. George Orwell does it also. It’s not atrocity, it’s more like a coming to consciousness of the economic system on which we depend. B&W: Do you think that literature that depicts atrocity needs to be written some time after the atrocity? BR: Empirically there’s a lot of delay behind the production of some of the great works. One of the books I’ve just been talking about in that course is Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy called Auschwitz and After. She was a member of the French Resistance along with her husband. They were both caught by the Nazis. Her husband was shot, and she was sent on a train full of women of the French resistance to Auschwitz and not gassed right away, but used for their labor. She survived, obviously, and it took her 20 years to write it all out. It may have also taken 20 years before people were willing to publish it, because they didn’t know what to do with that initially. What’s especially interesting to me and complicates the book and enriches it as literature—and it’s very poetic literature—is that during those 20 years, let’s say between 1945 and 1965, there was the whole liberation struggle in Algeria in which the French were committing atrocities against the Algerians. I don’t think that Charlotte Delbo as a French woman could say some of the most uncomplicated things about the Germans that she might have wanted to say in full knowledge of what her people were doing in Algeria, if you see what I mean. Her first book was about Algeria and not about her own experience, which is kind of crazy when you have an experience like that. It’s cultural capital; you can sell it. But what she really wanted to write about first was what France was doing in Algeria. B&W: Why do you think that was? BR: I can’t get inside her mind, but to judge from myself, the worst stuff is the stuff your own people are doing. B&W: One of the names on your syllabus that intrigued me most was Peter Singer. It feels like a lot of the effective altruism movement is about quantifying suffering as a prerequisite to alleviating it. What do you think of this idea, especially in the context of atrocity? BR: The Peter Singer that I put on the syllabus is the famine essay which got a lot of things started for him. You know, you see a child drowning in a shallow pool, and you can save the kid at very little inconvenience to yourself, maybe getting your suit dry cleaned. And this is analogous to being more philanthropic, giving a percentage of your disposable income to save people from hunger. He wrote that essay in response to famine in Bangladesh in 1970. And the point for me is that he is decontextualizing the famine in Bangladesh in 1970 in a scary and undesirable way, because the United States had indirect but strong responsibility for that famine. They were supporting Bangladesh against Pakistan. And I want Henry Kissinger to fry in hell for the famine. Maybe I put that a little more strongly than I should have, but you get the general idea. I want philosophers like Peter Singer to say there’s a historical situation here, and this is not a philanthropic situation, it’s a situation for political intervention. You have voted for a government that is creating the famine, it’s a humanly created famine. So I put this together with a Jhumpa Lahiri story [“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”], which is about a kid of South Asian parents getting the news of what’s going on in what’s going to become Bangladesh and not knowing what to do with it. Now the act of contextualization in the case of effective altruism would have to include, and I’m not the first person to say this, “What do you have to do to the world to make the money that you will then give away?” Let’s not keep our morality in a little box and forget about the context around [it]. B&W: There’s been a lot of talk about the death of the humanities and shrinking English departments and fewer English majors. I was wondering what you think the role of a professor of literature is today and whether you think that it’s changed. BR: Well, there’s a political context for the so-called decline of the humanities. There were what we called the culture wars in the 1990s, which have flared up again recently. And a lot of people would say that there’s a responsibility of these culture wars for defunding higher education. There were taxpayer revolts against subsidizing higher education. If state universities, for example, are being defunded, then there are not going to be jobs for graduate students, and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Ideological people start to represent higher education as an investment in the upward mobility of the family; they think of it entrepreneurially rather than as a public good. I’m on the side of it’s a public good. So, I can’t keep the public or political context out of my thoughts about the situation of the humanities, and I’m not trying to. For better or for worse, I think I’m entirely representative of my colleagues and my discipline in the sense that everybody, partly because of the market crisis, is interested in public-facing work. That is to say, instead of teaching people to just do stuff that is interesting inside the discipline,  write stuff that is interesting outside the discipline. So there’s a lot of that; I don’t think that’s a bad idea. It would be bad if people were no longer teaching the social realist novels of the 1840s because it’s not public facing enough. I am very old fashioned in the sense that I think there’s a