It doesn’t take a scroll down Sidechat to realize that not everyone at Columbia knows how to catch a vibe. We’ve all been there. You meet someone in class, strike up a conversation, and it slowly dawns on you that, perhaps, you don’t actually crave their platonic company. The question remains: Is it possible to practice healthy social distancing with the peers who don’t get the memo to just be casual acquaintances? Can we be the kind of people who, when they see each other in the cafeteria, smile, nod or maybe even laugh, wave goodbye, and then sit at separate tables?

Can we, when we see each other on the subway, nod at each other awkwardly and then avoid all further eye contact?

Can the only details I know about you be your first name, where you’re from, and what your major is? And absolutely nothing else?

And yet, for some reason, they don’t get the social cues you send their way, and suddenly you’re stuck in an uncomfortable situation, where you don’t want to hurt their feelings (they are relatively nice people!), but you also just don’t want to be their friend. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like you, I just don’t like you.

So what do you do? How do you let them know it’s time to step back, in the face of persistent social contact you just don’t wish to take part in?

I went on an adventure to find the best answer to the question: How can we tell someone “can we please just be casual acquaintances?” without insulting them or polite society?

The Problem

It’s a series of unfortunate events: You go to orientation, classes, maybe even a few clubs, and suddenly you become acquainted with a huge amount of people, most of whom aren’t really best-friend material. But here’s the rub. On a campus so big and yet so small, you just can’t seem to hide. The people you want to see the least are going to be, inevitably, standing in line in JJs, on the steps of Low, or lurking in your favorite comfy Uris chair. But is it only a Columbia problem?

Chris, 38, is a bartender who lives in New York with his husband. When I approached him with my question, he had a clear answer in mind. “Sometimes regulars will want to meet up outside the bar. They invite me to go out, and I have to be clear about wanting to keep a work-life balance. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t want to go out in this neighborhood so I wouldn’t run into them.”

“When I went out with my husband the other night, one of my regulars from the bar recognized me, and asked if he could sit with us. Then, all of a sudden, he started talking about his friend who tried to commit suicide that morning,” he recounted. “So I told him, listen, I’m sorry you had to go through that, but me and my husband are trying to have date night. I don’t need to know your entire life story.” I found myself agreeing with Chris: Should it really betray social norms to not want to be someone else’s therapist on a night out?

The Guilt

Now that we’re all aware of the problem, you’d think it would have a pretty easy solution—just tell them: “Sorry, I don’t want to be your friend.” But it’s not always so easy.

“I felt really guilty,” shared Yumi Cho, GS ’28.

“She wanted more, and I just couldn’t reciprocate,” added P.C., a current GS student who chose to speak anonymously.

“I find myself resenting myself that I didn’t try harder. Now in Columbia, there are much less opportunities to meet up. Plus he lives in Brooklyn, which feels like a different country now,” shared Paolo Godcharles-Mendez, GS ’28.

We don’t want to hurt anyone, especially not someone who wants to be our friend. And so, in procrastination of the inevitable rejection, we look for different ways to avoid contact, leading us to even more dread. But what do we do in the meantime?

The Excuses

Chris brings up one of the main questions we’re forced to ask ourselves when coming across a casual acquaintance: How much are we willing to change our ways in order to avoid them? Will you move to a different seat in class? Will you go to a different cafeteria? Will you choose another room in the library?

Miya, GS ‘25, is one of the many interviewees who chose to keep their identities hidden. I think it speaks to the guilt we feel when encountering these kinds of situations, and the fact that, ultimately, we don’t want to seem like bad people. “I just made up some stupid excuse.” Making up an excuse is actually the most common answer I got from the interviewees, with excuses ranging from basic to outright insane. I’m not in the city. I moved to the suburbs; I don’t use this phone number anymore…I prefer to change my phone number seasonally. You know?

The Solution?

In an obvious bind, I turned to public opinion for an answer, meaning I Googled the words: “How do I deal with casual acquaintances who want to be closer friends?”

Surprisingly enough, most of the articles I came across were about the exact opposite. Instead of the social boundary guides I was hoping to explore, I found Reddit posts like “How do I turn friendly casual acquaintances into friends?” and blogs entitled “How to move from acquaintances to friends in adulthood?”

Suddenly it dawned on me—am I in the wrong here? Perhaps I’ve disregarded my own privilege of having so many friends and acquaintances around.

But this is also where it becomes complicated. We don’t really owe our friendships to everyone who asks us for it. We’re pretty busy people, and not everyone has to like everyone. But treating someone else’s attempts at making a connection as embarrassing or uncomfortable can’t be the solution either.

The Bad Guy

When I was in high school, there was a girl that I considered a “hallway friend,” meaning the type of friend you say hi to in the hallway, and then maybe talk to when you’re free and around. When finals were coming up, she asked me if I wanted to have coffee with her before class. I said yes, and we hung out that day for about two hours. Then school was over, and I never expected to talk to her again.

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Then the texts started. Every day she was asking me out to coffee, or to a restaurant, or just to hang out. And at first I politely said yes, but I wasn’t really interested in her. It’s not like I didn’t like her, but, again, I didn’t like her. So I started making up excuses, like “I’m too busy today,” or “I’m not feeling really good.” And at some point I just started dreading her texts, and finally ignoring them. It all ended when she finally understood the message, and sent me a long and angry text about ghosting her like that. And at that point I was mad too: why couldn’t she just find another friend? But I also felt really guilty, which I was masking in my mind, by making her “the bad guy.”

In Retrospect

“Friendships are hard. It’s not an easy thing having a friend. Especially for a long time,” states Keval Deliwala, GS’ 28.

None of my interviewees had a solution for our problem. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I have the words to solve it either. The only thing we can really do, I now believe, is try and be upfront with our emotions, as much as possible.

“The best policy is honesty,” shares Chris. We don’t owe anybody our friendship, but we do owe them respect.

So yes. We can be casual acquaintances, the type where I kinda know your name starts with an L and I’m pretty sure you’re from California. We can also maybe be the type that sits together on the bench in front of Butler, even for a bit. And maybe, just maybe, we can even share some eye contact. Even if we aren’t the type to stay up until 2 a.m. exchanging our entire life stories, it’s not hard to respect and care about each other’s wellbeing. A casual acquaintance is a perfectly valid category of “friend,” as long as you both know where you stand.

Ms. Shai is a current first-year in the School of General Studies, studying creative writing and cognitive science. She is a staff writer for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

When I attended Columbia from spring 2023 to spring 2025, I noticed the same problem that many others did: There was a severe lack of productive dialogue between individuals and groups who disagreed on important issues. Instead, we had protests, encampments, and a lot of yelling. I wanted to do my part to improve the culture on campus, so in the last semester of my senior year I founded the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA).

There were already several groups at Columbia concerned with fostering dialogue and defending free expression, namely the Columbia chapter of Heterodox Academy (HxA), BridgeColumbia, Sundial, and Platypus (Columbia’s Marxist reading group), but I felt as though we (I say “we” because I was a part of both HxA and Sundial) weren’t coordinating our efforts as effectively as we could have been.

Attendance at events was rarely stellar, despite our collective memberships numbering well into the hundreds. We weren’t making a united effort to pressure the administration to cooperate. Garnering enough media attention was also a constant challenge.

We needed a central node for sharing ideas, resources, manpower, and connections. Such an organization would make it easier to market events, deal with administrative red tape, and get more attention on campus and off.

We also needed this organization to act as an alliance. If one member came under fire for hosting a heterodox speaker or voicing an unpopular opinion, we could all come to their defense. Anyone who decided to stand up to the mob would not do so alone.

That was CODA’s raison d’être.

Recruiting My A-Team

I was optimistic about what I was building. I had representatives from HxA, Bridge, Sundial, and Platypus on board, and was reaching out to the College Republicans and College Democrats. I believed that if CODA could amass a large, ideologically diverse membership, it would be capable of radically changing campus culture. In the wake of national controversy, Columbia could become a paradigm of productive disagreement and civil discourse.

The only thing left to do was to find a group of students to carry the torch after I graduated; an open-discourse A-Team, so to speak.

I ended up recruiting three people for the job: Nikos Mohammadi CC ’28, Chloe Hoyle BC ’26, and Aum Desai CC ’28.

I already knew Mohammadi, with whom I overlapped at Sundial, and Hoyle. I was confident they were up to the task. Desai and I only met after he expressed a strong interest in leading CODA. After a long discussion over coffee at Joe’s, I felt just as good about him. He seemed very sharp and incredibly driven. He conveyed a real passion for CODA’s founding ideals, and I believed his ambition would serve the fledgling organization well.

I didn’t keep close tabs on CODA after graduating that May, but from what I could tell, it was making great progress. The website looked nice, and several impressive faculty members had joined the advisory board.

Later that year I hosted Mohammadi and Desai on my podcast The Discourse Lab (along with Anthony Rispo, who has since resigned as co-host), where we discussed the state of free expression at Columbia and the importance of civil discourse. Both guests expressed how optimistic they were about CODA’s future and the impact it was having on campus.

I thought Mohammadi, Desai, and Hoyle were clearly right for the job, and I was proud to have played a part in the organization’s formation.

The Betrayal

You can imagine my surprise when, while scrolling Instagram last week, I saw the following post from CODA’s account:

“Open discourse requires that every member of our community be able to speak. This article does the opposite: it promotes rape culture and works to silence survivors of sexual assault. It is therefore not a contribution to debate but a step backward,” the statement read.

The open discourse organization I had founded was attempting to stifle civil discourse? I could barely endure the irony long enough to finish reading it.

I had read The “Cornell Seven” Is Really About Liberalism just days before, and had no idea how the CODA executive board could have interpreted it the way they did. The piece was written by a member of my A-Team, Nikos Mohammadi, a deputy editor for Sundial, and his co-author, Christina Ma, a staff writer for Sundial. In it, they articulate a viewpoint on the “Cornell Seven” story that is undeniably provocative. Part of their argument is that liberal sexual norms often facilitate traumatic sexual encounters that are nonetheless consensual. They also argue that much of the outrage surrounding the Cornell scandal constitutes a “collective frenzy” that ultimately infantilizes women.

I can entirely understand why many people would vehemently disagree with their article, and was not at all surprised that it garnered significant backlash. The piece triggered a pile-on which included messages telling Mohammadi to kill himself and condemnations from several student groups.

However, it was also well written, well reasoned, and well within the Overton window. CODA should have come to their defense and started brainstorming a way to put them in civil, public dialogue with their critics. Instead, it joined the pile-on.

The claim that Mohammadi and Ma’s article prevents other students from speaking because it “promotes rape culture and works to silence survivors of sexual assault” is so absurd it’s almost laughable. Although they cast doubt on the veracity of Jane Doe’s narrative, they never argue that she, or anyone else, should ever be denied the right to take legal action against their alleged transgressors.

As for the charge of supporting “rape culture,” I would simply ask them to explain exactly how they do so, and what that term even means.

Hitchens’ razor is best employed in a situation like this. The accusations the CODA executive board levels against Mohammadi and Ma’s piece are not only extremely serious, but entirely unfounded. What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

In actuality, the board’s invocation of “rape culture” is just a lazy excuse for them to justify something they likely all understand is inexcusable, leveraging their position at an open discourse organization to try and silence opinions they don’t like.

Later that day, the CODA executive board came out with another, equally troubling statement.

CODA was in part founded to ensure emotional mob reactions would not stop events like this from taking place. For the executive board to erroneously allege that Mohammadi and Ma’s article constitutes an attack on survivors, threatens the safety of survivors, or that their argument “fails” as a justification for canceling an event on press freedom is a perversion of its mission.

They threw two of their classmates under the bus to appease a mob. They doubled down on lazy, baseless accusations to justify taking actions which are anathema to the stated values of their organization. They did all of this while hiding behind hollow commitments to free expression.

I soon came to discover that, as I immediately suspected, both Mohammadi and Hoyle had nothing to do with this fiasco. In fact, they had both left CODA long before the statement was published, and Hoyle has also since graduated.

Desai, however, is still the president.

According to Mohammadi, he and Hoyle began to lose faith in the direction in which CODA was heading. Mohammadi told me recently that it often appeared as if the executive board seemed more concerned with securing official university recognition and cultivating the “right” connections than actually fostering productive discourse about divisive topics.

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Perhaps this explains how CODA ended up with a board that was comfortable denouncing unpopular opinions and canceling events. All the true believers quit, leaving only those who were more concerned with status than sticking to principle.

It’s also possible that they were simply lacking in courage. They may not have been able to stomach the criticism and the controversy, so they caved to the mob to save face.

It’s tough to say for sure, but whether it was a failure of values or a failure of nerve, one thing is certain: They have blatantly betrayed CODA’s mission.

What Should Happen Now?

In my humble opinion, all of the board members who supported CODA’s statements should resign. Those who dissented (if there were any) should stay on. The remaining seats should be filled by people with a genuine commitment to CODA’s founding principles and the spinal fortitude to stick up for them when doing so is unpleasant.

I could think of a few young writers at Sundial who might make a good fit.

To be clear, this is just a recommendation. I’m under no illusion that it will be heeded, and I’m certainly not trying to force anyone out. I would give the same advice to a movie director who didn’t understand the appeal of cinema or a priest who didn’t believe in God. If you don’t understand the value of civil, productive discourse around contentious topics, even ones as sensitive and serious as the “Cornell Seven,” or if you lack the courage of your convictions, then you simply shouldn’t be leading an open discourse organization.

Until there is a major change in leadership, I fear CODA will continue on as the bastion of irony and hypocrisy it has mutilated itself into. New students may well look to it as an example and come away believing that free expression only applies to speech that the majority finds acceptable, or that open discourse means only discussing viewpoints that don’t offend anyone.

I can’t help but think of that famous quote from The Godfather:

“Look how they massacred my boy!”

Mr. Smith is a former senior editor for Sundial, and hosts the podcast The Discourse Lab.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Within hours of Sundial publishing “The ‘Cornell Seven’ Is Really About Liberalism,” authors Christina Ma BC ’28 and Nikos Mohammadi CC ’28 had received death threats. On Sidechat, students vowed to burn copies of Sundial. The Columbia Political Review’s editorial board demanded that Sundial publicly account for its editorial process; the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA), ostensibly “dedicated to strengthening the structural conditions that enable open discourse,” canceled a panel on press freedom our editor-in-chief was scheduled to appear on; and a group of Sundial’s own staffers petitioned on Instagram for the publication to “cease organizational operations” and aired their grievances to the Columbia Daily Spectator.

I want to start by saying that Christina and Nikos are my friends and colleagues. I opposed their argument, voiced concerns to them directly, and entertained writing a response. I also think Sundial had the right to publish it, and the past four days have vindicated that decision. The authors warned that campus discourse on the “Cornell Seven” had devolved into a “frenzy” that vilified dissent. Their critics then inadvertently proved their point.

Much of the outrage surrounding the article was warranted, particularly with regard to its treatment of consent. Although it never explicitly asserts that consent cannot be withdrawn, the authors’ logic is predicated on the assumption (one they concede) that Jane Doe was responsible for the predicament in which she found herself. That may be a defensible reading of New York state law, under which voluntary intoxication alone does not establish incapacity; reformers term it the “intoxication loophole,” which public officials have used to explain why no charges were brought.

I am not interested in relitigating the facts of the case. What I will say is that I believe a person can rescind consent at any moment, and that someone too intoxicated to understand what is happening to them is in no position to grant it. On this, I am largely repeating the argument from Jayna Rohslau GS ’27, who penned a response to Nikos and Christina, which Sundial published on the same day.

Nikos and Christina’s essay frames Doe’s underage alcohol and ketamine use as proof of adults’ “freedom to make bad decisions.” It cites feminist social critic Camille Paglia’s claim that a woman who goes upstairs with a man at a party is tacitly consenting to sex. Paglia’s caveat that imposing oneself on someone is wrong does not mitigate the damage of making that argument in an essay about an alleged gang rape. The authors warn against “armchair verdicts,” before inviting readers to consider the implications if this was “a reasonably consensual but regrettable encounter.” Nor does it help that “hysteria” was a needlessly charged descriptor of female critics, many of whom deeply resonate with the case.

There is also Christina’s account of her own relationship, which I would like to approach with care. She spoke of her 19-year-old self’s involvement with an older man, and her anxiety over seeming like a “prude.” The age gap itself suggests a latent power imbalance, one that blurs the line between choice and coercion.

The first time I read the essay, I found it, for lack of a better term, “triggering.” Two days ago, an anonymous submission to the Columbia Confessions Instagram account read:

Shame on all of you. I can only hope that you might one day mature enough to understand the effect of your words. Until then, I hope you sit in the discomfort of the backlash you are rightfully receiving and realize that, even then, you are experiencing only a fraction of the pain, torment, and degradation that Jane Doe has been experiencing in every moment since that night.

I don’t have to imagine. As a “Jane Doe” myself, Christina and Nikos’ essay provoked immense frustration and rage. Anyone who finds this subject too painful to read about has every right to refrain from doing so, and I would never think less of them for it. But that is a personal choice, not a license to decide for others.

I did not call my friends “rape apologists” or question their morals. I contacted them, and we had a series of difficult, and often painful, conversations. We did not change each other’s minds. But all of us came away understanding our arguments better. Nikos told Spectator that anyone with concerns should bring them to him and Christina directly. Almost no one has, which is telling.

To quote former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ concurrence in Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Sundial applied that remedy expeditiously. Jayna’s rebuttal has received a fraction of the attention it deserves. Nor was it an afterthought, as some commenters insinuated. It would not have been possible to write and edit a nearly 2,000-word op-ed in the three hours that separated the two pieces’ publication. Sundial ran both because the Cornell case has consumed our campus and social media discourse; publishing only one would have been an abdication of our mission to amplify new and often underrepresented ideas, especially when Nikos and Christina’s position falls well within the national Overton window.

Consider our critics, beginning with the loudest. On Sidechat and Instagram, students condemned not just the essay but Sundial en masse, declaring every writer on the masthead, including those of us who disagreed with the piece, complicit in “rape culture.” Much of the online fury also made it painfully obvious that many students had not read the essay in full; they often attacked arguments it didn’t make and drew conclusions it overtly rejected.

Sundial was inundated with accusations of censorship for turning off comments on our Instagram post. One student told Spectator that Sundial practices “free speech on their terms,” referencing this decision and the subsequent cancellation of CODA’s panel.

