The purpose of the opinion page is to act as a public forum for Columbia, representing and expressing the extraordinary diversity and fecundity of thought on this campus. While each individual voice on the page is supposed to be perfectly tuned, the combination of these voices is inevitably and deliberately a cacophonous mess, a beautifully jarring dissonance of Columbia’s clashing opinions.
In recent months, however, there has been, at least on one level, a startling and uncomfortable harmonization of opinion on these pages. From seemingly every corner of campus, in seemingly every edition of this paper, comes the same lament: We live on a cliquey, factious campus where like attracts like and people rarely leave their insular factions to find out what’s going on in the cold, snowy world outside. Our diversity, the concert says, starts with diversity and ends with diversity. Our efforts to integrate—the rare instances in which we leave the ethnic, religious, political, or vocational interest groups that we select—are feeble and ineffectual.
I think we fail to give ourselves enough credit. From my vantage point, ours is a campus of vibrant exchange and interaction where individuals make a concerted effort to learn about something unfamiliar and where campus groups take remarkable pains to reach out to one another. Nitpicking at the instances in which diversity engenders disjunction only reinforces the idea that our campus is a factious one, eventually turning that false perception into a reality. Instead, we should make a point to overlook the inevitable times during which we look inward too deeply and emphasize the merits of our model of diversity.
Last Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of enjoying hamantaschen and a discussion of faith and identity in the Kraft Center. The event—co-sponsored by the Interfaith Collective, the Wednesday Night Learning Program, and Hillel’s Interfaith/Intercultural Committee and featuring yummy victuals from Challah for Hunger—drew enough people to fill the room and offered a meaningful conversation about religious identity on our campus. What was perhaps most significant about the event, though, was just how insignificant it was: Hillel, the Interfaith Collective, and so many other groups on our campus host these sorts of events all the time, and they do a fantastic job of it. That event was just one of so many constructive conversations happening on our campus.
I don’t attend such events nearly as often as I should. And while it would be great if I stopped convincing myself I’m busy and started attending more intergroup events, perhaps to some extent, the number of people who actually show up at a given event doesn’t matter that much. Compared to the outside world, our campus boasts a remarkable sense of integration in its diversity. And even if it’s true that we talk the intercultural talk more than we walk the intercultural walk—though I would argue that this criticism itself may not be true—the psychological state prevalent on this campus, one of acknowledgment that reaching out to other groups is an act of inherent worth, deserves commendation. We should not take for granted the culture of mutual respect and openness on our campus when that ethos is so wanting outside the gates of our Morningside kallipolis.
And we must safeguard that culture. I struggled with that conviction throughout my time as a Spectator editor. Journalistic and editorial integrity demand that a newspaper staff hold organizations and authorities accountable. They ask that we take pride in exposing the faults in our community, convinced that doing so will spur our leaders to be honest and responsible. Yet in a community as small as Columbia’s, one in which so many bemoan, legitimately or not, the absence of a sense community, are we doing even more damage by continually pointing out the perceived problems in our society? The journalist must be truthful, but does every truth need to be articulated at any given time? Even if our campus is fractured, might pointing that out ignite conflagrations too difficult to stamp out?
Perhaps my argument is intellectually pusillanimous. After all, it is the polemical, the iconoclastic, the revolutionary whom we study in our classes—those who have had the intellectual courage to denounce the status quo. It is the sources of conflict that act, more often than not, as the subjects of academic investigation. It is those who have contributed to our society by having the audacity to disagree whom we revere.
But must we apply that model to our campus? If there is room for improvement in our campus’s model of diversity, must we, for the sake of progress, continually highlight those shortcomings? I’m not convinced.
Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College sophomore. He is the former Spectator editorial page editor. He is also a senior editor of the Columbia East Asia Review and the secretary of the Bahá’í Club. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com
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