Letter to the editor

To the Editor:

It is quite bracing to see the rectangles of College Walk covered with small American flags as they were for September 11. I’m not accustomed to such high-volume patriotism on such a diverse and cosmopolitan campus, but I acknowledge that there may be a time and place. So, I walked over and tried to understand who was being honored. There were 2,819 flags, “one for each victim of the attack,” Spectator writes. In that case, the choice to display only American flags must have been an error or an act of cynicism. There is no mystery about the diversity of the victims of September 11: undocumented workers, nationals of many countries. There were hundreds of non-U.S. citizens killed, with more than 90 different nationalities represented. How can we possibly honor victims by erasing their identities? Imagine if we represented the Columbia student body in the same one-dimensional way. And on College Walk, where on each day, we live the diversity of this community through the dozens of languages spoken and even more diverse group of nationalities? So this was not the time or place.

Peter Rosenblum
Lieff Cabraser Clinical Professor of Human Rights
Columbia Law School