Coming Together

This semester, we as students have felt many things—anger, joy, determination, even, at times, despair—but I am proud to say that complacency was not one of them. When faced with incidents of racism, a campus expansion into Harlem that will displace thousands of people, and administrative stonewalling on long-standing issues of curricular reform, we were not content to stay concentrated on our studies. We took our convictions beyond the seminar room and worked to make a critical intervention in the reality of this University. A great number of steps have been trod, but the road ahead will still be long, particularly on the issue of Manhattanville.

There is a tremendous amount of positive energy that was generated by the culture of solidarity of the hunger strike that I only wish could have been experienced by the entire campus community. At our nightly vigils, at the hours and hours of meetings that went into planning every event, at the sometimes-exasperating administrative negotiation sessions, a new sense of trust and community was being forged. The symbolic space of the tents became an organic student center. Questions of clique and club put aside, we learned not only how to study life, but how to live it.

The important thing for strike critics to understand is that no matter what the rhetoric was in the heat of the moment, the strike was not targeted against Columbia. One of the most poignant moments of the strike occurred when I was sitting outside with several strikers when a parent of a prospective student came up to the tents and asked whether he should send his daughter to Columbia. The strikers all replied, “Yes.” Yes, the University is tremendously problematic and remains problematic enough for students to be willing sacrifice themselves to make change happen. But they all believed that the University could be a positive place to live and learn.

The strike was a success because we had a deep belief that the University was fluid and a site of contestation. While there was deep anger at University policy, it was always coupled with deep respect for the faculty and the student body of the University. We saw that, in the long run, administrators were willing to make compromises on points of contention. We were facing not an evil monolith, but a bureaucratic institution that could do much better for its students. The result of the strikers’ actions was not the imposition of a fringe agenda, but rather the creation of a series of spaces that will allow for student empowerment—regardless of whether they supported the strike.

There was one issue, however, that remained utterly unresolved and bespeaks of a moral crisis within this administration. Over the objections of its students, constant raucous demonstrations by community members, and a 32-2 vote from Community Board 9, Columbia has decided to push its plan through the city approval process by using its political muscle. The University could have shown its good faith to the community by agreeing to develop within the framework that had been developed over several decades of democratic planning and created an anti-displacement program to deal with the affordable housing crisis in its own backyard, but it has chosen not to deal with the criticism, but to ignore it. When the University acts not as a critical institution of higher learning but as a profit-driven business, something fundamentally wrong is occurring. We did not come here to be stakeholders in a real-estate corporation or to see neighborhoods bulldozed in our names—we came here to learn.

As we go into the City Council hearing this week, we know that we are participating in an undemocratic process that will inexorably lead to the approval of the plan regardless of the wishes of some of the constituencies involved. We will congratulate Columbia on their ill-begotten victory, and we will fight to ensure that it is Pyrrhic. When the bulldozers are sent into Harlem, we will not stand as silent witnesses. But we cannot stand alone.

To be successful, we need to both work off of the ties built by the activism this semester and transcend them. Those that opposed our strike are not our enemies. We must go to them, not to evangelize them with an objective truth that we do not hold but to humbly invite them to participate in a process to re-envision the way that our University relates to its neighbors.

We gain nothing by remaining divided and attacking each other. Columbia will expand, and so much the better. Let us use our position as students to make sure that it does so responsibly and accountably. By working together, we can take the joy, the tears, the incomprehension, and the anger generated by the past semester and push for a better expansion.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in Latin American studies.