Losing Eric and Keeping Faith

Prior to the Jan. 31 death of Eric Harms, I was planning to dedicate Borderlands this week to the Manhattanville expansion. Although this is a topic of vital importance to the Columbia community and something I will turn to in the coming weeks, I decided to pause and use this week to reflect on Eric’s death. This is a delicate task because I did not know Eric Harms. All I know of him is what I have read in this paper. There is no doubt that he was well-liked and active in campus groups. There is no doubt that his suicide is a devastating tragedy to those who knew and loved him, and my condolences go out to his family and friends.

When my mother’s brother committed suicide in his twenties, it was an act of despair, rage, and terrible loneliness. A suicide within a family or any community sends people scattering in search of answers. Sometimes those answers are obvious and come quickly, and at other times warning signs and reasons are not so easily detected. My family still struggles to find peace, to piece together what went wrong. In Eric Harms’s case, I can say nothing about who he was or what those around him knew. But I know that as a community, we are all mournful because a talented young man slipped through everyone’s fingers and chose to end his life.

In his most recent column, my fellow columnist Eric Hirsch debated whether or not Columbia is a “godless” campus. He concluded that, despite the opinion of Fox News commentators, we are not a godless group of people and that we should encourage openness in our dialogues with one another. This is true—we are not godless. But even more importantly, we are not faithless people at Columbia. Atheists and theists alike hold onto faith in moral concepts and in the value of compassion.

That being said, a suicide among us means there is a need to look at where we could be more unified as a community in general and as a student body in particular. I am not seeking to blame anyone but to encourage openness—not just intellectual or theoretical openness, but the kind that is motivated by empathy and can spark friendship. I find most people here to be friendly, and I think many people here are kind. But there are also huge gaps between students in the different undergraduate schools.

When I began studying here in 2006, I was taken aback by the animosity between students from each school, including Barnard. I’ve heard Barnard students called derogatory sexual names by CC students, GS students dismiss CC students as “children,” SEAS students dismiss everyone else as “stupid,” and CC students accuse GS students of sneaking into Columbia through lax admissions policies. While this is clearly not the kind of thing that causes suicide, it is something that causes enough tension among us to divide us.
Add this to our racial, ethnic, religious, social, and political differences, and there is a hodgepodge of categories to separate us. This is what makes us one of the more diverse schools in the Ivy League, and I say that with great pride, but the kind of hostility that can arise from these differences is only aggravated by academic pressure and intense competition. Competition is probably the single biggest factor in what drives Columbia students apart as a whole. This is somewhat inevitable. But if the GS students who feel demeaned by the presence of younger CC students could, instead, offer friendship and guidance and if the female students from Barnard and CC could find common ground, perhaps there would be opportunities for relationships that could help prevent someone like Eric Harms from committing suicide. If we could approach each other with more compassion and less competition, we could proactively build towards a unified student body and attempt to prevent each other from falling into isolation or loneliness.

Following the Columbine tragedy, the father of victim Rachel Scott wrote a book about his daughter’s faith in the face of death. Several years later, he testified in front of Congress about the importance of allowing prayer in public schools. He reasoned that when students need faith or prayer, they will reach for it regardless of laws. He also argued that faith almost always arises during moments of tragedy and death. I agree with him on those two points, and I see Columbia students, faculty, and staff encouraging and relying heavily on faith. Now the challenge is to hold that faith as we move forward and to extend that faith in the form of friendship and support to one another. Whether it is faith in values, faith in a higher power, or simply faith that there is something that unites us, we should keep that faith as the foundation for the way we relate to each other as schoolmates and as individuals.

Nicole Winter is a student in the School of General Studies majoring in creative writing. Borderlands runs alternate Tuesdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com