The comment section was disabled by the Sundial managing board after death threats and other abusive remarks were made. Meanwhile, the Substack comment section remains open, topped by one calling the piece “bullshit.” As for the panel, Sundial had no say in CODA’s cancellation of the event, and our editor-in-chief was among the scheduled speakers.

The Columbia Political Review writes that it is “alarmed by this article’s sourceless retelling of the history of sexual liberation,” and contends that with responsible sourcing, the article “would have looked quite different.” Christina and Nikos’ essay cites numerous primary documents and news reports, from Doe’s lawsuit and the Tompkins County district attorney’s statement to coverage in The New York Times, CBS, and ABC. Their claims about the sexual revolution and its aftermath are interpretations. The essay went through Sundial’s four rounds of editing, two of them copy edits. The Political Review may dislike the result, but it cannot credibly insist the process was careless. In fact, Nikos and Christina’s piece received the most extensive editorial scrutiny since Sundial’s founding in 2024—and understandably so.

Spectator’s coverage describes “concerns” about the essay’s “factual accuracy,” and states that the staff petition “draws on claims” from the Political Review’s letter. Yet neither the Political Review, nor the petition, nor Spectator, identifies a single factual error in the essay.

The Political Review’s concern for “facts” also appears limited to facts its leadership would like to hear. The letter asserts that “the movement towards sexual freedom has always been accompanied by rigorous, robust calls for consent.” Always? Including the 1970s liberationists who campaigned to abolish age-of-consent laws? Or the Weather Underground, a militant offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society that bombed government buildings, and whose “smash monogamy” campaign pressured members into sexual arrangements as a test of revolutionary commitment?

The Political Review declares that Christina and Nikos’ essay “perpetuates a culture of campus violence, rape, and assault.” It faults them for not discussing fraternities and disciplinary processes, which amounts to criticizing an op-ed for failing to be a different op-ed. It reproaches the authors for presuming Jane Doe’s state of mind, then devotes the rest of the letter to assuming our staff’s motives, informing readers that Sundial “willingly omitted” standards of respect.

The more fundamental problem, however, is that the letter equates questioning an allegation with tolerating assault. It is a standard the Political Review applies selectively.

Nowhere is this more evident than in their treatment of Christina. The board declares that no one—not even Christina herself—may characterize her situation as not constituting rape “without substantiating the claim with overwhelming evidence.” As previously mentioned, I have reservations about how she deployed that anecdote. But that does not change the fact that an editorial board claiming to speak for survivors demanded evidence from a young woman about her own sexual history. You may reject the conclusions a woman draws from her experience, but you may not demand she “substantiate” it to you and still call yourself an “ally” to survivors.

The board’s charge is guilt by association: that by publishing the essay, Sundial and its staff are complicit in “rape culture,” which the letter does not care to define. Every opinion page in the country runs on the principle that publication does not imply endorsement—the Political Review included. If printing the essay means Sundial sanctions “rape culture,” platforming Jayna’s rebuttal made us its opponents.

The Political Review called on Sundial “to formally re-evaluate their publishing guidelines and their commitment to public safety and publish a response detailing the formal decision-making process that allowed for this article to be released.”

The Political Review’s letter “reflects the majority opinion” of its editorial board. A majority. Who dissented? How was the vote taken? What objections were overruled? The Political Review has not published the “formal decision-making process” behind its own letter, and when Spectator asked, the board declined to comment.

No publication hands its internal correspondence to a rival on demand. Privacy allows editors to deliberate freely behind closed doors without subjecting every disagreement to adjudication by whoever is angriest.

The Political Review’s sudden enthusiasm for transparency is also curious. Its submissions page invites anonymous and pseudonymous pieces, recommends burner email addresses, and promises that contributors’ identities “will not be shared with anyone.” That is their prerogative. The last time the Political Review attacked Sundial, in December 2025, they alleged that our general policy against anonymity was an attempt at “moderat[ing]” discourse at Columbia.

So, a publication that shields its own writers from scrutiny demands that we submit to it, and wishes to police campus discourse in the meantime. Transparency, it seems, is virtuous only when it serves the prosecution.

The same letter announces that the Political Review will now refuse “any article that upholds or recreates cultures and systems of rape, sexual assault, or violence,” and urges all Columbia publications to follow suit. They do not explain what this encompasses. Their board demands that we divulge our guidelines while unveiling an arbitrarily vague speech code of its own. This is the same board that, in April 2024, condemned the University’s “intrusion on student discourse” (removing students who unlawfully occupied campus spaces) and promised to fast-track pitches from anyone defending the protestors. In other words, “intrusion” on speech only betrays Columbia’s values when the “speech” was an anti-Israel demonstration the Political Review sympathized with.

Finally, the Political Review invokes “public safety,” writing that “we understand our role in protecting our campus and our community.” Protecting the campus is Public Safety’s job. What is a political magazine’s purpose, if not to publish arguments?

If the Political Review’s letter was a failure of logic, CODA’s response was a failure of nerve. On Wednesday morning, its executive board posted a statement affirming that CODA exists to defend “the open exchange of ideas, including ideas we disagree with,” then declaring that this particular idea “promotes rape culture,” “works to silence survivors,” and was “not a contribution to debate but a step backward.” It announced its panel that evening, “Who Gets to Tell the Story? Press Freedom and the Public Square,” would not proceed. CODA answered the titular question of the event before its panelists even had a chance to speak.

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CODA’s president, Aum Desai CC ’28, told Spectator that their board canceled the event “not in spite of, but because of our commitment to free expression.” He explained that if survivors might not feel comfortable speaking up in a space, that possibility was “in and of itself” enough to cancel the panel. By that standard, no event on any contested subject at Columbia can ever take place, since someone may always feel uncomfortable.

CODA also disclaimed twice that Nikos and Christina are “not affiliated” with the “free-speech” organization, though no one to my knowledge had suggested they were. (Nikos is a former executive board member.) A pro-free-expression group that instinctively distances itself from controversy reveals how little pressure its principles can bear. It cited “the safety and wellbeing of [its] attendees.” Safety from whom? The only danger this week came from those targeting Nikos and Christina, and canceling an event effectively handed them a heckler’s veto. Across three slides about safety and survivors, CODA never once mentioned the death threats and ad hominems. It closed by promising a community where no one must “choose between speaking up and staying safe.” Nikos and Christina faced precisely that choice this week. CODA had nothing to say to them.

A common refrain I’ve heard from those who support free speech in theory, they assure me, is that this essay was “beyond the pale.” But where was this line after October 7, 2023? In the days and weeks following Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians, Columbia students hailed terrorism as “resistance.” In April 2024, protesters outside the gates chanted “burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one held a sign reading “Al-Qassam’s next targets” pointed at Jewish students, and encampment leader Khymani James was exposed for saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” on an Instagram Live. Many of those now confidently asserting that some speech goes too far called all of that “free expression,” or stayed conspicuously silent as their Jewish and Israeli classmates were harassed.

On this campus, posters of kidnapped Israeli hostages were torn down and vandalized, and testimony from survivors and first responders about sexual violence they endured at the hands of Hamas was readily dismissed as “propaganda.” Where were the editorial boards demanding that campus publications “redefine what we refuse to publish”? Some of the students now posting about “rape culture,” spent the past three years liking and sharing posts from accounts that legitimized rape as a weapon of war.

It would be easy to end my response here now that I’ve laid our detractors’ hypocrisy bare. But that would be dishonest. It’s also widely known that some of the pressure to retract Nikos and Christina’s essay came from within. A group of Sundial staffers circulated a petition calling for the publication to “cease organizational operations” until leaders address concerns about our editorial process.

The petition’s central complaint is that the essay ran “without full-staff discussion.” That is by design. Sundial is not, and has never been, a bottom-up publication. No serious magazine puts every op-ed to a staff vote. Editors call the shots and answer for them, as Sundial’s editor-in-chief, Nick Baum, has commendably done. While he wrote to the entire staff that the members of the managing board “agree there could have been more transparency and that this may have reasonably come as a shock,” he was correct to also state that, “with a topic as real, serious, and upsetting as this, we always exercise a great degree of deliberation as to how to proceed.” It’s entirely understandable that the decision to publish opposing pieces on a topic this fraught rested with leadership. There was also no effort to “hide” Nikos and Christina’s piece from the rest of the staff, as the link to the draft was available on Sundial’s Slack throughout the editing process.

Disagreeing with an editorial choice does not authorize a staff member to sabotage the entire publication, and those who believe they are entitled to do so should resign. In April, I vehemently objected to Sundial publishing an anonymous piece written by a student protester under the pseudonym “Colloquious.” The article, in my view, was little more than an activist tirade that did not live up to our standards on tone and factual rigor. I consider it the worst editorial decision Sundial has made to date. Yet I fought it internally, because that is how disputes ought to be handled.

If this controversy has a silver lining, it is twofold. It has reminded us why Sundial exists: to publish perspectives many students don’t hear, or don’t want to hear. And it has prompted our managing board to have serious conversations with staff about how the publication is run. I’m glad these discussions are happening. But they belong inside Sundial, where they can strengthen the institution instead of tearing it down.

So Sundial will not “cease organizational operations.” We will continue publishing arguments that many of our own editors reject and find offensive, alongside rebuttals, this one included. We cannot let mob rule dictate what gets printed. And we will keep asking our critics to do what they have so far declined to do: write. If you think Christina and Nikos, Jayna, or I am wrong, make your case under your own name, and send it to Sundial.

Ms. Aufzien is a junior at Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, majoring in history and Jewish text. She is a staff editor for Sundial.

While the views in this piece are the author’s own, the Sundial managing board supports the author’s statements on the publication and its course of action.

Some like it contrarian at Columbia, where appearing beyond convention is practically a convention of its own. Devil’s advocate might as well be another credential on the CV.

In the wake of the sexual assault allegations at Cornell University, that particular vanity has acquired a troubling dimension: the tendency to mistake provocation for intellectual independence. Commentators have proven eager to unleash their alternative perspectives. Podcast host Megyn Kelly has speculated that the complainant may have welcomed the attention of her alleged assailants because she was “not the most attractive gal,” while author Kat Rosenfield has questioned the condemnation of the accused, arguing women shouldn’t be considered less autonomous just because they’ve taken drugs.

Such contrarian attitudes have made their way to Columbia’s student body. An investigation for online magazine UnHerd, with Sundial deputy editor Nikos Mohammadi contributing reporting, concluded that Jane Doe wasn’t sexually assaulted under New York state law, despite acknowledging the case is unresolved. It also invoked both her drinking and sexual decisions to make a broader argument about women’s responsibility, all while focusing on Scott Kretzschmar, one of the seven fraternity members facing comparatively less serious allegations.

Notably, Kretzschmar’s legal challenge focuses on the fairness of the disciplinary hearings, including the procedures through which he was found responsible for attempted sexual exploitation. The article places particular emphasis on a Cornell adjudicator driving during his Zoom hearing, a procedural concern warranting scrutiny. That Cornell imposed disciplinary sanctions hardly proves that it adequately addressed the allegations, just as procedural irregularities don’t establish that the allegations were unfounded.

But the article largely decenters the four students accused of nonconsensual sex to make a sweeping generalization that men are systematically punished by an ideological campus culture. Moreover, a procedural argument can raise valid concerns without passing moral judgement on a complainant from selectively presented evidence, especially when such judgements reinforce common contrarian narratives about women’s sexual credibility.

In a separate article Mohammadi wrote for UnHerd, the response to the allegations at Columbia is characterized as a “campus media frenzy.” The editorial cites Columbia students sharing their experiences of sexual assault, fraternities condemning sexual violence, and planned protests. There is reason to scrutinize public response before all the facts have been established, but demanding institutional accountability shouldn’t require dismissing widespread outrage as irrational.

Public condemnation of accused students before the facts are established carries its own risks, but concerns with due process need not be posed as opposition to the prevalence and gravity of sexual assault. Performative contrarians may insist otherwise. Campus sexual assault is an issue that evokes justifiable emotion. Ragebait exploits the tendency to regard that emotion as suspect, inflating what may be a genuine belief into a provocation that garners attention. The ensuing outrage feels like a morally dubious hamster wheel: the ragebaiter provokes someone engaging in good faith, then points to their emotional response as evidence of the mass hysteria they claim to oppose.

At Columbia, where independent thinking is valorized, there is an appeal to being the person willing to tackle the elephant in the room—or to be the elephant, stomping around and challenging prevailing beliefs. Yet disagreement based on faulty reasoning is hardly evidence of intellectual sophistication. Rather, it is all the more pathetic for its pretensions to rigor. When skepticism supersedes critical thinking, contrarianism becomes its own brand of X-pilled conformity.

Of course, skepticism is not inherently misogynistic. The reality is that none of us were present at the scene. It is possible to believe women have agency and should take responsibility for their decisions, including those they may later regret, without suggesting these decisions negate the need for consent. People can regret consensual sex, just as they can initially struggle to accept or articulate an experience of assault. Neither possibility establishes what happened conclusively. Female agency includes the ability to consent to some sexual acts without consenting to others. Treating voluntary drinking and consensual initial sexual decisions as sufficient basis to resolve questions of consent per se does not empower women; it merely replaces one reductive definition of female autonomy with another.

It is possible to entertain uncertainty about allegations without confidently declaring no sexual assault occurred, demanding that Jane Doe conform to an idealized version of victimhood, or dismissing the considerable problem of sexual assault within fraternity culture. When the campus response is reduced to a “media frenzy,” or the distinction between drinking and consent is flattened, nuance is lost in the fog of skepticism’s performance.

Performative male feminists, where have you been? We miss you. The character of the ragebaiter makes one nostalgic for the days when performative male contests dominated the conversation: also chronically online, but determined to win approval through drinking matcha and at least pretending to care about women’s issues.

Whether shaped by social media algorithms or indifference, many male friends and friends’ boyfriends have been completely unaware of the allegations, or unwilling to challenge dismissive comments about sexual assault. “Wait, what happened in Ithaca?” a friend’s techie boyfriend asked, overhearing us discussing it while in line for the club. Others have been curiously quiet, watching the ragebait unfold. Once again, the onus has fallen upon me and my female friends to educate our peers on sexism that extends well beyond fraternity culture, aware that if we assign too much weight to “just a stupid” comment, we risk being accused of overreacting and being too sensitive. I have found that some men in my life are sympathetic when they hear about an incident of sexual harassment on the street; they don’t necessarily apply that same concern to the comments of their peers.

Anyone can be complicit in perpetuating misogyny and simplifying a complicated issue. People of all genders can victim-blame, play into gender roles they benefit from, dismiss women and be ignorant. We’re all laughing along with edgy jokes and falling into invisible gender norms, hoping we’re not too much or not too little, a girl’s girl or chill or somehow good enough. Since we’re going to perform anyway, one might as well perform something worth believing in, rather than blaming women for the fear they’ve learned to inhabit.

Contrarianism doesn’t have to be performative to have consequences beyond getting a rise out of people. An article on consent may be intended as an exercise in skepticism, but its flippant insinuations don’t become less consequential simply because the author is challenging a prevailing opinion. The basic principle of consent is not a contrarian thought experiment, nor should empathy be treated as intellectually unserious. Being sensitive to the experiences of others, even if unimaginable to you personally, isn’t a weakness: It is basic human decency.

Mohammadi posted on X: “Consensual sex often happens when people are drinking” in response to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s post that choosing to have a drink is not consent and it’s never a license for sexual assault. It is common for journalists to abbreviate the message of articles for socials; it is lazy to respond to the governor’s statement not with a valid policy critique, but with an observation that doesn’t contradict the original meaning and reads as a passive-aggressive ‘gotcha.’

Online discourse in the era of Elon Musk’s X is often just locker-room chatter with a dearth of visible muscle definition, its sweaty desperation disguised as intellectual courage. This might sound mean-spirited, but I thought I’d exercise my own right to an unsolicited opinion.

Behind this particular exchange lies a substantial debate over intoxication and the legal capacity to consent. The New York State Senate has passed legislation to make it easier to prosecute certain sexual offenses involving people who have voluntarily consumed alcohol or drugs. The bill is pending further action in the State Assembly. Currently, voluntary intoxication alone doesn’t establish that someone was too incapacitated to consent. Under New York law, prosecutors can establish nonconsent through physical helplessness if a complainant was unconscious or incapable of communicating unwillingness, or on other legal grounds tailored to a particular offense. The proposed legislation would expand this standard to recognize an inability to consent when intoxication leaves someone incapable of understanding or controlling their actions, provided a reasonable person in the accused’s situation would have known of their condition. This proposed standard raises legitimate legal questions, but does it really need to be flattened into a tweet?

The consequences of this rhetoric extend beyond online discourse, particularly when students already face substantial barriers to reporting sexual assault. Ragebait may be intended as harmless. It can also convey a blithe disregard for the reality of life on college campuses for women and gender-minority undergraduates, approximately 1 in 5 of whom experience nonconsensual sexual contact or inability to consent, as well as the 1 in 16 men.

Sexual assault is particularly difficult to navigate when there is an 85 to 90 percent chance the perpetrator is someone you know and potentially trust, while trauma can complicate how someone responds to what happened.

Days after the alleged assault, Doe initially responded positively when one fraternity member texted her to apologize, though she later described much of what happened as nonconsensual. Her attorney has attributed her initial response to trauma and denial. She didn’t know that another fraternity member had sent Snapchat messages inviting other men into the room, a detail he did not disclose when Doe later questioned him about how so many people had entered.

Reporting can be exhausting, requiring a student to navigate several levels of bureaucracy with no guarantee of accountability. The interview questions are often invasive in nature, and investigators can misconstrue previous or initial consent as evidence of ongoing consent, which is a false parallel. For example, Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia activist who carried a mattress as part of her protest against the university’s handling of sexual assault, said she was dismissed by the New York Police Department, who focused on her consent to an initial encounter, rather than her allegation that consent did not extend to what subsequently transpired.

Further, students have often described university disciplinary procedures as bureaucratic and drawn-out, with delays that can discourage filing a report. With no guarantee of action and the possibility of a long and invasive process, reporting can feel like an exercise in institutional fatalism. There is also the prospect of retaliation: Jane Doe recently had a SWAT team falsely called on her house. It’s no wonder that less than a third of college women who are raped reach out to a program or resource, let alone reporting.

Free speech is commendable. So is deliberation prior to exercising it, a skill fortunately less difficult than underwater basket weaving. It is not self-censorship to be thoughtful about how one’s words or actions might affect others. Allyship entails refusing to dismiss a joke as just part of who someone is or dismissive language as provocation with a worthwhile purpose.

