student-protest

When Maria Ordoñez, a rising Columbia College senior, talks about her favorite small businesses in West Harlem and Morningside Heights, her joy is palpable. The Hungarian Pastry Shop makes her smile so much that she mentions it twice. When she tells me about Mofongo del Valle, a Dominican restaurant in West Harlem, she beams about the owners’ kindness—something she has experienced firsthand as she attended school with their daughter—and she describes just how much she loves the smell of 5 Estrellas Bakery in Washington Heights, exclaiming “Oh my gosh, I love it.”

When the spring 2021 Ivy League season was canceled, student-athletes had to grapple with being stripped of a part of their identity. For many, the cancellation meant the loss of another season, and for seniors, it meant the premature ending of their collegiate athletic careers.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the music industry was left reeling. Live gigs were canceled, bands were wrenched apart by financial strain, and the industry’s future was as uncertain as the release date of Kanye’s next album. Ingenuity, both in music and business, was a must for all those who desired to stay afloat.

On Saturday, the Society of Professional Journalists announced the recipients of its 2021 Mark of Excellence Awards, which honor the best of collegiate journalism at the national level. Spectator, which submitted eight articles and its editions for consideration, won in three categories—including best all-around student newspaper—and had four finalists.

A new $1.4 billion funding campaign was announced by University President Lee Bollinger in an email Thursday. The Columbia Student Support Initiative will provide assistance to all 16 schools at the University, with a goal of raising all funds by June 2025.

After three weeks of the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers strike, University President Lee Bollinger announced that the University must reject the union’s demands in the spirit of “preserving the authentic graduate student experience of financial and emotional suffering.”

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.

Before I came to Columbia, I wrote on medieval love poetry. Now I write on power—and its detractors.

In 1968, then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon labeled Columbia students’ famous protest over the Vietnam War and civil rights as “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle.” Putting Columbia at the center of his anti-activist crusade, he observed that “The eyes of every potential [activist] … are focused on Morningside Heights.” Columbia’s valedictorian that year, Richard Mosak, CC ’66, echoed Nixon’s assessment in a Class Day statement saying that, at Columbia, “protests and demonstrations against social injustice [are] as important to a student’s overall education as classwork.”