Dammit, I’ll miss Spec. How it toyed with my heart and teased my brain, destroyed my GPA, and impugned my liver. I’ll miss this craft, which bathes in the sheen of drama and basks in an earthy sentimentality toward human nature. I’ll miss this sleepless love affair with an art that boasts the world as its muse.
Sitting here, facing the luster of a certain kind of retirement, I realize I don’t know what a senior column is. I guess it’s a chance to cull together a legacy as editor in chief, an apologia, as well as to capture now a feeling that will eventually be only a memory.
More than anything, I just want to thank the staffers I had the pleasure to work with, to learn from, and to spend many late nights with in the dilapidated and homey Spec office. Thank you to Dan, Ellen, and Tom, who keep this place running. And I am eternally thankful for my parents, who are, frankly, rather perfect.
I could spend my 800 words on a coherent reminiscence, but it’s all a disorganized jumble so (forgive me, senior columns are pretty masturbatory) I’ll just ejaculate some unassuming pieces of the gestalt:
Trying to recognize people from Facebook. Wanting to talk about Marxism with floor mates. Trying to remember Hegel for discussion of Marxism. Wondering why everyone here throws Frisbees (especially since most suck at it). Learning postcolonialism by osmosis. First stepping into the Spec office. Agreeing with my professor that homework is a waste of my time and his. Covering student politics, Ahmadinejad, David Charlow, and the random discipline Columbia handed out to the Minuteman protesters. Being skeptical of ServiceNation. Unearthing the raw will to stay awake, one more hour, one more page, one more assignment, without recourse to psychotropic dehumanization (but a hell of a lot of coffee). Not being able to remember much of junior year at all. Wrestling with, cursing at, and sending death threats to the Spectator’s K4 and Adobe software. Making RegretTheError.com. Deconstructing. Thinking that Socrates, not Jesus, died for our sins. Eating alone as a freshman in John Jay Dining Hall with the Times, Spec, and a good book for good measure, not because I had no friends but because we have no time to read for pleasure what with all the pages our teachers assign. The first and last frat party I went to. Making snow angels in Riverside Park. Protesting something.
Ah, Columbia—those hallowed grounds where everything is intellectualized into absurdity and discovery. I cherished the opportunity to exercise for a while the piety and play of the intellectual—I leave empowered and also humbled. But now it’s pencils down, grab your cap and gown—the blue and aluminum stands are rising.
I was never supposed to be editor in chief of the Spectator. I didn’t have the raw talent or the ambition, and so it came about by virtue of my not having been burned out by the time our internal elections came around. I don’t know how I ever ended up in the Spec office in the first place—if there ever were a clique for me, I expected it would be more bookish than newsy. But I guess I liked Spec’s hours better.
At Spectator I learned about journalism, Columbia, business, libel, and people. I learned about politics and power—scary stuff. As EIC, I learned that many of Spec’s (many) flaws take years to fix, and that many of our achievements are only fully comprehended in the context of our predecessors and successors. No ego, nor editor, nor “campus leader” can transcend the structure, except maybe by ignoring it.
I’m still not quite clear why this seems to matter, but it matters.
As the world changes, so too must the industry and the aesthetic—this is obvious, and no amount of hand-wringing will make up for the fact that the journalism industry was bloated, complacent, and in need of a neat kick in the ass. But this does not pose a great threat to the idiosyncratic charm of the Spectator. As long as there are students who want to take part, Spec will keep on rolling in some form. That was always the point.
I probably should be telling you something awesome that suggests that I’m really awesome and that Columbia is awesome and that Spec is really awesome, as is walking home just before dawn after putting an awesome issue to bed.
And it is, definitely. It’s naked and raw at its best, frustrating and tragically pointless at its worst. The camaraderie and masochism toward a common cause are a good way to approach life and struggle.
But it is unfair of/to me to summarily tell you these things, and since I have transgressed this far, I must at least resist the temptation of a wholesome conclusion. The fact is that the happiest hearts carry the longest shadows, and I don’t care to sum up the harrowing and yet rather typical narrative of my undergraduate career.
As can sometimes happen this time of year, it’s nice out and my friends just called to meet up on the steps. Peace out, homies.
The author is a Columbia College senior concentrating in philosophy. He was a deputy news editor on the 130th and 131st Deputy Boards and the editor in chief of the 132nd Managing Board.
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