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Sergio Peçanha on visual storytelling, journalism in the Trump era, and keeping your head up in the face of absurdity. By Dominy Gallo. On a recent Sunday, as I was enveloped in a History midterm, my mother tore my laptop away and placed hers in my lap. “Look at this, Dominy!” she said. “How great is that? Hilarious!” It was a piece in The Washington Post entitled “The Trump era, so far, in 10 drawings and fewer than 200 words.” In it, opinions graphics columnist Sergio Peçanha mockingly lambastes the president for his failures these past four years in office. My mother spends upwards of two hours a day—easily—reading and watching the news and not infrequently presents me with articles and segments, head hung low in despair or arms flung up in frustration. As I told Mr. Peçanha in an email, “I have not seen her light up reading about politics like she did that day in a long, long time.” He graciously agreed to speak with me, and the next day, we were on Zoom, chatting about his childhood in Brazil, his trajectory toward a career in visual journalism, the birth of his column, and how he stays positive and productive in the “absurd America” he loves so much. The following are excerpts from our dialogue. B&W: You’re very humble on your website, describing yourself simply as a graphic designer, journalist, and illustrator. If no one were listening, how would you describe what you do? Sergio: I think the same way. I’m just a journalist who can draw a little bit. B&W: When you’re doing visual journalism, how much of that is data visualization, and how much of that is artistic rendition? Sergio: I try to have more of the visual illustrations and other types of visual storytelling than data. I did a lot of data-driven graphics, of course, but… [m]y passion is visual storytelling and mixing images and words, because when you choose the right image and the right words, one has the power to alter the meaning of the other, and, together, they can guide whoever is looking at it to a different perception that’s their own.… So that’s what I am most interested in, how people perceive information, how the story is told. B&W: You segued perfectly into the next question, this relationship between visuals and words. When you set out to tell a story, how do you decide what to present to your readers in visuals and what to present in words? What does that process look like? Sergio: Well, there are two different things. One if I’m doing the column, and one if I’m doing more formal storytelling. The column is a very personal thing where I can figure out whatever solution I want. For the other, I’m trying to tell a specific story that sometimes I’m writing, sometimes someone else is writing and I’m just making the charts. So it’s a collaboration.… Say that you’re using numbers to tell a story. I would try to select the minimum amount of words possible that would help people to understand the image that they’re about to see, because you want to have to do all the work yourself—to have the minimum work possible for whoever’s reading. Now, on the column side … it’s a mix. Sometimes, it comes out quickly, but it’s always a very familiar, very painful process…. [W]hen I first took this job, I didn’t know if I would be capable of delivering the column that I thought that I, maybe, could do. So I had this very blurry idea of a column that would mix news and visuals and maybe some level of poetry, definitely a little bit of humor. That was my pitch for the column, and that would focus, in this case, on things that don’t really make much sense in this country. Hence the name, Absurd America. But I didn’t really know because it didn’t exist and I hadn’t sketched it…But I thought that there was something that I could do along those lines, mixing it with more hard, news-driven information…and I was seriously concerned that I would fail. B&W: I’d like to know what the inspiration for the column was, if it came to you in an instant, if it was slow or if it revealed itself to you in stages. What was it that set off that vision that you had for Absurd America? Sergio: OK, I will tell you the whole story. So I was working at the Times and I had been there for a decade. I really enjoyed the job there … but I felt like I wanted to do something more personal… [T]here was this opportunity at the Post, and I came and I spoke with Fred Hiatt, who is the opinion page editor there. We were having lunch…. We were just there to meet each other. They had this position that they were trying to fill with somebody who would be a graphics columnist for them, but … they didn’t really have a template. Nobody had ever done it, so they didn’t know what to expect. So it could be anything. I knew that part of what they expected was something that I was very comfortable doing, which is doing information graphics … but also there was the other thing that was something that I wanted to do that I didn’t know if I could do, and since they didn’t really know what to expect, I thought there was a window that I could try to do it there. So during lunch … at a certain moment … I said, “Look, I know what you need, I understand what you need, and I think I’m capable of doing that. But there’s something else that I want to do. I want to do a column.” And I really didn’t know that he would let me because I found it kind of a big deal at that time, doing an opinion column at a place like the Post.… I just kind of threw that on the table because really, for me, that’s what would be the thing that would make me come, just a chance to pursue that. But he says, “Oh, yeah, sure, of course.” It was like that.… I was expecting, probably, a “no.” But he said, “Sure, of course! What would you like the column to be about?” And I was kind of caught off guard because I had no idea. I hadn’t thought about that. And then I had a sip of water because I needed to gain a few seconds. I said, “Mmm, good question.” So I’m making time. I said, “Ummmmm,” and as you have already noticed, sometimes I mumble, but I took it to my advantage in this moment, and I said, “Hmm, so …” and I’m thinking. I thought, well, the Washington Post, politics, National. All right. “How about….” I’m still thinking, I was literally gaining time. Thirty seconds.… Illustration by Samia Menon I said something like this: “There are many things in the U.S. that happen but simply don’t make any sense. I was born outside of the U.S. and I look at it and I think, this is the richest country on the planet, and some people don’t have health care or some people don’t have some basic things. So strange. How is that even possible?” And then I have an idea. I started mumbling these things and then … I said, “How about if the column was about everything that doesn’t make any sense in the US but happens anyway?” And then he looked at me and said, “Hmm. Good idea. Like, ‘Absurd America!’” That’s how it happened.… When I walked home, my wife said that she could see on my face that I had to go.… I feel very lucky, fortunate that I had this opportunity and also very happy that it’s starting to become something that is less blurry.… At least now, I have something that I can look at and try to aim for. B&W: You live and work as an American journalist. Being both of a place and not of a place gives one both a conscious connection and a more refined awareness of the given situation in a country. Absurd America reports, quote, “on the idiosyncrasies of life in the United States.” Do you feel as though your childhood and education outside of the US gave you a clearer understanding of just how absurd America really is? Sergio: That is really the heart of what that page that day was. I’m talking about something that is so crazy in this country that right now is the president himself, who is really an extreme, unusual person.… I live here and have been living here for a long time … I love this country, too. But I also feel very much what I’ve always been. You can see I speak with an accent and I write with an accent and that kind of guides my writing style in English…. I can already be fairly eloquent, but not to the same level of other people who are native, I think. So I figured out a way of using fewer words, which is already my way of speaking. B&W: Many of our readers will be anxiously anticipating the results of the election. Can you speak to the precise experience you mentioned that our current president is … particularly absurd. Is there something unique about the experience of reporting on this administration compared to all of the other things that you’ve had experience reporting on? Sergio: I’ve been doing journalism for about 20 years, and … with Trump … there’s news all the time. He is always making headlines because of something either radical that he said or something absurd. And I don’t think I had seen that in my career before that. Before that, you know, you sometimes have … major events … things that happened and they’re extraordinary. But those generally last a few news cycles…. Trump is just every day, there’s a new headline of something weird. For example, like you had that debate and he was terrible and so aggressive and did poorly. And then, just three days later or so, he fell sick from Corona, and then two more days and he is having a joy ride around the hospital, and then three days later he is taking off his mask while he’s still sick, and another three days he is in the rally … It’s nonstop. So that is … what I find different from covering Trump. B&W: Your column especially is bitingly funny. I think much of Columbia has sort of descended into despair, reading upsetting headlines, and you somehow manage to make us laugh about these things. Can you talk about the role of humor and satire in the specific work that you do? Sergio: Oh, yeah, I think it’s very important to be able to look at everything that happens and put it in perspective. For example, Trump. I think he has been doing some really terrible things…. Now, we are about to have an election and maybe he’ll lose, maybe he’ll win … While that may be a scary thought for some people, the reality is that in another four years, he will be gone for sure. So if you put things in perspective, everything passes. Life passes, time passes, and you need to make the best of what you can today with what you have.… Find something to laugh at, because otherwise, life, it becomes too difficult. You need to smile, and I think it’s very important to smile. Another thing that is important for this is that I’m from Brazil, right? Brazil is a country that is messed up as well. The president there is Jair Bolsonaro, who is a mini-Trump. He is kind of like Trump but just considerably dumber…. I actually kind of think he’s like the crazy uncle that went too far. He is like that guy at the Thanksgiving table that says absurd things and then one day he’s elected. That’s who he is. How did he get there? I don’t know. It’s not like I would hate my crazy uncle. I can get along with him. I can laugh. I just don’t want him to be the president. This is in Brazil, but … Brazilian people make fun of everything, everything, everything…. And that is something that we just do because, over there, life is much harder than here. The basic things, to get a job, to pay the bills, everything gets harder … everything is more difficult to afford. If you lose your job it is probably going to be much harder to get another one, no matter how good you are. So the way people manage life there is by making a lot of jokes about things…. You can see people laughing at each other and laughing at themselves. I think it’s important to laugh and I think it’s important to take it easy and try to see the beauty of things. B&W: your most recent installment in your column, “The Trump era, so far, in 10 drawings and fewer than 200 words,” hilarious, but also brilliant. I’m curious as to how you distilled four years of a presidency in which, as you said, every three days, something absurd and horrifying was happening. Sergio: This one, I confess that it came fairly fast, the text. I struggled a lot in this one with the drawings.… Sometimes the drawings come first, sometimes the idea comes first, sometimes the text comes first, and then I change it completely once I start doing some drawings. In this case specifically, I just started with the idea.… We’re about to get to the end of the first term…maybe of the presidency. So, what would be Trump’s list of accomplishments? That’s how I started writing. And then I just started to remember things that he had done. Of course, you can write thousands of words, but other people will do that. I’m the one who will make some drawings and write just a few. So I just wrote a few…. I showed it to my wife.… She’s a journalist, too … so very often she will tell me, “This sucks. You can’t publish this.” Just like that.… And some other times — in this case, she read it and said, “Huh. This is good. Get it done. Publish it.” … Then I said, “Can I send it to Duffy (my editor)?” She said, “Yeah, yeah, send it to him.” So she’s always my first line of defense when I have an idea. And then I send it to Duffy—Duffy is a great guy … but he is not a guy of very many words. So he replies, “Keep going,” which to me makes the obvious evident. First, he thinks it’s an acceptable idea that, if I pursue, maybe we’ll get somewhere. And second, it’s definitely not done, even though I may think that it’s close to being done. So after he says keep going, then I start to organize that story a little more in chronological order, to put it into a shape that I thought would make it better. I add some drawings and start figuring it out. In this case, at the end, I thought, OK, I’m done.