It’s About More Than a Noose

On Tuesday afternoon, I received a text message in class about a noose being hung outside of a black professor’s office at Teacher’s College. I could barely contain myself from slamming my fist on the table in front of Professor Partha Chatterjee. I was overwhelmed with disbelief, anger, and despair, and had to immediately leave. After venting with friends over dinner, we decided to put out a call for an emergency gathering at Earl Hall where students could react to the events of the day and support each other in a communal space. Over 150 students from a diverse array of communities showed up on short notice during a thunderstorm, and I greatly appreciate their love and support. However, as a university community and people of moral and social conscience, we have to challenge each other to go beyond mere consolation and reaction to this particular event.

While it is necessary, it is also very obvious and easy to condemn and confront racism in the form of a noose on a door, or graffiti on a wall. If we are going to come together in meaningful solidarity, we have to take a strong stand against racism in all its insidious forms. We should not be upset about the noose simply because it offends our sensibilities. We should be upset out of a deep commitment to justice and our care and concern for the members of our community targeted by racism and other forms of oppression. If we care about people and not just ideas, then we should move forward from this event with a commitment to address racism at Columbia in all the ways that it affects our community.

There have been three town halls in response to the graffiti found in IAB and now this noose incident. At all of these events, diverse groups of hundreds of students have stated that the institutional culture of Columbia University must be changed. While bias incidents are certainly dramatic moments and may seem like extreme or anomalous events, they resonate with the daily weight and trauma of marginalization. This is why students have said that we have to increase our support of Ethnic Studies, and continue to rethink and rework the Core Curriculum, or that we need to expand our campus in a way that is accountable to West Harlem.

While different parts of the administration have responded by arranging meetings, it is imperative that we put intense pressure on the administration to implement the institutional changes that stem from years of student struggle to combat racism in the university. Students have shown great initiative in coming together to support each other and think programmatically about the actions needed to change this institution. In past years, student organizing has been responsible for getting the university to establish the Intercultural Resource Center, Ethnic Studies, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Students obviously have great passion and imagination for how to deal with racism on this campus and in the world, and the administration has mostly been satisfied with following our lead when we make it unbearable for them to ignore us.

When will the administrators get it and stop playing catch up to a student body that seems far more diverse and innovative than they are? Dean Austin Quigley and Vice President Nicholas Dirks seemed to recognize this need at a meeting with students on Wednesday morning. But at a later meeting with President Bollinger that afternoon, his basic response to student criticism of our institutional structure and culture was that the University is trying, he is proud of those efforts, it can try harder, and we should let him know what are issues are so we can talk about it some more and think about ways to move forward. Frankly, this is an unsatisfactory, tired, and uncommitted response. I have personally been at meetings with President Bollinger over the past few years where students have communicated almost the exact same issues and gotten the same responses, with insufficient progress in the meantime.
When will President Bollinger and the rest of the administration enact a bold and imaginative agenda for working with students to address the systemic injustices of our University community? While I would like to have faith in our administration, decades of student struggle have shown that more often than not, students have to make the administration act, and even when they do, the results are never enough. As students, we have to do more than meekly or even angrily ask for changes to be made, but to leverage our collective power to hold the administration accountable to our needs.

In these efforts within a slow and bureaucratic university, we can never have too great a sense of urgency, for though we must hold the administration accountable, it is ultimately the student body that has to pay the price for their inadequacies.

Christien Tompkins is a Columbia College senior majoring in African-American studies.
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