With Great Power...

The end of the line. Sure enough, I forgot to include some things I won't miss in the last column. Here are some more downers before we get into the sappy stuff:

Counseling and Psychological Services

The whole system of counseling at Columbia needs a drastic overhaul. Students who call CPS or go in to make an appointment can expect to wait two to three weeks to get an appointment. The walk-in hours are short, inconvenient, and inadequate. In my experience and in those of numerous friends and peers, the counselors available to students tend to be cold and off-putting, acting as though there is a burden on the student to justify why he or she is there taking up CPS's valuable time. If a student does forge a connection with a CPS counselor, he or she can expect it to last for less than two months, for Columbia limits its students to a handful of free sessions before referring them to expensive outside therapists.

Essentially, Columbia treats counseling like a stigmatized luxury when it should be an accepted part of college life. College is a turbulent time full of stress and instability when students' academic, professional, and personal lives are all intertwined and when everyone knows everyone else in the community. Talking regularly with a neutral third party trained in providing support is absolutely vital. Consider Columbia's system in contrast with Harvard's, where students can talk to a counselor every week for all four years for free. This is a necessary service at any college, not to mention one where undergraduate student suicides have become an epidemic.

Debt

Columbia should follow the brave step Princeton made in February by moving to quell the burden of student loans. Princeton's new policy will be to provide scholarship money to pay for portions of lower- and middle-income students' tuition that previously came from loans. The effect: crippling and long-lasting debt will no longer be the price of a Princeton education for students who aren't wealthy. Sure, Princeton's endowment is larger than Columbia's, but Princeton is only spending about $5.6 million on the initiative (a small part of our endowment, and about the cost of 7,000 pleather Lerner Hall chairs). And this is precisely the type of gesture of support for the students that would make alumni turn around and support the school.

What I Will Miss:

Professors & Classes

The faculty at Columbia is really incredible, and it's been an honor to learn from and work with them over the past four years. They've changed the way I think, broadened my view of the world, and challenged my most basic assumptions. Some have even gone a step beyond and made an effort to find out about who their students are and reach out to us as mentors. Some professors who have influenced me include Paul Anderer, Ellen Baker, Robert Belknap, Elizabeth Blackmar, Alan Brinkley, Evan Cornog, Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Mary Gordon, Wayne Proudfoot, Phyllis Raphael, and Jill Shapiro. To these wonderful professors who have left such an impression on me, I offer heartfelt thanks. I would also like to present the X-Ray Specs award for Best Class at Columbia to Prof. Blackmar's Making of the Modern American Landscape. As a sophomore, it taught me that history is everywhere and in everything. On bus trips now I stare out the window and try to decipher the interplay of historical forces that went into that factory or that mini-mall or that nature preserve. It was like learning a new language that synthesized so much of what I had been learning at Columbia. It was the moment when academics became exciting, relevant, and intense.

Politics & Peculiarity

Columbia is a place where politics is very much alive and where people are really peculiar. The result is a constant Cuisinart of political discourse in the strangest places. I will miss reading heated exchanges in random campus bathroom stalls, such as, "Jews against the occupation / Are traitors / What they called Afrikaaners Against Apartheid!" (from the stall in the second-floor Lerner Hall bathroom). I'll miss the intellectual lineage of a place that turned out Langston Hughes, Lionel Trilling, and Lars-Erik Nelson.

The Spec

What can one say about a black hole in a chaotic office above a nondescript Broadway storefront where one watched with bleary eyes as three good years disappeared in the service of something as silly as a college newspaper? I say I'll miss it terribly. I stared into the Spec abyss, and it stared right back. It changed my friends and me more than my friends and I changed it. It always reminded me of what it must have been like to be Spider-Man, the webslinging hero (and Columbia student) who realized that his superpowers had to be harnessed for good. Overseeing the daily chronicle of life at Columbia--137 painstaking shots at giving a community, a college, and a few thousand kids a place in history--was just like fighting the Hobgoblin. How could I ever forget that with great power came great responsibility? How could I ever forget that for a little while inside this bubble, people cared about what I had to say? How could I forget trembling before that? How could I ever be the same?