AJ Stoughton

People both on and off campus seemed flabbergasted to see recent polling data claiming that roughly 40 percent of Millennials support government censorship of speech considered offensive to minorities. The very first amendment of our Bill of Rights, after all, focuses on freedom of speech, and time and time again, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that amendment by protecting offensive speech that does not advocate violence or directly cause physical harm against others.

In December of last year, Bloomberg magazine declared Brooklyn the least affordable housing market in the United States. The median home price in the borough is approximately $610,000. To live there, a prospective Brooklyn resident would need to spend roughly 98 percent of the median income of borough residents to afford payments on such a property. This is, of course, a problem—not just for residents there, but for those of us who want to stay in New York after graduation. We can take solace in one thing, however: Manhattan is only the third-most expensive real-estate market in the country, behind San Francisco and Washington D.C. Small victories.

But for many at Columbia, "bad politics" mean bad morals. If a friend supports Hillary Clinton, for example, she's a white feminist who doesn't support the plight of women of color. She's a corporatist who doesn't care about economic justice. If a friend doesn't believe in trigger warnings, they have no sympathy for victims of assault.

On Feb. 1, Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine and the Columbia chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace released a joint statement declaring the foundation of their new organization, Columbia University Apartheid Divest. A part of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, the group wants Columbia to divest from companies that it claims materially benefit from what the group calls Israel's violation of Palestinian human rights. CUAD ultimately wants Israel to return land seized in the War of 1967, recognize the rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel, and respect the right of return for those who have been displaced from their homes by Israel's existence.

"And indeed there will be time

Nevertheless, I don't regret my choice. While Columbia's undergraduate creative writing program works for a lot of very talented people, it didn't work for me.

Rabin was no saint. As a young man he was a member of the Palmach, an elite unit of the underground Jewish army that preceded the establishment of Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces. Later in life, during the first Intifada, he approved the use of extremely harsh measures to put down Palestinian rebellion.

These were the motives I admitted to myself, at least. In truth, I wanted to convince myself that I still loved Columbia because I no longer felt like I did. As much as I wanted my participation in student journalism to be an act of civic engagement, of community building, it was, in the end, just an attempt to have some part of the perfect college career that I imagined for myself when I got here.

Considering all the changes that the administration has made to Bacchanal since 2013, it's pretty cool that 40s on 40 has remained unchanged. Though not an officially organized event, it's worth noting that 40s on 40 is school-sanctioned. The big bad administration that hates fun lets us get drunk 40 days before graduation on the most iconic part of our campus at two in the morning without interference.

With all these options, though, one has to ask: Are any of them actually any good? I use a lot of these, but I hardly rely on them for anything substantive. With the exception of a few Facebook threads and Twitter conversations, I do all of my real communication face to face. (All of my Gen Xers and baby boomers out there reading this, please feel free to say how nice it is to see a kid these days understand the importance of in-person conversation). I adore a lot of social media platforms, but they all require something that helps complement, but can never replace, in-person interaction: brevity.