Andrew Lyubarsky

We've all lived seven years since the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, and all we have to show for it is an occupation in Iraq, with over 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and perhaps over a million Iraqis perishing in the turmoil. When we hear Barack Obama's and John McCain's words offering up "service" as a panacea, we must always remember the context we are living in—a society that learned the wrong lessons from Sept. 11, and went down a destructive path toward a messianic unilateralism and international disrepute.

On paper, it seems like I've done everything right. I attend regular protests on 125th Street, I can cite Huey P. Newton, and I recite compellingly how American urban policy has ravaged communities of color since the halcyon days of Robert Moses. Marathon readings of Manhattanville documents are my idea of a fun time. But no matter how many man-hours I put in working for affordable housing, it is impossible to mask the obvious. If I decide to move to Harlem and be a white person in a non-white urban space, I cannot help but be an agent of gentrification.

To those who are involved in the movement criticizing the Manhattanville expansion, this month's public hearings on the potential exercise of eminent domain were a familiar spectacle. The university trots out its people—the few Harlem-rooted administrators affiliated with the project, well-treated commercial tenants, representatives of construction unions, headlined by the stentorian figure of beloved PrezBo. They present the University as Harlem's potential savior, a remover of blight, the redeemer of the promise of what Upper Manhattan could be. Community critics, numerically a far larger group, decry the expansion as a displacement plan that will destroy their neighborhoods and convert their working-class homes into gentrified playgrounds. There is sound and there is fury. The hearing officer sits stoically, moving only to call the next speaker or reprimand the audience when the Dominican grannies get too rowdy.

I was born in the Soviet Union. Never Russia, never Moscow, always the Soviet Union. I cannot count the number of times I have, playfully or defiantly, uttered these words or cynically tucked them into some personal statement or other. The fallen republic is all things to all people. It is Lenin at the Finland Station and the early lost promises of a people's state that could serve as a beacon for the world. It is Stalin and the Siberian gulag, a tyranny unrivaled in modern times. It is the breadline and the red star, bottles of vodka scattered on the depleted earth, an endless gray horizon and the first man in space.

In Tuesday night's chorus of thousands of jubilant "yes-we-cans" that emanated from the spontaneously gathered masses on 125th Street, we saw not only the joy that a redemptive political moment can inspire, but also a glimpse of what a mobilized American population looks like. With shouts of triumph that rang into the night, we took to the streets and reclaimed our city. Class, race, and culture did not disappear, but for a couple of hours they were unimportant. America was important, and we defined it much as Barack Obama did—black, white, and Latino, gay and straight, old and young. In its teeming contradictions brought together, we saw beauty.

In opposing the initial version of the much-discussed Wall Street bailout, Rep. Darrell Issa of California boldly declared that any intervention to stabilize the financial system would be akin to putting a "coffin on top of Ronald Reagan's coffin." To remedy a crisis that was generated by the systematic assault on state regulation starting with the Reagan administration, Republican dissenters to the bailout offered us a Polyanna-like faith that free markets will never cease to bring forth manna from the earth.