… I am generally very demanding of myself, but sometimes when I’m tired … or when I have struggled too much, I try to, maybe, move it in. Then, it’s really fortunate that I have somebody like my wife or my editor who will say it sucks…. For me, that’s what I need, because deep inside I know it sucks and I need to fix it. B&W: You mentioned insecurity, which I think many creative people share. And … you mentioned that sometimes you have a feeling that something’s ready. What does that look like for you? How do you know when you’re ready to put something out into the world? Sergio: Hmm, that’s a good question. I’m both very secure in the sense that I know what I want to try to get and, at the same time, terribly insecure that I feel like I can fail at any time and people will finally uncover me and I’m going to fail completely and I will be unemployed forever…. I’m laughing and smiling about it, but it can be excruciating sometimes. When I was doing this column, I knew that I was trying to get to something that, on the first two or three installments, I hadn’t got to. And I was just having this sensation of failure because even though they were … good enough for publication … they weren’t what I was trying to do. I almost gave up. The only reason why I didn’t give up is because … I wasn’t born rich, so I can’t not work, and suffering is my thing.… By now, I am starting to get some confidence that I may be capable of sometimes achieving something that I want. The first time that I ever felt like that while I was doing this column was when I did the love story, “A Viral Love Affair,” and the one that came after that—“Lessons from the Confinement.” When I did the first one, “A Viral Love Affair,” I thought, Ah! I can do it. There is something, it’s here. It’s this way. Then, I did the other one, the “Lessons from the Confinement,” and I thought, Yes! That wasn’t just luck, I can do it again. Then, the next one I did, I was so nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to do it again that it didn’t really turn out that good. It was fine, it was publishable, but it wasn’t really what I was trying for. But every single one I try to do something slightly different … because I keep pushing and pushing and evolving. Then, I was so nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to keep delivering like the first ones, these two that I mentioned.… I started to feel like, I’m a failure, it’s just not going to work, it’s never going to work. Too much suffering.... But this is growing pains. I was just suffering because I was growing, I think. This is the answer to your question. If something is good, when you listen to your heart, you have to feel it. You have to feel like, look, this is fine. It may not be the best thing anybody has ever written on the planet, but perhaps it is the best that I can do for this subject at this time in my life. And for me, Sergio, as long as I can do the best that I can do, now, about that, as long as I give 100 percent of what I have to give every single time, I’m OK with taking some losses sometimes, because what I can’t do is give it 90 percent. I’m lucky to have some folks that call me out if I give 90 percent, but if you don’t have somebody who can guide you, I would say that if you do and if you do not, the same is true: listen to yourself first, try to listen to what you feel. And then show it to … somebody who you trust. #November2020

The first installment of a graphic series detailing interviews with Columbia’s spiritual advisors on the definition of happiness. By Kat Chen. Please wait while flipbook is loading. For more related info, FAQs and issues please refer to DearFlip WordPress Flipbook Plugin Help documentation. #November2020

By Sam Needleman Bereft of cohesion, and hardly expecting any looming events to provide it, our editors chose to bind this issue of The Blue and White with a theme: COLLECT. Across our November pages, it appears as a demand, a memory, an aspiration, a suture, and a craving—sometimes where we expect it, sometimes not. Rather than force the writers and illustrators to work within this frame—the kind of stylistic tyranny that we imagine plagues the agenda at n+1—we derived it from their reportage. In perhaps the most astute analysis on the subject to date, Claire Shang shows us that mutual aid funds are a new form of student solidarity. By interviewing faculty and scouring reports, Elizabeth Jackson finds that the Climate School is positioning itself as a galvanizing scholarly force at Columbia. In a powerful essay on the life and times of the marching band, Cy Gilman paints a picture of an organization failing to collect itself, time and again. Indeed, the theme threads all of this month’s Features, from Gabe Garon’s account of the recent mass exodus from Sigma Delta Tau, which was fueled by members’ frustration over failed reforms, to Nicole Kohut and Claire Schweitzer’s report on the Core Curriculum, in which faculty share their hopes to maintain unity while teaching new syllabi in remote classrooms. And as they near graduation, the seniors profiled in Campus Characters are collecting themselves on a much more intimate level: Oscar yi Hou is painting, Uwade Akhere is making music, Sophia Houdaigui is running a nonprofit. Arguably, the theme appears in more frivolous forms, too—just look at 69-across or 52-down in our first crossword, constructed by Cy Gilman. Wary of bludgeoning readers with curatorial coherence, we have divergent offerings for you, too. In one of our illuminating Conversations, Sophie Poole speaks to author Nicole Krauss, who’s in residence at the Zuckerman Institute this year. In At Two Swords’ Length, Michael Colton and Nicole Kohut duke it out over whether the sex was, in fact, good. And in addition to our standard two poems, we’re showcasing shorter works in Inkblots. There’s more to read—and we hope you will, as we think Fall Break is the time to take stock of our semester’s arc. Maybe next term, collecting won’t feel so complicated. #November2020

#November2020

By Lyla Trilling When I ask Ali Hassani, CC ’21, how he wants to be pitched for Campus Characters, he texts me: “When I was 9, I had two pet ducks that I carried under my arms.” Jileel and Bileel, the ducks in question, made up part of nine-year-old Hassani’s intimate circle of friends. A self-described chubby misanthrope, young Hassani spent his childhood in Dubai holed up inside, watching art-house films and figuring out ways to contain the massive amounts of poop excreted by his companions. Hassani is no longer the hermit he once was. Holding court at a table outside of Hungarian Pastry Shop, dressed in sweatpants and rubber ducky socks, Hassani is interrupted every five minutes by friends and associates. He tells them about restaurants he likes and his favorite bookstore in New Haven: “It’s the one with the bookkeeper who looks like Stephen Malkmus.” His reference to the lead singer of lo-fi ’90s rock band Pavement is not unusual—his discourse is colored with niche facts. “Did you know that Regina Spektor wrote ‘Us’ about Leningrad and Stalingrad?” Columbia helped Hassani come into his own; New York City piqued his interest in intellectualism and cosmopolitanism, especially as they relate to Judaism and his own culture. Through bites of raspberry hamantaschen, Hassani shows me videos of a sweet, bearded man named Moishe who has been tutoring him in Yiddish for a few months now. In the years since his archival job at The Forward, New York’s premier English-Yiddish hybrid magazine, his Yiddish has gotten a bit rusty. “It’s a beautiful language,” he tells me. “It’s just misunderstood.” Yiddish turns out to be but a single bullet point on a long list of things that Hassani deems “misunderstood.” On the very top of that list stands former Columbia professor Edward Said, the author of Orientalism. (Though after my talk with Hassani—whose Instagram handle is @edwardsaidofficial—I would be remiss not to refer to Said as a cultural critic.) Hassani loves Said because he wants to be like Said: a renaissance man confined to an intellectual coterie, a lover of literature and art. When I ask about his post-grad plans, he says, “Ph.D. programs. Definitely Ph.D. programs.” He has no professorial aspirations, though. A writer, a lawyer, maybe—he still doesn’t know. For now, he wants to continue building his cultural and intellectual vocabulary and finding ways to situate himself in a “broader historical context.” He is well on his way; throughout the entirety of our three hours together, I was only able to surprise him with one historical fun fact: “You know, Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfiction.” It took me a while to successfully schedule a meeting with Hassani. He was always slammed with work (his vow to take only seminars has undoubtedly left him with more to do than the average Joe), meeting up with old friends, or reviewing books for his current internship at BOMB Magazine. When I finally manage to sit down with him, our time together is sandwiched between his job and a meeting for the Columbia Journal of History, where he serves as one of two Editors-in-Chief. It’s a big day for the Journal—Hassani finally gets to choose his editorial staff, a head-honcho hallmark that he’s been waiting for since he first joined the Journal in 2018. Embarrassingly, as a History major, I had never heard of Hassani’s publication, but their website reveals that the job was made for him: Its members are interested in everything from the history of cybersecurity to settler colonialism to Spartan bribery. A day after our meeting, I asked Hassani to send me photos of his bedroom. It’s exactly what you’d expect: Posters from a Viennese art show hang above a repurposed fireplace, and golden light pools through the windows—illuminating his shelf of W.G. Sebald and Phillip Roth novels. The Dutch and French versions of Portnoy’s Complaint signal one of Hassani’s greatest loves: languages. With a method that he describes as “foolproof,” Hassani has garnered an extensive arsenal of dialects, including (but not limited to) Arabic, English, French, Dutch, German, and Yiddish. My very first interaction with Hassani took place in Central Park sometime in September—he overheard me jokingly speaking in Hebrew with a friend. “I barely speak it,” he said, and then proceeded to converse with me in grammatically sound Hebrew sentences that my nine years of Jewish Day school could have never prepared me for. Hassani doesn’t own a start-up. He didn’t invent groundbreaking med-tech, and he’s never negotiated a peace deal between warring nations. But he still manages to be one of the most distinct people I know. Though he’s still figuring out his next steps, he has some idea of who his future self will be: “What do you want to do with your life?” I text him. “Who the hell knows bro,” he replies. “I just want to be a mensch.” #November2020

A collection of short works of poetry. The moult By Eliza Rudalevige up north, where I’m from (or pretend to be) the autumn plummets into piles as if it has somewhere to go. in the city, where I belong (or pretend to) there are fewer leaves, more pigeon feathers. the moult begins in late august and often isn’t finished until the last of november; despite the cars honking, the pigeons take their time, know that this their city waits for them to pluck scattered blessings, shed the sweat of summer from their backs, discard it soft and sopping to the swiftly cooling curb. ··· Gate By Victor Omojola Opening my mouth, a gate creaks open Tentatively No words come out and the fortress retreats to its preferred position Just that: a fortress Protecting thoughts and vulnerabilities from escaping But also shielding the larger entity from being penetrated itself Inside the halls of this structure, a beautiful thing still manifests Riddles are written and solved Theories, theorized And illnesses, cured Work is done, life is processed Within these halls But life yearns to be lived, not just analyzed Like athletes want to be quantified and not just qualified The same as musicians who want to be quantized, who want to be monetized The same as lovers who wish to be romanticized So let these walls crumble In an event bigger than that of Babylon Let that black body, mind, and heart be free And as the mouth opens once more Let the words come out Let the words escape the construct And let the words construct ··· X-Miles Away By Judy Xie I reconsider yellow And the sun through the branches whistles the aching of an endless complaint I want to see you again. I would like to unwind you or wind you The way your arms the hair standing up You insist on squandering sanity for sunflowers They are your favorite Slow-motion everywhere I am not used to concessions but my arms reach out– ··· Gyotaku By Annelie Hyatt I press a paint brush against the shark’s exposed skin creamy blues and greens rubbed into its lined, ancient denticles Its fins are cut off and my hands recoil, washed in its oil fumbling I reach for a sheet of rice paper to cover its body a mask for the dead, perhaps or proof of its existence — or maybe it was I who wanted to preserve its memory, hold it soft in my young hands press rice paper to its flesh and pull up, higher a painted spectacle of blues and greens but there isn’t an inside, no cavity for a soul I search for life in places I can’t find it a corpse of pigment, my trembling hands, trying to remember what I lost ··· Title By Sylvie Epstein I cannot walk and sip something hot all and once And so instead Of stopping on delancey Once Twice Again By the time I sit down on Navy blue linoleum char I carry soggy paper bag and my palm Is sticky White plastic looks like the 3rd grade watercolor I made in North Hollywood He rolls his eyes But I cannot walk and also sip something hot Again, Next tuesday ··· Magnolia Blvd By Gaby Edwards We are striding down Magnolia in the waning afternoon, a wide, boring, and flat boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. Everything is beige: all-you-can-eat Sushi restaurants, smoke shops, burrito stands, parched grassy front yards, boxy apartment buildings. The wind is whipping down the street, stirring up overflowing garbage into miniature trash tornadoes: baby vortexes swirling with ripped coffee cups, straw wrappers, napkins, and soiled plastic bags. Cars are streaming up and down; we shriek over squeaky brakes and rumbling engines. How can we stay quiet? ··· Elephant By Elysa Caso-McHugh You keep telling us, The world is not safe for us. But you always refuse to tell us why: This elephant in the room Takes up more space than I have to Breathe. Quite honestly, I’m tired of trying to. #November2020

EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. The stories we tell about The Cleverest Band in the World and the stories it tells about itself. By Cy Gilman. I. The complaints, couched as a long overdue institutional confession, seemed to portray a group engaged in indefensible behavior rather than a nerdy ragtag marching band that gleefully retooled Katy Perry songs for its eclectic instrumentation, and taunted opposing teams that they did not know who Plato was. – Corey Kilgannon, New York Times These lines seem to convey a journalist’s frustration—even suspicion—at encountering a narrative that fails to conform to their story’s expected angle. And the Columbia University Marching Band (CUMB), without a doubt, has confounded many a journalist before. For decades, commentators have been unable to decide whether to label the Band reactionary, revolutionary, political, apathetic, radically inclusive, racially exclusive, privileged in its platform, unjustly silenced, a threat to students’ well-being, or a critical part of the Columbia community. But Kilgannon’s mistake is to assume that the Band is reducible to a single narrative—that his two characterizations of “a group engaged in indefensible behavior” and “a nerdy ragtag marching band” are mutually exclusive. Evidence suggests, in fact, that both descriptions are accurate: CUMB, which officially disbanded in September, was a haven for geeky students, a community for many who struggled to find one elsewhere; it was also an abusive institution that, in the words of former CUMB Minister of Propaganda Maria Pondikos, “literally traumatized members and nonmembers alike.” It is telling that in the same article, CUMB Alumni President Samantha Rowan chose to criticize not the current Band’s decision to disband, but its “characterization” of the Band’s history. But this history is itself a decades-long war of conflicting narratives, all of which attempt to impose a unified “characterization” of the group. For the Band derived its power—and subsequent impact on the lives of generations of Columbia students—from stories about itself. These mythologies enabled it to perpetuate vicious cycles of trauma, entrance and alienate countless students, and stand up to a hostile administration’s attempts to disband it. And ultimately, it was reckoning with these mythologies that led Band’s members to disband it themselves. II. “Rejected From A Cappella? Join the Band!” – CUMB Recruitment Poster, Fall 2018 (approximate) This poster on a Carman bulletin board firmly implanted two ideas in my first-year head: that rejection from exclusive clubs was enough of a phenomenon at Columbia to warrant a pithy flyer, and that the Band positioned itself as a bold alternative. Though I never had any inclination to join, I naively began to see the group as the antidote to the toxic elements of Columbia’s social and extracurricular scenes. In the face of widespread jostling for social status, glamor, and popularity within Greek life, a cappella, and pre-professional clubs, CUMB embraced its pitiful social stratum and took in anyone willing to do the same. And at a school whose students often fixate on academic and professional achievements, the Band was proudly unproductive and stress-free. Coming from a background in classical music, with its exorbitant financial barriers and outsize temporal demands, I was especially impressed by the Band’s willingness to accept all levels of musicianship and to provide instruments for its members—something that many cited as among the most important factors in their decisions to join. In particular, Orgo Night—CUMB’s 65-year old performance in Butler on the eve of the Organic Chemistry final—felt to me like a collective activity, the screaming Band members and the blob of stressed students performing their communal rage against the social hierarchies and self-seriousness that permeated campus. III. “Keep your damn frat shit out of our Band. Non-frat frat shit is still frat shit.” – CUMB_Constitution, ratified Nov. 2019 My rose-tinted view of the Band closely resembled how the group tried to portray itself, with much of its self-description couched in defiance—of the administration, other clubs, Greek life, other Ivies, mainstream sources of humor. Particularly motivating was the Band’s opposition to “stress culture” on Columbia’s campus, a crusade that Joan Tate, CC ’22, the Band’s final Poet Laureate—responsible for writing Orgo Night jokes and game day scripts — cites as the most prominent internal justification for many of the Band’s more questionable pursuits. The social identity of the Band formed as a protest against the student body’s tendency to reserve its most coveted social spaces for those with the most wealth. “We didn’t have any prestige,” Tate said. “There weren’t that many students who were really super wealthy. It was mostly a bunch of real outsiders and people who didn’t have money and who were normally very confused about stuff.” But for all the Band’s attempts to portray itself as cutting against the social grain on campus, its internal social dynamics often mirrored those of the organizations and subcultures it nominally opposed. Tate explained that mentions of “frat shit” and “non-frat frat shit” in the CUMB Constitution often took on an ironic double meaning. On one hand, they reinforced a culture of internal loyalty to the Band, invoked jokingly against members who brought up issues from fraternities or other campus student groups. On the other, the line was a winking nod to their striking resemblance with Greek life. “Like, what is frat shit?” Tate asked rhetorically. “Because we did a lot of stuff that would be considered frat shit…. We partied constantly. We drank a lot. We… were very irresponsible. We had a huge network of alums who would sometimes give us money… We were very much just kind of like a frat for a non-frat crowd.” Tate even suggested that one of the Band’s mottos, g(tb)^2 (“grab them by the balls”), was treated as the Band’s Greek letters. In an op-ed for the Spectator published shortly after she disaffiliated from the band, Amanda Amilcar attributed many of the Band’s internal troubles to its “secretive nature” and “culture of discouraging transparency,” which, she argued, “mirrors the toxic nature of many Columbia organizations.” And although the Band would accept anyone into its ranks, those in leadership positions often formed an exclusive clique, which likely undermined attempts at reform. CUMB’s Bored Procedure for Supporting Band Members and Maintaining a Safe Environment and Community Standard Agreement, created in 2014 during the aftermath of incidents of assault within the Band, were cited by the Spectator as the source for a genealogy of similar standards from major student organizations at Columbia. But these standards could only take effect if members reporting an incident felt that they could trust the board: any incident reported to one board member would subsequently be shared with the rest, and with no outside contact, the board would be entirely responsible for deciding on and enforcing disciplinary consequences.“The board really was not a place where people necessarily felt like they could go to,” Tate said, both because of “a gigantic breach in communication between the board and the Band” and “rumors of boards past that had gotten reports that they just really didn’t handle very seriously.” Thus the narrative of an organization dissolving social hierarchies and relieving the strains of normal campus life began to crumble. IV. “The culture hurt me a lot and I ignored it because I had no self-esteem and thought that it wasn’t that bad or at least better than me being alone.” – Columbia Confession #7162 Anonymous CUMB member, allegedly It is especially difficult, of course, to trust the board to handle harassment if that harassment is both committed by the club’s leadership and inscribed in its rituals. And from what has been revealed, many of the traditions and social dynamics within the Band had two effects: they established unofficial barriers to entry that undermined the group’s claims to universal acceptance, and they forced those who remained to integrate into a sexually and emotionally degrading—or downright abusive—culture. As Pondikos put it, “Many of its ‘traditions’ actually constituted hazing.” “Initiations,” as described by the Spectator, occurred on specific occasions, such as at an annual flashing of new members on the Staten Island Ferry or during “CUMBquest…a scavenger hunt in which former members described that at least one participant was required to strip for some challenges.” It also happened habitually, as when senior members would spontaneously undress in front of unsuspecting newbies in “jump scares.” The Band also collected and maintained intimate information about its members—any sexual experience was subject to irrevocable and uncontestable inscription on “The Napkin” or incorporation into the Band’s choral repertoire. Meanwhile, as Amilcar notes, “The secretive nature of the CUMB consequently created a hostile environment that discouraged members from speaking out against inappropriate actions or events… we were forbidden from discussing Band events with non-Bandies.” CUMB thus predicated membership in its social community not only on subjection to harassment, but on complicity in its cover-up. The Band claimed to accept everyone who wanted to participate but made it difficult for many to feel comfortable doing so. Choosing to leave, however, came with its own costs. Tate reflected on the fact that she had not recently spoken to many friends who had left the Band due to negative experiences—and although she expressed regret over this, her anecdote is a powerful reminder of the Band’s power to isolate those it drove away. Considering the profiles of typical Band recruits—usually outsiders, rejects from other groups on campus, students “who really didn’t know where to go”—a Bandie’s choice to leave might have amounted to forfeiting the only friendship they had on campus. And the degree to which many older students fused their personas with that of the Band made departure a potential identity crisis. So the Band presented each member with a grotesque choice between subjecting oneself to sexual harassment and losing the community that had drawn them to the Band in the first place. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the Band’s sexual culture was the contradiction between the chaotic libertinism it claimed as its spirit and the explicit subjection of members to relationships of unequal power. Sexualized forms of hazing exercised the power of higher-ranked members over newcomers; the recitation of former members’ sexual exploits, many of which were enshrined in the constitution, use the trope of sex as conquest to assert power over rival schools’ Bands; even the frequent sexualization of the Band’s public image could be interpreted as an attempt to claim social power among an age group for whom sexuality is often linked with social status. The Band’s assertions of its sexuality, then, marked the point at which bottom-up efforts to assert power against perceived external authority devolved into top-down abuse of power against peers. V. “I was very lost and it was a place that was offering substances. And I wanted to explore. I didn’t know what I was doing, which I think is a lot of people.” – Joan Tate, CC ’22, former CUMB Poet Laureate CUMB’s “traditions” of harassment, hazing, and peer-pressure-induced drinking most obviously impacted those who were uncomfortable or unconsenting, but Band culture took its toll on even its most enthusiastic adherents. Tate explained to me that although she always thought of CUMB’s debauchery as optional, she often dove headfirst into the Band’s substance-centered events, both in desperate pursuit of social acceptance and in an attempt to reckon with more personal questions of identity. And while Tate emphasized that she was speaking to her particular experience, it’s unlikely that these patterns were unique. Several former Band members emphasized the naiveté of first-years entering the Band. One remarked to the Spectator, “As a freshman, you don’t know what is just uncomfortable and what is a threat.” Given the Band’s appeal to students who are looking for a community or uncertain about their identity, it’s clear that the bacchanalian traditions often took advantage of its newcomers’ inexperience. Tate described many CUMB initiates as “people who don’t know what they’re doing or are at a very vulnerable time in their life, and they are being told, look, you don’t have to drink, but everyone’s doing it.” Internally, many members of the marching band justified such pressures by pointing to the few members of the Band who successfully refused to drink. But even if the drinking culture was technically optional, it enabled and legitimized substance abuse as a valid response to personal crises and external stresses, a manipulative practice that had the potential to cause long-lasting damage to its most vulnerable members. Furthermore, those not driven away from the institutionalized harassment detailed above were left desensitized to instances of sexual assault and generally troubling attitudes about consent. As described by former members, sexual encounters at Band events were often treated as insignificant, and often took place when participants were far too inebriated to give affirmative consent. And that “no one batted an eye” at this toxic behavior normalized it among the incoming first-years, many of whom were grappling with the concept of consent for the first time. The Columbia Confessions posts that precipitated the Band’s downfall—primarily accounts of actions committed by Band members against non-members—demonstrate the ripple effect of this twisted acculturation throughout the surrounding community, as individual members imposed the Band’s culture of irresponsibility on students across campus. VI. “I thought it was hilariously draconian when they tried to dissolve the Marching Band. The whole thing felt like a Beginner Fiction Workshop submission where the professor commented, “Your villain is one dimensional and not believable. Who would dissolve a marching band for performing in a library? AND threaten to cut the students’ financial aid? What