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It would be nice if Columbia men could be feminists, matcha and wired earbuds optional, and go the extra mile to call out stupid jokes others make. At the very least, they should not be bystanders. Perhaps the issue isn’t that we’re performing our values, but that we’re interested in performing intellectual independence at the expense of basic moral standards.

Maybe women want something less fashionable than contrarianism: sincerity, or a genuinely interesting take. But what do I know? I’m just a girl.

Ms. Rohslau is a senior in the dual BA program with Trinity College Dublin and the School of General Studies. She is a staff editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

The Instagram storm began on Monday, September 28. “I did not go to Cornell. I went to a different Ivy in New York. Title IX betrayed me there too,” posted one Columbia graduate turned pro-Israel influencer. Another widely liked and shared post highlighted Emma Sulkowicz, the since-graduated Columbia student who says she was raped on campus; throughout 2014 and 2015, she carried a mattress from class to class as a form of protest. (Columbia’s Title IX office found no evidence for that claim, and no charges were brought either by the police or the Manhattan District Attorney.)

Another Instagram post, with over 350,000 likes as of this piece’s publication and first reported in UnHerd, calls to “remove their heads in a public setting,” showing the likenesses of the “Cornell Seven.” And everywhere, far beyond Columbia’s gates and our student bodies’ bespoke social media algorithms, women are gender-warring and declaring, “I am Jane Doe.”

We believe that this collective frenzy is deeply unproductive, neglects any and all facts of the case which disagree with the “preferred” narrative, and infantilizes women. It has also ushered in a climate on campus in which it is difficult to disagree with the maximalist position on what happened on October 19 and October 20, 2024, to one “Jane Doe” at Cornell’s Chi Phi frat house. (The woman bringing forth the allegations is doing so anonymously; “Jane Doe” is the pseudonym she uses in her September 16 lawsuit.)

The Problem With the Frenzy

The seeds had already been sown the week prior by The Cornell Daily Sun, the Upstate New York Ivy’s principal student-run publication. In a September 21 cri de coeur, entitled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” the editorial board wrote:

Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.

The Daily Sun also named the seven men who had participated, or been complicit, in the alleged gang-rape of Doe. By October 3, the top three rows of the campus daily were devoted to covering—from a single perspective—the “Cornell Seven.”

To date, the closest thing the Daily Sun has published to a “contrarian” position, in relation to its editorial bottom line, is an October 8 op-ed on how the incessant social-media posting reflects a lack of “respect for Jane Doe,” “respect for survivors of sexual assault everywhere,” and “respect for yourselves.” (The Daily Sun did not respond to Sundial’s request for comment.)

Such a crusade neglects the complexity of the matter.

Doe initially reported the incident to Cornell Police, the university’s safety force, three weeks after the incident had occurred and only once she had been disinvited from Chi Phi’s Halloween party. The seemingly progressive Tompkins County District Attorney then found that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” He declined to press charges. An array of statements uncovered from Doe herself following the alleged rape, further calls into question whether it’s prudent to jump to any definitive conclusion, no less the one many Columbians have: What occurred was absolutely rape, all women’s experiences are represented in what happened to Doe, and if you disagree you are deeply suspect.

The social media freak-out has had real-world manifestations as well. On the morning of October 5, a Cornell administration building was vandalized, the glass door smashed, and the walls graffitied: “At Cornell, rapists are prosecuted protestors are expelled.” Later in the day, students assembled at a campus rally, which, according to The Free Press’s coverage, featured signs such as “I don’t want to go to school with rapists.” Two days later, the Ithaca Common Council voted to halt all Cornell and Cornell student organization special event permits—because of an incident that occurred two years ago.

Columbians appeared to take inspiration from what happened in Ithaca. On October 8, a rally was organized by a group called “Epstein off Columbia,” where students protested outside the main gates on Broadway and 116th Street to “#stopsexualviolence from the frat house to the White House.” Per the Columbia Daily Spectator’s reporting, demands included: “end sexual violence end capitalism,” “arrest & convict the Cornell 7,” and “expel rapists not protesters!” There have since been similar rallies across the city, and on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

With all the evidence that suggests what happened to Doe heavily complicates the armchair verdicts that so many have reached, it’s worth taking a pause before jumping to wide-sweeping conclusions. And certainly before posting, sans reprieve, and attacking those who dissent. The fact that various journalists and commentators have exercised a healthy degree of skepticism over the Cornell case is a welcome development. This was not the case with the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case or the 2014 University of Virginia case, and both ended up being disproven as false allegations. While the case of the “Cornell Seven” shouldn’t automatically be put in the same bucket as Duke and UVA—with both, the entire story has since revealed itself to be fabricated, and this is not the case with Doe’s accusations—a rational sense of scrutiny has still not translated into discourse on college campuses and into our algorithms.

Why the Discourse Infantilizes Women

If it is indeed the case that a reasonably consensual but regrettable encounter occurred, it’s worth pondering the implication of this hysteria.

In a liberal society, women are allowed to make bad decisions, ones that may later reveal themselves as deleterious. The discourse, nonetheless, seems to omit the possibility that consensual sex, to the woman participating in it, can later reveal itself as traumatic and immoral. Consensual sex can leave someone feeling ashamed, degraded, disgusted with herself and the people she has slept with, and acts she has agreed to the night before.

The relentless Instagramming also claims to defend women while relying on a rather diminished conception of female agency. It is true that women are more physically vulnerable than men in most sexual situations. That is one reason why sexual encounters involving multiple men and one woman may deserve particular scrutiny, and one reason women have good reason to be cautious about whom they trust and the situations they put themselves in.

Camille Paglia, the heterodox feminist theorist, is of especial use here; if not from a legalistic perspective, a cultural one. “It’s absolutely infantilizing to women. It must stop,” she once said on our era’s ever-expanding perception of rape. “If you go to a fraternity house party with chaos going on in the living room area and a young man says to you, ‘Would you like to go up to my room?’ I’m sorry, ok, you are consenting to sex.” She continued, “It’s not right, of course, for anyone to impose themselves sexually on another person. Naturally. But women must realize they are now free. The sexual revolution has been won. Why are we coddling young women?”

Women are adults. Doe was, even if she fell one year short of America’s abnormally high drinking age. She is now suing a downtown Ithaca bar and her sorority for allowing her to drink. (The bar claims it did not sell “alcoholic beverages to any visibly intoxicated person,” as Doe claims in her suit, or to anyone underage.) And Cornell, as with the law, also infantilizes its students. Since 2018, the university has barred hard-alcohol consumption in Greek life, regardless of the age of the drinkers.

With a 21-year drinking age and Cornell’s hard-alcohol ban in place, and Doe circumventing both rules anyway, this itself proves that adults do have the freedom to make bad decisions. Yet that freedom becomes meaningless when we only recognize it when the decision ends well, and when the narrative is one which confirms the story we tell ourselves about America’s libertine sexual ethic always producing palatable results.

The case has also become a vessel for grievances that extend far beyond Cornell. Women who have had degrading sexual experiences or moments where they felt used or humiliated can easily see themselves in Doe. That sense of identification or compassion might be understandable, but it also means that people are often reacting to far more than the particular facts in front of them.

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This case hit home for Christina because she’d been through an experience which later proved itself similarly degrading, albeit in different ways from Doe’s own. When she was 19 and 20, she entered a deeply traumatic romantic relationship with an older man. A significant part of the trauma was sexual, where she had participated in things she is now profoundly ashamed of.

But she also knows how tempting it is to look back and reinterpret the sex as coercion, and even rape.

Yet, what contributed to her participation in such acts was the larger rhetoric surrounding it—the seductive world of sexual liberation and taboo. At first it sounded cool, and doing it would mean she’s not a “prude,” but the aftermath left her feeling gross.

This helps explain why the rhetoric so quickly expands from seven men at Cornell to men generally. Once a viral allegation becomes a repository for every bad encounter, every resentment toward men, and every fear women have carried into their own relationships, disagreement begins to feel personal. Questioning the reaction to the Cornell case and Doe’s wide-sweeping claims about it starts to be mistaken for questioning women’s experiences writ large.

Beyond the “Cornell Seven”

Of course, one can go too far the other way. What happened that night was, to say the least, deeply unfortunate. To deny that, or insinuate that it was “based,” or even mock Doe as the “rapist,” as has been commonplace on social media, we find repellent.

The media framing of cases like this fuels a cycle of gender polarization, whether it’s the right-wing manosphere or the posts “in solidarity.” The danger now is that the most extreme voices on each side come to represent the entire debate. The arguments become retaliatory, and accountability and reason slowly devolve into tribal loyalty. What we want to avoid is the media frenzy turning into a self-reinforcing memetic cycle, where each side becomes more suspicious of the other, and the actual facts begin to disappear beneath emotional responses. It even transcends age, to an extent. One mother recently wrote in USA Today that when her daughter texted her a photo of her with her best friend from a frat house, she “thought of Jane Doe.”

The sexual revolution created a hyper-liberal, pro-sex culture that insists that ‘women can do whatever they want with their bodies.’ In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there’s a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it.

Drug-fueled orgies may be morally appalling and violating to those who chose to participate in them—even the men participating in them—but we probably do not want to live in a society where that is illegal.

Between the opposing poles of a culture wedded to celebrating degeneracy while insisting we coddle women, and a conservative alternative equally totalitarian in its demands for “purity,” is a third way.

We don’t have all the answers. What is clear to us, though, is that such liberalism as practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century—all the sexual freedom and none of the consequences—does not work; neither do punitive and reactionary laws or unsubstantiated media frenzies. A more dignified sexual ethic would recognize the agency of men and women alike, and have a greater share of adults, including college students, making adult decisions. It also probably wouldn’t celebrate depraved and extreme acts for their own sake as “empowering,” even if they’re consensual.

No civil suit will get us there. Neither will student paper editorial boards publishing activist pieces, one crop of Columbians stymying debate and the others self-censoring, or one more woman posting, “I am Jane Doe.”

Ms. Ma is a junior at Barnard College studying English and philosophy. She is a staff writer for Sundial.

Mr. Mohammadi is a junior at Columbia College studying American studies. He is a deputy editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Dear Reader,

As one of the few college students who can call themselves a morning person, I’ve always held onto a certain quote by the famed science fiction writer Glen Cook: “Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.”

I, for one, have come to cherish the process of waking up early, venturing to a coffee shop, and wandering a pedestrian-less cityscape as a sacred routine. Yet, beneath the clichéd treatment of the morning hour as some near-mythical window of new beginnings and opportunities that arise with the sun, Cook’s words hold merit even for those of us who aren’t sleepyheads. New opportunities don’t always come at the most opportune times.

In this issue, I cover the Columbia administration’s diminishing credibility with valuing student free speech, senior editor Uma Rajan points out how the Core Curriculum often contradicts the University’s stated educational goals, and staff editor Mathilda Simons investigates the worsening financial condition of both Columbia and Barnard. In other words, it’s not the most opportune moment for President Jennifer Mnookin to take the reins at Columbia.

The former University of Wisconsin Chancellor herself has faced mixed reactions over her time in Madison. While Mnookin was credited with expanding tuition assistance and scholarships to working-class Wisconsinites and growing the University’s research footprint, she also faced criticism for her inaccessibility to many students, as well as her absent relationship with the school’s faculty union and even their football program’s declining performance.

Mnookin may not have to worry about our football team getting any worse, but she has to grapple with leading what is, by some metrics, the nation’s most polarized campus. It seemingly follows that the incoming president herself pledged to uphold Columbia’s “deep commitment to open inquiry,” while the Columbia Board of Trustees, in explaining their choice of leadership, cited her as “a keen listener who builds consensus.”

Although many Madison students will dispute that, at the very least, Columbia’s new leader seems dedicated to what I deem in my article as ‘dialogue-ism.’ In her Wisconsin years she introduced her own array of programming geared to promoting open dialogue, from “Deliberation Dinners” to “The Wisconsin Exchange.”

Of course, I’m not sure how many more ‘open dialogue’ initiatives Columbia needs for an atmosphere of actual relationship-building and thoughtful engagement with each other to actually develop. What waits to be seen is if anyone—no less our new president—has the courage to introduce something new.

One great aspect of the morning is that it provides a ‘reset’: a fresh set of lenses with which to approach the challenges of the day. Whether it be staff writer Jayna Rohslau’s stories of how the Luddite movement taught her to be more tuned-in to her surroundings or staff editor Jessica Weinfeld’s analysis challenging the claims of elected officials on which groups voted them in, this issue, in keeping with Sundial’s intellectual tradition, features commentaries that scrutinize, challenge, and mold existing assumptions into new understandings.

The moment to form new ideas and restore open inquiry to campus isn’t the most opportune, but it’s now, and it’s up to our President Mnookin to seize it. At an institution as storied and devoted to truth-seeking as Columbia, it may just be the only way forward.

For the staff,

Nick Baum

Editor-in-Chief

Mr. Baum is a senior in the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary and School of General Studies. He is the editor-in-chief of Sundial.

At one of the purple-covered tables near Columbia’s South Lawn on Wednesday, October 7, a participant asked what, exactly, everyone was supposed to talk about. The answer was fairly simple. There was no set topic, no assigned position to defend, and no particular resolution participants were expected to reach. They could discuss whatever they wanted.

That is the idea behind Columbia’s Listening Tables, a faculty-led initiative that brings students, faculty, and other members of the University community together to talk across disagreement. Launched in late summer 2024, Listening Tables is a project of the Trust Collaboratory, a Columbia-based research center that studies how trust is built and maintained. Gil Eyal, a sociology professor who directs the center, and Cristian Capotescu, the Trust Collaboratory’s associate director, launched the program. They now work alongside postdoctoral scholar Asya Tsaturyan and student fellows to create opportunities for members of the campus community to engage in conversations across differences.

Wednesday’s gathering took place on the third anniversary of Hamas’ 2023 attack on Israel. In attendance were President Jennifer Mnookin and Trustee Keith Goggin, adding University participation to an initiative that the organizers said were largely devoid of administrative support. Nearby, rows of empty white chairs installed by Columbia/Barnard Hillel commemorated those killed in the attack. Later that afternoon, around 70 pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside Columbia’s gates to march in support of what Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) described as the Palestinian people’s “century-long struggle for sovereignty and liberation.”

The events of the day reflected the bitter tension that has shaped campus life in recent years, and the solution Listening Tables was attempting to offer.

Not everyone welcomed the effort. In an October 7 Instagram post (since removed) and a flyer circulated by SJP, the group condemned the gathering as a “worthless dialogue session.” SJP accused University administrators of promoting discussion as an alternative to ending what the group described as Columbia’s “complicity” in Israel’s war in Gaza.

SJP also wrote that the sessions “normalize three years of genocide” and declared, “We do not engage in dialogue with Zionists.”

Meanwhile, throughout the afternoon, participants frequently returned to the importance of dialogue itself, discussing the need for intellectual humility, openness to disagreement, and a willingness to listen. There was considerable agreement that these qualities were desirable. But much of the discussion remained focused on these principles, rather than progressing toward a more substantial examination of the contentious issues that arose during the conversations.

At one table, for instance, participants discussed the difficulty of relying on different, sometimes conflicting sources of information about Israel and Palestine. How could they have a productive conversation, they wondered, if they could not even agree on the basic facts? Yet, rather than examining particular disputed claims, much of the conversation remained focused on the difficulty of establishing a shared understanding in the first place.

One student who participated in the discussions expressed reservations about their productivity. Although she appreciated the opportunity for open conversation, she observed that participants spent much of the time “talking more about talking” rather than addressing the issues themselves.

Capotescu, the Listening Tables organizer, is no stranger to the challenges of operating such an initiative. In a written response to Sundial, he recalled that when the tables first began in 2024, even the mention of dialogue was met with “suspicion and skepticism.” Two years later, he has observed a change. Students now approach the tables, he wrote, with considerably more curiosity and openness, a development he described as “a remarkable shift in tone.”

Whether this reflects a broader shift in Columbia’s campus culture remains unclear. But for some of the students and faculty who have participated, the tables appear to offer something they have found lacking in their ordinary experience of university life.

A Different Kind of University Life

One international student in his senior year described arriving at Columbia with an idealized view of the American college experience. He had imagined an environment of open intellectual exchange, where students from different backgrounds could discuss unfamiliar ideas, challenge one another’s assumptions, and encounter perspectives quite different from their own.

His experience, as it turned out, had been considerably different. He described an atmosphere in which students sometimes felt pressured to withhold opinions that differed from prevailing views, whether among their peers or in the classroom. Recalling his experience in University Writing, he described wondering whether expressing a political position at odds with what he perceived to be his instructors’ views might affect his grades. “Should I take this position,” he recalled asking himself, “or should I just go with the status quo?”

Listening Tables represented something closer to what he had originally imagined. He had not planned to attend Wednesday’s gathering, but upon noticing the tables, he decided to join the discussion. For him, the opportunity to hear unfamiliar perspectives and participate in an environment where disagreement was welcomed, rather than immediately dismissed, was closer to what he believed university life ought to offer.

At the tables, Mnookin similarly acknowledged that the fear of condemnation from one’s peers can indeed discourage students from expressing their views, whether inside or outside the classroom. She emphasized that the proper role of universities should be to create the conditions necessary for students to explore contested questions, and cautioned that taking institutional positions on those disputes risks silencing students who might hold different views.

The organizers also envisioned something more enduring than a series of pleasant conversations. Capotescu distinguished between dialogue understood simply as a skill and what he called “dialogue-as-ethos,” which he described as “an ethos of democratic citizenship on campus.” It is an approach to disagreement that, in his account, develops through education, repeated encounters, and practice, rather than through a single training session or workshop.

“Dialogue knows no winners and losers,” Capotescu wrote to Sundial. Rather than approaching a conversation with the expectation of persuading another person or resolving disagreement, participants are encouraged to explore unfamiliar perspectives, question their own assumptions, and consider ideas that may be uncomfortable. Even a position previously regarded as settled, he suggested, may seem less certain when considered from another perspective. “That uncertainty is often the surest sign that we don’t see the entire picture,” he wrote.

Underlying this understanding of dialogue is the importance of familiarity and personal relationships. Capotescu emphasized that dialogue must be practiced in person, where students can encounter others beyond their political convictions and develop the social ties on which trust depends. Knowing someone beyond their politics can make it more difficult to reduce them to an ideological category, or to assume the worst about their intentions.

