Sophia Cornell

In 2009, George Krebs, then president of Columbia College Student Council, gave what Bwog called “a rather rousing speech.”

On 8 p.m. on a Monday this October, students trickle into Mathematics 509. Professor Ovidiu Savin, the director of undergraduate studies for the math department, walks in, and the room goes silent. Savin is tall and thin and somewhat wry. Today, it seems like his job is mostly to lower expectations.

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For her birthday this year, Inga Manticas, a sophomore in Columbia College, held a 1968-themed party. She decorated her suite on the third floor of Greenborough, the sustainability-themed special interest community. “Revolution!” screamed a green painted banner on the wall. Two adjacent signs said “Out of Vietnam” and “Out of Harlem.” A sign above the bathtub urged, “No More War.”

Julia Crain, who will graduate from Barnard College this spring, is a curious case of the Columbia ActivistTM: She’s both passionate and jaded, both radical—willing to risk disciplinary action for a cause she cares about—and not. We speak of her activism, which both began and ended while at Columbia, in the past tense.

In 2014, Olga Brudastova was working in her lab on the sixth floor of Mudd when a stranger knocked on the door. He introduced himself as Bradley Gorski, a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic languages and literatures and an organizer for the Graduate Workers of Columbia. Gorski told Brudastova that some graduate students were thinking of unionizing. Brudastova was intrigued, in part because she had been paid several months late for the last two semesters and had had to borrow money from her roommate to pay rent. At the next town hall held by union activists, Brudastova asked if a union for graduate students could help her be paid on time. “That’s the easy one!” an organizer told her.

Most Columbia activists will tell you how the frustrating the work is—how no amount of research and organizing, squeezed into spaces between homework, can upend the David-and-Goliath-like imbalance between one small activist group and the intricate, all-powerful University. Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn, who graduated from Columbia College in 2016, tells me all of this. But she also stands for something else about Columbia activists. David got the shot off, and sometimes, activists win.

In the spring of 2015, Zoe Ridolfi-Starr was about to graduate from Columbia. At the time, she was one of the most public and controversial faces in the national conversation about campus sexual assault.

The man waiting to place his order at the register taps his fingers on the counter to the beat of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which is playing over the ambient din of the restaurant. He is tan and wearing a circle scarf—dad-age, but the kind of dad who knows the difference between Kobe and Wagyu beef and who has been on the receiving end of a manicure. He looks a bit like what I imagine Barbie’s boyfriend would look like at 50.