would they have to gain!?” – Jacob Kaplan, Bwog Senior Wisdom, 2020 But for all its internal tumult, most of the public CUMB-related drama over the last four years concerned a feud with the Columbia administration. As has been extensively chronicled elsewhere, the Band was kicked out of Butler, snuck back in, lost its funding, performed outside under threat of further punishment, was disbanded by the administration, and was reinstated after intervention from the incensed alumni. According to Pondikos, the saga distracted from the board’s efforts to reform some of the Band’s most problematic practices. External pressures from the administration shifted the immediate goals toward “what we could do to get admin’s respect.” Furthermore, the amount of work required from board members in dealing with the controversy made it more difficult for them to deal with other pressing matters inside the organization. “Executive board members were expected to liaise between administration and alumni as well as to handle the inevitable conflicts that arise as a result of what the Band does,” Pondikos said. Externally, however, CUMB’s war with the Columbia administration was the best PR gift they could have asked for, as media coverage shifted away from the Band’s political insensitivities and toward an anti-establishment narrative that was more sympathetic to the public. Bwog’s announcement of CUMB’s expulsion was accompanied by a photo of Chief Librarian and Vice Provost Ann Thornton—who had requested that the Band be ejected—edited by CUMB members to include devil eyes and the Grinch’s Santa-hat; the Spectator’s Editorial Board published a statement opposing the move; the New York Times wrote of Fall 2018 Orgo Night, “It is hard to see who would be aggrieved by these kinds of attacks on power, except perhaps the power structure itself.” The specific actions taken by the University played directly into this narrative, validating the Band’s greatest institutional paranoias and threatening exactly those elements of the Band that made them a sympathetic organization. By choosing to justify the original expulsion with “complaints from students about the expected disruption of their study time,” rather than the political backdrop to the event, the administration willingly played the part of the self-serious, hyper-academic, stress culture-inducing behemoth the Band claimed to oppose. Because the administration supported this logic by invoking library rules, it also framed the opposition to Orgo Night as coming from the administration rather than the student body. According to Tate, one of the Band’s motivations to continue performing despite uncertainties about many of its traditions was the prospect of a University-sponsored replacement—one that was sanitized and free of CUMB’s boisterous culture. Rowan told the New York Times that members of the administration “want something that’s pretty on a brochure.” To confirm these fears, after banning CUMB from atheletic events, Columbia hired straight-laced high-school marching bands from the surrounding area as temporary stand-ins and announced plans for a permanent University-sponsored replacement Band—one that would require auditions. Meanwhile, many of the administration’s tactics in disciplining the Band ended up disproportionately targeting its low-income students. Given the Band’s relatively high proportion of members who fell into this category, this only further exacerbated its public status as an underdog organization. Cutting the Band’s original sources of funding quashed its ability to pay for transportation to games, instruments, uniforms, repairs, meals during Band trips—funding that made membership possible for students who could not otherwise pay for those things themselves. The Band argued that the sources of funding proposed by the administration, through Undergraduate Student Life, would not have been sufficient to sustainably cover those expenses for each student. The worst look for the administration was its threat to jeopardize the financial aid of individual students—a form of disciplinary action completely determined by the income of each student subject to it. And so, as the final cohort of CUMB leaders were arriving on campus, the group’s defining struggle was against an authoritarian bureaucracy that bullied low-income students, a battle far more appealing than the culture wars of just a few years before. VII. “Orgo Night… It’s like, a lot of white people screaming or something.” – Danielle Evans, quoting a suite-mate, in a Spec Op-Ed, 2004 But CUMB’s claims to being an institutional underdog must have rung particularly hollow to those who remembered its previous era, particularly many students of color. The Band maintained its status as, in Pondikos’ terms, a “Predominantly White Institution” by alienating students of color while also benefiting from institutional treatment not afforded to BIPOC students. Even if, as Rowan attested, race has never been a formal barrier to entry, it is not hard to understand why the Band made a hostile impression on many students of color. A group whose members at recruitment events cried, “Is that what massa’ says to the slaves?” would not likely present itself as a welcoming community to prospective BIPOC members; a public event where the “jokes” have included, according to Tate, a bunch of white people screaming the n-word while blaring air-horns, would not be a cherished campus tradition to BIPOC students in the audience. As Evans noted in her 2004 op-ed, the Band’s reputation as a group by and for white people preceded it, which remained true until the end, even if many of its members attempted to reform some of its most racist practices. While many Band members and alumni relished the vehement opposition to their foibles, their opponents noted that the consistent levels of support for the Band shown by both students and alumni reflected broader racist insensitivities within the campus community. In a more recent Spectator op-ed, Dunni Oduyemi and Tracey Wang argued, “The unification of predominantly white students who think it’s okay to laugh at the trauma we feel on a daily basis is literally the creation of an unsafe space.” The defense most commonly levelled against those protesting Orgo Night by both students and administrators—its status as a long-standing tradition—was particularly grating given what Evans describes as Columbia’s “real tradition of isolating minority students and exacerbating the problem with its approach to the study of marginalized groups.” And despite the Band’s complaints of administrative injustice, critics have often noted a discrepancy between administrative responses to the Band’s most incendiary actions and to public controversies surrounding students of color, with the latter usually facing far more immediate consequences. Pondikos explained that this discrepancy in official responses reinforced CUMB’s status as a PWI, with the Band’s culture “weeding out students of color who could not equitably participate in the Band’s ‘chaos’ without facing disproportionate repercussions.” In other words, social life in the Band often revolved around controversial activities, such as extreme drunkenness, petty theft, and public obnoxiousness, that only white members could partake in with the confidence that they could get away with it. VIII. “You don’t ever have to drink, but all the cool kids are doing it.” – CUMB_Constitution, ratified November 2019 It’s difficult to determine the impact of the Band’s past controversies on its final cohort. Nearly all of the members I spoke to emphasized the difference in perspectives between themselves and the Band’s alumni—and although the alumni were very vocal about “preserving Band tradition,” those from different eras often had wildly different ideas of what that tradition actually was. According to Pondikos, the last cohort had dismissed concerns about the Band’s troubling history when joining, telling themselves, “we aren’t like that anymore.” Meanwhile, many were engaged in an ongoing effort to reform the Band’s most egregious practices and texts, rewriting songs to remove particularly offensive lines. Tate described to me an attempt among recent Poet Laureates to reorient the humor of their Orgo Night jokes in order to “punch up.” The board banned the Napkin—their written record of Band members’ sexual activity—in September 2019 and very slowly began to question their institutional dependence on alcohol. But reforming ingrained attitudes and practices was an uphill battle. “‘Reforms’ have taken place every year,” Pondikos said. “But with each reform came pressure to retain the ‘tradition’ we all learned to praise and follow religiously.” Alumni—particularly the younger ones, who hailed from an era when the Band was concerned primarily with offending as much as they possibly could—proved a reactionary influence, singing the removed lyrics at events and giving advice on running the Band that often conflicted with reform efforts. After CUMB’s feud with the administration, the Band came to rely on the alumni much more heavily for funding and negotiations with the University, making their input even harder to ignore. Such debates regularly arose regarding particularly problematic lines in the CUMB Constitution during its annual revision—whether to preserve them for the sake of CUMB tradition or to excise them for the sake of institutional reform. The resulting compromise was a document that preserved some of the embattled lines, but crossed them out—a portrait of an institution battling within itself, of a culture suppressed but never fully out of sight. The Band’s ambiguous history encouraged its worst tendencies: Even as progressive-minded members pushed for change, the lingering influence of the old ways validated the misanthropic and reckless actions of those who found them appealing. And so, while none of the members I spoke to knew anything about the specific incidents described on Columbia Confessions, they didn’t doubt their veracity. As Pondikos put it, “It doesn’t surprise me to know that someone would take the Band’s culture and run with it like that.” IX. “The pandemic most certainly was, I would say, a nail in the coffin.” – Joan Tate As multiple former members related, the COVID-induced period of remote learning proved a watershed moment for the Band. When members had the opportunity to remove themselves from CUMB-centered campus life and emerge from its cave of suffocating mythologies, they were finally able to separate their own identities from that of the group: “With distance from the Band, a lot of people kind of recognized where they were and who they were, which is kind of hard to do when you’re in the Band,” Tate said. “I know that my identity was incredibly tied to the Band for a long time.” Their reflections weren’t pretty. “The Band saw what we really were,” said Tate. Pondikos ventured even further: “I realized that there was no real community in the Band as a result of the shift to online learning. Although we’d all been around each other in a social setting before, it felt really uncomfortable watching everyone get drunk individually through my computer screen.” The Columbia Confessions posts from the following summer bolstered these unsavory ruminations, giving members the language to interpret their experiences in an even more revealing way. “The Confessions posts named many of the Band’s traditions as hazing and sexual violence, which I hadn’t realized until then,” Pondikos said. “I hadn’t processed the fear and discomfort I felt until way after the fact.” The posts drew attention to the persistence of structural and cultural issues within the group, making it impossible for Band members to continue dismissing them as relics of the past. At this point, some saw the writing on the wall: By the time the Band was discussing full dissolution, five board members had already resigned. The transition to remote life thus stripped the Band of the power it held over its members. CUMB had often functioned as an emotional crutch, its members trapped (and simultaneously complicit) in an abusive environment out of fear—of losing their community, of facing uncertainties about their identity, of complete isolation. Quarantine not only realized those fears, but made clear CUMB’s fundamental inability to address them in ways that were healthy, meaningful, and enduring. As Pondikos said, “The Band being stripped of its superficial notion of community was the first step in its downfall.” X. “While substantial efforts have been made in recent years toward undo-ing decades of wrongdoing, we as a Band feel ultimately that it is impossible to reform an organization so grounded in prejudiced culture and traditions.” – Official CUMB Statement of Dissolution, 2020 Meanwhile, this summer, the largest civil rights movement in half a century was demanding existential reckonings across the country. BIPOC activists and organizers brought the language of abolition into national discourses, insisting that reform can never root out racism from institutions and systems that are racist and racialized to their core, from police departments to prisons to capitalism itself. Though the movement ought not be reduced to a debate between reform and abolition, that discussion seemed to emerge everywhere, including on campus. Band members, too, started to explore the possibility that, in the end, any efforts to merely change the group would be futile. The summer’s movements also asserted that an institution must maintain a community’s trust in order to serve it. As Tate and Pondikos both explained, the fallout from the Confessions posts made it explicitly clear that even a reformed Band would and could not earn the trust of the Columbia student population—not to properly respond to sexual harassment, nor to “fight stress culture,” nor to foster a healthy community of any kind. In addition to its internal support, the Band had lost its public mandate to exist. So Pondikos, citing the Black Lives Matter movement, the campaign against Greek life, and the wave of Columbia Confessions posts as immediate influences, co-wrote a letter to the CUMB executive board advocating for full disbandment of the Band in all capacities. And the rest, as they say, is history. Some of the Band members I spoke to expressed hope that a new Band, one free of CUMB traditions, leadership, and especially alumni—yet similarly financially accessible and welcoming—might eventually form in its place. For Tate, this was yet another reason that dissolution was necessary: By continuing to exist, the Band would take up space on campus that might otherwise be filled by something better. It is apt, perhaps, that a group that broke with the authoritarian tradition of the American marching band during the political tumult of the ‘60s would choose to once again break off from a reactionary past and build something new. At the very least, it would make for a very good story. #November2020

