Aaron Fisher

My first week at Columbia, I walked into the Spectator office and met Christian Zhang, the city news editor at the time. Christian immediately took me under his wing and sent me across the Upper West Side, Manhattanville, and Harlem to chase stories and develop relationships with sources.

In the second semester of my first year, as winter turned to spring and Columbia was just becoming mine, I’d sometimes stand in the middle of campus at night and look at Butler Library, sandwiched between the glowing trees on College Walk, still amazed I was here. As I’ve gotten older, the wonder of Columbia often seems like it has worn off, but as graduation gets closer to becoming a reality, our school’s romance has started to pop up for me again. Some nights, Butler is just as beautiful—and as daunting—as it was to me three years ago.

I’m from Washington, and I live two blocks from the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. Although the pizzeria has a particularly good pie called the Smoky, it doesn’t have a basement—let alone one with children trapped inside.

The Columbia administration has an attitude problem.

We go to college just as much to learn from each other as from our professors. Yet over the course of our time at college, we divide ourselves into social groups based more on political views than on intellectual curiosity.

Last weekend, my improv group welcomed four new members. We surprised them at their dorms and took them all out to Tom’s, the best place to celebrate on a Sunday after midnight. But as we ate our grilled cheese and drank our milkshakes, I thought about the larger group of students who were sitting in their rooms, reading their rejection emails instead of going out with us. I remembered what it was like to be one of them.

Last spring, while campaigning for student council, I went to River Hall for the first time. It was a weekday evening, but on a floor of 22 singles, only four or five residents opened their doors to me. I knocked on more than 2,000 doors in Columbia dorms that semester, and what I found was a great divide—a schism down the middle of our student body that creates two separate Columbias.

Columbia College Student Council should be an example of transparency to the Columbia administration. Yet, the student council, along with the Columbia Elections Board, does not adequately advertise its own elections, showing that its leadership is too far removed from the student body.

Given the recent string of student deaths at Columbia, I, along with other shocked students, can't help but wonder if it is not our school itself that has fallen ill. This academic year, six students have died, and it is not yet February. As Dean Valentini's notification emails have gradually gotten more surreal, we have all grown more numb.

Columbia University Medical Center announced Friday that the Mesothelioma Center would be absorbed into the Division of Hematology/Oncology and that Dr. Robert Taub has resigned as its director.