This is also part of the thinking behind the tables’ weekly format. The organizers do not expect a single conversation to overcome deeply held disagreements or establish trust between participants. Instead, they hope that repeated conversations will allow participants to become more familiar with one another, develop relationships, and learn to engage respectfully with views they do not share. The intended change, in other words, is not necessarily in what participants believe, but in how they interact with people who believe differently.

The First Step, and What Comes After

The larger question is what Listening Tables can accomplish beyond any individual conversation. If the project succeeds in making participants more comfortable with disagreement, will that openness extend beyond the tables themselves? Will students carry that willingness into classrooms, friendships, and encounters with people who might never attend such a gathering?

Capotescu himself describes dialogue as “a work in progress, requiring continuous attention and care.” For now, Listening Tables offers something more modest than a total transformation of Columbia’s campus culture. It provides a place where students and faculty who might otherwise remain strangers can sit together, speak openly, and perhaps begin to regard one another with greater understanding.

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Whether such encounters will produce more enduring change remains uncertain. But the willingness of students and faculty to participate suggests that, at least among those who come to the tables, there is a genuine desire for a different kind of university life.

At Wednesday’s gathering, the initial question was what everyone was supposed to talk about. The more difficult question, and one that remains unanswered, is whether that willingness to talk can become part of everyday life at Columbia.

Mr. Sivieri is a sophomore in the School of General Studies studying political science and history. He is a staff writer for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Odds are, a day before the start of classes, you’ll find a horde of freshmen enveloping either Book Culture, the Columbia Bookstore, or the library, scrambling to find copies of The Iliad, Aeneid, and Symposium in time for their first class of Literature Humanities (LitHum). In just a few short weeks, you’ll find those same freshmen in Carman floor lounges, Ferris, or Uris bemoaning the hundreds of pages they were assigned to read of those very same books. But after the obligatory workload complaints, you’ll also hear intense discussion, debate, and disagreement on the fabric of these texts—the kind of authentic engagement that isn’t always rewarded by the grading structure.

This intellectual spirit, as we’re routinely reminded, is the principal goal of Columbia’s Core Curriculum. The euphemism of teaching students not what to think but how to think has indeed become cliché, yet this pedagogical philosophy undoubtedly remains at the heart of the Core. It is meant not just as another set of requirements to fulfill but rather viewed as Columbia’s signature academic program and primary selling point, emblematic of the school’s approach to education as a whole.

While this vision is admirable, for many students, it is simply not the reality. Assessment methods used in many Core classes prioritize memorization and regurgitation of facts over intellectual inquiry, creating a disconnect between the Core’s stated goals and the students’ quotidian experience.

The Core Curriculum bulletin details the origins of Columbia’s Core, which started with the creation of Contemporary Civilization (CC) in 1919. CC was originally conceived by the philosopher and education theorist John Dewey as a progressive educational experiment, with the bulletin noting that “rather than focusing on the transmission of knowledge and the development of expertise, Contemporary Civilization would provide students with a space to develop their own ideas and create knowledge collectively at the intersection of historical consciousness and self-awareness.” The goal of this course was not for students to master existing facts, but instead, for them to “develop their own perspectives” and “create knowledge collectively” through discussion and critical inquiry.

With this open-ended structure, the question then becomes a matter of how, exactly, students are expected to demonstrate their learning.

Despite the common syllabus and mission that unite Core sections, there is no shared assessment structure. Some professors mandate that papers and analytical essays make up the bulk of a grade. Others prioritize exams, usually consisting of some combination of passage identifications, short paragraph responses, and longer essays. A majority, in my experience, simply use a mix of both. Columbia presents this flexibility as a strength, describing the Core as a “common syllabus; uncommon experience.” Students are meant to engage with the same texts while also benefiting from different classroom environments tailored to their professor’s strengths as an educator.

Not all assessment differences, however, are equally consistent with the Core’s original mission. While professors may approach The Republic or The Odyssey from different angles, the skills they assess should still reflect the broader curriculum’s goals. The Core exists to cultivate critical thinking and independent analysis; it follows that students should be evaluated precisely on those abilities, not on any one instructor’s individual whim.

The latter, lamentably, happens all too often. When what is measured becomes how much information a student can remember and regurgitate on an exam, these classes fall short of the Core’s true mission.

The most egregious example of this might be the commonly-employed passage identification (passage IDs). In these questions, students are provided with a short excerpt from a work from the syllabus, and are then asked to identify its source, author, and broader context—sometimes even the specific year the source was published. Most exams contain anywhere from 10 to 15 or more passage IDs. Given that Core classes routinely assign hundreds of pages per week, passage IDs are meant to reward those who complete the readings. Just how effective this all is in the age of AI remains an open question.

And still, completing the reading does not demonstrate critical thinking per se. A student who remembers that a particular line came from The Aeneid rather than The Iliad may not be able to explain its broader significance, connect it to other themes, or evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Passage IDs assess recognition rather than understanding, and leave no opportunity for students to display their critical thinking.

While passage IDs are the most common form of testing students’ memorization, there are also other testing methods that create similar counterproductive results, thus undermining Dewey’s original vision for CC. Some professors provide students with a list of vocabulary words, and students have to identify which text they came from. There are also other professors who give pop-reading quizzes as a way to incentivize students to be prepared for class. While these represent a less egregious affront to CC’s original mission because they typically do not constitute a bulk of an exam or grade, their existence is still antithetical to the point of the Core.

To be clear, this is not an argument against knowing the facts of the texts, as familiarity with the works is a necessary prerequisite for meaningful discussion. After all, you can’t think critically about Locke without having read Locke first. But sheer memorization of the text itself should not be the primary object of evaluation.

I have seen my friends in Butler before exam season painstakingly trying to find differences in writing styles and word choices to study for the passage IDs. I am one of the seemingly few lucky students who have never had to do this, and I believe my own Core experience is a good example of what the curriculum intends to do.

In LitHum, my professor assigned three analytical papers throughout the semester with no exams. These papers were open-ended, allowing us to explore any topic in whichever reading interested us the most.

My CC professor had a similar approach. Although we had exams, they consisted entirely of short-response paragraphs and essays. One of the questions would mirror a passage ID, as it provided students with a section of text, but the focus was not on identifying where it came from. Instead, the section of text usually spanned a couple of pages; we were then asked to explain and evaluate the passage’s purpose in the broader text. Other prompts were open-ended questions, requiring students to build arguments and engage directly with the ideas they had spent the semester learning.

These assessments were not necessarily easier than memorization-based exams. If anything, they were more demanding, as they required engaging with the text in a deep and meaningful way. Writing paragraphs, essays, and papers requires students to synthesize readings, anticipate counterarguments, and develop original claims. These are precisely the kinds of skills the Core aims to cultivate. These assessments reward students for thinking.

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Now, some variation between sections is both inevitable and may even be desirable. The Core would lose much of its value if every professor were forced into a more rigid, standardized curriculum à la high school Advanced Placement. The freedom to explore different themes, ask different questions, and design different assignments—or to have the instructor include a text not on the official syllabus, as is often the case—is what makes each student’s Core experience unique. This is a university, not Kumon.

However, pedagogical flexibility must not entail abandoning curricular coherence. If Columbia truly believes the purpose of the Core is to help students develop their critical thinking skills, then the assessments should reflect that. Rather than standardize how professors evaluate their students, the University should standardize the skills that these assessments are meant to gauge. This would be standardization in service of a worthy goal: testing the true understanding of students, not whether they can memorize facts.

Every Core section should give students meaningful opportunities to analyze primary texts, develop and defend their own arguments, and pursue questions of their own interest. The University could provide a variety of assessment methods that test for these skills, whether it be a traditional essay, research paper, open-ended exam, presentation, or other method that promotes critical thinking. It would still remain the professor’s discretion as to what combination of assessments they give their class. If a professor feels strongly about an assessment method not listed, they could petition to have it added, provided it tests for the skillset the Core preaches.

The Core’s greatest strength has never been about the texts themselves. Hundreds of universities offer similar classes. What makes Columbia’s Core distinct, or what should make it distinct, is its promise that students will wrestle with these texts together, challenging one another’s perspectives and developing their critical thinking skills in the process. If Columbia’s Core is meant to teach students what to think, then their exams should actually give students something worth thinking about.

Ms. Rajan is a junior at Columbia College majoring in economics and political science. She is a senior editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Columbia prides itself on being a research university that seeks to promote “an environment that sustains the highest standards of scholarship, learning, and safety.” The University boasts over $1 billion in grants and external funding annually, credits itself with over 400 inventions annually, and has produced 88 Nobel Laureates. Leading this institution are the Trustees, who are tasked with guiding the University towards a stable future and protecting its core mission of education and enlightenment.

However, recent legal disputes and a Sundial investigation into Trustee Shoshana Shendelman, VP&S ’03, ’04, ’05, reveal new information about potential scientific misconduct when she was a graduate student at Columbia that casts doubt on the legitimacy of the Trustees’ governance.

Shendelman was elected as a Trustee in 2023. In November 2024, the Food and Drug Administration rejected govorestat, the lead drug candidate of Applied Therapeutics, a biotech firm founded by Shendelman. In a December 2024 letter addressed to Shendelman, the FDA cited “objectionable conditions” observed during inspections, including the deletion of clinical trial data ahead of an FDA inspection and failure to disclose dosing “errors” made during a pediatric clinical trial.

Within weeks, shareholders filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Shendelman, the company, and its chief medical officer had misled investors about the drug’s regulatory review. Shendelman stepped down as CEO days later. The parties reached a settlement in August 2025, and in March 2026, a federal judge granted final approval to the $15 million settlement.

The publicly available settlement information reveals no assignment of blame; Sundial reached out to Wolf Popper, the attorneys representing the class action plaintiffs in this case, and did not receive a response.

The FDA’s findings are not the first time questions have been raised about Shendelman’s scientific work.

In March 2024, Dutch microbiologist and image-integrity analyst Elisabeth Bik—writing on PubPeer, a website where researchers publicly discuss published papers—flagged apparent irregularities in a figure from a 2004 PLoS Biology paper on which Shendelman is first author. Two of the images, which are meant to show control samples from separate experiments, appear to be identical.

To corroborate, Sundial reached out to Bik for comment. “The results from each experimental condition appear to have been cut out and pasted side by side, which makes them harder to compare fairly. In addition, two lanes labeled as separate control samples appear to be identical, suggesting that the same blot image may have been used twice,” Bik wrote in response.

Bik told Sundial she was “confident about that duplication.” She sent a version of Figure 3D with enhanced contrast, saying there were “enough details (strips and lighter dots) to see” the duplication clearly.

In November 2024, Bik reported these concerns to PLoS Biology, the original publisher of the paper in which these figures appeared. To her knowledge, there was no action taken, nor did the authors reply on PubPeer.

According to Columbia’s policies on research misconduct, falsification “includes purposeful manipulation, modification, or omission of data or results.” If the duplication was intentional, it could constitute falsification under the University’s own definition. Shendelman was a Columbia doctoral student in 2004, when the paper was published—and if the University holds its current students to zero tolerance for research misconduct, it should hold its Trustees, who were once students themselves, to no lower a standard. (Shendelman did not respond to Sundial’s request for comment.)

Shendelman’s doctoral advisor and the senior author of the PLoS paper, Asa Abeliovich, has faced scrutiny of his own. In 2015, two papers from his lab—a 2011 Cell paper and a 2013 Nature paper, both with Abeliovich as senior author—were retracted after investigators found that first author Ryousuke Fujita had fabricated and falsified data in 74 figure panels. A 2007 Science paper from Abeliovich’s lab has also been flagged on PubPeer for possible image duplication.

Abeliovich left his tenured Columbia position in October 2017 after founding Prevail Therapeutics that July. In 2019, Alector, a biotech he had previously co-founded, brought a confidential arbitration against him over alleged breaches of his consulting agreement and misuse of confidential information. According to Alector, the arbitrator found him liable for breach of contract and for destroying documents relevant to the proceeding; according to Prevail, the arbitrator rejected the claim that he used Alector’s trade secrets in his work for Prevail. (Abeliovich did not respond to a request for comment.)

A source close to University leadership, who spoke to Sundial under the condition of anonymity, said that Columbia held investments in Applied Therapeutics during the period in which the FDA rejected govorestat and issued a warning letter to the company, while Shendelman was an active University Trustee. According to Applied Therapeutics’ public SEC filings, in 2017, they issued to the Trustees of Columbia University stock with a fair value of $0.5 million and recorded that as a research and development expense.

According to the “2016 Columbia Agreement” as listed in the filing, there was an upfront payment and, “following the occurrence of certain trigger events,” Applied Therapeutics “issued to Columbia University shares equal to 5% of our outstanding common stock on a fully diluted basis at the time of issuance.”

After the FDA’s rejection and warning letter became public in November 2024, the company’s stock value nosedived by roughly 90%, dropping from $10.21 per share at closing on November 26 to $2.03 per share at closing on November 29, the day after govorestat was rejected. The shares plummeted further to $1.29 per share on December 5, a few days after the FDA warning letter was disclosed.

It is unclear whether Columbia still held all 486,077 shares from its licensing agreement at the time; if it did, the University’s stake would have gone from being worth around $5 million to around $0.63 million.

Despite the seriousness of the allegations involving Applied Therapeutics, Shendelman was not removed from her positions as a University Trustee or Vice Chair of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons Board of Advisors.

A spokesperson from the University’s Office of Public Affairs, when asked to comment, responded that “we do not comment on allegations received or reviewed and cannot confirm or deny their existence.”

Columbia’s IRS Form 990 filings state that “All trustees are subject to the ‘Statement of Conflict of Interest Policy for the Trustees of Columbia University.’” According to the 990 filing, this policy states, in part, that when a Trustee is aware of an existing or potential conflict of interest, they must disclose it to the Board Chair, refrain from acting to influence any decision which might improperly benefit the Trustee, and recuse themselves from discussions or decisions when relevant.

The conflict of interest policy was only recently made available on the Office of the Secretary’s website, after repeated requests for comment by Sundial and Columbia Daily Spectator and a spring 2026 referendum from Columbia College calling for its release. While the form is now public, the individual disclosures of conflicts of interest from the Trustees are still not available publicly; therefore, it is unclear whether Shendelman ever disclosed her involvement in Applied Therapeutics during her term as Trustee, or if she had any influence over the University’s holdings in Applied Therapeutics.

When asked about the University’s stake in Applied Therapeutics and potential conflicts of interest, the spokesperson from Public Affairs merely directed Sundial to the 2019 Trustee bylaws with no further elaboration.

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In a University Senate Plenary on December 12, 2025, Senator Eli Baum CC ’26 asked then-Acting President Shipman about the conflict of interest that Shendelman posed. “The whole company was made with Columbia licensing, Columbia patents, Columbia personnel,” Baum said in the December meeting, in relation to Applied Therapeutics.

Shipman replied: “I don’t think it’s my position to comment on individual board members.”

In July 2025, House Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) sent a letter to Shipman about her text messages to other Board members regarding Shendelman. Shipman had said of Shendelman, “I just don’t think she should be on the board,” and that she was “so, so tired” of Shendelman. Evidently, Shipman was capable of commenting on individual board members—just not publicly.

In one message, Wanda Holland Greene, CC ’89, TC ’91, ’21, then-Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees, referred to Shendelman as a “mole” and a “fox in the henhouse.” The messages were controversial, as Shendelman has been an outspoken advocate of Jewish and Zionist students on campus and has publicly called on the Board to comply with the Trump administration’s demands regarding alleged anti-Jewish Civil Rights violations at Columbia.

By the 2019 bylaws in effect when Shendelman first entered office, her current term ends in 2029. (The new 2026 bylaws, amended in August, revise a Trustee’s term to be four years instead of six; it is unclear whether the new policy applies to sitting Trustees.)

The current bylaws for the Board of Trustees state that, “A Trustee may be removed for cause by the vote of a majority of the Trustees then in office.” The bylaws don’t define “cause,” and they give no mechanism for anyone outside the board (students, faculty, the Senate, alumni) to initiate a removal. The existing process, this investigation finds, is unduly opaque and subject only to internal accountability. The existence of guidelines sans public disclosures from each individual Trustee is simply smoke-and-mirrors—for any such policy to be enforceable, someone other than those with the most to lose ought to be enforcing it. Whether the Trustees have ever considered Shendelman’s case, or ever reviewed her conflict-of-interest disclosures, is known only to the Trustees themselves.

American higher education has, for the past few years, been experiencing a crisis of confidence. Although there is no panacea for the anxieties that roil under the surface of our universities, it seems sensible that those who shape the future of our educational institutions should act responsibly to bring back said confidence. Part and parcel of that calling would be for the University’s foremost representatives—the President, Trustees, and the rest of senior leadership—to actually reflect the mission that their institution espouses and claims to inculcate in future generations. With this responsibility comes an invitation for an elevated degree of scrutiny. Shendelman and her peers who are supposed to oversee her conduct seem to fail that test—or, at least, aren’t willing to explain why they don’t deserve our scrutiny.

Ms. Chen is a junior at Columbia College studying linguistics, economics, and East Asian languages & cultures. She is a deputy editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

At Columbia, the concept of living in the moment is an archaic legend, like affordable tuition or the drunken anecdotal stories my uncle had told me about strippers in Butler during finals season in the ‘80s: nice to have, but also distinctly implausible. For most, it’s more common to have your attention span dragged in every which direction, constantly pinged by Slack notifications from your third unpaid internship and seventh evil situationship, stopping for a breath only to be submerged by a whirlpool of IG Reels parading as life advice from parentally-funded-peers-from-the-Midwest-turned-parasocialites.

Fun goes to die online: If we spend all our time worrying about our futures or our public image, we are left stranded in the void, a place even worse than hell or Ithaca. To be sure, a diagnosis of incurable try-hard syndrome is how we arrived at this college in the first place. Still, there is also a mythical quality of leaving this anxiety by the wayside that is appealing to those pursuing linear success. This summer, a certain intrepid Sundial writer decided to shut her phone down and partake in events centered around the Luddite community in New York that aspire to usher in connection rather than progression to Wall Street, Palantir, and death.

“Luddite” is a term that initially referred to the 19th-century labor movement of English artisans destroying machinery during the Industrial Revolution to deter their employers from replacing them with cheap labor. Today, its definition has expanded to almost anyone searching for a lifestyle outside of the Big Tech ecosystem that has monopolized our lives. In a time when our attention spans have become physically shortened, and policymakers haven’t been able to effect real change, young people are forming collectives to rescue themselves through what I would best describe as phoneless “side questing.” The real antidote to Columbia hustle culture lies in recovering forms of attention that make room for willful meandering.