By Judy Xie 9/17/20 I began the day by trying to unvisit it or yesterday or the weeks that came before it. For so long I have wanted for us to freeze in a moment. To just pause and be. Everything is so different now. In public, your head is always covered and you feel the creeping suspicion—even more so now—that someone is watching. You are probably right. But I wish this would not stop you from being. It does. This morning I decided my face over Zoom does not matter much. So I spend five minutes of Lit Hum making strange ones. Yesterday a girl told me she noticed that I was always taking my hat on and off and on and touching my hair and braiding and on.on.on. I wonder if she noticed the funny faces. Zoom has made things unexciting almost enough for me to miss high school. Which makes me miss you again. Mostly I think it is just you. Instead of saying you are crazy dear: You used to say—these are just things you do. Like driving poorly or turning right on red in Boston. Where nowhere no one tells you not to except the blaring horns and slamming breaks around you. You never notice anything wrong. This is just how you are. Until you arrive in Cambridge or the town 10 minutes down from Cambridge (so basically Cambridge). And you feel that you are still that same person but you are not. Calling has become very hard. I have met someone. Today, I plastered baking soda on his nose. He sees me differently. 9/20/20 I began the day by asking Mom if I can stay home from school: She does not see the irony in this. Instead she checks my temperature, and I roll over. When I was a kid (still am), it was dangerous to be seen. Some days I was certain of my body’s slow decay- smells of the dried spit and fust crush of my hair. I was also certain that ghosts lay hermited in my shoulders: specifically because that was where I was always cold. I haven’t felt this way in days or months, and I think this must be a good thing or it must be summer or I have not forgotten to be a living thing. Sometimes I am convinced that the battery life on my phone is a reminder that I am a living thing—with living people and living and living. I am two hours late to meet my friend. I apologize profusely for each hour that I hold off. When I see them I swear I have never seen anything more beautiful. The way he is framed in the field and the marsh and the light. There are blue and yellows and of course he is clothed in all black. One color. I remember the face of one person and then another and another. I tell myself it has to stop at two (otherwise it is no longer real or beautiful). Three if I can will it. When I stare at him, he looks almost in tears. We share this. We sit on a park bench. The plan was to read but instead he takes out a pen and marks my arm haphazardly with dashes. He tells me about the parchment he keeps on his dorm wall where he marks down ideas and thoughts and everything that just won’t shut up. The other day he destroyed himself, slathered his lips in Hershey’s Kisses and then kissed the wall—and inscribed his lips. I ask if he is okay. He does not respond. We take turns drawing lines on his arm. We make a person. We take turns drawing letters. We make a name: Rambugey. 9/18/20 I begin the day with the sweep and blur of red-brake lights beyond our wipers as we pull up slowly to the speed bump. This is where I went to elementary school, and this high school, and this the hill I lost my kiss-virginity on. It’s all here: 50-mile radius to a bump. With this, you turn to me with your pointer finger raised and press it solidly against my forehead and I go backwards as you accelerate forwards. The back of my head bounces off the car-seat by your finger or physics—I do not know. But I’m sure you do. You deny this across the dinner table. We are driving down a road or highway. I am convinced that every road is now I-89 with your hands on the wheel. You don’t do anything flashy like drive with your knees or spin the wheel super fast and wink there’s no– I like to live dangerously or you scared darling? You are just driving & I find… I like this. We make two stops. An overlook. With the landscape stretched before us where the only walls are punched clear of my held breath. Here, I inhale the air like possibility. I did it in enthusiasm to forget my body was still there, still a solid thing. Because in front of us it felt like the world was opening up in vast caverns of green and green like a sea to fall into and I wanted this to keep. A college. It gets dark, and the airbnb we stay in has no A/C or Wifi and there is nobody, nothing out here except the stars and the cows. But it’s enough. I lean back against the splintered—step and look up at the sky, an elbow to prop up my torso—I turn to you and say— “Out there is a time-capsule version of us.” #November2020

GOODBYE, SYLLABI. New challenges rock the Core Curriculum’s staunch traditions. By Nicole Kohut & Claire Schweitzer. While the Core Curriculum may advertise itself as the immovable benchmark of the Columbia experience, it has yielded to widespread pedagogical and curricular transformation in recent months and years. Initiatives to expand Core syllabi beyond the Western canon and other hegemonic discourses by including more works by women and people of color have been accruing for years. But the pandemic and a summer of mass mobilization against anti-Black racism pushed the organizers of the Core to make rapid alterations to their teaching styles and content. These decisions have effectively redefined the status of the Core while leaving students and faculty wondering about the future of Columbia’s academic cornerstone. As the only required full-year class for Columbia College first-years, Literature Humanities is meant to foster intellectual and social collaboration, which is perhaps why its syllabus often faces heightened scrutiny. As Professor Jessica Stalnaker, the Program Chair for Literature Humanities put it, “The syllabus has often been criticized dating back quite some time for the lack of diversity—whether it be the prevalence of male authors, the emphasis on Greek and Roman antiquity, or the lack of authors of color and Black authors in particular on the syllabus.” She explained how the department has tried to contend with these issues: Toni Morrison was both the first Black and the first living author to be added to the syllabus in 2015, and in the 2018-2019 academic year, Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home From the Wars was added. According to Professor Stalnaker, adding a contemporary work was a way to “encourage students to think dynamically about how contemporary authors pick up on, revise, subvert, and even undermine the traditions [they] are reading in fall semester.” A more rapid alteration was made to the syllabus after this summer’s national reckoning with racism—the addition of the poem Citizen, by Claudia Rankine. Professor Zachary Roberts, a veteran Literature Humanities instructor and Core Lecturer, understood Citizen as a vital opportunity to integrate more discussions about race into the virtual Lit Hum classroom. He did, however, struggle with its placement to the very beginning of the syllabus. He recounted a brutally honest conversation with his students regarding the new material in which he told them, “I found it fascinating and perplexing, but I didn’t know what to do with it as a poem or book, which is good—you should be bewildered by something and that’s what this semester is about.” His decision to return to the poem at the end of the semester, he hopes, will give them “the opportunity to examine the text with the tools we develop by reading epic, lyric, and tragedies.” He hasn’t welcomed every change, though: he noted his disappointment that Herodotus, a LitHum staple, was removed from this year’s syllabus. To him, it’s “the only place on the syllabus in which you got to discuss ethnicity, cultural difference, empire and race.” While the recent additions to the syllabus exemplify a more inclusive Columbia community, Professor Roberts reminds us that such changes cannot stand in for close reading, critical thinking, and good teaching. Ultimately, it is up to the professors to maintain a discourse throughout Zoom classes that meets expectations for diversity and inclusivity at Columbia, regardless of which texts remain on the syllabus. Other Core programs have also undergone changes in pursuit of inclusivity. The Contemporary Civilization curriculum now begins with five texts on race and justice in America by authors including David Walker, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis, rather than Plato’s Republic. An overwhelming majority of the CC faculty supported this change. Professor Emmanuelle Saada, the Chair of Contemporary Civilization, explained that in creating the adjustments, instructors “wanted to frame the year with those texts to show the students that CC is really a reflection about the present—it is, afterall, called Contemporary Civilization.” Contemporary Civilization was first integrated into the Core Curriculum to encourage students to think historically and philosophically about contemporary problems, and according to Professor Saada, “racial justice is one of the most important of those problems.” In contrast, the semester-long Core class Art Humanities has undergone a two-and-a-half year reform process rather than immediate changes. Women and people of color, who were previously not included in the curriculum at all, were finally added, including Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This year’s students will also be exposed to the curriculum’s first induction of non-Western objects: a Kru mask from West Africa. Professor Noam Elcott, the Chair for Art Humanities, described the change as necessary because “women and people of color pervade both the artworks we study and the types of questions we ask.” When asked about why he thinks this change has taken so long, Elcott reasoned, “Change is hard. There are only about 50 institutions that have existed continuously since the year 1500, and the reality is that they change slowly.” Art Humanities’ counterpart, Music Humanities, was modified this fall, with the addition of Black musicians including Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. These alterations in content appear to be igniting new, valuable conversations in Zoom classrooms. Meanwhile, changes in methodology may threaten the very identity of the Core Curriculum, the aspect that precipitates both stress and bonding among classmates: its tests. Literature Humanities, which used to have a mandated program-wide final and a class-specific midterm, now has neither, allowing individual professors to choose the assignments and grading metrics for their own classes for the first time ever. This is a substantial shift for Lit Hum, whose testing relics have literally gone down in the Columbia College history books: Professor Benjamin VanWagoner, who is in his second year as a Literature Humanities instructor, described a “terrifying and hilarious” archive hidden in the trenches of the Core office that contains quizzes and tests dating back to the 1960s, all of which serve as testaments to the Core’s traditions. The fact these annals were meticulously preserved is perhaps why it was so surprising to hear that Professor Larry Jackson, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Core Curriculum and Undergraduate Programs at Columbia College, has noticed a “lot of excitement about the alternative forms of assignments that [teachers] have come up with.” It wasn’t just the pandemic that made Lit Hum shift its gears, though. For years, faculty have already engaged in debates over whether to have a department-wide final exam when instructors were allowed to focus on different material throughout the year. For instance, Professor Roberts has been implementing alternative midterms for years, having students create art, memes, dances, and games to express what they’ve learned from the course. For those like Roberts, then, Zoom simply presented an opportunity to explore the creative ends of the Core more fully. Despite the enthusiasm for creative assignments, some professors worry that expectations for students may become looser than the Core’s norm. VanWagoner said, “I sense that I have to find other ways to encourage students to do the readings, because there is not the same pressure to do them.” This anticipated fear seems to be reflected in concrete changes for CC, including Saada’s proposal that colleagues assign a smaller amount of reading for their classes—“not to be less demanding of students in terms of intellectual conversations, but rather to understand the material difficulties that students face now.” Additionally, Jackson explained the trimming of assignments as an acceptance of the challenges of focusing and having productive discussions in a virtual classroom. The fear that students might slack off when it comes to the integrity of their coursework isn’t unfounded. Last spring, while Columbia was in virtual turmoil, Frontiers of Science was shaken by a significant infringement of academic integrity. In an email sent to the entire class—half of all first-years in Columbia College—after the final exam, Professor Ivana Hughes revealed that instructors had found “clear evidence that a number of them engaged in the sharing of information that was not consistent with our academic honesty policies.” Professor Hughes explained that she was aware when designing the exam that it would