A Letter of Grievances and Demands

President Bollinger:

I am writing to inform you of the outrage that certain segments of the Columbia community are currently feeling toward you and the Columbia administration. We are tired of the inconsistency in the support and solidarity this administration provides to different groups on campus—an inconsistency which continues to be made abundantly clear. We are tired of unequal responses issued by the administration to hateful incidents that take place on our campus. Most of all, we are tired of purported advocates of tolerance and “the dignity ... of every individual” hiding their partiality behind grandiloquent words while perpetually silencing injustices perpetrated against those groups to whom the purse-strings of Columbia and its president do not lead.
On Sept. 26 a hateful message was scrawled on a bathroom wall in the School of International and Public Affairs. The message, initially targeting Muslims directly, broadened out to include Africans and all non-white Europeans in America. The discovery of this message precipitated a swift reaction from campus leaders, an article in Spectator, and a campus walkout in solidarity with those protesting the treatment of the Jena Six in Louisiana.

You were repeatedly asked to release a statement on the issue to inform the wider campus of what had transpired, but no such action has been taken, despite your assurances to campus leaders and concerned students at your Fireside chat that you would. The campus has since seen two more public instances of hate: a noose hung on an African American professor’s door at Teachers College and anti-Semitic statements written in Lewisohn Hall.

Although you have been criticized for your delayed reaction to the incident at Teachers College, it is made more egregious by your instantaneous response to the Lewisohn Hall incident: if only the administration could react so swiftly to all such incidents. In your own words from the statement released regarding the incident at Teacher’s College, “we have a particular obligation to respond forcefully to events that affront our values.” The glaring inconsistency of your responses to these similar incidents makes it clear that attacks on some segments of Columbia’s community do not qualify as affronts to your values.

In the same vein, I would like to remind you that the Muslim community on this campus has never forgotten your falure to issue a statement to the entire Columbia campus on the murder of Law School employee Malik Murray on 125th Street in May of last year. After ruminating over the tragedy, I came to believe that if a campus employee were killed so close to campus at any college in this country—regardless of his identity as an African American Muslim—the entire community would be made aware and come together for mutual grieving. But not at Columbia. This lack of acknowledgement stood in complete contrast to the play-by-play information we received after the horrific incident involving that poor School of Journalism student last spring. It was then that I first felt the selectiveness of your empathy and the disingenuousness of your words. When a community’s leader shies away from important occurrences that may tarnish its image, that community crumbles.

In your statement released today, Oct. 11, 2007, which acknowledges the incident of anti-Semitism at Lewisohn Hall, you state, “as one community, we will overcome these hateful acts and hold each other to the highest standards of respect for the dignity and diversity of every individual.” Well Mr. President, consider this letter an attempt to hold you to that standard. As such, I demand a public apology for both the inconsistency of your support to groups on this campus and for the incongruity of your words and actions.

The author is a 2007 graduate of Barnard College.