University Culture and the Death Announcement

The questions I’m about to pose about the Columbia community have been asked and addressed over and over again. And recent events would lead me to ask one more painful question: If I were suddenly gone one day, would the university really miss me?

The questions I’m about to pose about the Columbia community have been asked and addressed over and over again. And yet, as long as a problem remains unsolved, how dare we do anything but repeat ourselves? After all, we are a community of whiners and complainers, and yes, we do occasionally get pretty annoying, but that’s okay. Because at least some of the time, our complaints are intellectually productive. So here’s mine for this week. Why, I ask, does this university sometimes feel like a very alienating place? Is the university really here for its students? Am I just another nameless and faceless student walking across campus in the typical 21-year-old uniform, a replaceable member of a homogenous mass that somebody calls the student body?

And recent events would lead me to ask one more painful question: If I were suddenly gone one day, would the university really miss me?

The above questions have suddenly become tragically relevant, having moved from being slight disturbances under our noses to punches in the face. First, the recent sudden death of a young member of our campus community continues to shock and perplex us. Second, in this column, I circle around and enter the architecture of social life here through the often marginalized religious people and groups on campus that do not seem to get much coverage in the conventional forums of discussion. We already know that religion is bigger than it seems to the eyes of our average campus “non-believer.” At this point, we might begin to ask ourselves why.

Sure, statistically this makes sense. Any mostly American population of this size should have a fair amount of religious people, even in a place known for its hipster snobbery and enlightenment pressure toward secularism. Structures are in place to allow religion to thrive here. According to a December Blue and White article, religious organizations on campus get a substantial chunk of Student Governing Board allocation. These groups are often very visible. One night during the last Jewish High Holiday season, for example, more Jews crowded together on Low Plaza to celebrate Simchat Torah than students turned out for any Iraq war protest I have seen in my time here. Recruitment on the street also continues to run strong: one day last week at the Broadway Greenmarket I was handed an invitation to pray and a pamphlet that presented the biblical story that allegorizes the possibility of hope in the face of alienation and despair.

The presence of religious groups, and, more broadly, what I might call “belief communities” (i.e. small campus communities sharing a belief in social justice, in fitness, or in good radio, to name a few) is in some ways a reaction to the lack of a strong wider Columbia community. While out there one feels like he or she is part of a society of strangers, united in the campus space and the timing of its routine but not much else, inside these communities things are different. In the face of oft-felt alienation and anonymity, they become intimate spaces that are warm and fuzzy, providing students with hope, especially in moments of unsettling tragic rupture.

On campus for almost four years, I have received around five university-wide e-mails from some administrator or another announcing the tragic death of a student. At least for me, they have always, even if briefly, forced me to pause and consider my own mortality. But one thing that always confuses me about these e-mails is the emphasis on how highly valued the individual was for the university. Each e-mail contains some variation of the following sentence: “[the deceased] made many very unique contributions to the university and at the university we all will miss him/her dearly.”

These e-mails always make me wonder if the writer actually knew the person whose death he or she was announcing, and I usually conclude that he or she did not. Here I notice a new curious disjunction between the value of the members of the campus community who have died and those who are still alive. A student’s death inspires the administration’s outpouring of care and empathy. To show anything but that would be a PR nightmare. Yet those of us still alive often face just the opposite. We face an impossible bureaucracy that, according to extensive participant observation and elaborate back-of-the-envelope calculations, makes at least one Columbia University student cry each day. A student’s parent makes a payment mistake he couldn’t afford to make and suddenly has to fight for his money back. A student’s much-needed check for sixty hours of tedious IAB office work falls through the bureaucratic cracks and so in tears she runs to four corners of campus trying but failing to find it. We are all forced to negotiate a maze of outdated regulations. And, despite the recent tragic reality check, many fundamentally unhappy students continue to quietly move through their lives on campus while their pain goes unrecognized. How valued are these living students supposed to feel?

Even though religious and other belief communities provide students with a place to go and feel valued, times like these remind us that we urgently need a stronger Columbia community, a more supportive administration, and a university culture that shows each of its living students what might be told about us in a kind but hollow death announcement.

Eric Hirsch is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology and English. He is an undergraduate fellow with the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. The God Beat runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com">Opinion@columbiaspectator.com