be easy to cheat—she just didn’t think students would even attempt it considering the cushion provided by the universal pass/fail mandate. And, while Hughes mentioned the violation of Columbia’s honor code in her email, the ramifications for those who cheated on the final did not parallel Colombia’s typical protocol. Students who cheat normally face suspension, expulsion, or an automatic fail, but the Fro Sci class of Spring 2020 simply had to write a reflection email to their seminar leaders discussing what they did and why they won’t do it again. But how will all of these transformations affect students’ long-term academic experiences? Core classes are meant to form the foundation of a Columbia student’s four undergraduate years, so what happens if the foundation students receive from a Zoom curriculum doesn’t continue when classes resume in person and the teaching methodologies shift once again? Stalnaker explained that the continuation of changes made to syllabi and alternative assessments “will be open to debate” when and if Columbia reaches a post-COVID norm. “The use of most of those online resources won’t end after we return,” Professor Elcott predicts. “Breakout rooms are hugely successful, and we will try to replicate that when we go to in person classes. For online annotations of texts, we will never go back to doing it by hand.” While professors can’t promise that their alternative assignments will prepare students for classes in the future, many are trying to maintain another facet of the classroom usually fundamental to yearlong courses like Lit Hum and CC: a sense of community. Professor Jackson explained that faculty conceived of certain structural changes to further this goal, such as encouraging virtual events to substitute for in-person field trips and designating sessions for students to interact with each other outside of structured class time. Amidst these successes are key hurdles that students and faculty are struggling to overcome: Zoom fatigue and choppy classroom conversations. Professor VanWagoner explained how difficult it is to create the same dynamic of a Core class over Zoom. Between “two hours of everyone staring at each other’s faces” and the “challenge of keeping people’s energy high,” professors are having difficulty creating the spontaneous, dynamic discussions that they are used to. Additionally, he explained, the intimacy of the Core classroom has been stripped away by our new online rhetoric—22 students now feels like 100, and hesitance to participate is at an all-time high. The failed possibility for smaller class sizes comes as a major loss for those like Professor Stalnaker who believe that “the single most important goal of LitHum is that everyone is pooling their ideas and reactions as readers.” Yet Professor Jackson has found that, for the most part, faculty “have found that being online has not compromised the quality of conversation in the classroom.” In fact, he cited that an added perk of online learning is that some students feel more comfortable speaking online than in a class environment. For example, he explained that in Frontiers of Science, lectures are viewed asynchronously with a live Q&A hosted separately, in which students participate much more actively than they had during a comparable in-person Q&A. He thinks that the added time afforded to students to consider the lecture and to prepare questions beforehand has contributed to this method’s success. Several professors also expressed the plurality of ways their syllabi can continue to be reckoned with, especially to further consider the balance between works that speak to the present and those that engage with tradition, and how to increase the representation of the former without sacrificing the latter. As VanWagoner put it, “I think Literature Humanities is a valuable exercise so long as we realize we have the responsibility to change and react to the canon as we study it. It’s not a course just to absorb.” Opportunities to further reform the Lit Hum curriculum are plentiful, especially because the course is due for a syllabus review this year. Such events always mark chances for the Core at large to grow, but this year they carry new weight. As the Core’s centennial celebrations occurred just last year, its endurance in this uncertain environment raises questions about what its near future will look like, as well as how it will evolve over the next century. Professor VanWagoner hopes that “the syllabus continues to recognize that not every valuable writer from before the common era was a Greek dude.” Additionally, he expressed his desire for it to become more interdisciplinary, reasoning that “there’s a danger to flattening LitHum,” wherein it is completely isolated from other courses. He hopes in the future, Lit Hum will provide more opportunities for students to embrace modes of analysis that connect to a wide variety of academic disciplines, not just classics or literature. “We will see the Core continue to reach into the past, but I think that we will also see it responding increasingly to changes in our world today,” Jackson surmised. “We will continually be thinking about what students need in order to go out into that world and to grapple with the problems that they are going to be facing.” Conversations with faculty and students remind us of the tendency to idolize the Core. Stalnaker explained that when these texts were written, “they were often subversive and challenged existing traditions,” making them applicable to the type of intellectual and critical discourse that the core encouraged. But as time went on, they were plastered onto pedagogical pedestals. “If you just accept a syllabus, you can have a tendency to reify the ideas of value,” Stalnaker said. “These canons are constructed, and oftentimes with political stakes…and if you don’t examine the stakes and the way that the construction happened, then you are not really engaging with what literature is supposed to be, which I think is to challenge received ideas.” As this semester has proven, it is possible to modify course material with the modern student in mind. Although it may have taken a global pandemic to stir dramatic change in the Core Office, instructors seem to believe in their collective capacity to connect ancient and contemporary discourses and values. And though many of the events that precipitated these reforms were unpredictable, instructors are responding and adapting by creating a new archive, both curricular and pedagogical, at Columbia. #November2020

Affirmative By Nicole Kohut I always knew I’d lose my virginity in college. Not because I was a prude in high school, but because of my tragically specific sexual kinks: twin XL beds, stained walls, and central heating. To put it bluntly, I have always fantasized about giving it up in a personally renovated shithole. Let me take you back. It all began when I was introduced to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Seeing cracked molding and broken bunk beds become extravagant living spaces at utterly reasonable price points was liberating. I thought to myself, “That’s it! That’s the feeling I want to achieve when the moment comes for me to unlock my chastity belt.” Unfortunately, neither my king-sized bed nor my bidet needed upgrading. But waiting didn’t matter to me because I knew it would all be worth it–perhaps even season-finale level—so I counted the days until my steamy, eminently upgradable 60-square-foot single in Hartley. Then again, I never expected to lose my virginity over Zoom. Was losing housing a setback? Absolutely. Did it put the kibosh on my pubescent fantasy? Not in the slightest. I refused to wait any longer. The time was now. I quickly realized that the hardest part of my journey to sexual liberation would now be finding the perfect mate. Then, after scrolling through the entire CFIG, LionFund, and Columbia Alpha Partners rosters, I found you. I started by attending the virtual info session for your finance club–showing interest, you know, but not too much interest. Once you learned my name, I admit I launched what would grow into a veritable cascade of submissions to Columbia Confessions, making it appear as though hundreds of eligible lions were enamored of my beauty and dying to date me. In no time, you placed the two of us alone in a breakout room together during a club meeting. Then you finally popped the question in the chat: “wanna have phone sex tn ;)” Ecstatic, I sent you a GCal invite for 2:25 p.m. (11:25 a.m. for you, with the time difference)—right after my first peer review in University Writing. The next step was to claim the perfect location. I needed to find a dorm-like spot to enact my fantasy, if only on cam. After some cursory research and a late night stroll, I soon stumbled upon an abandoned Spirit Halloween store. I took it upon myself to put a downpayment on the lot. I figured it was the least I could do to make the moment as magical as possible–you were, after all, upgrading to Zoom Pro for the occasion. The Zoom experience mirrored reality: like anyone on the cusp of deflowerment, I was shy and insecure at the start. To get in the mood, I tested different lighting and angles, asking my classmates to pin my video and rate my appearance on a scale from one to ten. One of my friends managed to get on-campus housing, so I had her send me a photo of her dorm’s view for my Zoom background. I was disappointed to receive an image of a brick wall covered in cobwebs, so I ended up going with a photo of the New York City skyline instead. Besides the store’s surplus of hitachi magic wands, there were really no materials for me to use to spruce up the place. I knew I had to hire a last-minute U-Haul to bring my essentials: therapeutic mattress topper, Egyptian cotton sheets, bedjet, and lava lamp. When the moment finally arrived, I almost backed out, but the “fix imperfections” setting calmed my nerves. I undressed slowly to the sound of your heavy breathing in the background. The ominous mid-day grunts coming from surrounding rooms formed a symphony whilst we consummated our love. The only blip in my plan occurred when you said “The wifi in your sex dungeon’s kind of spotty” in the chat. Ultimately, however, it was just me, you and the NSA agent monitoring my screen sharing a beautiful moment together. In fact, I’m glad I lost my virginity over Zoom. Unlike a typical sexual awakening, this isn’t a memory that will be confined in our minds alone, slowly withering away, buffered details fading as we age. Whenever we want to reminisce about our debaucherous debut, there will always be a recording waiting for us in the Columbia Cloud. Negative By Michael Colton I’m laying on the mangled remains of my twin XL bed’s labrador-golden frame. You, caked in glitter and spread-eagled across my body, haven’t stopped panting for seven or eight minutes. This Furnald single is steamier than the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo, and just as dimly lit. I don’t necessarily blame you for that. I do, however, blame you for using pyrotechnics in my room. And for breaking my bed during a “never-before-seen aerial silk maneuver.” I might not be so critical if anything remotely intimate had happened between us. Regrettably, I have no choice but to offer some honest notes from the perspective of a (fully-clothed) audience member. And, no, the “sex” was not good for me. To be clear, it never happened. Nevertheless, your act has legs, and I’d love to work with you to find something here. Let’s start at the top. I could tell from the instant you walked through my door that you had plans to be a star. Maybe you just have that “Broadway energy.” More likely, it was the white silk gloves, petticoat, and top-hat that told me I was about to crotch-tango with a showbiz type. Beyond that entrance, though, your first 10 minutes were mostly flat. I was with you through the card tricks, and the bit with the parrot that said filthy words was cute. But you lost me with your performance of “America the Beautiful”—it’s a touching song but, honestly, a bit incongruous with the rest of your material. Maybe something with a bit more pop! could do. Try Dolly Parton, or maybe a show tune. Actually, maybe I’m wrong about the song. I was still slightly expecting to get laid when you started singing it, so the moment’s poignancy could have been totally lost on me. Your call. Despite the slow start, I thought you ultimately threw together a pretty workable variety show. Around two and a half pages into my notes, I’ve written: “‘Disco Ball/Rollerskates’—YES.” By this point, my focus had shifted from the fact that my pants were still on, and I began to realize that I was witnessing potential greatness. “Greatness” is a strong word, but I think that’s where you’re headed if you just punch your act up a little bit. Tuck in your legs when you do the triple axle; don’t try the aerial ribbons thing again; go easy on the pyrotechnics. The Roman candles were fun, the firework spelling your name was perplexing yet oddly beautiful, but the old-fashioned cannonball with a big cartoon wick was your downfall. And by that I mean that it was the downfall of the structural integrity of my dorm. But I won’t gripe too much about that. Honestly, I think I’ve been pretty generous, given the whole “I thought this was a sex-hang out because we agreed it was” thing. I’ll end with this: your show is as good as its weakest link. If you keep at it, I expect to see you on stage in Vegas someday. Call me when that time comes, or if you ever actually want to, you know, do it. #November2020

