In these last words I publish as a Columbia undergraduate, I’m going to do something a little bit unfashionable. I will offer some words of thanks and praise to the institution that is Columbia University, and clarify some of the arguments I have sustained in this column in light of these words of praise.
It has always been easy to criticize the University. And I believe the University needs to hear its criticism, and needs to listen closely to the members of its community and the communities that are its neighbors. In many ways, the institution has failed us and has been the source of an endless barrage of disappointment. Many people in our community and outside of our gates suffer and are unnoticed. Much of the time, the brushing aside of religion as a topic of discussion endures, unless within a smaller group. And religion is not the only thing that people don’t seem to want to talk about. Perhaps it figures into the community’s broader theoretical interest in, but profound practical discomfort with, difference. That is one crucial reason for the consistent formation of strongly bounded and intimate belief communities that arise here, surviving in the shelter of the margins.
Yet there is also a great deal of good. Religion, if marginalized, still has its places to thrive. Hillel’s blog still has its exclamation points; Facebook still reminds us daily of religion’s importance for the presentation of identity; people—this past week, for instance, a gentleman just outside of Westside Market from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—still ask me whether my life is worth living and if I would like to talk about God. And I, a mostly secular Jew who has remained outside of my religion’s group activities during my four years here, have at least been able to learn something about what my Jewish classmates are up to.
My project in this column has been, from the outset, to go beyond straight criticism of this institution. We often take for granted that Columbia is one of the best research universities in the world, and that the students and faculty Columbia attracts are really smart, highly accomplished, and, most of the time, intellectually generous and open. Even though I have argued that our community—which includes administrators, students, and staff all existing under institutionally formal and socially informal rules and parameters—too often disappoints when it comes to religion, which the broader campus community often brushes off to the side to sustain other, supposedly more important ideologies in an often hypocritical gesture, the institutional structures themselves are only partially at fault.
When it comes to encouraging and cultivating cultural, religious, and intellectual diversity, the institution itself deserves a great deal of praise. Structures are in place for just about any group to form that wants to, as long as it has the energy to run back and forth a few hundred times between bureaucratic organs. (Could this be an initiation rite?) People come here and most of the time, they get to think what they want to think, and even find forums and institutional spaces in which they can voice their opinions. Indeed, one could argue that here, the institutional celebration of difference sometimes goes too far, allowing students the ease of clinging too much to belief communities and interest groups while forgetting what unites us as a community.
Despite our tendency to relentlessly criticize this place, we hesitate when it comes to examining ourselves. When each of us enters this community for the first time, we not only assume a given set of social laws, but we also assert our own rules. So, as each generation of a mostly transient community passes through, the parameters of social life change just a little bit. I say this to make two final claims. First, even within this supposed apotheosis of American intellectual life in which a generous diversity of opinions, approaches, and perspectives is meant to thrive and move us all toward truth, we as a collective—and not the institution of which we are members—have chosen to dogmatically drive religion to the margins.
Second, this can change. But it is up to us. After all, the university’s motto is “In Thy light shall we see light.” Perhaps nobody believes this anymore—perhaps our public forums are illuminated by something else, and that original light can only shine through the cracks into the margins where our belief communities thrive. But in a place fraught with curious disjunctions yet glittering with accolades, maybe the idea of that light (in whatever shade it may take)—not so much its possibility as its importance as a cultural form here—is on its way to better recognition. And I think it is. For that, and lots of other things, I offer Columbia my thanks.
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