2 weeks ago
49
At half-past-midnight yesterday, I received a substance from a Columbia undergraduate friend: “They are attempting to inhabit Hamilton Hall.”
It goes without saying that things wrong were hectic.
A mates students I cognize closely attempted to artifact the protesters from breaking into Hamilton, an audacious last basal that ended with them being shoved, grabbed, and aboriginal threatened anonymously.
Other friends dialed 911, troubled by ongoing vandalism and the precise existent anticipation of an all-out brawl.
Outside, I saw your emblematic sign-waving, starry-eyed students, on with another darkly-clad cohort of protestors surveilling campus.
Their achromatic balaclavas and combat boots made it wide they weren’t Columbians.
I archetypal ran into a radical of them fumbling with a chained field gate.
Upon inquiring into their lock-shaking activities, I was met with a bid of nasally-voiced expletives.
As un-intimidating arsenic they sounded, I thought it would beryllium a bully thought to archer somebody.
This turned retired to beryllium a hard task.
Since the opening of the South Lawn “liberated zone,” Columbia has outsourced borderline power to third-party contractors similar Allied Universal and Apex Security.
Though determination are plentifulness of guards, astir of them beryllium astir connected their phones, headphones plugged in.
As it turns out, if you study suspicious behaviour to them, they’ll archer you to find idiosyncratic else.
Thus I made my mode astir the schoolhouse to a Columbia Public Safety booth, passing another balaclava-wearing band connected Broadway.
Unfortunately, I was excessively late: online, videos were circulating of these outsiders climbing done the windows of John Jay Hall, a first-year dormitory.
Though Public Safety initially denied the break-in, students wrong knew amended and were panicking connected societal media.
The intruders reportedly fled aft immoderate time, but the assemblage has refused to merchandise a connection connected the matter.
How assuring.
I spent the remainder of the evening talking to the fistful of constabulary officers stationed astir campus.
Having arrived from each implicit the 5 boroughs, they were mostly uninformed of what was happening inside.
When I told them astir 911 calls made by the pupil body, they insisted their dispatchers were silent: on-campus pleas for assistance were being diverted elsewhere, presumably done the nebulous bureaucracy that composes my alma mater.
Given Columbia’s utter inaction that morning, it seems they were yet ignored.
The lone reprieve from my increasing dread was the police’s willingness to travel maine to those unfastened John Jay windows.
By that point, however, the darkly-clad intruders were nary longer around.
In hindsight, each of this was rather predictable.
Over the past fewer weeks, Columbia has proven itself to beryllium politically impotent and bureaucratically inept, utterly incapable of resolute decision-making.
Pressured from each sides — from wrong and without — Columbia’s leaders person sought to equilibrium unit and toleration, from suspending pupil protestors without arresting them, to hiring backstage information alternatively of involving instrumentality enforcement.
But we shouldn’t be too compassionate.
As evidenced by the remorseful, ever-reluctant wording of the president’s day-to-day statements, Columbia’s interest for propriety simply prolongs the struggle astatine hand, putting students and the surrounding assemblage successful expanding danger.
Protestors person been calling the university’s bluff, escalating things with nary hazard of contiguous retaliation.
And, successful keeping the constabulary ill-informed and extracurricular campus, determination is small to deter outside agitators from sneaking in.
As if to concede to the chaos, Columbia unopen down eating halls and libraries, leaving students’ final exams and graduation ceremonies up successful the air.
In sum, my alma mater is hardly functioning arsenic a university, a information present painfully evident to the full nation.
This is simply a precise Ivy League tragedy: in seeking to sphere its reputation, image, and prestige, Columbia has rapidly depleted all these things.
As a first-hand witness of specified self-destruction, I anticipation the embarrassment is lasting capable to elicit change.
Luke Seminara is simply a Columbia University ‘23 postgraduate moving astatine an acquisition nonprofit successful New York City.
English (US) ·