BRAVE NEW WORLD. Southeast of Morningside Heights, Manhattan Valley business owners grapple with COVID and Columbia. By Annelie Hyatt. The sun consumes the streets, rescuing the asphalt from the burgeoning October chill. It is Saturday afternoon on Amsterdam Avenue, and the streets are closed to vehicle traffic; pedestrians can venture out of quarantine to eat under a restaurant’s canopied outdoor seating area, or they may simply ditch the pavement for the wide breadth of the streets, unimpeded by its normally suffocating traffic. The Columbus-Amsterdam Business Improvement District (BID) has overseen Amsterdam Avenue Open Streets since the middle of August, when the NYC Department of Transportation permitted them to bar cars from 97th Street to 110th Street on weekends. This endeavor does not impact Morningside Heights, which has yet to announce any Open Streets programs in their neighborhood. Open Streets enables restaurants to extend their seating areas into the streets, where many customers shed their masks and converse with friends as they eat. Parents push their children in strollers, residents run their errands, and people spend their afternoons outdoors, their bones still aching from the chronic loneliness of the past half-year. Wandering the streets of Manhattan Valley, it is easy to forget its dynamic history. In the early 18th century, it constituted but a small section of Bloomingdale Road, which ran from Madison Square to West 147th Street. The neighborhood gets its name from the natural depression that occurs on the Upper West Side. Much of its tenement architecture was constructed in the early 1800s while it was populated by German and Irish immigrants. In the 1950s and 1960s, white flight beset the neighborhood, leaving a vacuum that many Latinx residents filled. Although the area began to gentrify as early as the 1980s, and its population of white residents has increased, Latinx people remain the most represented group in the neighborhood, constituting 40% of residents, in comparison to the 27% of residents that are white, the 21.1% of residents that are Black, and the 4.5% of residents that are Asian, according to a 2018 study conducted by Columbia. Similar to many of the neighborhoods in the city that sustained severe disinvestment in the 1970s and 1980s, Manhattan Valley gained notoriety for its crime rates and gangs. The neighborhood, though, began to consciously distance itself from this reputation in the nineties. Associations such as the Columbus-Amsterdam BID were created to provide employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for local residents, and have since supported a number of small businesses that serve the neighborhood’s diverse population. In response to the pandemic, the BID has restructured Manhattan Valley to accommodate its people, who are free to spill onto the streets in the absence of spatial restrictions. This portrait of vibrant city life was inconceivable in March, when nearly two-thirds of the restaurants in Manhattan Valley closed their doors. “No one was coming around,” said Norma Jean Darden, who co-owns the Southern restaurant Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too on 110th street. “Everyone was in a panic. You would see people with huge boxes of food from grocery stores, because they didn’t know how long they’d be in their homes. And so long as they were buying all that food and cooking it at home…” Darden laughed. As revenues plummeted, many restaurant owners discovered additional expenses brought on by the pandemic. “The amount of staff needed has gone up,” said Jacob Poznak, the owner of Moonrise Izakaya, a Japanese gastropub that celebrated its first-year anniversary in October located on 96th street. Not only did their number of tables rise due to the increased dining space provided for them, but the distance traveled by waiters did as well. “Whereas pre-COVID, servers would handle multiple tables at one time, given the cleanliness and sanitation processes we’ve implemented, you can’t carry food outside for two different tables at one time. You have to make two different trips.” Most restaurants had to subsist on the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a federal Small Business Administration loan meant to help businesses continue to pay their employees. But for many, this money is running out―or already has. “I’ve started to make decisions on whether I can continue assigning the same amount of shifts my employees are working now,” said Steve Hlay, the owner of Crepes on Columbus, near 109th Street. Hlay was excited about the possibility of a second federal stimulus package: “That will get us through the spring, because this is going to last another six months.” Some owners regard the government’s policies as damaging. “My crew is getting unemployment,” Darden said. “If you’re making the same amount of money not working, who wants to work?” While owners widely agree that the outdoor seating policies are a tremendous help to their restaurants, everyone worries about the impending threat of winter. “We are building a roof around the street dining, and then for the tables on the sidewalk, we ordered a permanent tent,” Poznak said. “We are getting heaters for every area.” They’re even planning to clothe cold patrons. “Starting next week, we’re going to sell sweatshirts at cost, so we’re not trying to make money on them. We’re just trying to help someone who is cold, and the heaters aren’t doing it for them.” At Miss Mamie’s, Darden feels less confident. Her outdoor seating area is not canopied; she can’t seat customers when it rains, much less when it snows or sleets. She already feels indebted to those she couldn’t serve during the pandemic, and she worries about those numbers increasing as the cold months further frustrate her desires to conduct business as usual. “Now they tell us, ‘You can do it all winter long,’ but I’m not following that,” Darden said, referring to the indefinite extension of the outdoor seating policy that was passed in late September. “Do I have to put on galoshes and boots and scarves and bring the food out when it’s snowing?” Hlay elaborated on the limitations imposed by strict capacities, which are designed to keep customers distant. “The old idea was to get as many people in and serve them and turn tables and do the best you can. And that just can’t happen.” Because Manhattan Valley restaurants also depend on students at Columbia and other nearby institutions, their revenue has been devastated by this fall’s smaller population on and near campus. “I used to have a good relationship with them,” Darden said. “I did weddings at Columbia in the Chapel. I did fraternities and sororities. We used to do a lot of catering and drop-offs at Columbia and participated in a lot of their functions. But we haven’t heard from anyone this year.” Hlay concurred. “Mostly, we are really popular with all of the colleges and universities in the area,” he said. “They would probably be our first major patrons.” Restaurants did see their revenues increase, though, as students returned to the area in September. Many relocated to Manhattan Valley, where rents tend to be more affordable than those in Morningside Heights. “We’ve been open for three and a half years, and from the very beginning we have noticed the impact that the students make,” said Angel Hidalgo, the owner of Demitasse Cafe on 108th street. “Whenever it’s vacation, our revenue drops dramatically. Just as soon as students started arriving in the neighborhood, we can see the biggest impact on sales.” Restaurant owners thus raise the perennial―and perennially fraught―question of Columbia’s impact on nearby neighborhoods. While it is undeniable that the flood of affluent or soon-to-be affluent students into Manhattan Valley has contributed to a rise in rents and the subsequent displacement of many of its lower-income residents, Columbia is now an entrenched economic force in the area, and small businesses have come to rely on its operations. Peter Arndtsen, the Manager of the Columbus-Amsterdam BID paints a more rosy picture of neighborhood relations. “Columbia students are a cherished part of the people that come to visit the avenue, both Amsterdam and Columbus,” he said. “It is hard with them not being here.” But setting students aside, Arndtsen was more concerned about the University’s neglect to inform the Columbus-Amsterdam BID of their commercial ventures in the area. “Back a number of years ago, they told us that they would notify us if they wanted to buy a building. That did not happen the way it was supposed to,” he said. “I would like to think that they are supporting local businesses, but I have not gotten that sense from them.” Arndtsen has been at the forefront of Amsterdam Avenue Open Streets. Alongside a team of six other BID employees, he opens and closes the streets each weekend, lugging barriers to and from the curb line. Opening the streets presented a unique set of challenges for the BID, in part because of the avenue’s various bus and truck routes as well as the strained fourteen blocks it covers—it is longer than the average New York BID. “When the pause was first announced, less than a third of our restaurants and businesses were open. We’re now up to 90 percent,” Arndtsen said. “Many of them are mom-and-pop businesses, and you get to know these people, and see how they are stretching themselves to make this work.” The BID plans to focus its resources on Open Streets for the foreseeable future. “We are looking at heating, and how to deal with that. We’re trying to think about how to move forward,” Arndtsen said. “We have tried to raise the standard of the neighborhood―of what it means to live in the neighborhood and to visit it.” There’s a poignancy to strolling down Amsterdam these days, surrounded by strangers and restaurants and so much space aching to be filled. There is the sense that people are reclaiming what has been lost―from the cars, perhaps, or more accurately, from the secluded, paranoid lifestyle that has emerged during quarantine. Winter bites at the arms, a reminder of the transience of this moment: it is easy to imagine the streets once again devoid of people, the wooden chairs rotting amidst a dead, sinister chill. And yet there is a Sisyphean bliss to the masked children running in the playground, to the people laughing while seated at their socially distanced tables, to the smell of fresh tacos wafting to one’s nose. It is the sight of a people learning to open up again. #November2020

SUSTAINING DEVELOPMENT. On the Columbia Climate School, what it is, and what it must be. By Elizabeth Jackson. Attentive observers recognize that climate change impacts and is impacted by everything we do—from the food we eat to the energy we consume to the air we breathe. Such a pervasive problem demands understanding that transcends individual disciplines and traditional academic structures. In July, recognizing the breadth of the problem, President Bollinger formally announced the creation of the Climate School, established in accordance with recommendations made by Columbia’s Climate Task Force, a group of 25 administrators, researchers, professors, deans, Earth Institute faculty, and a University trustee. The heart of the Climate School’s purpose probably lies in the relational terms that the Task Force Report, released in December 2019, employs liberally: “multidimensional,” “trans-disciplinary,” “systems-level,” “partnership.” Though the Task Force Report stresses at the outset that it “does not lay out a detailed blueprint for the School or how it would operate,” and, indeed, key components of the School in the Task Force Report are left vague, it is clear that—ideally, at least—the School is about connection. The administration intends to adopt a “hub and spokes” model for the School. The phrase’s meaning is somewhat obscure, as specific organizational structure remains under development. Based on my discussions with professors and leaders of Earth Institute-affiliated centers, some, if not all, research centers will be absorbed into the “hub” of the Climate School, while the School’s activity and influence will extend to the rest of the University and beyond. Director Alex Halliday elaborated, “The spokes will connect the climate hub with Columbia’s Schools, as well as with Institutes, the Global Centers, and other University-wide initiatives.” University Professor Ruth DeFries, co-director of the Sustainable Development program, member of the Climate Task Force, and a leader of a working group helping to design the School, also explained, “The Climate School very much recognizes that there is this wealth of expertise within departments and within different schools, and we’re not trying to replicate that within the Climate School. It’s more building the bridges.” Eventually, as the Report outlines, the Climate School will also include a physical hub for climate work, and the University’s goal is to fundraise for a new building on the Manhattanville campus—a tangible embodiment of its efforts to address the insufficient connection between the many research centers and individuals currently focused on climate at Columbia. For instance, the Report mentions that, currently, The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, while located at Lamont alongside the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), “pursues its own governance and strategy, despite sharing scientific labs, teams, and students [with LDEO].” LDEO itself, which is a major climate research center, “has been quite independent from the rest of the university.” The Report goes on: “The lack of strategic alignment and integration between LDEO and DEES limits a coordinated vision from just the physical science perspective.” A unifying physical space would help support more coordinated climate work. Though at first glance, the Earth Institute (EI) may seem to provide a sufficient basis for collaboration and concrete, extensive climate action, the EI structure, according to the Report, has certain limitations. The EI “cannot appoint faculty, which limits its ability to recruit and retain the top academics in their respective fields.” It also “has limited ability to determine who teaches in its co-sponsored education programs,” as these programs are “housed at schools.” Financially, “it has no major tuition base of hard funding to subsidize its soft-money research endeavor” and “has no alumni with which to develop a pipeline for fundraising.” A school structure would, by its very nature, address these issues. Regarding finances, Professor Upmanu Lall, Director of the Columbia Water Center, said, “I think the biggest thing that the Climate School could do that the Earth Institute did not succeed in doing would be to create a large endowment so that the income from the endowment can support these projects.” By “these