Dispatches from a Campus on Fire

Everything is happening and it’s all happening right here, right now. The world is spinning

fast and slow. A year and a half ago, my roommate and I pressed our faces into the glass of our

windows, watching the largest police force in the country consume Amsterdam Avenue with its

tanks, guns, and riot gear. Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect. We listened to the campus radio detail

brutalization against students, and though the news was chilling, we were grateful to have it all the

same. The only thing scarier than a full-force armed invasion of your campus is a full-force armed

invasion of your campus that nobody’s recording.

In the time since everything changed, it seems as if nothing has changed at all. The gates,

which connect Columbia University to the rest of New York City (the very same that, in 1968, the

University swore never to lock again), have remained firmly closed for nearly two years. Equal parts

the perfect metaphor and a harsh reality. It is difficult to articulate the speed and totality with which

things have changed for the worse at Columbia University. There are arguments to be made that

things were never great – which is true. There are arguments to be made that we have no right to be

surprised, which have merit. Still, the disdain and totalitarianism with which the administration

treats the rest of the university demands shock and defies logic. And yet, for every attempt the

administration makes to sink further into silence, I am amazed by the students, faculty, and staff

who push back.

Think of what’s below as notes from a world that feels somewhere between a George

Orwell novel and a history book you have a sinking feeling you know the ending to. Dispatches

from friends across the ocean.

On Phone Calls in Fields:

It’s August and I’m writing an application. An application full of potential and possibility. It

is an application to a government scholarship. I am applying to a government scholarship to fund

my intellectual academic pursuits in the humanities. Already, in an anti-academic environment such

as the United States of America in 2025, not a great place to start. In my application to a

government scholarship to fund my intellectual academic pursuits in the humanities, I have to talk

about my extracurricular and non-academic engagements; sort of real-life CAPTCHA test to make

sure that I am a multidimensional human being with interests and passions, not merely an academic

drone (although I am still certainly expected to have the GPA of someone with no external

commitments).The snag: I work for an organization called the Education Equity Lab*. It’s an admirable

organization that teaches University classes in low-income public high schools. It has, however, the

misfortune of being named the Education Equity Lab. This is bad, this is very bad. You see, the

government has a list of over 250 “banned words” and equity is on that list no less than three times

in various forms. These words have been wiped from government websites and instantly kill any

grant proposal. They hang like a threat, demanding obedience in advance. So I’m careful, I don’t

mention the Education Equity Lab by name, merely whispering about a “collaboration.” But now,

the awkward part. How do I ask my Professor, who runs the program, for a letter of

recommendation that never mentions the name of the organization we both work with?

And so it’s August and I’m lying on the grass on a phone call with my Professor (my

personal number? Her personal number? On a Saturday of all things? Dire times call for intimacy!).

You see, I’m nervous. I tell my professor my concerns. She sighs. She says this is doing the right

thing, that I’m being smart by asking her not to mention the Education Equity Lab by name. She

sounds weary. She didn’t get into teaching to coach students on what words they can and can’t say,

and in front of whom. This is new territory for us all. Somehow she’s expected to guide me despite

never having been through this herself.

Ok, she says, we can do this, she says. I guess this is just how it is now.

*Since this event, the Education Equity Lab has changed their name to the National Education

Opportunity Network (NEON)…I wonder why?

Observations on Email Signatures:

It’s October and I am taking a class on medieval manuscripts taught by a librarian. When

she emails me, there’s a black box next to her name in her email signature. I ask what this means. Is

it artistic? Stylistic? A design choice? It’s redacted, she replies. What? It’s redacted. Highlight it. And

I do, and when you click and drag your cursor over this black box you realize that it’s not a block

but rather black highlight over black text and what’s obscured are the letters PhD.

Columbia won’t allow the librarians to put their PhDs in their email signatures anymore,

she says. She says this to me grimly, as a matter of fact. They’re trying to de-academicisize the

libraries. They are trying to de-academicisize the libraries. It cannot be said enough times. The

University, the historic seat of knowledge, does not value the nucleus of scholarship that is the

library nor its cultivators, the librarians. My librarian is a ghost walking, and she knows this. She

knows that when she retires, they will not fill her position. They will dissolve her role as special

curator of a special collection into the corporatizing ocean of the University and hire a generalist

manager to take over her position. This librarian handles papyri scrolls older than Christ and

manuscripts completed over generations. She is a highly trained, highly experienced, highlyintelligent, highly dedicated woman and she works every day in an institution that is openly hostile

to her qualifications.

They won’t let you put the PhD – the qualification they hired you for – in your email

signature, I gape. She shakes her head. My heart wrenches.

Business as Usual:

It’s November and I’m walking past the gates. There is a protest happening. They happen

frequently, which I take to be better than the alternative. Silently, faculty and staff hold pictures of

students who have been detained – beaten, brutalized, kidnapped – by I.C.E.. They form a corridor

on the sidewalk. To walk through it is to be haunted. Before I.C.E. started terrorizing cities across

the country, ripping families apart and sentencing refugees to death by whatever forces they were

trying to get away from in the first place, there were already so many holes ripped into the fabric of

our on-campus community. How many people in my class are still expelled or suspended for

participating in on-campus protests? How many people who had their degrees and their community

taken from them?

And then it gets worse. And then in the exact moment when coming together and

communing is most desperately needed, for many in New York, it becomes dangerous to do so.

There are group chats and story posts and warnings and network – the little acts of a big resistance.

But these are lives at stake and there are people talking about them as if they were poker chips. It is

the kind of evil that language feels useless at capturing. Something horrific that defies description.

Evil beyond words. But not because none of the words fit, in fact, it’s the opposite: they all work. It’s

just that none of them are strong enough, none of them capture the true hatefulness of these raids.

Their violence, cruelty, callousness. The stakes are so high it feels as if there is not room to breathe.

The Coming Together:

I am reminded, always reminded, that if those complicit in the I.C.E. raids around the city,

the censorship on campus, the destruction of the University, and a seemingly endless list of other

evils feel the need to silence the students, faculty, and staff, that’s probably a pretty solid indication

that we’re doing something right. If our thoughts, our existence, and our actions are so threatening

to them that they lock the gates and gag the student paper, then we are obliged to get loud. This is

what this “Freedom of Expression” exchange is all about: creating a space beyond borders or gates to

be entirely, completely expressive. The only way out is through, and the only way through is

together.