Over the past three months, I’ve attended seminars and outdoor events organized by the Strother School for Radical Attention (SoRA), a nonprofit that turns public space into an outdoor philosophy seminar. They hold additional events during the Summer of Ludd, a week that aims to unite people at in-person events to get away from Big Tech, and other weird in-person events announced through the online NYC Off Tech newsletter.

I initially attended an Attention Lab seminar at SoRA not knowing what to expect. I was reassured by the modern and inviting atmosphere of the space in Dumbo, a studio where refreshments and snacks were served, and someone immediately engaged me in conversation about our favorite key lime pie spot in Brooklyn.

An assortment of around thirty people filled the room, a diverse grouping ranging from a pair of married attorneys to solemn children dragged to attend by their progressive, clog-wearing mothers. We completed strange exercises that included thinking about random objects in the room as problems to be solved for three minutes and then reconceived as poems. Later, we would draw abstract shapes, exchange them with partners, and then go out into the night to find our partners’ ill-conceived art in Dumbo. I ended up in a park squinting at the trees to make them look like squibbles before we reconvened to discuss our findings.

When I was asked about my past week, I felt weirdly enthusiastic as I detailed my experience at the event. “I stared at a pillow and made it into a poem with my mind,” I said, insanely. “It was great.” My employed Columbia friends told me that they were happy if I was happy in the tone that one addresses a small child that has drawn a subpar stick figure, before our conversation returned to their real-life complaints.

“They’re bringing a baseline level of practiced intentionality to regular life,” regular SoRA event participant and recent City College of New York graduate Koll Moss told me. “I think [the Luddite resurgence] makes perfect sense because there’s clearly a collective assault by Big Tech and it is only natural that we would begin to have some sort of collective resistance.”

At Columbia, constant stimulation feels like a prerequisite for belonging. We’re glued to screens for social connection, but our attention is monopolized by momentum itself.

Especially at college, there is pressure to always be working toward the next accomplishment. The pressure isn’t to succeed, but to package yourself into a marketable story. Tell me about yourself, the networker says in the bloodsport known as the coffee chat. Entertain me.

This summer, I didn’t work a prestigious internship. I value ambition and accomplishment. But I also found myself wondering what happens when every moment becomes something to optimize. Fresh off a breakup, I arrived at the Summer of Ludd looking for distraction, but I found myself intrigued by the people I met.

Although far from the most “brain-rotted” of my peers who speak fluent Gen Alpha at the expense of sanity, I still mourn the time wasted online when I could have been connecting with others. But at a time when we’re all more distracted than ever, I believe we should stop diagnosing distraction as an individual failure and begin recognizing attention as a shared practice cultivated by communities.

According to psychologist Gloria Mark, who studies attention in digital settings, the average amount of time people remain focused on a screen before switching tasks has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades. Summer of Ludd seemed interested in creating natural conditions where paying attention to other people became easier than being absorbed by my phone.

At a Summer of Ludd event, I stepped off the F train at Roosevelt Island and spotted a man in a gnome hat drawing with chalk, surrounded by New Yorkers young and old. I knew instinctively I had found the right place.

Rather than another productivity hack, Summer of Ludd offered something different. We read Sara Ahmed aloud over the sound of arriving trains and wandered Roosevelt Island with the intent of leaving a note with the instructions to care for something. The point wasn’t productivity, it was learning to pay attention together.

Walking along the water, I wondered why Roosevelt Island had escaped my notice as a lifelong New Yorker. Then I spotted a cat and promptly forgot the assignment as another participant, and I wandered over to investigate a cat sanctuary.

The event’s invitation to pay attention landed differently for everyone. As we wandered, conversations drifted toward exits, life, and love. I learned that hydrangeas change color depending on the pH of the soil, as well as the personal transitions everyone else in our group was navigating. Perhaps every exit is also an entrance into someone else’s story.

If shrinking attention is one of the defining problems of our generation, we can’t simply expect people to get off their phones. We need more spaces that invite people to disengage from algorithmically curated lives, where paying attention to one another is the activity itself. After all, attention is a social practice. I was surrounded by others navigating life transitions that day. Leaving, I didn’t feel less heartbroken, but I was aware that the discomfort would move and pass through me, dissipating into waves like the seafoam lapping the edge of Roosevelt Island.

This became a summer of side quests. Through listening, you notice idiosyncratic tendencies in yourself and others, and learn to appreciate your friends. Paying attention became infectious. One conversation led to a writing group; a chance encounter became a murder mystery party; a walk became reporting on vampire bats and friendship. The summer accumulated richness through curiosity.

It is a sentimental education that the classroom supplements but cannot replace. Speaking to Columbia students and alums, I was struck by how many others described similar experiences. “Stress culture is super prevalent on campus, so when I want to disconnect, I feel the best thing to do is physically remove myself from the space,” Jay Jacobson, GS ’28, told me. “The guilt of not being ever-productive is so omnipresent. We are all so “busy” we have no time to do things [like seeing friends].”

Blake Appleby, CC ’25, said he noticed benefits from living with a flip phone, slowing down to be more grounded in every aspect of his life, including his career—to the point where brain-rotting entailed listening to an album all the way through. “It felt monastic,” he enthused, adding he relished offline hobbies like rock-climbing.

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I had long been tired of being told to be ‘true to myself,’ under the impression that it meant becoming a nun who goes to bed at a reasonable hour. Instead, I now understand authenticity as something you won’t find on any Pinterest board. To be cringe is to be free from the algorithm, constant self-curation, and wondering if every experience will look good on your CV.

Entering the college year, I know that pre-professionalism and constant action will be inevitable forces at work. Phones are also necessary for me and most others. “I don’t feel like it’s possible to even become a Luddite in the West, like how many of those off-the-grid people also have full-time social media accounts,” Lucian Mignone, CC ’26, said, writing to me from a corporate basement bathroom. Maybe so.

But I think it is possible—and worthwhile—to resist the blind buffalo stampede toward whatever comes next, to relish the smaller details rather than constantly ask if we’re there yet. The answer to heartbreak wasn’t another romance. It was paying attention.

Ms. Rohslau is a senior in the dual BA program with Trinity College Dublin and the School of General Studies. She is a staff editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Across the country, higher education institutions are facing a mounting crisis. 16 institutions fully shut down in 2025; two-thirds of all colleges faced either consistent financial losses, enrollment declines, or decreasing government funding and endowment values between 2014 and 2023. These are recent figures, but they come after years of hardship. During moments of financial strain, the educational models and nontraditional learning opportunities central to these institutions are placed at severe risk. Responding to new financial needs has left many universities more beholden to donors and governments, prioritizing efficiency over the exploratory learning and academic curiosity liberal arts colleges are intended to protect, universities responding to financial concerns and considering future developments have repeatedly failed to prioritize the educational values and institutional independence that define their purpose. The pattern is consistent: financial pressure becomes the justification for narrowing the pool of who gets to decide.

This crisis has several roots. Beginning with the high school class of 2026, a noticeable decline in birth rates after 2008 is expected to contribute to reduced applications for incoming freshman classes, disproportionately affecting small-enrollment schools. Additionally, many families are prioritizing pre-professional education: fields of study with a direct path to employment. The Education Department recently selected professional students in 11 fields, including dentistry, law, and theology, who can borrow $50,000 annually, limiting others to an annual cap of $20,500. At the undergraduate level, several small liberal arts colleges have been forced to merge, cut staff, or end low-enrollment programs. Wealthier institutions face less drastic and immediate concerns, especially with regard to declining enrollment. Still, rising costs, new expansion projects, and recent irregularities with government funding, among other factors, have produced temptation toward unilateral administrative decisions that prioritize cost efficiency over institutional values.

Harvard recently announced the consolidation of its Writing Center; its director was laid off, and tutors will likely begin working under the Academic Resource Center. This is part of a larger scheme of bureaucratic changes intended to address Harvard’s $365 million structural deficit. Financial stress was heightened by funding disputes with the Trump administration, an increase in endowment taxes, and higher construction costs for both campus expansion and maintenance of older infrastructure. It now seeks places to “efficiently” save costs, though cuts to staffing positions justified by financial turmoil have been condemned for lacking a true understanding of institutional needs, especially when financial concerns could be better addressed through a previously-instituted hiring freeze. Harvard students and faculty have especially strongly condemned the closure of the Writing Center. Most consider the Center’s relatively low financial burden an insufficient reason to disband a program that symbolizes and encourages critical thinking among students, particularly as AI poses a threat to the value of human reasoning in education.

Even more immediate and serious financial stress is closer to home: Barnard College is currently $273.59 million in debt. The situation has become so severe that, in August 2024, the S&P Global Ratings report revised Barnard’s outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative,’ blaming mostly rising expenses and crediting turmoil in senior leadership for a failure to address financial concerns. Furthermore, compared to other women’s colleges, Barnard’s endowment is rather small: the school is the only member of the “Seven Sisters” with an endowment worth less than $1 billion. This makes high inflation and labor costs much harder to absorb.

Barnard’s plan to address it relies mostly on decreasing benefits for faculty. It includes higher adjusted healthcare costs for faculty, changes to travel and business expense policies, delayed tuition benefits, and more. In addition, several unfilled positions have been eliminated, and 77 full-time employees were laid off in 2025. Most notably, Barnard’s Slavic Studies program is on pause after its sole faculty member was laid off. Barnard’s faculty union, AAUP, noted that declaring a financial crisis can serve as a tactic to introduce and defend cuts on employee spending. Declaring a crisis also changes who is consulted: decisions that would normally involve processes including faculty and students can be made without them. Despite the abysmal outlook for faculty and its rapidly growing deficit, the school invested heavily in the construction of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Science Center, set to open in fall 2026, digging itself an additional $80 million in debt.

While still in an operational deficit, Barnard’s financial report in fiscal year 2025 seemed more promising than in previous years. The improvement was purchased with those cuts. Revenue improved not only from a 5.5% increase in tuition costs and an increase of about 50 students, but also from changes in spending on staff and administration and reduced cross-registration with Columbia. Barnard’s payments to Columbia decreased from $15.6 million in FY24 to $8.6 million in FY25 as it introduced a new guideline for freshman students to take all their classes, with very few exceptions, at Barnard.

Across the street, Columbia University faced intense pushback after releasing plans to expand its student body. The University has promised substantial investment in fitness, health, dining, student, and library services to accommodate the expansion. More immediate concerns remain, as a class of 2029 20% larger than previous ones has been haphazardly accommodated through the short-notice displacement of General Studies students from their dorms, removal of graduate students’ access to certain dining halls, and increases in Core Curriculum class sizes. Former Interim President Claire Shipman said the expansion was her decision; the initial expansion of the class of 2029 occurred because of financial pressure from the Trump administration, and, after the University settled with the administration, later plans to increase class size were made to generate more revenue.

Following outrage from faculty and students alike, the University abandoned its original plan to expand the student body by 20% as the Trump administration’s original threats were largely rescinded through the University’s settlement with the White House. Still, Columbia’s FY25 report indicates that its operating surplus is below its recent average. Its newer “modest” plan seeks to add 125 students to the next first-year class and incrementally raise that to 200 and 250 students, respectively, for the next two incoming classes. Together, those additions amount to an increase closer to 15%. The University has defended its expansion plans, arguing that it addressed critiques through proposed investments and dialogue.

Nevertheless, strong opposition to the plan has continued, with arguments that the financial relief from additional tuition revenue will be offset for the University by higher costs and what could be a severe drop in quality of student life. Still, Columbia has prioritized its finances following the $221 million settlement with the Trump administration, increasing costs of providing financial aid, continued campus expansion into Manhattanville, and higher operational costs outpacing revenue growth.

Beyond the possible damage of austerity measures to institutions, maintaining independence within universities is made harder in times of economic downturn. Reliance on a small set of private donors for vital funds and can open the door to outsized influence by individuals. In 2025, Barnard’s total “pledges receivable” amounted to $32.55 million. As the College reported, “As of June 30, 2025 and 2024, 45% and 54%, respectively, of the total of gross pledges receivable and pledge receivables for capital projects were due from four donors.” This concentration of financial power can leave institutions vulnerable to donor demands.

Columbia’s much larger donor base provides a different level of security. Its endowment is $15.9 billion and its donor base stems from roughly 6,700 funds, broader than Barnard’s 1,000, and its Ivy League status shields it from the effect of declining enrollment amongst otherwise similar “smaller liberal arts schools.” Still, this level of security is not the standard for private institutions facing growing doubts about the value of a liberal arts education, rising costs, and unstable government support. And, even for Columbia, power imbalances between the Board of Trustees and the University Senate remain. Several vital decisions, including changes to the disciplinary processes, were made with little to no democratic process within the University community. This concentration of authority reveals the same pattern as in Harvard’s Writing Center closure and Baranrd’s faculty cuts. When efficiency and financial security have become the sole priorities of institutions, collective deliberation and shared governance have been neglected. Maintaining processes that account for the broader goals of a University community both embodies and protects long held institutional values.

Public schools are also no stranger to financial struggle. Before 2020, one-third of all public institutions of higher education lost money each year. After the COVID-19 pandemic, however, strong state funding and returns to enrollment reduced this figure to only 15 to 20% of public schools. Of course, as we have all been painfully aware in recent years, relying on government money for education and research spending creates unexpected or sudden removal and can infringe upon the independence of a university. During the Trump administration’s furious slash-and-burn operation, specific Columbia programs were targeted and the public schools that fuel the nation’s science research were broadly exposed to proposed cuts to NIH, NSF, and NASA budgets. It’s clear that, regardless of the source, financial strain builds a susceptibility to outside influence that can infringe upon a university’s autonomy.

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Balancing the need for fiscal responsibility and protecting educational institutions is a difficult task with no clear solution. Administrators have a real case: deficits left unaddressed compound, and a college that runs out of money protects nothing. The objection is not to cutting, but to cutting by decree. Still, high-ranking universities influence the broader course of higher education, and Columbia, which reported an operating surplus over $100 million, is uniquely positioned to lead the response to these challenges. Avoiding the pitfalls of unilateral decision-making and preserving the role of the student body and faculty in building a sustainable future together is vital. That happens through process: putting expansion and budget decisions before the University Senate, publishing the reasoning behind cuts, and requiring consultation with all stakeholders rather than treating it as a courtesy. Independence in our classrooms depends on it.

Ms. Simons is a sophomore at Columbia College studying mathematics and philosophy. She is a staff editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

To anyone who’s been paying attention to New York City politics over the past several months, it appears that the traditional welfare-capitalist Democratic order has been turned entirely on its head. Candidates who openly identify as socialists and are endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won victory after victory, catapulting their members into dozens of elected offices. In addition to Zohran Mamdani, the now-mayor of New York City, Darializa Chevalier—the Democratic candidate for Columbia’s own House of Representatives district—is also a card-carrying member of the DSA.

To hear the candidates themselves speak of their victories, their wave is part of a permanent change not only in New York, but across the country, with themselves as representatives of a growing coalition of the working-class and people of color. DSA-affiliated member of the New York State Assembly Diana Moreno declared she was running as a representative of an “organized coalition of a multiracial working-class base.” Chevalier, meanwhile, promised to “bring the values of working-class people of color here in Harlem and Washington Heights and Inwood and [T]he Bronx into the halls of Congress” and claimed her campaign centered “working people in this district.” In his victory speech, Mamdani promised to usher in a “generation of change,” championing the cause of “those earning $20 an hour” and standing up for minority groups including immigrants, trans people, and black women.

The new coalition, as its leaders define it, is of, by, and for the most marginalized and downtrodden groups in society. It is a manifestation of Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant,” a term used to describe the unification of racial minorities, women, and young people that sent him to the White House in 2008 and 2012. At the time, David Gregory, an NBC television host, speculated that such a coalition could lead to a “permanent Democratic majority,” a common (and unrealized) liberal dream that, as demographic changes lead to the continued increase of the percentage of nonwhite Americans, those voters would consistently elect Democrats. Now, DSA supporters claim that the same demographic trends have swept them into victory and will continue to expand their reach.

To test this proposition against two recent elections, Sundial collected and analyzed data on Chevalier and Mamdani’s primary victories. Information on Chevalier’s vote share came from unofficial NYC Board of Elections data and was combined with data from the 2025 American Community Survey. Information on Mamdani’s primary vote totals was collected from New York Times reporting of results by neighborhood and compared to data from the 2020 census as listed by the New York City Department of City Planning.

A dispassionate examination of New York City’s new socialist coalition reveals that the DSA’s self-description is far removed from reality. The numbers contradict the narrative that socialism is a product of the poor and racially marginalized, and they hint at the cracks that could manifest over the coming years.

Take Columbia’s likely future House representative, Chevalier, who recently defeated longtime incumbent Adriano Espaillat to win the Democratic nomination and bragged so confidently about embodying the values of “working-class people of color.”

Contrary to her narrative, Chevalier’s election results show that if a neighborhood had more white residents, it was more likely to vote for her. According to the model, a 10 percent increase in a neighborhood’s white population was associated with a roughly five-point increase in Chevalier’s vote share.

In contrast, if a given neighborhood had more black residents, there was no significant impact. And if a neighborhood had more Hispanic residents, that actually had a negative impact on Chevalier’s performance. An increase in the Hispanic population by 10 percent was associated with a roughly three-point decline in her vote share.

The only people of color whose population actually contributed to Chevalier’s increased performance in a given neighborhood were Asian, with an increase of 10 percent for the population being associated with around a full 8-point increase in Chevalier’s vote share.

While significant, clear success with one minority group is certainly not a justification for Chevalier’s claim to be a representative of racial minorities broadly.

In terms of income, Chevalier’s results report a very slight positive association between income and her vote share, with a $10,000 increase in median neighborhood income associated with a 0.07 percent increase in her vote share. While very slight, this association is notable because it goes in the opposite direction of her narrative.

A similar dynamic is seen in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s primary election results. While the percentage of white residents in a neighborhood had no statistically significant impact on Mamdani’s election share, an increased black population actually decreased his vote share.

As with Chevalier’s results, the only racial minorities with a statistically significant positive impact on Mamdani’s vote share were Asian residents, though to a lesser extent. A 10 percent increase in the Asian population was associated with a roughly 2-point increase in Mamdani’s vote share.

As for Mamdani’s claim to be the representative of low-wage earners, his results similarly disprove his description. Wealthier New Yorkers voted in his favor, while those from poorer neighborhoods favored New York State’s former governor, and centrist Democrat, Andrew Cuomo. In an analysis published by RealClear Politics, Daniel Idfresne notes that New York neighborhoods where the median income is above $117,600 favored Mamdani by 13 points, whereas low-income areas favored Cuomo.