projects,” Lall referred to practical environmental fieldwork, especially projects abroad. In a virtual town hall on October 22, Earth Institute Director Alex Halliday clarified that he envisions a move to newly situate the Institute entirely within the Climate School. Academics and Faculty The School expects to someday offer new graduate degrees, many of them likely granted jointly with other graduate programs—Journalism, for example—to formalize and underscore climate’s relevance to an abundance of fields. An education-focused working group is currently developing the School’s future offerings in greater detail. Halliday mentioned that some possible new Master’s programs include but are not limited to “climate risk and finance, climate ethics and justice, disaster management, [and] climate communications.” In the town hall, Halliday stated that the Climate School’s first Master’s program would be Climate and Society, which is currently housed in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. DeFries, as one of the town hall panelists, emphasized that this kind of transition is not a model for the way the Climate School intends to establish programs going forward; instead, it will focus on establishing new ones. She also noted that in undergraduate programs such as Sustainable Development, changes would serve to “expand our offerings, to have more classes that would be available to the students, to have different topic areas related to climate and other sustainability problems, to have more faculty, to have more research opportunities.” The interdisciplinary approach to climate detailed in the Report will serve even students pursuing degrees and careers previously considered unrelated to climate. “No matter what students go on to do,” it insists, “they will need to understand the climate crisis and its impacts.” One of the most obvious and effective ways to extend climate studies to as many undergraduates as possible is to integrate it into the Core. The Report mentions a few possible methods, including making climate a “4 week module” in Frontiers of Science, approving new climate courses to fulfill the science and Global Core requirements, and the possible “introduction” of climate into Contemporary Civilization. For Ellie Hansen, CC ’22, founder of the Tricentennial Project, a climate-focused student group, climate integration into the Core should not be a matter of a “climate day or week” or other hyper-focused but limited efforts. Instead, when thinking about climate in the Core, instructors should make it “an active point to incorporate it as a point of discussion and a thing to analyze within [the] texts.” Hansen went on to say that environmental themes like “relation to nature” could be organically incorporated into class discussions, just as themes like gender are often used as lenses for analysis. The Report also mentions two potential approaches to climate integration into University Writing. A new UW section (“‘Readings in Climate Change,’” for example) could be formulated, and the administration could “challenge/incentivize” instructors of other sections “to consider climate as a vehicle within their own subjects.” Emily Hunt Kivel, a fiction writer and former UW: Contemporary Essays instructor, explained that instructors have near-total freedom to choose the texts they teach. Referring to climate, Hunt Kivel stated, “I also think that it could be integrated really naturally” by making it “more present in our training.” Though UW leadership does not mandate specific texts, particular texts are used in instructor training, and new UW instructors in particular tend to rely on them. Hunt Kivel added, however, that regardless of instructors’ experience, if UW leadership provides an excellent text, “it’s likely that a lot of the instructors are going to use it.” Emphasizing climate-focused texts in orientation would preserve instructor freedom while providing key resources for climate integration into UW. Hunt Kivel also liked the idea of a new UW section fully devoted to climate, but she specified that this approach will likely be most effective if there are a lot of those sections and if students are given some incentive to take them. Siloes and Interdisciplinary Importance The word “silo” cropped up several times over the course of my interviews and in the Report, denoting two general kinds of separation: an academic institution’s isolation from its surrounding community and the world, and the insulation of disciplines and projects from one another. Dr. Bob Chen, who directs the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), acknowledged that in climate, “as with any area of interest like this, there’s a lot of silos, there’s a lot of parallel things going on that don’t connect very well.” He believes that the Climate School “is an opportunity to really do a better job pulling all the different pieces together and getting more systematic approaches to addressing climate change.” Hunt Kivel lamented the growing gap she identifies between the humanities and the sciences, particularly environmental science. In her observations as a fiction writer, even climate activists “struggle to write about climate,” as doing so “can be a kind of daunting task to people who do not have a scientific background.” Overcoming this gap requires artists and writers to realize that “they can bring their particular interests and talents to the conversation about climate.” Understanding how the arts and humanities can help us grasp and cope with the climate crisis is the first step. On the humanities front, that understanding is partially about establishing personal, active connections with the environment. Hunt Kivel referred to Zadie Smith’s essay “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons,” which she taught in all of her UW sections, explaining that “it was able to make me care personally about something that I had only, before that, sort of theoretically and vaguely participated in.” Regarding climate, Hunt Kivel said “the more that we can all I think feel individually involved and invested, the better.” Hunt Kivel believes in the motivational power of the humanities. “If humanities are the things that’s going to make you think critically and deliberately about the way you live your life, which humanities do,” she said, “I think that’s a really effective way to communicate with people.” She then added: “To ignore the humanities would be to essentially say that on an individual level, our actions are not going to be what saves us—like the individual doesn’t matter in this, and I think that’s inaccurate. Or maybe it’s accurate, but it’s sad.” To conceive of climate as an issue beyond our reach, dominated only by power structures and irrelevant to our individual pursuits is, as Hunt Kivel puts it “an intellectualization of complacency.” Faculty The Report outlines new potential approaches for recruiting faculty and for multiple levels of faculty engagement with climate, including the possibility that “Faculty from across the University could be challenged to incorporate climate into their teaching…The Climate School could ask each department to develop and offer one course in climate,” which the School could support either through “course development funds” or through “buy out[s] of academic time.” Though faculty structure is still being designed, the Report discusses the prospect of joint appointments between the Climate School and other departments, as well as that of “5-10 year secondments,” during which faculty time would be bought out in order to facilitate “focus on particular inter-disciplinary problems for a limited period.” This structure may provide a method of engaging faculty without traditional academic backgrounds, like those with experience in policy, finance, or other related fields who would prefer not to pursue a tenure track. Engaging faculty from non-academic backgrounds, including policymakers, journalists, business and financial experts, and artists, is part of the University’s effort to bolster another form of connection—that of academic work to practical solutions. As the Report acknowledges, the Climate School’s engagement of these “professors of practice,” as it often calls them, will involve applying new weight to different metrics of success, like field and industry experience, as opposed to just academic expertise. The School may also facilitate greater flexibility for current faculty and staff. When I spoke with Dr. Chen about what the Climate School might mean for CIESIN staff, he expressed optimism about its capacity to provide more options, allowing them to blend research and teaching more fluidly. “I think staff would have the ability not to just be in the research-officer track but be—have different kinds of faculty appointments,” he said. Even if these appointments do not involve tenure, they may give staff more job security and may streamline the process of combining research and teaching. Community Engagement Part of the Climate School’s mission is realizing the University’s “fourth purpose,” alongside research, education, and public service: “extending Columbia’s abilities to bring knowledge, in tandem with actors beyond the campus, to more effectively address pressing human problems.” Part of this practical action will necessarily include giving a “seat at the table” to communities most vulnerable to climate change—often low-income communities and communities of color. A forthcoming working group will examine how the Climate School can thoughtfully engage with the local community surrounding campus, as well as the broader NYC community, in a sustainable and inclusive manner. I spoke with Sonal Jessel, a graduate of the Mailman School of Public Health and a Policy and Advocacy Coordinator for WEACT for Environmental Justice, about methods of structuring the Climate School’s community engagement in a way that is beneficial to all participants. WEACT is a community-driven environmental health and justice advocacy organization based in northern Manhattan that has been instrumental in securing passage of important environmental and health initiatives. WEACT has longstanding partnerships with individuals and research centers at Columbia, with both institutions initiating particular collaborations. Jessel emphasized that that Columbia isn’t “guiding” the focuses of the partnered projects; instead, “Columbia plays a supportive role when asked to help bolster the efforts of groups like us, community groups that have been doing the work for a really long time and just might not have all of the infrastructure and resources needed to conduct like bigger research studies.” In other words, the community’s needs drive the partnerships. As Jessel stressed, WEACT ensures that “the policies and the programs that we’re pushing forward are informed by our community and are led by our community, ‘cause we believe that communities know what’s best for them.” There is equity in these partnerships in that community members know the issues, culture, and workable solutions in their community best, while Columbia provides access to highly skilled researchers who can aid in data-collection that can be the basis for effective advocacy. Both DeFries and Lall, who work abroad extensively, emphasized the necessity of place-based solutions—without a deep and nuanced understanding of a place and its people, they claim, sustainable remedies aren’t possible, even if issues in multiple communities appear similar on the surface. Professor Lall described his early time working abroad as humbling. “We learned a lot,” he said. He specified that considering lessons from the community was essential to eventually having “something to communicate” in the way of advice. “Understanding what the real issue is, is important before you start pitching solutions to people,” he said. On the subject of how the Climate School can best structure its community input beyond research, Jessel explained that she thinks Columbia “should be doing it through partnering with CBOs [Community Based Organizations], partnering with organizations that have been around for a long time that do work with community.” She added, “I think a lot of people that live in communities don’t really love the big institutions that are in their neighborhoods…so I think being strategic about how you gain the trust of community members is going to be a big piece of it.” More broadly, Jessel stressed that however the University structures engagement with community members, “Columbia should pay them.” She continued, “Underline, underline bold—pay them. I think that’s just vital. I mean, so many people are, like, their knowledge is taken for granted and taken for free.” The format for student input remains in the works, but at the recent town hall, Halliday mentioned the development of student engagement opportunities, including but not limited to participation in working groups, roundtables, and town halls, led by Professor Sandra Goldmark, the Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action at Barnard, who is helping to facilitate the design process for the School. More information about these opportunities will be shared with the student community in the coming weeks, in the form of a student engagement survey. Many aspects of the Climate School have yet to be defined and addressed. Concerns about the University’s ability to lead climate action when it has not yet announced a plan to divest from fossil fuels or released a hard date for achieving carbon neutrality still exist, though the Report mentions these concerns and recommends taking practical steps to address them as part of a comprehensive climate action plan. According to Halliday “In particular, the School will serve as a key resource for the University in terms of understanding its own impact on climate—including carbon neutrality.” Students should stay abreast of Earth Institute updates and take advantage of opportunities to contribute ideas, especially in these early stages of design, because the Climate School has the potential to forge lasting connections among fields and individuals both within and beyond the University, and to help us understand climate for what it is—existential and all-encompassing. #November2020