// editor's note //
Spring 2016
The Real Solidarity Network
This semester began with a devastating loss of life: three students—classmates, roommates, friends—taken from this world much too soon. On January 13, 2016, a bus carrying a volunteer Columbia medical brigade crashed in Honduras, resulting in the deaths of Abigail Flanagan (GS), Olivia Erhardt (CC), and Daniella Moffson (BC). The ensuing waves of grief and disbelief that overtook campus revealed an oft quieted sense of community across Columbia. Beyond the academic and social micro-communities that routinely revive themselves at the start of each semester, a broader, emotional campus community surfaced. It was new to many of us, this camaraderie that crossed the conventional lines of class year, undergraduate college, and field of study.
Visceral shock shattered clique culture, basic sadness beat out political angst. Distress tore through campus, deeply affecting these women's closest friends as well as those who had never heard their names before. Columbia lost three of its own. For many, like the two of us writing this Letter, the question of how to react as neither a best friend nor a stranger but rather, simply, a friend, presented a staggering challenge that persists still to this day.
From within these different pockets of mourners though, materialized a centralized source of solace and strength. The unique campus communities that grieved for Abigail, Olivia, and Daniella had existed previously in rather disparate universes: Abigail’s Columbia University Medical Campus colleagues and General Studies post-baccalaureate classmates, Olivia’s dorm-mates and fellow Columbia College aspiring scientists, Daniella’s roommates and expansive Modern Orthodox Jewish cohort. Yet, one week after their deaths, when thousands of students returned to campus from winter break, the boundaries that had traditionally separated these groups dissipated. Students shared their sorrow and expressed their anger—together. We mourned collectively; we memorialized collaboratively.
This past January, the Columbia community formed an organic solidarity network rooted in a plethora of personal struggles. We—all of us—needed one another, some unwittingly, and others quite deliberately. For once, at a university more acclaimed for its students’ stress levels than their social lives, we put friends, classmates, even strangers first. In the wake of catastrophe, we stood together. We are not better for having experienced the Honduras tragedy, but neither should we resist holding onto its hard-earned lessons.
The passing of time and prioritization of schoolwork has, predictably, ushered this sort of solidarity out, but a different sort of student solidarity remains front and center. In the most recent and dramatic example, which culminated in a take-over, sit-in, and shut-down of Low Library by Columbia Divest for Climate Justice, we see how political activism, too, steers students toward a sense of solidarity. This recent occupation of Low, though, is but one instance in Columbia’s recent history of intense student solidarity born out of commitment to a rousing political cause.
Combating rape-culture on campus, increasing minimum wage, encouraging the University to divest from fossil fuels. Each issue is truly important and urgent on its own accord, but the respective groups that champion each of these agendas have launched a Solidarity Network that serves not to unite its members but to conflate their many causes. At Columbia, one cannot support, say, fossil fuel divestment without also supporting a whole cadre of other causes. By prescribing mandatory platforms to which activists writ large must subscribe, the Solidarity Network has hijacked the activist’s ability to advocate for just one mission, or to pick and choose among causes to support. The activist community, in effect, breeds communal division more than it bridges any sort of intersectional gap.
Isolating and denigrating those who disagree, or who choose not to participate in some of these highly political affairs, the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network is less a demonstration of student solidarity than of selfish solipsism: the activist community disregards the lay people with whom it shares a campus. But it behooves the activists to recall the kind of community that emerged at Columbia at the start of this semester, and the astounding equality with which it functioned. Everyone, equally, had the option to join the mourning after the Honduras tragedy. Nobody had to, but everybody could.
Certainly, some students featured more prominently than others in mobilizing Columbia to mourn, to memorialize, and finally, to heal; no community functions without leaders. But, at no point in that process did those figures limit access to involvement, or contort involvement into something it’s not: we were mourning the loss of life. Full stop. Conversations about the safety of Columbia’s global programs, or about the infrastructural dangers of Honduras, rightly, were put off for another day. Students who came to mourn and to remember did not have to worry about broader political issues: in our grief we were, rightly, singly focused. The impact of the tragedy was acknowledged by all as relevant to all. It was a Columbia tragedy, and every member of the Columbia community, simply by virtue of their status as such, was welcome to mourn. Strangers cried beside best friends. That is what a solidarity network looks like.
Should not our hot-button topics galvanize the same sensibilities? Must we lose life, or worse, three lives, before respecting the people around us as equal participants in campus matters? There are many more people around us whose opinions add value—and who have ideas about what activism ought to look like—than the small group of the most vocal activists behind the flashy posters and snappy social-media posts.
Five months since Columbia gathered on Low Plaza in solidarity with Abigail, Olivia, and Daniella and in solidarity with each other, Low Plaza transformed into the activists’ playground. They preach solidarity, but in reality, practice intense singularity in their membership and modes of thinking. Their solidarity extends only to the ragged borders of their Frankensteinian Mega-Cause. Would not these incredibly worthwhile activist communities benefit from lowering their barriers to entry and from embracing a more diverse set of supporters? In the end, is a narrow solidarity really solidarity after all?
This issue of The Current digs beneath the often shallow conceptions of community, and unearths examples of unusual communities that encourage simultaneously particular and inclusive environments. We explore one of Columbia’s most niche living communities—the Bayit—and its turbulent, yet harmonious atmosphere that so many students have called home for half a century. You will find one pseudonymous student’s raucous attempt at navigating Intro to Judaism as an unapologetically secular Jew with a bemused appreciation for the nuances of particularistic Jewish practice. Old-world Lower East Side knishes and new-world hipster-hassidic music feature as instances of deconstructed and reconstructed meaningful Jewish communities. Philosophy professor Michele Moody-Adams weighs in on the state of the modern university and the role of academic freedom in the increasingly chaotic campus. These stories, among others, we hope, will both engage and entertain as well as illustrate the power of community and the sort of solidarity it should—and shouldn’t—inspire.