heritage that needs to be protected and transmitted. Because if you don’t keep transmitting it, people won’t remember on their own. You said you’re taking a course on Jane Austen. Jane Austen may actually be the cutoff. People read Jane Austen because they really like Jane Austen, whether they go to college or not. You go a little further back from Jane Austen and things sort of drop away. There’s not a lot that gets really read the way Jane Austen gets read before Jane Austen. If we don’t teach it, if we don’t create scholars who are going to want to teach it and write about it, it’s going to just drop out, and that’s not good. B&W: Can I ask what your desert island books are? BR: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, over and over again. I was a James Joyce fanatic early in life, and I’ve been wanting to reread Ulysses. I haven’t done it in a really long time. That desert island would not feel like exile if I had Ulysses with me.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Grove. By Sam Hosmer At twilight on a partly cloudy day, climb six Low Steps and turn around so that scars of vivid sunset cast Alma Mater’s crown into silhouette and shade Butler and South Lawn with violet. This is Columbia’s brand identity. We relish it. It fills our camera rolls and frames our Instagram stories. In hospitable weather, we crowd the lawns encircled by limestone and brick. Administrators confer degrees flanked by time-weathered balustrades and Low’s 10 stately columns. During those moments when we feel grateful to be here, campus is the shape of our pride; when the institution lets us down, it is the environment for our frustrations. But then, this was always the point. In Mastering McKim’s Plan, Columbia art history professor Barry Bergdoll argues that “architecture was both a vital tool in Columbia’s reinvention of itself as an urban research university and a reflection of the trustees’ new determination to abandon years of ad hoc problem solving.” As University president Seth Low and architect Charles Follen McKim began to formulate campus’s first architectural principles in the late 19th century, they established the materials, scales, and symmetries that would become the University’s institutional face. Today, the results seem to speak for themselves: Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus is an internationally recognized landmark—the school’s website and emails are anchored by images of its buildings and idyllic lawns; Alma Mater caps the walls of the 116th St. subway station and stares imperiously away from our names on our student IDs. Some 130 years after Low and McKim turned to architecture to define Columbia University, that architecture is among its most valuable assets. But the surfaces and structures of campus are not as consistent as these vignettes would have you believe. As anyone who has spent time here knows, as you move north, past the walls of craggy concrete that cast the staircase of Dodge Fitness Center into shadow, the aesthetic, so unified and resolute just moments ago, seems to fray. The ground underfoot changes from herringbone brick to long strips of utilitarian decking. Entryways become spare and walkways claustrophobic. Above-ground vestibules, humming with machinery, squat beside exhaust pipes that belch clouds of steam. It is a stark change. And then, in two areas to the east and west, this elevated level of campus simply ends. One of these chasms is behind Schermerhorn Hall, and the other is behind Havemeyer Hall. Both are guarded by railings that do not invite casual viewership. If you glance over them, you will see people in uniform pushing carts, yelling directions, and commuting from basement to basement on street-level expanses of uninterrupted asphalt. Bulging dumpsters accumulate trash. Every surface, pipe, duct, and doorknob is coated with a thick patina of rugged use. And above all of this, on the incongruously decorative southern walls of each of these spaces, stand rows of monumental windows that gaze only at walls. These two holes in the fabric of campus permit a rebellious view of the “Grove”: a parallel dimension that, although enshrouded by the surfaces and structures above it, underlies all of campus. It chills our water, generates our steam, and coordinates our climate control. Pipes and cables deliver utilities to our buildings through warrens of winding, ragged tunnels. Research chemicals, lab equipment, and other packages arrive here first, later becoming the garbage that fills its dumpsters. And, arising from the Grove’s clandestine garages and workshops, vital members of Columbia’s facilities departments are forever engaged in the rigorous, ad-hoc tasks of cosmetic and mechanical upkeep required to preserve the visual identity McKim and Low invented in 1894. In addition to yielding a peek behind the scenes, these incidental spaces in North Campus also manifest a dense and layered archaeology, divulged in the form of palimpsests, anachronisms, and windows that gaze at walls. These clues tell the architectural story of Columbia’s century on Morningside Heights, and of how far the University has gone to make things look easy. … McKim’s plan, though prescriptive in attitude and broad in scale, is perhaps equally defined by how little of it was actually realized. Low Library, the centerpiece of McKim’s design, was roundly criticized by a student body that found it sacrificed function for idealized proportions and symmetries—“‘Library’ Is a Misnomer for Edifice Designed for Benefit of