This year, a number of rules in the housing process have changed. One difference is the end to the same room/same suite policy, which allowed people in a room or suite to stay the following year instead of choosing a new residence. Last week, Kim Kirschenbaum’s Spectator article, “New EC policy poses problems for religious needs,” noted that a number of Orthodox Jews have used this policy to maintain kosher spaces, to offer living space to younger students who might not otherwise be able to live with that community, and to have in place other accommodations that make observance a little bit easier. Effectively, this policy change has made the preservation and observance of religious tradition for a certain group just a little bit more vulnerable.
A number of students who have left comments on the article’s online edition and many others with whom I have spoken expressed relief at this policy change, as now the housing process has become more “fair.” Many students believe that allowing a certain group to keep an East Campus suite is simply granting a special privilege. Why should Orthodox Jews have priority in choosing the most coveted upper-class housing? They should just find a way to deal with the inconveniences themselves, the typical argument goes. In other words, they should, as one fellow student told me, “join the modern world.”
It seems, however, that many students fail to see the grave consequences of such a policy change. It is difficult to see certain traditions as no more than “superstition” if one does not follow them. However, it is unreasonable, oppressive, and discriminatory to expect that a small group of people drop traditions and abandon a culture in order for a process to be fair for everybody else. Accommodations must be made to ensure that this, which could potentially amount to a precedent for forced secularization on campus, does not happen. Of course, I am slightly exaggerating, and I recognize that nobody is actually telling the Orthodox Jewish community of East Campus or anywhere else to change their religious practices. But I am disturbed by the fact that at a place committed to diversity and intellectual rigor, the implicit expectation to drop tradition and come into modernity, to be somebody else, seems to exist. Beyond bad intentions, this narrow-minded requirement shows bad epistemology.
Still, the argument for fairness in the housing process is not without its merit—religious or not, most of us do pay a lot of money to live at this school. The housing process should be as fair as possible. And, while it is of utmost importance that the school respects a tradition that a large and visible portion of the student body observes, this policy change perhaps brings up a larger matter. Many less visible religious and cultural groups, who do not have as much pull in campus life, may function even more often under similar circumstances—they are tacitly expected to whitewash some elements of religious culture for the imperative of the majority.
What this group of Orthodox Jews at Columbia essentially did when they used the same-suite selection policy in EC was establish informal religious housing. Now that this policy has expired, the university will ultimately find some way to accommodate them. Yet other, less visible groups on campus will not be accommodated. So, why not have more elaborate, more accessible formalized religious housing for every person and every religious community that has effectively been told to forget about religious tradition in the process of housing selection? At Columbia, students should never be forced to compromise culture in the name of fairness.
Currently, campus provides formal residential spaces for people interested in health and wellness, those concerned with Latino/a issues, members of the LGBTQ community, students who commit to building a community around cooking food for each other, and others. Special interest housing, according to its official Web site, creates “safe spaces” for these communities. I’m not saying that members of religious communities are fundamentally unsafe here at Columbia because they do not have special housing. But the debates that have erupted over housing have illustrated that many of us do not understand what it means to be forced to leave behind a tradition according to the rule of and for the good of the majority. So, I believe that Housing and Dining should accommodate all religious groups here—those who have the power to loudly advocate for themselves and those who do not—that need their residences designed according to particular rules by establishing better religious group housing. In what remains a rough university environment for many religious people, spaces must be created for all who need them, so that tradition is no longer vulnerable or something to be negotiated.