Power of the Pen

Colleges have the potential to be the birthplace of ideas and liberalism, and Columbia University has often been at the forefront of this onward push in the name of equality for all. The recent expansion of the Equal Justice Center of the Roosevelt Institution serves to further the cause of progressivism and provides more students than ever with the unique opportunity to harness their ideas in order to shape national policy by writing it.

The Roosevelt Institution, however, predates the Columbia chapter’s Center on Equal Justice. Roosevelt is a relatively new operation, founded in 2004 following the presidential election. It is the nation’s first nonpartisan student think tank, and it has been producing progressive policy that has made its way into the hands of our nations top legislators for the past few years. Furthermore, the organization is non-partisan, which lends it to an open-minded constituency.
On the Columbia University level, Roosevelt was founded by Josh Lipsky, CC ’08, and has grown from a small operation to a weekly forum for ideas and policy to blossom. The topics discussed include education, health care, foreign policy, environment and energy, labor, and most recently, equal justice.

For the students who participate in Roosevelt, Equal Justice is the most expansive and inclusive center in terms of issues covered. As co-president Dario Abramskiehn relayed, it is “a component of every part of our procedure. The other centers at Roosevelt serve a more specialized role catering to the specific issues, but the over-arching purpose of equal justice is to provide a forum for issues that are best suited under the heading of equal justice.”

The idea behind expanding from the Electoral Reform Center to the Equal Justice Center was to create an umbrella for students who wanted to write a diverse variety of policy, but couldn’t find the right arena to do so in any of the other Roosevelt forums. Having a broad environment for discussion is at the core of the venue. The newly coined center deals with a wide array of issues, from marriage equality, to electoral reform and felon disenfranchisement, to protection of civil liberties. While these topics are under the jurisdiction of legislators in this country, students also have the ability to change policy, and policy matters on this campus. Equal Justice is an all-inclusive endeavor, granting the opportunity for exploration and innovation. There are no constraints. As students, there must be an organization available that allows freedom of ideas and promotes the belief that our government is there to help, to foster, and to grow—an organization that empowers students to proactively shape their tomorrows through the power of the pen.

With so many activist groups it is often times difficult to look at the heart of the issue and see the solution rather than merely the problem. At the new Equal Justice Center, we do more than criticize—we make our complaints constructive. The center allows its members to write their own policy, thereby rectifying the injustices they view in the world.

The Equal Justice Center fills a unique niche in Columbia in that it brings all different kinds of activism together while channeling protest into the kind of policy that makes legislators sit up and take notice. Columbia University needs to keep pushing for all kinds of freedom in our local, statewide, national, and global environment, and we need to do so with cohesion and inclusion. This is why the Equal Justice Center was expanded, and this is why we hope to see it grow with the support of the diverse student body of Columbia in the future.

The author is a Barnard College first-year. She is the center leader of the Center on Equal Justice in the Roosevelt Institution and lead activist of the Activist Council of Columbia University College Democrats