With all of these statistics in mind, why might the new wave of DSA candidates be so focused on describing their base as an imaginary coalition of the marginalized?

The answer, I believe, lies in the feelings of the leftists who vote not to improve their own lives, but in pursuit of their ideas of social and redistributive justice. It makes sense, then, for the new socialists to forgo campaigning for the working class that actually exists, but instead to symbolically display their devotion to the downtrodden in order to win points with upper-class whites. This dynamic would explain their consistent promotion of policies that have consistently failed to help the economically disadvantaged in the past, including government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and higher local taxes. I suspect such policies’ primary purpose is not to help the downtrodden in the first place. As far as election-seeking DSA candidates are concerned, it does not matter if they actually work or even win favor in the communities they are ostensibly designed to help. It matters only that the core base of upper-class whites believes they are in the right in their course of action.

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My analysis might sound depressing. After all, every hope that New York will move on from socialist policies depends on the people who voted for them noticing that such policies don’t actually improve their lives. If those who voted for socialism are not expecting to be personally uplifted by the politics they vote for, will they ever notice that such policies don’t work?

However, the numbers don’t just predict a harmful spiral of policies perpetuated by potentially nonresponsive upper-class saviors. They also chart a potential coalition that could serve as a moderating influence on the city. If non-socialist politicians seek to pull New York off of its downward socialist spiral, they should work to gain the support of the very people the DSA candidates claim to represent.

Ms. Weinfeld is a senior at Columbia College studying political science and creative writing. She is a senior editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Welcome to Morningside Heights, freshmen!

I want to take this opportunity to share my two cents: Columbia is an amazing school, perhaps precisely because of its many drawbacks.

This is the place where you will, through all your trials and tribulations, become an adult.

This is not to say there aren’t any positives: Apart from the obvious academic rigor, the Core Curriculum, the amazing faculty, and the diversity of interesting personalities, it’s the little things that make Columbia what it is. The random conversations that lead to surprising friendships, the people you join playing volleyball on the Butler Lawns when you’re procrastinating, the random side quests you go to that are the most interesting thing you’ll do all week, and so much more.

But there will be many obstacles in your way. Growing up in rural Romania, my transition to embracing a cosmopolitan education in New York revealed as much about myself as it did about Columbia. Determined to go to university in the US since the ninth grade, I received a lot of criticism, jealousy, and praise from the people around me. A lot of adults encouraged my journey, knowing that this close-minded country couldn’t provide the opportunities an ambitious, soon-to-be adult needed.

Still, other adults—especially some of my teachers—heavily criticized my decision. Why would I leave this beautiful country to strive for something more, to do something harder? Why leave comfort just to become “great”? (Pardon the one Nietzsche-inflected remark, I assure you I’m not that type of freak.) While I agree with their claim now that one doesn’t need to strive for a materialistic or social standard of “greatness,” what subconsciously angered me then—and still does now—was their lack of open-mindedness. Why did they revolt so strongly at the idea of me studying in America?

I understood the comments at the time about my arrogance and lack of empathy, which I was guilty of, but what was the catalyst that made me become a more empathetic and down-to-earth man? It was, in fact, coming to Columbia and talking with so many different types of people, each with vastly different views of life—something that was impossible for me to do in a small town in Romania.

The moment I first arrived on campus, I was filled with combined senses of excitement, anxiousness, and the extraordinary feeling of being overwhelmed. Homesickness and nostalgia hit quickly. To any international student feeling this way, my NSOP leader gave me the best piece of advice that calmed my uncontrollable feeling of sentimentality. Imagine you have two homes: one in your home country and one at Columbia. It’s like going to your grandparents’ over the summer as a kid because your parents were too annoyed with dealing with you.

I also came to terms with the reality that you may not be able to go back to your home country for a while. From my experience, while video calling your family is not the ideal solution, rest assured that you will find a way to stay connected to them. Even when life gets busy or when you feel down, staying connected with them is the cornerstone that will keep you grounded. Furthermore, if you are an international student who feels a sense of guilt for having left your family, gravitate towards those other students in similar situations. Even if those people found themselves on opposite sides of conflicts back home, I’ve witnessed the international student community support one another and demonstrate that grief doesn’t have to be a solitary act. At the very least, it should suggest that we can be a bit more open-minded and empathetic with one another.

Whether you’re rich, poor, have traveled the world, or never left your hometown until now, you are all here now, so you were probably one of the highest achievers in your school. When you gather a few thousand high achievers in one place, the result is impostor syndrome. This can manifest in two ways: either false overconfidence or extreme underconfidence. You will quickly find out that university doesn’t compare to high school. It will humble you, hard. This can lead to the intensification of the fake self-confidence, which deep down really is just internal impostor syndrome. You need to find the balance between being humble and confident, and ultimately, compare yourself only to yourself.

You will meet peers who are better than you academically, or who brag about their first internship for the summer between freshman and sophomore year when they return in September—one that they probably secured through nepotism. You should not resent these people, because in reality, our network is stronger than any resume. Don’t let impostor syndrome stop you from fostering professional relationships or even taking advice from those who are successful in your field. Make use of the network that Columbia provides, but do it genuinely and because you’re willing to put in the hard work; don’t be a gold digger. Nobody is expecting you to provide groundbreaking value. Just showing up, being respectful, and showing curiosity is a very good start.

So many people I know here either view academics as easy or extremely challenging, to the point that a surprising number of students claim to have ADHD just to legally receive the sweet GPA booster (only one chemical compound away from meth) that is Adderall. In reality, Columbia is as hard as you make it to be. You could take the easier physics course or the harder one. You could take 21 credits in your first four semesters, have an easier junior and senior year, or you could take as many fun electives as you want and realize you’re going to have a hell of a senior year. Everybody bites off more than they can chew at the beginning and thinks they can handle it. You can’t: It might take a semester or two, but you will come to realize how much you can actually handle.

A common mistake I find students making—and one I made myself in my freshman year—is putting certain courses on a pedestal. This mentality will create an anxiety factory of an existence for you, one that produces many sleepless nights and high-caloric early morning stops at JJs. It’s better to be emotionally detached from the courses that at first scare you. That doesn’t mean you don’t care; just don’t raise the stakes to an astronomical level. Focus on your GPA, but don’t obsess over it. A bad grade, or a bad semester, can always be fixed in the next one. It’s up to you to modify your lifestyle, workload, and work ethic to improve. And be ballsy. Don’t mass email professors for research opportunities: instead, go to their office with your resume and talk with them, face-to-face. Be interested in what they are doing and show it. Maybe you will be rejected by a few, but it certainly has higher odds than hopelessly writing follow-up emails to an already overflowing inbox.

For all the social and political polarization that’s come to characterize campus over the past couple of years, if you are craving an intense hunger to expand your social horizons, I believe that Columbia is probably one of the best universities for that. It is a melting pot of interesting and diverse people. You will quickly find the many first-timers in New York who will be enthusiastic to explore the city with you.

While walking to Butler to do your first homework assignment, you will encounter the sometimes mysterious and sometimes obnoxiously loud “Butlerian smokers,” who will offer you a cigarette. It is important you take it, not necessarily to smoke it, but to engage in conversations with a highly diverse set of personalities with the most interesting (and sometimes horrifying) stories. And don’t worry if you don’t find a stable friend group right away: This school is big, and a lot of students find their people in a semester or two.

Finally, I feel as though you can perceive the weight of the history of Columbia throughout the campus in the way people approach debates and conversations. It is instilled in all of us, whether consciously or not. Having such a concentrated population of intelligent people with strong beliefs should be a positive, right? The major flaw in our current discourse, and one expanded upon extensively by Sundial, is that we are not hearing each other out.

I am not always comfortable, but I have a lot of conversations with people with wildly different beliefs from mine, some of whom have done acts that I consider unforgivable—like killing innocent civilians while deployed. Still, I want to hear everybody out because I want to understand why people believe what they believe, so that I can learn more about myself and what I really believe in.

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The main takeaway we have after we graduate is the ability to know how to think, be intellectually curious, and have as much empathy as possible. We were all selected to attend this school not only because of our academics, but also because our vibes can foster a community that continues the legacy that was built in the past. We can get along, and we should realize that we have more commonalities than differences, no matter where you come from or how rich or how poor you are. Every one of our different worldviews and experiences converges, at the very least, at Columbia.

And yet, much as we may talk to one another, unfairness is everywhere. Whether it’s a bad financial aid offer that will make you pay loans for the next 50 years, or your lab partners grading you down so that they get a higher score, you will, sooner or later, come to face unfairness. To truly adapt and succeed here—or for that matter anywhere—you have to get used to unfairness. It is also important to recognize when you are at fault. (For example, wasting your money by playing pool against that guy at 1020 who always pockets all the balls first. That’s on you.) Take the opportunities to smarten up when they come your way.

There is always so much to learn every day, so go out, explore, and find your own understanding of what Columbia means to you. With every stage of life, there are always new challenges to face. How they shape your self-definition and outlook on life depends on you.

Mr. Galbenus is a junior at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science studying mechanical engineering. He is a staff writer and photographer for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Dear freshmen,

Welcome to Columbia!

Many students cite the school’s location in New York City as a major attraction. Now that you’re actually here, though, you may be feeling overwhelmed. With a slew of tourist spots and activities to check out, where should you begin?

Here are some must-dos in NYC that even our beloved New Student Orientation Program (NSOP) may not cover:

1. Coffee at Blank Street

A traditional coffee pot takes an entire minute to boil. Tech-y Blank Street, meanwhile, offers fast, automatic espresso machines that can whip out 700 cups an hour! It’s also owned by private equity, so you know every last coffee sleeve, stirring stick, and mint-colored chair is engineered to maximize profit—I mean—the consumer experience! Order coffee here to explore firsthand the fast-paced NYC culture. Get exposure to the busy Columbian life that will leave you spinning with homework assignments, excessively difficult club recruitment, and the Backrooms concept sketch that is Handshake!

2. Wait in line for Froyo at Mimi’s

If you haven’t been in line for Mimi’s Frozen Yogurt before, then you’ve yet to realize just how many Midwestern transplants call New York home. Take the 40-minute subway from campus for a three-hour wait time perfectly designed to let you finish The Odyssey on your phone as a substitute for actually reading it in LitHum, just like Nolan intended. Rest assured by the herd mentality of you and your many line companions that you are making the right choice.

3. Get a slice from Joe’s Pizza

Never mind the awfully convenient on-campus pizza options and the local (and Mamdani’s) favorite Koronet’s. If you’re in NYC, of course you need to get a slice from yours truly. Which of the 50 different Joe’s Pizzas should you go to? I don’t know. Are they all the same pizza, or are some secretly Joseph’s and Josiah’s masquerading as your humble Joe’s? I’m not sure either! The main drawing point is that Spiderman worked there: The mass memory wipe probably explains why, even though every trip to Joe’s ends in an aggressively mediocre slice, people like you keep going back.

4. Walk around Times Square to experience authentic NYC culture

Behold, the most famous hub in the world’s most famous city! Because what’s more worthy of fame than a bunch of glowing advertisements and mascots (don’t worry, they’re all real) fastidiously working their $5 photo scams? Times Square, our cathedral of consumerism, is bright and flashy—a bigger version of its famous disco ball. This boot camp accurately simulates the feeling of descending a staircase after your 10:10 ends or squeezing through that thin hallway at JJ’s after one too many drinks. All of the above might also be considered a paeon to historical Versailles, in the sense that it reminds you—up close and personal—of the value of deodorant.

5. Rent a Citi Bike and almost get hit by a scooter

While the NYC subway’s frequent delays teach you the value of patience, and its unexplained stickiness the value of carrying hand sanitizer, Citi Bikes prove to be the most convenient way to get around the Big Apple. That is, if you don’t mind spending half your time out planning the route to the next docking station to avoid the late fees every 30 minutes. Rent one in the blink of an eye by downloading the Citi Bike App. Then you can have the time of your life swerving and ducking in attempts to avoid the whizzing Uber Eats e-scooters that trespass bike lanes all the time in NYC. It’s like an urban version of Temple Run!

6. Spend an entire afternoon in SoHo buying absolutely nothing

Welcome, shoppers, to the fabulously expensive South of Houston Street, which is definitely pronounced like the city in Texas! Cosplay being in a higher income bracket than you actually are by posing in front of the cast-iron architecture, lavish window displays, and eateries heaped with decadent cakes that might be more expensive than going on Ozempic. Here, you can buy the latest trinkets that influencers have been obsessing over that went viral in China two summers ago—and are retailing for five times the price. Two years is simply vintage now—and Shein is much more convenient than the actual thrift stores; even the ones in (gasp!) Bed-Stuy have been overrun by trust fund babies pretending to be poor, soulful artists. At those prices, buying the latest barrel-leg-low-waisted-acid-washed-harem-pantaloon-jean in SoHo even starts to feel reasonable.

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7. Take a picture in front of the Charging Bull

Did you know that the bronze Wall Street Bull symbolizes prosperity and America’s resilient economy? Well, now you do! When you’ve succumbed to the siren song of SoHo’s “indie” boutiques and bargained away your firstborn child, join the other tourists in line to take your photo in front of the bull. Or join the longer line waiting to take photos with, well, the other side of the bull instead. If, against all odds, you do manage to get a picture holding those dangly bits, you definitely need to make that your Linkedin profile photo.

Ms. Yang is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in English and Comparative Literature. She is a staff writer for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Earlier this month, New Yorkers gathered at Ground Zero to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Alongside former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, Vice President JD Vance, and Governor Kathy Hochul, stood Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

For better or worse, his presence had become controversial in its own right.

In the runup to the memorial, many of the victims’ families urged organizers to bar Mamdani, citing his perceived apathy toward the attacks. They pointed to a 2023 tweet in which Mamdani invoked “the hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed” and “the unknown millions injured & displaced.” His critics found the statement overly evasive, leaving the perpetrators unnamed while rebuking the subsequent War on Terror.

Others referenced Mamdani’s interview with contentious left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who previously declared that “America deserved 9/11.” According to Fox News, “Mamdani initially declined to condemn the remarks but later called them ‘objectionable and reprehensible.’” For his detractors, the episode typifies the mayor’s stance on terrorism, or rather, his patrimony.

Like Father, Like Son

Mahmood Mamdani was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1946 and raised in Kampala, Uganda. In 1972, while completing his doctorate at Harvard, he was among the tens of thousands of South Asians who Idi Amin expelled from Uganda, an experience he chronicled the following year in From Citizen to Refugee (he would later find kinder words for the dictator in Slow Poison.) Mamdani went on to teach at the University of Dar es Salaam, Makerere University, and the University of Cape Town before Columbia hired him in 1999 as its Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. His 1996 study of colonial rule in Africa, Citizen and Subject, won the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Award, and in 2008, Foreign Policy and Prospect voted him the world’s ninth most influential public intellectual. In 2021, he came third on their “Top 50 Thinkers to Rebuild the World” list.

Zohran was born in Kampala in 1991 and moved to New York at the age of seven. In an interview with The New York Times, he credited his father with shaping “his understanding of what the world took, and what it offered.”

9/11 redirected Mahmood Mamdani’s attention from Africa to America. His 2002 essay “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” argues that radical Islamism was a byproduct of American Cold War policy; two years later, he expanded it into a book of the same title. There he contends that suicide bombers should be understood as “soldiers” rather than “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,” and draws “moral equivalence” between terrorism and U.S. military operations: “There is an eerie similarity between the American bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda bombing of embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam and of the Twin Towers on 9/11.” The mass murder of nearly 3,000 civilians is reduced to a footnote in a broader indictment of American foreign policy, a tactic Zohran reprised in his 2023 tweet.

A “Prosecutorial Agency”

Columbia’s esteem for Mahmood Mamdani never wavered. At a University Senate plenary last December, then-Acting President Claire Shipman offered him a peculiar benediction. Mamdani had just concluded an impromptu diatribe against Columbia’s Antisemitism Task Force. “If I have your permission, Senator,” Shipman said, “I will come to you for guidance.”

Mamdani laughed. “I don’t know what that means, but…”

“I didn’t mean it to sound threatening,” Shipman clarified.

“No administration has come to me for guidance before,” Mamdani replied.

This exchange was conspicuously absent from The Columbia Daily Spectator’s coverage of the plenary. The paper reported only that Mamdani “opened the discussion informally by asking the administration to discuss potential initiatives to bring the University community together,” decrying “infinite fragmentation” and its “terrified” student body.

What had Mamdani said to earn Shipman’s deference? By his own admission, nothing informed: “A couple of days ago, I saw the report of the Antisemitism Task Force, which they said was its last report. I haven’t had a chance to read the report,” he told his fellow senators, referring to the Task Force on Antisemitism’s fourth and final dispatch, published on December 9, 2025.

The report catalogued a litany of abuses: professors smeared Jewish students as “murderers,” hijacking lectures to rail against “genocide.” An instructor in a required public health course told over 400 students that Jewish donors “launder blood money.” One read a Jewish student’s private email aloud to the class and offered a line-by-line rebuttal in front of his peers. Another asserted, “It’s such a shame that your people survived in order to commit mass genocide.”

Mamdani doubled down: “I’ve been following the Task Force for the duration of its existence,” before extracting what he termed “two lessons” from its work.

The first concerned its qualifications. “If the task force did its work, it became very clear that it saw itself not as representing the community, but as a prosecutorial agency.”

This, Mamdani explained, was a pattern he recognized from his study of colonialism: “In British divide and rule, you set up different sections of the population as independent, as autonomous, as separate constituencies, and each begins to see the other as a competitor. Soon you have a fragmented society.”

His proposed alternative: “not a Task Force on separate grievances of separate constituencies, but an anti discrimination task force.” Mamdani’s invocation of “divide and rule” was a crude attempt to discredit allegations of antisemitism masquerading as a principled objection to exclusive remediation.

Shipman’s request was superfluous. Columbia tacitly accepted Mahmood Mamdani’s guidance for nearly thirty years, to its own detriment. It conferred him tenure and accolades, including a seat on the Senate’s Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee. It let him train doctoral students who now replicate his methodology across the academy. My peers celebrated his son’s election, while he watched from the ivory tower.

The Mamdanis continue to exhibit an odd symbiosis: Mahmood benefits from his son’s publicity, and Zohran relishes his father’s academic cachet.

