Eye: features

Before speaking to Luis Velasquez, I never knew it was possible to be in Peru, China, Harlem, and on Wall Street all at once.

The concrete halls of the mechanical engineering department are decked in dim grey blocks and starved of natural light, but Mike Massimino’s office feels lively. Inside, the walls are lined with tidy rows of memorabilia: photos of Massimino’s crew in their space station hailing from his two missions, a proper portrait of him beaming in his space suit, and awards written in dramatic typefaces, adorned in heavy golden frames. There are more eclectic objects too, like a plush Snoopy that grins at me from the corner of Massimino’s desk, donning a clear astronaut’s helmet. This space holds an entire universe—spanning from intimidating-looking official letters to objects like Snoopy that seem almost like inside jokes, winking at whomever ventures into this abode.

Henry Williams, a sophomore at Columbia College, is fresh out of the shower, standing in his pajamas with a towel draped over his shoulders, as he welcomes me into the basement lounge of River Hall. There is a lot to talk about, and he does not waste time. He speaks quickly and eloquently—it’s clear that he has told this story many times before. As Williams laments the uninspiring centrism that he believes has plagued leftist politics since the end of the ’60s, a student plays violin across the room. The melancholic crooning is like a funeral march for politics as we know it.

I meet Patricia Culligan, a professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, in her sunny sixth floor office in Mudd. Fairly early into our conversation, she describes a real-life situation. She hones in on a particular spot on a Boston road that has grown notorious for its high number of deaths as a result of people attempting to cross the street.

At the end of his final year teaching at Columbia, Michael Rosenthal, a professor emeritus in the English department, received a gift from his Literature Humanities students: a hardcover copy of “Tales from Shakespeare” with its pages hollowed out. Inside sat a bound booklet titled “If I Could Be Permitted a Totally Ridiculous Statement”—a compendium of Rosenthal’s one-liners for each book on the syllabus. In a section of general “Rosenthalisms” lies the following quote:

“Apple does this to you all the time. I had some action shots. I don't know what they did with it."

“It’s the mecca,” Desiree Parker, a current sophomore, says of life at Howard University. We are catching up over the phone, and while I sit alone on the barren steps of Low after dark, I hear the laughter of friends waft from behind her voice—reaching my ears all the way from D.C. She is definitely not alone when she says, “It’s a place where people of all walks of life can come together to find a salvation on one common ground.” This is the first taste that I get of life at a historically black college or university, and it leads me to wonder what I am missing out on.

It’s a rainy Thursday evening at the beginning of October, and a group of students is hard at work in Hamilton 516, solving climate change. At the front of the classroom, long sheets of bright yellow paper are spread out on the floor as students sketch out an outline of Manhattan with chalk. Soon, that outline will be filled in with black and blue paint, representing the areas of New York City that will be severely flooded if sea levels continue to rise. But 516 and its inhabitants—the Columbia/Barnard Sunrise Movement hub—are far from grim. As Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (a protest song from the 1960s, the one that goes: “... stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down ...”) threads through the speakers, what you get instead is a sense of hope.

An arrow whizzes by my head—it narrowly misses. As I spend that moment fixated on the near-death experience I’ve just endured, my pursuer appears, promptly taking away any relief I may have had. He wields an iron sword and proceeds to mercilessly assail my character, who I’ve customized to look like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, winning the battle. In the process of all this, he screams, “easy, easy dub,” exposing me for the noob I am.

On April 3, 2019, the plastic chairs that lined the Broadway Room of Lerner were dotted with students ready to talk about the challenges of having a disability at Columbia. Dierdre Radigan, a senior in General Studies, opened the town hall by speaking about her experience as an undergrad at Georgetown 12 years earlier. “I sat there facing all these problems that I had no idea how to solve and couldn’t have any perspective on. I felt like my life was falling apart, and I didn’t know who to talk to,” she said.