Sightseers,” grouses a 1925 Columbia Spectator editorial—so Butler was built shortly thereafter. Then came the construction of University Hall, an opulent student center McKim envisioned for the space behind Low Library. Columbia’s funding was exhausted after only one floor, rendering it unfinished for five decades. And only one of the many fully surrounded academic courtyards McKim had planned—between Avery, Fayerweather, St. Paul’s Chapel, and Schermerhorn—was ever realized. But the erosion of his larger vision belies a much more familiar and stubborn set of rules: Buildings would obey a common material palette of granite, red brick, and limestone; central campus would sit on a plinth above the neighborhood; expansive terraces of hardscape would define its vistas and choreograph movement across them. In the century that followed, these core visual hallmarks became canonical. So when new buildings began to deviate more brazenly from that scripture, the dissenting structures gained a reputation among students as canonically ugly. After the Seeley W. Mudd Building was finished as a new home for SEAS in 1961, the Spectator called it “sad,” “repulsive,” and an “irreparable mistake”; when crews broke ground for Uris, students picketed it with signs that read “No More Mudds.” Once it was finished, the Spectator called Uris “an excretion” and “a monumental offense,” concluding that “it should be demolished with all the violence it has committed upon its surroundings.” Curiously, however, even campus’s most apparently heretical 20th-century additions betray the lasting influences of McKim’s original plan. Mudd, long hated for its austerity, is nonetheless clad in red brick and trimmed with granite and a limestone-like material. The Sherman Fairchild Center, which was added to Mudd in 1978, is covered in a screen of large, metallically bordered rectangular panels inset with quarry tiles, abstracting McKim’s bricks and mortar. Even Uris, a building notorious for its seeming rejection of McKim’s aesthetics is—in addition to being clad primarily in limestone—literally built on top of the four-story basement of University Hall. As a result, its library follows the curvature of University Hall’s recognizable rotunda. All of these projects understood the need to express some recognizable aspect of the brand identity, even if practical requirements or restrictions made them defy other parts of it. Thus McKim’s scriptures had relaxed into a handbook of superficial aesthetic choices. But as each building began to impose its own interpretation of that visual identity, inconsistencies emerged. … There are a few ways to enter the depths of North Campus, in which all those monumental windows gaze at walls. On Broadway and Amsterdam, two entrances, used by trucks and service vehicles, access it directly. These are monitored by security guards and aren’t always available to pedestrians. Otherwise, it is easiest to get there through back doors in the basements of Havemeyer and Schermerhorn, beyond which the stenciled lettering on its dumpsters assigns this shadowy realm a name: “The Grove.” Officially, the Grove is a small, paved, street-level courtyard behind Schermerhorn, which Columbia calls its “central waste management and recycling facility.” In practice, the name refers to the entire hidden catacomb that snakes from Amsterdam to Broadway. Like Mudd and Uris, it is often the butt of mean jokes, which in this case usually contrast its bucolic name with the fact that it processes garbage. WikiCU, the internet’s primary archive of Columbia snark, calls it a “crude joke” that “emits a foul odor of decay,” while Bwog calls it a “human scale trash can.” A 2019 episode of Spectator’s podcast accuses the “so-called Grove” of being “strange, grimy, and a little spooky.” It was even called a “hellish, stinking pit” 12 years ago in the pages of this magazine. What is it about the Grove that provokes such brutal wrath? If we’re to take these critics at their word, it is that it looks and smells bad. But the real reason, once again, is an unearned nostalgia for McKim’s plan, where the Grove began life as the “Green": an expansive landscape at the north end of campus, past the late University Hall, dotted with trees and tastefully cultivated vegetation, surrounded by an ornate fence, sliced by diagonal gravel pathways, and furnished with a bandstand and a statue of the Great God Pan. Also prominent in the Green’s design, though often elided by those nostalgists, was a curving, promenade-like driveway that cut across its lawns and bore through the first floor of University Hall. Regular inserts in Spectator report the Green filling to capacity for commencement and summer concerts; Bergdoll quotes Frederick Law Olmsted’s prediction that it would “one day be the pride of the University and of the city.” By the mid-1920s, however, prodigious institutional growth had exceeded the capacity of McKim’s original design for campus. In response, Nicholas Murray Butler, president since 1901, began commissioning campus plans that contemplated aggressive but systematic expansion into much taller buildings on the remainder of the Morningside site. The first and only building to emerge from these orderly schemes was Pupin Physics Laboratories, completed in 1927 within the Green’s northwest corner. Pupin was designed by McKim, and thus its materials, proportions, and symmetries were overtly faithful to his master plan, despite the building’s unprecedented scale. And, after it was completed, the Green below