A Family Affair

This was not the first time a Columbia administrator fawned over the Mamdanis. A month prior, Senate Chair Jeanine D’Armiento “congratulated Sen. Mamdani and his family on the election of his son Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City,” stating that “this was a historic election in many ways” and that “it was notable that the son of a faculty member and University Senator was elected to such a position.” Per the Senate’s record, “as a parent herself, she understands that, along [with] the excitement of the occasion, she shares the hopes for the success of Sen. Mamdani’s son and the success of New York City.”

Under D’Armiento’s helm, Columbia became the first university in American history to face a federal civil rights settlement over antisemitism, coughing up $221 million for failing to protect Jewish students. Unsurprisingly, she chose to celebrate the political ascent of a family whose patriarch spent decades propagating antisemitic libels.

If Zohran Mamdani credits his father with shaping his worldview and Columbia’s Senate leadership treats Mamdani Sr. as a worthy role model, the weight of his influence demands scrutiny. What has Mahmood Mamdani taught his son? And, for that matter, what has he taught his students?

The Machinery of Inversion

To understand why Mamdani instinctively reaches for anticolonial theory when confronted with Jewish students’ complaints of harassment, it helps to examine the intellectual project he spent decades constructing. At its core lies a single rhetorical maneuver.

The practice of casting Jews and Israelis as the “new Nazis” ranks among the most insidious forms of contemporary antisemitism. First, it transforms Jewish victims into uniquely culpable aggressors, thereby invalidating their right to self-determination. Second, it trivializes the Holocaust by reducing it to an appropriable political analogy. And most crucially, it forecloses recognition of Jewish suffering in any contemporary context. If Jews are “the new Nazis,” then any claim to victimhood is both implausible and obscene.

In a 2002 lecture at Hampshire College, Mamdani quoted Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism: “The European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the Negroes of Africa,” later adding that “The Holocaust was the imperial chickens come home.”

Shifting his focus to apartheid South Africa, Mamdani described white Afrikaners’ fear of black retribution, before insisting “that same specter must also haunt the survivors of the Holocaust in Israel: yesterday’s victims turned today’s perpetrators.”

Mamdani never mounted a salient critique of Israeli policy. That would be too banal and defensible. Instead, he alleged that Jewish Holocaust survivors, by virtue of establishing a state, were tantamount to Nazis.

They weren’t the only ones who received that charge. In October 2025, a video resurfaced of Mamdani alleging Abraham Lincoln inspired Adolf Hitler.

In Neither Settler nor Native, a 2020 book dedicated to Zohran with the exhortation to “inspire many and blaze a trail,” Mamdani’s project appears systematic, his distortions more brazen. He writes that “Zionists created a Jewish state in Palestine so that Jews, too, could have their rightful homogenous nation-state,” placing Israel in explicit ideological continuity with Nazi Germany. In an interview with Jadaliyya, he rails against the “Judaization” of Israel by Ashkenazi Jews and asserts that the Nuremberg trials “[created] a Germany without Jews and [laid] the groundwork for an Israel without Palestinians. This is the two-state solution that Israel tries to complete today.”

The Nuremberg trials were the first major international effort to hold Nazi war criminals accountable. To claim they “[completed] the Nazi political project” because some Holocaust survivors subsequently emigrated to Israel erroneously implies that Jewish survival was itself a vestige of Nazism.

“Israel without Palestinians” fares no better against a census. Roughly two million Arabs are Israeli citizens, over a fifth of its population. The “purified” states of the twentieth century lay elsewhere. In the two decades following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, more than 850,000 Jews were expelled or driven from Arab countries, emptying communities from Baghdad to Tripoli.

Ranking Genocides

In When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001), Mamdani pursues a related provocation, insisting that the Rwandan Genocide was more viscerally brutal than the Holocaust.

Mamdani quotes a minister in the Rwandan Patriotic Front: “In Germany, if the population participated in the killing, it was not directly but indirectly. If the neighbor’s son is killed, it is because he joined the army.” Apparently, this afforded Germans a sort of moral extenuation unavailable to Rwandan génocidaires.

The Holocaust was not wholly industrialized. In addition to the roughly 2.7 million Jews murdered in death camps, the Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators shot as many as 2 million Jews in mass executions across Eastern Europe. These were hardly distant, mechanized killings.

Mamdani’s genealogy of violence traces the origins of “genocidal impulse” to the oldest relic of “organized power”: the Hebrew Bible. Citing the Book of Numbers’ divine directive to wage war against the Midianites, Mamdani treats Jewish scripture as a literal pretext for ethnic cleansing.

Pages later, Mamdani criticizes General Lothar von Trotha, the architect of the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, for blaming missionaries who supposedly “incit[ed] the Herero with images ‘of the bloodcurdling Jewish history of the Old Testament.’” The Hebrew Bible is simultaneously the primordial source of violence and a racist canard when invoked by German colonial officers. Jewish texts, suffering, and political autonomy all become infinitely malleable in service of whatever argument Mamdani wishes to advance.

An Eye for an Eye

In Neither Settler nor Native, Mamdani engages in a protracted comparison between Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, pitting a theorist of anticolonial violence against a Jewish philosopher of totalitarianism. His sympathies are transparent:

“When Frantz Fanon came face-to-face with native violence, he understood its logic as that of an eye for an eye, a response to a prior violence, and not an invitation to fresh violence. It was for Fanon the violence to end violence, more like a utopian wish to close the chapter on colonial violence in the hope of heralding a new humanism.”

Fanon understood native violence as “life affirming,” Mamdani writes, because it represents “yesterday’s victims who have turned around and decided to cast aside their victimhood and become masters of their own lives.” In the book’s most chilling passage, he quotes Fanon approvingly: “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence... For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.”

Mamdani believes that violence by those he classifies as “natives” differs categorically from violence by “settlers.” The former merits justification and eventual redemption. The latter remains irredeemably evil. Superimpose this framework on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as he suggests, and a throughline emerges. Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians cannot be condemned on its own terms. It can only be understood as a “response to a prior violence.”

His absolution transcends the Middle East. In Mamdani’s 2025 book Slow Poison, he offers what a Wall Street Journal reviewer called “an apologia for Uganda’s Idi Amin, a bloodthirsty tyrant like few others in modern history.”

Amin’s regime is estimated to have caused between 100,000 to 500,000 deaths. In 1972, days after the Munich massacre, Amin cabled the UN secretary-general to praise the attacks and declare that Adolf Hitler had been right to kill six million Jews. He later announced plans to erect a statue of Hitler in Kampala. When Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France jet in 1976, Amin welcomed them to Entebbe, where the hijackers held Jewish passengers hostage until Israeli commandos intervened. Dora Bloch, a 73-year-old hostage who had been taken to a Kampala hospital, was murdered on Amin’s orders.

No reputable historian would volunteer as his character witness.

Mamdani obliged, dismissing rebukes of Amin as a “media-driven preconception.” “Even as Amin ethnically cleansed Uganda of Asians and expropriated them,” he wrote, “he did everything in his power to spare Asian lives.” Amin’s real target, in his telling, was Britain, which had “no intention of taking responsibility for its colonial history.”

Nationalism for Me But Not for Thee

Last September, British-Palestinian journalist John Aziz identified a deeper incoherence in Mamdani’s position. Mamdani presents himself as a “post-nationalist” whose remedy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves not two disparate states but “a single political entity that goes beyond nationalism altogether.”

But as Aziz notes, this proposal “has won no favour with either side. Most Palestinians are not demanding a ‘post-national’ arrangement but a Palestinian nation state—either alongside Israel or in its place. Their struggle is not for the abolition of nationalism but for the realisation of their own.”

Mamdani condemns nationalism as inherently violent while explicitly aligning himself with Palestinian nationalism. He calls for the dissolution of the sole Jewish state, refusing to extend the same prescription to its Arab neighbors. Mamdani’s selective “post-nationalism” functions not as a universal principle but as a cudgel aimed at a singular target: Jewish self-determination.

The Encampment

The views that fill Mahmood Mamdani’s books permeate Columbia’s campus. In April 2024, he was the first faculty member to address the pro-Hamas encampment organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

Mamdani was allegedly spotted on Butler Lawn on April 29, “wearing a dark baseball cap, a yellow scarf around his neck and an orange faculty vest.” Faculty members donned these vests while bolstering the protesters’ “human chain” to prevent Zionist, and often identifiably Jewish students from entering. Perched within, Mamdani described charges of antisemitism as “part of the currency the administration uses to demonize protests like this.”

The encampment ought to have marked the confines of Mahmood Mamdani’s reach.

Here, it’s worth remembering that his son’s political career began as an undergrad. At Bowdoin College, Zohran Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2017, performing under the sobriquet “Mr. Cardamom,” he released “Salaam,” a track about growing up Muslim in New York. “My love to the Holy Land Five,” he rapped, referencing the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the largest Muslim charity in the United States, convicted in 2008 for funneling over $12 million to Hamas. In 2004, a federal court held the foundation liable for the 1996 Hamas murder of Jewish teenager David Boim.

By the time he reached Albany, Assemblyman Mamdani had discovered his inner watchdog. His 2023 “Not on Our Dime” bill would have empowered the state attorney general to dissolve any New York nonprofit engaged in “unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity” and sue it for at least $1 million. The bill failed to narrowly define the phrase critics warned would disproportionately affect Jewish philanthropic organizations sponsoring humanitarian programs operating over the Green Line, including volunteer ambulance corps and trauma counselors assisting Jews and Arabs indiscriminately. Even Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who spent years challenging settler funding, warned its ambiguity might ensnare groups supporting victims of terror. Democratic leaders in both chambers promised the bill would never reach a vote. Mamdani’s allies reintroduced it this May.

Proof of Concept

In a 2022 virtual lecture hosted by the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia, Mahmood Mamdani assured his audience that “Jews are more secure in New York City than they are in Israel.”

Hours after Zohran’s election, vandals scrawled swastikas on a Jewish day school. On November 19, demonstrators massed outside Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, chanting “globalize the intifada,” “death to the IDF,” and “resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.” The mayor-elect’s spokesperson said that while he discouraged the protesters’ language, “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

On his first day in office, Mamdani revoked the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. The same order scrapped a directive instructing the NYPD to reassess how it polices protests at houses of worship. Jewish organizations ranging from the ADL to Agudath Israel of America issued a rare joint statement lamenting the decision.

It is difficult to combat what one refuses to define.

The following week, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Queens, chanting “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” The demonstration forced the early closure of a daycare and two elementary schools. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Muslim American Society of New York, which boasts extensive ties to the mayor, promoted the event.

In response to the synagogue protests, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, herself a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Eric Dinowitz advanced bills requiring the NYPD to plan security perimeters for demonstrations outside houses of worship and schools. The first passed with a veto-proof margin; Mamdani let it become law without his signature. The schools bill passed 30 to 19. On April 24, Mamdani vetoed it, a move leading Jewish organizations called a “profound failure.”

Ten days later, four masked vandals spray-painted swastikas across Queens: on synagogues, homes, cars, a plaque honoring Holocaust victims, and on a Jewish community center, alongside the word “Hitler.” One of the targets houses a preschool.

Earlier this month, the NYPD reported that Anti-Jewish offenses accounted for more than half of all hate crimes, in a city where Jews comprise roughly 10 percent of the population. In August, the Justice Department opened an investigation demanding Mamdani answer for the “unequal treatment of Jewish New Yorkers.”

From One Dynasty to Another

Zohran Mamdani, for all his faults, is deeply pragmatic. Take his relationship with NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch; notoriously strained, but they appear to have reached a détente. Still, the dissonance between his amiable public persona and checkered past is unsettling.

Just as substantive objections to Zohran’s platform were muffled by cheap ad hominems, so too is much of the recent criticism of Mahmood undermined by vague denunciations of his academic enterprise: African studies. The right cried wolf at the wrong moment and inadvertently catalyzed mass desensitization to the Mamdanis’ genuinely extreme conduct. The left preemptively absolved them of wrongdoing.

I hesitate to blame the son for the sins of his father. Yet Zohran has made no effort to distance himself from Mahmood or denounce his Baba’s penchant for Holocaust inversion. That, coupled with his policy record and ties to terror apologists, invalidates any rehearsed gesture of solidarity with the Jewish community.

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At Columbia, support for both Mamdanis is assumed a priori. The Columbia Daily Spectator’s editorial board endorsed Zohran Mamdani ahead of the Democratic primary. And on September 12, Columbia’s Institute of African Studies announced Mahmood Mamdani as its new director (Mamdani previously held the position from 1999 to 2004). Evidently, historical revisionism isn’t disqualifying.

As popular as the Mamdanis are on campus, one would be remiss to excuse Mahmood Mamdani’s poor scholarship. Not only as a political or parochial matter, but because his work has legitimized real harm—and jeopardizes the university’s reputation, especially as he continues to ride the coattails of his son’s ever-so-Instagrammable mayorship.

In his November victory speech, Zohran Mamdani told a crowd of adoring fans that they had “toppled a political dynasty,” referring to his predecessors, Andrew and Mario Cuomo.

Ironically, the Mamdanis are no less “dynastic.”

Ms. Aufzien is a junior at Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, majoring in History and Jewish Text. She is Co-President of Columbia Aryeh and a staff editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Editing a college publication requires constant adaptation. As an active editor for three separate Columbia publications this past academic year, I’ve found that we are increasingly forced to grapple with the impact artificial intelligence has on our editorial standards, beginning on the granular level and gradually inserting itself into all facets of the publication process.

Understandably, a handful of student-led publications on campus retain a firm stance against the use of AI in any capacity in submissions. Per the Columbia Economic Review’s website: “Plagiarism, including the use of generative artificial intelligence technologies, is unacceptable.” Meanwhile, the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review “prohibits the use of generative-AI, both in writing and in substantive editing of works set to be published.” However, this complete aversion to AI lacks merit in a world where such technology has increasingly permeated into nearly every aspect of our daily digital processes.

The writing process, especially, is no exception to AI’s growing ubiquity. To attempt to prohibit AI in journalism or publications of any subject—in principle—is impossible, as even a quick Google search’s summarize feature is informed by the algorithms of language models. Even modern scholarly databases such as JSTOR have begun to integrate these model-informed toolkits. Between the prevalence of AI at all stages of the research process and the limited capacity to track and register what is written by a Large Language Model (LLM) versus what isn’t, to reject AI entirely is to fight a losing battle against the inevitable.

Put another way: The notion that journals refuse AI’s involvement at any stage of the writing process is an impossible one. There simply can’t be a binary between an article that used or didn’t use AI, as the line between these categorizations has been increasingly blurred to the point of no return.

What is more, the very policy of prohibiting AI use in writing has become increasingly unenforceable. At first, it was very simple. For example, a paper with excessive usage of em-dashes was often an indicator of the lingering presence of ChatGPT or other LLMs. However, as AI output is trained on human output and as humans continue to consume the output of these models, the “is-it-AI-or-not” distinction becomes the age-old chicken-or-egg question with no clear answer. As readers are exposed to more em-dashes, they become more mainstream and integrated in our own daily writing processes. The same process could be said to happen to any new “indicator” of AI use: In effect, the skepticism is perfectly poised to become a witch hunt without end. Publications, thus, have begun to rely on AI “detectors” like Pangram: mechanisms, we are told, which simplify the task of editors in recognizing increasingly complex AI writing patterns.

However, their output—listed in percentages of AI versus human-generated writing—comes without context. These AI models also tend to flag what’s considered trite or overused language; sometimes, even quotes and cited sources such as the entire U.S. constitution are wrongly flagged as “AI plagiarism.” What’s to differentiate someone who’s simply been trained to write by mainstream sources from someone who has deliberately used AI in the work?

How is an editor expected to act on a guess? Should there be a cut-off point of, for example, 45% instantiated? What, then, keeps this threshold from being arbitrary? Furthermore, given that most student-led publications run on limited funding and unpaid student editors, we can’t expect these papers to afford high-end AI-detection services. The next “best” option is using the deeply flawed, free models.

Most alarming, AI detectors have been proven to have biases when it comes to non-native English writers. Even black teens, for example, are disproportionately more likely to have schoolwork incorrectly flagged as created by generative AI. In this context, these models are unable to act as an accurate measure of AI use. How can one base decisions on something with so many faults? This question is extremely pressing, as it often concerns a person’s social, professional, and academic reputation. With so much on the line for the writer, does a blanket statement of strict no AI use from the editors truly resolve the issues at hand?

The final blow is dealt when analyzing this technology. Models that are most often relied on—such as GPTZero, Grammarly, or ZeroGPT—are AI models themselves. If AI is marked as an unreliable source, these systems of measurement are just as much. As AI-generated writing increasingly comprises a greater number of online content, AI detectors may output percentages and judgments based on training data that’s increasingly unhuman. When the entire process, start to end, is based on such a black-box process, the potential for miscarriage of justice seems unacceptably high.

I can’t help but compare this to the thought experiment of the monkey and the typewriter. Sit a monkey at a typewriter, give it enough time and bananas, and let it type its heart away until one day it eventually outputs the completed works of William Shakespeare. I think AI can be seen in a similar manner; the limitations of AI’s language production are endless, it’s just a matter of time and resources until its output causes human and LLM writing to become indiscernible. Therefore, the question of AI is not if, but when, and so what?

Taking normatively anti-AI thinking to its logical conclusion, we must be as distrustful of AI checkers as we are of the use of AI in the writing process. If, as editors, we strive to be objective in the publication process, relying upon such false processes masquerading as an “objective” source is hypocritical at best.

If it’s so inevitable, why do so many publications keep rejecting AI’s existence in the research and writing process? Perhaps because, at Columbia and in higher academia in general, it is a rather shameful thing to admit in the first place. I will be the first to say, AI has been involved in my writing process, because I’ve learned to integrate it in a responsible yet productive manner. While AI is a core element in the research and framing stages, the words that I publish or submit are my own.

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The reality is, we all are using AI, whether we like it or not. It could be as simple as the algorithmic categorization of secondary sources; some might take it further by forcing it to write whole essays with a lifeless and hollow tone, but the truth is that AI has already established a foothold in some of the most fundamental stages of research and thinking, and there might be no going back.

One solution would be to make writers document AI use at every step of the writing process. In an ideal sense, this would facilitate transparency and honesty. What is more, this could serve as a useful tool to help immerse editors in their writer’s draft process. As an editor myself, seeing the process rather than a half-finalized draft makes me feel more secure about my edits and further immersed in the vision of my writer. This is also fair to the writer’s time, as the cost of setting aside a minute or two to document use is the least of their concerns; implementing these language models can serve to be extremely time efficient. We might find a regained transparency that we often lack nowadays in conversation with our professors, professionals, and between ourselves as peers.

