Remembrance of Things Past

In the 1940s, $100,000 would have bought the Air Force a mid-level fighter plane. It might have even bought the airplane that William Thomas, CC '45, was flying when he was downed over Germany in 1945. There is nothing on Columbia's campus to commemorate him.

Although he died over 50 years ago, Thomas lives on in the memory of his Delta Pi fraternity brother Reggie Thayer, CC '47, who sits on a committee of alumni devoted to memorializing Columbia's war dead in a new campus monument. Thayer, who flew as a bombardier during World War II, is one of several College alumni on the committee, which was founded seven years ago by the late Jim Lennon, CC '41.

Unfortunately, $100,000 today cannot buy a military aircraft. In fact, it may fund only the endowment for the monument's upkeep. The monument itself, designed by the Architecture Research Office, a private company, will cost around $600,000 to build. It will include a wall for every war in which Columbia undergraduates or alumni died in the service of the United States, with bronze bricks showing the names of the deceased.

Lennon, Joseph Coffee, Jr., CC '41, the new committee chairman, and the original group thought it was "high time that Columbia honor its war dead." And it is. Columbia is one of very few large universities not to have memorialized its war dead. Some schools have entire buildings devoted to lives lost, but Columbia doesn't even have a plaque.

The proposed memorial can do more than just remember the undergraduate war dead. Students today have little contact with the tragedies of war in the way the class of 1940 did. War is an abstraction that connotes political agitation, moral outrage, or spectacle, but not grief. We grew up learning from our history books that war is violent manifestation of politics, from our parents of the anti-war generation that it is morally ambiguous, and from CNN that it is tantamount to performance.

In that way, the proposed monument will connect us with war the way the septuagenarians on the committee knew it--as devastating. It will show us how our predecessors understood war and, in that way, will allow us to relate to them. "To think about Columbia people dying in the Revolutionary War is an amazing thought," Vice President of Facilities Management Mark Burstein told Spectator.

The recollection of history for today's students is not accidental. The war memorial, insofar as it relates a sense of Columbia's history to current students, is an ideal project for the Office of Alumni Development, which has worked very closely with the memorial committee. Over the last three years, the Office has tried to bridge the gap--not just in years--between alumni of normal donating age and graduating students.

That is exactly why current undergraduate students should have been involved with this project from the beginning. Given that the memorial will be on a campus populated by current students--not the classmates of the fallen, who have been the driving force behind the memorial--the committee and the Office of Development should have reached out to students for input from the outset. Seven years later, they have still not been consulted.

Students could have taken a role in designing the memorial site. Columbia's undergraduate architecture program is one of the country's finest, to say nothing of its outstanding graduate counterpart. If students had been involved in the planning, the blueprint and construction estimate (which Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley's office purchased from the Architecture Research Office) would have been much less expensive. And what better way to connect students to Columbia's history than by making them a part of institutional memory?

Aside from Quigley's grant, the University administration--although it believes strongly in the memorial project--has refused to commit any funds for construction. The cost, after all, is daunting, and the committee and the University agree that $600,000 should not be drawn from funds that might otherwise benefit current students. They also agree that the Office of Development should concentrate on its own fundraising efforts, rather than this project.

Which is why, seven years since its inception, the project has still not raised even 10 percent of $600,000. Last September's terrorist attacks came just as the committee was about to begin a fundraising drive, and committee members decided they would wait until a more appropriate time to solicit donations for the war memorial.

But even if that time is now, committee members face an awesome challenge. They will find that a retarded economy hurts charitable giving. They will find alumni hesitant to give a project that may not come to fruition for many more years. They will find that many alumni of prime donating age are veterans--not of any war, but of Columbia's vigorous anti-war movement in the late 1960s. (Although the proposed monument is neither pro-war nor nationalistic, priorities will likely lie elsewhere.)

Although the fundraising drive will be an uphill battle, it is one well worth fighting. This battle, like the ones that killed so many Columbians over the years, will make families proud of their lost loved ones. But this battle will be fought in dollars, not in lives. May the committee find the fundraising success it needs to begin construction soon.

Adam B. Kushner is a Columbia College junior majoring in ancient studies.