With results coming in on the student referenda on NROTC, it looks like the return of the military program has been dealt a blow, albeit by a narrower margin than many expected. This is as it should be—"don't ask, don't tell" is a foolish and discriminatory policy, and it would be nonsensical to reward any institution for such retrograde practices. break I also believe that the policy of excluding LGBT people from the military is likely a deeply unpopular one amongst certain segments of the military brass, especially in a period of heavy recruitment in which finding enough bodies to service America's imperial follies overseas is becoming increasingly difficult. It is the product of a federal law, and under an Obama administration more willing to consider these issues, its repeal may very well be imminent. I grant that this would be a victory in terms of providing equal opportunity and would have positive repercussions in terms of lessening discrimination on the basis of sexual identity. However, I firmly believe that the return of ROTC, even a reformed, all-inclusive version, onto campus would be a grave reversal of the gains made by organized student movements and a great step backwards for the struggle to construct a more just community on this campus. All the respectable voices of the liberal establishment here, from University President Lee Bollinger to Professor David Eisenbach, have expressed that they would bring ROTC back with open arms once DADT is reversed. Since I consider myself neither liberal nor respectable, I feel free to say what I think is obvious—winning the right for gay people to participate in an institution which invades sovereign nations, bombs cities with white phosphorus, and tortures detainees in secret prisons is not a progressive development. Broadening a social consensus behind an institution that has violently harmed the stability of the world is not positive. If the tragic tale of Lynndie England is not liberating for women, then why would the case be any different for any other groups in our society? I say this neither from a pacifist position nor from one of moral superiority. There are times when groups, including nations, need to exercise violence to protect their legitimate interests, and a military is the institution to be used for that purpose. However, we have to look not at an ideal type of what the military could be through the lens of mystifying abstractions such as an integrative "national service" but from an analysis of how it has been instrumentally used. From Vietnam to Iraq to dozens of secret coups and palace intrigues in Latin America and the Middle East, the U.S. military has never been defensive, or about promoting democracy. The "terrorists" it struggles against are only nourished by the permanent bases on Saudi soil, the punitive expeditions in Baghdad, the billions in aid to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the Egyptian one-party state. The skeletons aren't even in the closet—they are openly accessible to anyone who cares to read up on their history, but we seem to forget them when we declare that we want to give all the right to patriotic service. It is indubitably true that the soldier in the American military is exceptionally brave, and risking your life in the scorching deserts of Iraq is not an endeavor that should be taken lightly from the comforts of New York City streets. But were the Soviets in Afghanistan or the Russians in Chechnya not equally brave? What about the militants of Hamas or the Iraqi insurgency, who are virtually assured death for their resistance? Self-sacrifice and bravery are not the monopoly of institutions with a noble mission. Our nation's troops can be perfectly noble in an institution with despicable effects on the world, and the testimony of antiwar veterans of Vietnam and Iraq indicates this view is by no means limited to ignorant civilians. The "No on NROTC" movement has, however, mainly accepted the thesis that the problem with the U.S. military has not been its actions, its missions, or its uses, and has limited its critique to an inequality of access. While I commend the efforts of activists that recall the role of LGBT students in kicking the NROTC off campus in the aftermath of the strike in 1969, it is revisionist history to consider that as anything else but a denouncement of militarism and the Vietnam War. For once, the right-wing media is right—the students were not protesting a lack of access to the military, they had a broader systemic critique of the military itself. Forty years ago, students decided that having an active NROTC on campus implied that the University was explicitly supporting an unjust war in Vietnam. They declared that a school that is proud to produce the leaders and administrators of the empire is incompatible with one that fosters the development of critical knowledge. Instead of accepting the vapid establishment argument that military service constitutes a transcendent good, why don't we assert that one of the elements of a "global university" is the production of minds critical of an established power so covered in corpses? Let's not be a pale shadow of those that came before us. We foreclose the broader societal questioning that the ROTC issue implies by limiting ourselves to DADT. Only when the assumptions of American foreign policy are fundamentally altered should the military have a place on our campus. Andrew Lyubarsky is a Columbia College senior majoring in Hispanic studies. Cliché Guevara runs alternate Thursdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com

This semester, we as students have felt many things—anger, joy, determination, even, at times, despair—but I am proud to say that complacency was not one of them. When faced with incidents of racism, a campus expansion into Harlem that will displace thousands of people, and administrative stonewalling on long-standing issues of curricular reform, we were not content to stay concentrated on our studies. We took our convictions beyond the seminar room and worked to make a critical intervention in the reality of this University. A great number of steps have been trod, but the road ahead will still be long, particularly on the issue of Manhattanville.

Tuesday, I sat with a broad coalition of students in a meeting with Maxine Griffith, executive vice president for government and community affairs—in layman's terms, the lead administrator responsible for handling Columbia's expansion into Manhattanville. The concerns we have about the plan are diverse and abundant—the lack of mitigation for the vast amount of residential displacement the plan will engender, the potential forcible seizure of property by eminent domain, the creation of an entirely new enclave within a predominantly working-class, minority environment—but they all boiled down to one thing. We believe that Columbia has shown a wanton disregard for the principle of local democracy that its institutional principles stand for. In its rush to push its plan through by any means necessary, the University is sacrificing its entire theoretical belief system, and losing its identity.

As Jonathan Hollander argued in a recent piece ("Manhattanville's Forgotten Beneficiaries," Jan. 24), Manhattanville should not be simplified into a cheap morality play or a parochial battle between the community and the University. Only a global perspective that examines the conditions and trends fueling this development can explain what is occurring beyond emotional appeals to fight displacement. Gentrification is a global phenomenon and deserves to be studied in such a manner.