Hating on Hate

In response to recent hate crimes around the city, New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn led a movement to launch the Day Out Against Hate. Columbia elected to begin the campaign on campus in response to the recent string of bias incidents and the intense concern that they have raised. Over the next several days, students will have the opportunity to attend panels, poetry readings, and a candlelight vigil, and to contribute to a number of collages concerning bias and hate at Columbia. While these events are well-intentioned, the Day Out Against Hate is predicated on the false assumption that symbolic stands against intolerance can unify the campus community. The vast majority of Columbia students consider hate crimes and bias incidents reprehensible, regardless of whether we express these views in a public forum. But by creating an artificial division between students who choose to participate and those who choose not to, the Day Out Against Hate obscures the broad consensus against hate that already exists on campus. Moreover, the manner in which the Day Out Against Hate events have been structured will do little to address the divisions created by the recent hunger strike and the essential issues that it brought up. The University ought to use the Day Out Against Hate to solidify and further recent discussion on race and ethnicity at Columbia, rather than address such issues superficially.

It is telling that, in recent months, communication from University administrators has usually has heralded more bad news. But public commitments to Columbia’s core values, however appropriate, ring hollow when they are expressed only in times of crisis. Obligatory responses to campus controversies over tolerance and diversity are no substitute for long-term policies to rebuild campus community. The disconnect in the discussion of race and bias on campus is highlighted by the fact that, while an ad-hoc coalition of students planned a hunger strike, Vice President of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks and others were planning the programming for this day.

Rather than spend resources on events such as the Day Out Against Hate that amount to little more than publicity stunts, the University should sponsor constructive programming that engenders a shared sense of community throughout the year and work more actively with student groups who are concerned with race and ethnicity at Columbia. Going forward, administrators should engage student representatives in a public dialogue over the root causes of campus disunity. Recent events have revealed within our community both substantive disagreements and the desire to resolve them, but nothing will be solved without a good-faith administrative effort to restore a feeling of student enfranchisement in the affairs of the University.

Most important, students who have not been vocally involved in recent campus debates should be given an opportunity to express their views. To better assess the University’s climate, administrators ought to distribute surveys concerning diversity at Columbia and hold town halls in which students can raise concerns and ask pressing questions. The Day Out Against Hate would seem less hollow were more programming at Columbia devoted to these issues and backed by the same level of administrative support and involvement.