still ostensibly existed, its gravel paths rearranged to lead to Pupin’s front door. Yet after Pupin, the Green’s fate grew increasingly grim, as did any notions of its methodical and organized development. In 1961, the construction of Mudd and the attached Engineering Terrace covered almost all of its acreage on its eastern side. On the Green’s western side, Columbia completed a “Computer Center” between Havemeyer and Uris in 1962. Then, Dodge Fitness Center was built behind Havemeyer in the early ’70s as a hasty concession to the protests of 1968, filling in the last large parcel of original Green and raising Pupin’s entrance to the fifth floor. (This all subjected the Great God Pan to a series of relocations, ultimately depositing him on the lawn between Lewisohn and Low.) Once the unpardonably named Schapiro CEPSR and then the Northwest Corner Building were finished in 1992 and 2010, none of the Green’s once-leafy landscape remained. In its place, Columbia had incrementally erected an enmeshed and unwieldy superstructure. Dodge, the Computer Center, Mudd’s terraces, and warrens of tunnels and service buildings all sat below what was now campus level, their roofs adjoining to form the courtyard between North Campus’ towers. Only two small, awkward regions of the Green behind Schermerhorn and Havemeyer survived, each paved over to allow access to that service driveway—which, too vital to reconfigure or replace, was instead encased and buried. No longer green, these areas are now called the Grove. Together, they are Columbia’s root system. Meanwhile, only the visual tokens of McKim’s plan retained any purchase with these buildings, reducing any coherence between them to pure surface. Other than that, it would seem that the only common logic of the development of North Campus was to hide its driveway and service areas below campus level, where nobody could unintentionally see them. By physically and figuratively privileging its surfaces over the processes and people who maintain them, Columbia had permanently encoded a literal spatial hierarchy. In other words, from campus we can only look down on the Grove, and some of us may even have the audacity to insult it. … In my reconnaissance for this piece, I spent a lot of time in the Grove. As I walked its length, I imagined manicured lawns stretching to my left and right, and it was then that I began to sense the original architectural coherence of the Green—before its gestures were permanently fractured by increasingly erratic vertical and horizontal expansions. Without this context, at the Grove’s eastern and western ends—where its chambered depths are opened to North Campus and sunlight is allowed in for a few hours—the monumental windows and decorative exterior walls of Schermerhorn and Havemeyer’s basements seem misplaced and inexplicable. They do, after all, look directly onto piles of garbage. But inside the Green, these rusticated walls were the figurative plinths on which the rest of campus rested, completing a picturesque panorama. And the Green’s lack of buildings would likely have welcomed plenty of morning light, explaining those windows that now gaze only at walls. As the amount of time I spent in the Grove became inordinate, I started to recognize faces. I soon befriended Louis Feraca, who works for the Landscaping and Grounds department of Facilities and Operations and is around my age. Feraca and I happened to share a passion for campus history: When we first met, we found that we both had albums of before-and-after archival photos stored in our camera rolls, and we spent half an hour swapping them. A few days later, Feraca agreed to let me follow him around the Grove for a couple of hours at the end of his workday. … “So, yeah. Here we have everything, from food deliveries to all the cafeterias,” Feraca says, gesturing at a garage door that is rolled shut. “We have a bunch of mechanic shops here, students going to the gym, trucks in and out, bringing garbage from everywhere.” As we talk, we are in a section of the road that is deep underneath Uris. We walk past a cage that is full of cardboard boxes and is informatively labeled “BALLASTS.” The walls are a porridgy beige, but beneath the paint, the ghosts of former doorways are visible in the brickwork. Feraca gestures towards me to follow him down the driveway. “And over here is our shop. Just for Grounds.” We walk in and he turns on the lights far above, revealing several yards of shelving bays holding the attachments they use to groom campus. It smells like a Home Depot. On the cinderblock wall to my right, there is a whiteboard with assignments and a union sticker. “So, does everybody have their own shop down here?” I ask. Yes, he replies, but not just down here: “B230,” beneath the International Affairs Building, houses campus’s carpentry, plumbing, and electrical outfits. Trying to understand their scope and responsibilities, I describe a hypothetical scenario based on an incident I vaguely remember from when I was a sophomore, in which a serial burglar kept stealing herringbone bricks from walkways, leaving cavities everywhere. (“That was you?” he asks, and I’m not sure if he’s joking.) He tells me that, in such a situation, a service order would get issued for that particular brick. Once the relevant shop fabricated a replacement or located one in its stores, a supervisor would task someone in Feraca’s department with installing it. “There are a bunch of different shops behind this door,” he says, as we leave his shop and continue moving