Lily Wilf (BC '16), Editor in Chief
Ethan Herenstein (CC '16), Managing Editor
Visceral shock shattered clique culture, basic sadness beat out political angst. Distress tore through campus, deeply affecting these women's closest friends as well as those who had never heard their names before. Columbia lost three of its own. For many, like the two of us writing this Letter, the question of how to react as neither a best friend nor a stranger but rather, simply, a friend, presented a staggering challenge that persists still to this day.
From within these different pockets of mourners though, materialized a centralized source of solace and strength. The unique campus communities that grieved for Abigail, Olivia, and Daniella had existed previously in rather disparate universes: Abigail’s Columbia University Medical Campus colleagues and General Studies post-baccalaureate classmates, Olivia’s dorm-mates and fellow Columbia College aspiring scientists, Daniella’s roommates and expansive Modern Orthodox Jewish cohort. Yet, one week after their deaths, when thousands of students returned to campus from winter break, the boundaries that had traditionally separated these groups dissipated. Students shared their sorrow and expressed their anger—together. We mourned collectively; we memorialized collaboratively.
This past January, the Columbia community formed an organic solidarity network rooted in a plethora of personal struggles. We—all of us—needed one another, some unwittingly, and others quite deliberately. For once, at a university more acclaimed for its students’ stress levels than their social lives, we put friends, classmates, even strangers first. In the wake of catastrophe, we stood together. We are not better for having experienced the Honduras tragedy, but neither should we resist holding onto its hard-earned lessons.
The passing of time and prioritization of schoolwork has, predictably, ushered this sort of solidarity out, but a different sort of student solidarity remains front and center. In the most recent and dramatic example, which culminated in a take-over, sit-in, and shut-down of Low Library by Columbia Divest for Climate Justice, we see how political activism, too, steers students toward a sense of solidarity. This recent occupation of Low, though, is but one instance in Columbia’s recent history of intense student solidarity born out of commitment to a rousing political cause.
Combating rape-culture on campus, increasing minimum wage, encouraging the University to divest from fossil fuels. Each issue is truly important and urgent on its own accord, but the respective groups that champion each of these agendas have launched a Solidarity Network that serves not to unite its members but to conflate their many causes. At Columbia, one cannot support, say, fossil fuel divestment without also supporting a whole cadre of other causes. By prescribing mandatory platforms to which activists writ large must subscribe, the Solidarity Network has hijacked the activist’s ability to advocate for just one mission, or to pick and choose among causes to support. The activist community, in effect, breeds communal division more than it bridges any sort of intersectional gap.
Isolating and denigrating those who disagree, or who choose not to participate in some of these highly political affairs, the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network is less a demonstration of student solidarity than of selfish solipsism: the activist community disregards the lay people with whom it shares a campus. But it behooves the activists to recall the kind of community that emerged at Columbia at the start of this semester, and the astounding equality with which it functioned. Everyone, equally, had the option to join the mourning after the Honduras tragedy. Nobody had to, but everybody could.
Certainly, some students featured more prominently than others in mobilizing Columbia to mourn, to memorialize, and finally, to heal; no community functions without leaders. But, at no point in that process did those figures limit access to involvement, or contort involvement into something it’s not: we were mourning the loss of life. Full stop. Conversations about the safety of Columbia’s global programs, or about the infrastructural dangers of Honduras, rightly, were put off for another day. Students who came to mourn and to remember did not have to worry about broader political issues: in our grief we were, rightly, singly focused. The impact of the tragedy was acknowledged by all as relevant to all. It was a Columbia tragedy, and every member of the Columbia community, simply by virtue of their status as such, was welcome to mourn. Strangers cried beside best friends. That is what a solidarity network looks like.
Should not our hot-button topics galvanize the same sensibilities? Must we lose life, or worse, three lives, before respecting the people around us as equal participants in campus matters? There are many more people around us whose opinions add value—and who have ideas about what activism ought to look like—than the small group of the most vocal activists behind the flashy posters and snappy social-media posts.
Five months since Columbia gathered on Low Plaza in solidarity with Abigail, Olivia, and Daniella and in solidarity with each other, Low Plaza transformed into the activists’ playground. They preach solidarity, but in reality, practice intense singularity in their membership and modes of thinking. Their solidarity extends only to the ragged borders of their Frankensteinian Mega-Cause. Would not these incredibly worthwhile activist communities benefit from lowering their barriers to entry and from embracing a more diverse set of supporters? In the end, is a narrow solidarity really solidarity after all?
This issue of The Current digs beneath the often shallow conceptions of community, and unearths examples of unusual communities that encourage simultaneously particular and inclusive environments. We explore one of Columbia’s most niche living communities—the Bayit—and its turbulent, yet harmonious atmosphere that so many students have called home for half a century. You will find one pseudonymous student’s raucous attempt at navigating Intro to Judaism as an unapologetically secular Jew with a bemused appreciation for the nuances of particularistic Jewish practice. Old-world Lower East Side knishes and new-world hipster-hassidic music feature as instances of deconstructed and reconstructed meaningful Jewish communities. Philosophy professor Michele Moody-Adams weighs in on the state of the modern university and the role of academic freedom in the increasingly chaotic campus. These stories, among others, we hope, will both engage and entertain as well as illustrate the power of community and the sort of solidarity it should—and shouldn’t—inspire.
Lily Wilf (BC '16), Editor in Chief
Ethan Herenstein (CC '16), Managing Editor
// LILY can be reached at [email protected]. ETHAN can be reached at [email protected].