Sarah Braka

The polls for General Studies Student Council open on Monday, April 12, at 10 a.m. and will remain open until Thursday, April 15, at 10 a.m. The polls for the Barnard Student Government Association reopened on Wednesday, March 31, at around 4:30 p.m. and will remain open until Monday, April 12, at 12 p.m.

Explore our Black History Month Edition.

My first Rosh Hashanah away from home and family was supposed to be unremarkable. I planned to be with friends, make some semblance of a holiday dinner, braid my first challah, and FaceTime my parents and brother to wish them a sweet and happy new year. Yet, it was only minutes after hearing the blast of the shofar—the signal that a new year has begun—that I heard the sounds of incoming texts, tweets, and Apple News alerts that would signal the end of an era. All these electronic blasts brought the same news: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice whose shoulders bore the weight of our country’s democracy, had died.

There are about a million things on everyone’s mind during the COVID-19 pandemic, but one worry many of us share is that we are somehow falling behind by being home this summer. While not having an internship or a job the summer before your first year of college is perfectly fine—I did absolutely nothing but hang out with friends the summer before arriving at Columbia—being at home with nothing to do means that life can be a little uneventful.

During “Race, Caste, and American Pragmatism,” the first event in the second annual Ambedkar Lectures, a panel of faculty from various universities discussed the rigidity of the American social structure and how racial oppression in the United States reflects a social caste system.