through the Grove. “HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] is downstairs. Obviously, the boiler room mechanics, the chiller shop mechanics—anything you need for a campus to be running, you know, we have it.” I ask him what the boiler mechanics do, knowing nothing about boilers, and lacking even the faintest conception of what a chiller shop is. “In the boiler room,” Feraca tells me, “there’s somebody there 24/7. Watching its computers, lights, signals, making sure the pressure is correct. Now, custodians, they have their own closet-type room in each building. So, of course, they have a room in the basement with all the medical supplies…” I tell him that it feels like we’re in the beating mechanical heart of the University, and he agrees. … Before coming to Columbia, Feraca spent a few years as a delivery driver for Poland Springs, delivering water all around the New York metropolitan area—including to our campus, whose architecture had fascinated him since his childhood in the Bronx. So, when a position opened up with Grounds, he was quick to snag it. Though there are always Facilities and Operations posts available elsewhere, some less grueling, he tells me that he chooses to stay here because of all the history. I’m excited to realize, as he shows me a photo from the 1920s in which the stairs of Hamilton Hall bear a chip still visible today, that he approaches history like I do: by locating in our present spaces the overlooked, trivial details preserved from their pasts. I ask Feraca if there’s anything he wants to say to those who now use Columbia’s campus, and he responds: “Appreciate where you’re standing, because it’s a piece of history.” Feraca is fascinated by the life of the architecture that he loves, its details and transformations, but he is also responsible for stewarding its mystique. McKim and his interpreters may have created Columbia’s architectural identity, but Feraca and his colleagues in the Grove are recreating it every day, in little ways, like the Ship of Theseus. The heights and depths of campus are two sides of a battle between theory and praxis, in which theory strains desperately to hide praxis far below. As we keep walking, I look up and observe that the ceiling and everything attached to it has been painted black, which serves to camouflage a web of pipes, conduits, and other things that exceed the range of my technical knowledge. We both note and take photos of three dead pigeons, clustered and deteriorating on the ground. Then, dressing the upper reaches of this enclosed road full of pallet crates, mulch bags, and empty garbage bins, I notice that the paint is also disguising a well-preserved but entirely out of place crown dentil molding. I suddenly realize that we are not underneath Uris, but rather University Hall. Archival photos of campus facing south from 120th Street—in which a monumental, rusticated, four-floor foundation supports the single bald story of its main structure, bearing a conspicuous resemblance to a steamboat—reveal that this driveway, back when it still curved through the Green, was greeted at ground level by a thick arch of chamfered granite blocks built into either side of the first floor of University Hall. While Uris officially replaced University Hall, only its top floor, a cafeteria, was actually demolished. The four stories below it, containing the University’s gym, weren’t touched. Today, these four semicircular floors are part of Dodge Fitness Center, containing the basketball courts, “Tri-Level Fitness Area” (three narrow hallways with some weightlifting equipment), indoor running track, and the locker rooms. The next time you are unlucky enough to find yourself in the Tri-Level Fitness Area, you will see that a few frosted windows span all three of its Tri-Levels. They are dark, because they now gaze only at a wall. But in old photos, they bathe the floor of the gym in morning sunshine. So University Hall—or at least 80% of it—survives to the present day, albeit almost entirely buried beneath the haphazard growth of North Campus. As a result, the remains of that imposing granite arch, I now understand, are right in front of Feraca and me: The five stacked granite blocks flanking us are the arch’s unsquashed lower extremities, awkwardly protruding from the ceiling and the unadorned walls. I AirDrop a picture of University Hall to Feraca, and then we ascend to talk about the history of the buildings all around us. What I like about New York, I tell him, is that its intractable shortage of physical space forces structure and infrastructure to intermingle, one endlessly shaping the other in funny and inspiring and sad ways. And then, as we walk across North Campus, I notice that its surface doesn’t quite meet the northeast wall of Uris Hall’s rotunda, creating a narrow subterranean crevice between campus level and the building’s edge. Feraca asks me if I’ve ever stared into it, and as I then stand on the parapet and peer into this incision, I notice a core sample of the University’s archaeology: layers of erratic expansion fossilized into chronological strata. In this narrow space, membranous staircases and rugged metal service doors tease the possibility of a hidden underbelly. Contrasting materials clash in strange tapestries. And below the above-ground rotunda, on the rusticated rear wall of University Hall now permanently entombed in this hidden canyon, a row of monumental windows gazes only at a wall. It suggests that all is not what it seems. Illustration by Emma Finkelstein