Frozen in the Ninth Circle

This column should at least partly be a celebration of the past few years of my life. Above all, I got to do it at one of the greatest schools in the greatest city in the world. I still don’t know what I want to be in life, mostly because the door is overwhelmingly open now to anything I can make of it.

For whatever reason, one week ago today, Sheldon found himself on 122nd Street and Broadway, two blocks north of our campus and even closer to neighboring academic institutions. That’s where the incident happened, at 8:50 on an otherwise typical Friday evening.

One way or another, we’re confronted with the question of how much of our rebellious pasts we can shed before we wake up one day unable to relate to the next generation.

I’m sometimes embarrassed to tell friends that, every now and then, I enjoy acting like an uncivilized animal among others at a pro wrestling show. Though if doing it both relieves stress and helps us reconnect with the much larger nonacademic world beyond the gates, maybe it’s just as important to an overall well-roundedness as reading the next great book.

"Top news” on the University home page completely ignores an alumni band sending shock waves through the music industry. It seems bizarre that a school that prides itself on those with strong creative talents would do so little to foster those abilities within its walls, limiting students’ potential to become leaders in those fields.

I live on the corner of LaSalle Street and Claremont Avenue, about five blocks from Columbia. Walk a few blocks north of Tiemann, and you'll find yourself in Manhattanville–that foreign place where clearly nobody lives, works or has any business being in until there's a university in its footprint.

The problem, unfortunately, is that the hate-filled incidents of last semester gradually dropped this free-flowing intellectual academy to its knees, to the point that a rather innocuous incident, like Monday’s discovery in Hewitt, can be blown so far out of proportion as to risk harming the great free speech experiment that is the American university.