Alice McCrum

One evening in East Campus in the late 1980s, a group of students begin to dance. Illuminated by the sprawling lights of East Harlem and warmed by a home-cooked dinner, a young professor Marcellus Blount watches from the sofa. “Dance, professor Blount, dance!” one student insists. Blount, characteristically modest, replies: “No, no, no, I don’t think I’ll do that.” But now everyone is insisting. Then, “out of nowhere, all of a sudden,” one student remembers, he stands and begins to move.

It is late one Sunday evening and I am on my way to the third floor of Uris Hall. The elevator opens onto a large commonspace with computer stations on the right, a glass conference room at the back, and golden oak colored lockers framing the wide hallways. The space feels like something from the suburbs, too large to exist on a crowded city campus. Tomorrow, this sleeping giant will house 350 faculty members and 1,500 business school students; today, the radical possibility of such an enormous amount of space feels overwhelming.

On Monday, February 19, 2018, from 12:49 p.m. to 1:27 p.m., I lived life in the fast lane for the very first time. It was, in a word, exhilarating. For those 38 minutes, I was light and swift and streamlined. My skin was clean and soft. My legs were strong.