AI should not be mindlessly demonized per se, because it’s our new reality, whether we like it or not. Learning to use it and to judge its use through a reasonable lens is a much more productive path forward. If we remain “purists” of our respective crafts, then the likelihood of our work becoming obsolete increases. A love for literature like mine must learn to incorporate AI. Yet, a full submission is just as dangerous, as we may lose ourselves along the way. AI is not inherently evil, no more than the internet was in the early 2000s: Instead of setting off on ill-justified AI witch hunts, a more productive use of our time would be to learn and exercise its responsible use.

Mr. Vanuno is a senior at Columbia School of General Studies majoring in English literature. He is a staff editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

This year, hundreds of Columbia students will engage in a soul-sucking ritual endemic to late-capitalist America: recruiting for investment banking. This recruitment process is the first step on the conventional path of bright-eyed Ivy Leaguer to Wall Street vest-wearer: freshmen and sophomores network with bank employees throughout the fall, apply to summer analyst positions in the winter, and, if successful, candidates go through a multi-round interview process in the spring.

The job itself theoretically involves helping companies raise capital, issue shares, and complete mergers and acquisitions, but the day-to-day for interns largely consists of countless hours making Excel models and PowerPoint decks to support the full-time employees engaged in this larger mission. Landing one of these coveted internships during one’s junior summer is instrumental for getting an investment banking job upon graduation, since banks hire the majority of their associates from the interns they’ve already recruited.

Unfortunately, two forces are currently combining to make the recruitment process more difficult. The massive disruption caused by artificial intelligence, which has been felt first and foremost in Big Tech, has attracted more applicants to pursue Wall Street jobs. Simultaneously, banks themselves are utilizing new AI tools in the creation of financial models and decks. As this work is traditionally done by interns and young associates, this has led banks to hire fewer people in entry-level positions. Goldman Sachs’ hiring data illustrates both these patterns. In 2022, the bank hired 3,000 summer analysts out of 236,000 applicants (a roughly 1.3 percent acceptance rate), but—just three years later—that number shrunk to 2,600 summer analysts from over 360,000 applicants (a roughly 0.7 percent acceptance rate).

Hoping to capitalize on the crowds of wannabe Patrick Batemans who would kill for the chance to work 100-hour weeks at J.P. Morgan, over 10 distinct preprofessional finance clubs have been formed at Columbia in the last 10 to 15 years: LionFund in 2011, 116th Partners in 2015, and Global Research Consulting in 2019, to name a few. These clubs claim to help students’ recruiting efforts by offering students exposure to financial work, networking opportunities with people already working in the field, and more direct avenues of mentorship, such as mock interviews.

For instance, LionFund requires students to “present at least two investment pitches per semester, vote on investment decisions, and monitor current investments,” and boasts “one of the strongest and most extensive alumni networks among clubs at Columbia.”

Knowing all of this, many students at Columbia correctly observe that recruitment is competitive and that finance clubs could be a useful resource in this process, but they incorrectly infer from this that a student must first gain admission to a finance club to be a competitive candidate in the real job search. This belief naturally leads to an application process for Columbia’s finance clubs which is almost as competitive as getting a real finance internship.

Of course, the competitiveness of the application process to finance clubs strengthens the belief that joining the club is a necessary first step. This follows the prestige-above-all logic that attracted students to Columbia and finance in the first place. The unfettered growth of this self-feeding cycle is what leads to clubs like 116th and Partners boasting around a 2 percent acceptance rate and a multi-round interview process, all for the privilege of what feels like a finance job that pays you $0.

It’s also important to recognize the incentive that finance clubs have to perpetuate the narrative that students need to be in them in order to be successful. It’s a lot “cooler” to be in a club with a 5 percent acceptance rate than one with a 50 percent acceptance rate, so finance clubs communicate with prospective applicants with the implicit understanding that club acceptance is vital for Wall Street success, further deepening the influence of this collective mindset with every new club-recruitment cycle. Nevertheless, the fact that Columbia students fervently believe something does not itself make it true, requiring direct assessment of what the tangible benefits from finance-club membership genuinely are.

Given the common wisdom that a finance club is the prerequisite for finding employment in the world of finance, rather than just an honest space to learn more about what finance is, the result is droves of students half-heartedly applying to them. But what actually is the use of being in a finance club, other than the self-esteem boost from surpassing the ultra-low acceptance rate? To answer this, Sundial spoke with an investment bank recruiter, who reviews resumés and conducts interviews for a middle-market investment bank, under the condition of anonymity for this article.

His first point challenged the extent to which the “early work experience” provided by finance clubs actually benefits students’ resumés. “I value internship experience above club participation,” he told me. “With an internship, you went through an actual recruiting process to earn the position, and the scope and responsibility of the work are generally much greater.”

Finance clubs do offer members the opportunity to engage in projects like company due diligence and preparing investment theses, which applicants can list on their resumés to demonstrate prior experience. As freshman-summer finance internship listings on popular platforms such as Handshake continue to dwindle, the benefit of clubs has become comparatively more attractive. But, although the recruiter conceded that club experience on a resumé is “better than nothing,” students chasing finance clubs for their work-experience benefit should remember that this is a marginal benefit at best. Thus, dedicating more time and effort to the internship search, such as by engaging in a more-thorough cold-emailing strategy, may be a more-effective means to gain work experience prior to the recruitment process.

It is worth noting that, in the common perception of Columbia students, not all finance clubs are created equal. Student investment funds like LionFund and 116th and Partners are seen as the cream of the crop, boasting single-digit acceptance rates and high placement into elite firms, leading even more students to strive for acceptance into these “prestigious” organizations than the rest of Columbia’s finance clubs. Investment bank recruiters, however, are not Columbia students, and thus generally do not know or care about which groups are considered “good” and “bad” in the minds of a couple thousand college kids. For example, the recruiter mentioned that “We don’t know every club at every school. I don’t necessarily know exactly what a particular club does, how much each member contributes, or what resources they have.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that “people only see what they are prepared to see”—the student body at elite schools like Columbia is naturally self-selected to have lots of ambitious people who are hyper-focused on ascending the all-important ladder of prestige. This environment can lead people to falsely believe that the hierarchy of finance clubs is more determinative than it really is, as the only people who really care about the relative prestige of Columbia finance clubs are the members and applicants within the University itself. Although these clubs see themselves as a form of bootcamp for working in the “real finance world,” they seem to overestimate the extent to which real finance workers share this view and often mislead potential applicants to believe recruiters care more about club experience than they actually do.

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A final theoretical benefit of finance clubs is the opportunity for networking. If a student joins a club with lots of alumni at prestigious financial firms, the thinking goes, they have an edge in being able to meet those alumni and potentially score a referral. For this alumni network to provide members with a meaningful advantage in recruiting, however, former club members would have to give some degree of preferential access or treatment to students from their old organizations, which they don’t seem to do to a meaningful extent. This was confirmed by the recruiter I spoke with, who reflected that “I don’t think an alumnus would refuse to speak with you simply because you weren’t in the same finance club. If someone doesn’t respond, it’s probably for some other reason.”

The ultimate end goal of networking in the recruiting process is to obtain a “referral” (essentially a recommendation) from an employee of the bank a candidate is applying to. The bank employee loses credibility if they refer a candidate who isn’t a good fit, meaning a personal connection alone cannot secure a referral: the employee still has to perceive the candidate as competent. Thus, if employees accept networking chats from fellow finance-club alumni and non-alumni alike, club membership provides little competitive advantage in obtaining a referral: Both candidates ultimately have to demonstrate their competence through networking conversations. The institutional devotion students are searching for might instead be found in Greek Life, as these alumni do seem to retain a certain level of allegiance to their former fraternity or sorority long after graduation. In deeply unfortunate news for the esteemed nerds of America, however, building spreadsheets and decks together just doesn’t foster community bonding the way the ‘Elephant Walk’ does.

This is not to say that finance clubs are useless. Nevertheless, given that acceptance to even the most prestigious finance club on campus is neither necessary nor sufficient to get a job on Wall Street, students should see these clubs less as crucial professional development and more as personal development opportunities. Finance clubs give students a unique, risk-free opportunity to find out if they’re actually interested in pursuing a finance job post-grad: Students should take advantage of that, but they should also remember that the seriousness, competition, and elitism that these clubs generate are ultimately artificial.

Emilio Stuart-Alban is a sophomore at Columbia College studying economics and political science. He is a staff writer for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Summer! The best time of the year. When the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the stress of college life has all been thrown into the wind. Or perhaps that was how it was when we could still frolic and enjoy life without the need for a j*b looming over our shoulders.

As it seems, though, we have simply jumped from the frying pan into the fire. I have seen and heard it all: the 9 to 5, the LinkedIn-maxxing, the post-work slump. But add in vampire bats, Luddites, and robot performers, and that is what makes a Sundial summer truly special.

So let’s dive into their summertime infernos, and see what Sundial was up to for the past three months.

Sebi Galbenus, Staff Writer

Our resident Butlerian smoker entered the summer with one goal: do nothing.

By all accounts, he’s earned this reprieve from the grind. Since the summer after ninth grade, he hasn’t had a genuinely empty break to simply relax. College applications and career ambitions had come for the rest of them. But now, looking back, Sebi reports that he “can safely say [he] was just lazy,” highlighting a summer of playing guitar, watching cartoons and movies, and hanging out with friends and family.

Though, like a true Columbia student, even his “nothing” still meant doing something. He had an internship, one which required him to travel to Shenzhen, China for business. Nevertheless, the most insightful part of his journey abroad wasn’t the work: It was the relatable people, the rich culture, and the absolutely delectable food he got to experience in between trips to various factories.

At the Splendid China Folk Culture Village in Shenzhen, Sebi witnessed horse choreography, real explosions that left the stage on fire, and dancing robots prancing across the stage. Speaking with other under-30-year-olds in Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China, he also saw a rural to urban transition that mirrored his own journey from a village in Romania to the concrete jungle of New York City. And, underneath all the flashy shows, he learned that young people everywhere share similar struggles: maintaining a j*b, family pressure, marriage.

For Sebi, however, the biggest challenge this summer came in the form of two little human “batteries with f*cking unlimited life.” When he visited Italy for some family friends, he quickly realized he wasn’t as unflappable as he had thought. After three hours with their two children, a 7 and a 2-year-old, he quietly escaped for a smoke break, and “did not miss the kids” one bit after leaving Italy.

In the end, Sebi’s summer of nothingness was actually pretty eventful. It makes sense then, when asked if he’d change anything, he said he would’ve taken the chance to be “even more lazy.” Looking back, I might even have taken the chance too.

Nick Baum, Editor-in-Chief

Back in the good old Big Apple, Nick Baum was a man with a plan for the summer. He was going to be “super productive” for Sundial. He was going to train for the “New York Subway challenge,” the world record of hitting every New York Subway stop in the fastest possible time. In his words, he had “all these clear, big ambitions” for the summer.

Then he got an internship crunching numbers at an economic policy agency and discovered the couch.

“I underestimated how draining work would be,” he said. “By the time I got home, I just wanted to collapse and soak into the couch… it gave me a lot of insight into the average working person.” His days were also organized around the World Cup, which came on at 3 or 4 p.m. and functioned as a hard stop; the remaining hours he described as “taking a knee in football—you kind of just chew the rest of the clock down.”

But with the Knicks winning the NBA championship, the World Cup fans pouring into the city, and the everyday craziness of New York City, Nick’s journey to and from work was a whole odyssey of its own. One day he’s fighting tooth and nail through a crowd of orange and blue blocking his way to work, and another he’s being recruited by Curtis Sliwa to become a Guardian Angel on the uptown 1 train.

And then, on a Saturday deep in Brooklyn, none of the planning mattered at all. He’d gone out to catch a group of Luddites walking the length of the borough (see Jayna below), arrived to find them halfway done already, and popped into a nearby bodega for a water, only to find everyone raptured by a World Cup game on the television. He stayed fifteen minutes, and in that short while “it didn’t matter that I was this preppy college student from the Upper West Side, and that they were local, working-class Hispanic residents who may not have known any English. We were united in our hatred of Argentina.”

Nick never did make it to every subway station. He did, however, make it to over 190 local coffee shops in the city, a number he volunteers as his big flex and which suggests the city got covered regardless. Indeed, that might have been the best part of his summer, even better than anything his original plan included.

Jayna Rohslau, Staff Writer

Also in New York over the summer was Jayna Rohslau. Despite not having a j*b, she had arguably the busiest, and most eventful, summer out of everyone here. When asked how she would characterize her summer in one sentence, Jayna responded with “a summer of exploration in terms of pursuing my passions and connecting over shared exploration with others.”

Jayna certainly explored a lot. She hostessed at a Chinese-American restaurant in Brooklyn located inside a historic funeral home before it shut down. She joined a drunk writing group in Williamsburg and started exchanging poems with Ukrainian drone pilots, oil reporters, and drunken quants. She attended an egg-themed party and hosted a murder mystery party. She walked across Brooklyn with a group of Luddites. And she has been writing and performing poetry about her complicated feelings toward monetary policy and her “fundamental misunderstanding of econ” at KGB and other open mics.

Jayna was also simultaneously taking summer classes at Columbia, and, for a science writing class with Claudia Dreifus, interviewing bat researchers. Along the way, she became a scholar of “the complex social lives of vampire bats.” She imparted upon me the knowledge that vampire bats evolved a form of reciprocity to survive: A bat that fed will regurgitate blood for another that didn’t get any. Over a discussion with a Princeton researcher, she even discussed whether they might have something to teach us about resilience and friendship of the human variety. The only force that stopped her from going to New Jersey for more bat experts was food poisoning.

Sometime in the middle of her eventful summer, The New York Times also published her letter in its opinion section. It was a response to a piece they ran arguing that our generation doesn’t care about ambition and can hardly be blamed. Her counterargument was that for most of the people she knows, ambition is simply too personal to show up in the places the Times goes looking for it.

All in all, Jayna spent 11 weeks demonstrating just how much one could do if they just pursued their passions full-time. Maybe that should be a lesson for us all too.

Uma Rajan, Senior Editor

Last year, Uma wrote the original summer recap article. Consider this one carrying the mantle.

Uma was, by a wide margin, the most professionally employed person I interviewed: two internships totaling close to 50 hours a week, one of them with the New York Road Runners, the nonprofit behind the NYC marathon, where she makes TikToks and Instagram stories out of the Columbus Circle office. She’s also the only person here whose summer doesn’t end—the internship runs straight through the marathon in November.

She is likewise training to qualify for that marathon, which produced the most impressive logistical maneuver of anyone’s break. Having signed up for races before she had the job, Uma found herself scheduled to both run and work two four-mile races on consecutive mornings. Her solution: arrive at 5 a.m. for an 8 a.m. start, film for three hours, film the starts of Corral A, B, and C, sneak into the queue for her own Corral D, run the race, grab a water, then film the finishes of E, F, G, and H. Then wake up and do it again.

She sublet an apartment with a fire escape. She learned to cook. She came away with a working respect for the 9-to-5 and a warning about it: “If you don’t make an effort to do something else after work, you can totally just kind of go through the 9-to-5 cycle, come back and maybe work out, eat, and then suddenly it’s like time to go to bed.”

In other words, she spent the summer functioning as an adult in every measurable respect. Unfortunately, her employer disagreed.

Despite being the youngest person at the New York Road Runners, she was invited to a company summer social event at a sports-bar/golf-simulator hybrid, where (surprise surprise) booze was present. Arriving there an hour late, she was promptly strapped with two wristbands for the evening, plus a personal conversation with the bartender requesting she not be served.

As consolation, though, she did almost win at bowling against coworkers who, sober, would have destroyed her.

Jessica Weinfeld, Staff Editor

Other summers were spent on a more serious note.

Jessica Weinfeld interned at a district attorney’s office in a unit where roughly 90% of the caseload is child sexual abuse and the rest serious abuse and homicide. Her first reaction was the reasonable one: “I don’t know if I can handle this.”

She spent the next three months finding out. She sat in on trials. She worked through evidence, transcribing interviews and jail calls. Her final days were spent reading hundreds of pages of medical records and psychological evaluations for an insanity claim. She went to a police training simulator and toured a minimum-security prison, which was valuable in her words because “you want to know where you’re sending people.”

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What stayed with her throughout was the witnesses. “It was incredible to just be able to do the very meaningful work of holding people accountable,” she said. “You see all the victims, you hear their testimony, and you really feel like a part of something.” Not only justice for the people in the courtroom, she pointed out, but for the ones who now won’t have to be in one at all. She’s already taken the LSAT and prosecution is the plan.

So the answer to day one turned out to be yes. “I think I’m a bit tougher than I thought I was,” she said. Her only regret is not throwing herself in faster: “You’re only gonna be here for three months, so appreciate what you’re doing.”

Emeric Chang, Staff Editor

Last, but definitely not least, are my own summertime adventures.

The official version is that I spent it in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., in the division handling post-conviction litigation. Like Jessica, I drafted motions, scanned through thousands of pages of transcripts and prison records, and saw firsthand the responsibility of a prosecutor’s office to seek out justice for wronged victims. That experience also reaffirmed for me how law is one of the most human fields there is—a departing attorney described prosecutors as speakers for the dead, which is also coincidentally the name of one of my favorite books.

The unofficial version is that my summer revolved around various moments of danger and dubious people. On a night run through the D.C. Chinatown, I almost got mugged by a group of five. I was then accosted by a non-trivial amount of tweakers, some of whom were surprisingly politically literate as they followed me around the block. I went to my first hackathon, won, and was immediately offered an interview by a Palantir forward-deployed engineer. (I did not take the interview.) I also somehow landed on Columbia Confessions for a second time, this time due to some passing resemblance to a medieval knight.

But perhaps the best part of my summer was how on an otherwise ordinary afternoon inside a United States Attorney’s Office, I listened to my fellow interns—the future of American law enforcement, vetted and badged—make six-seven jokes. I knew I was already cooked, but to find out that we’re all equally cooked made it even better.

As my parting note, I’ll leave you with something I learned this past summer: the best parts of life are the ones you never planned for. Go on that random side-quest. Speak to that stranger. Wander someplace off the beaten path. Only then, will you see everything life can offer.

Mr. Chang is a sophomore at Columbia College studying political science and computer science. He is a staff editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

Mahmoud Khalil’s new memoir No Land to Stand On begins with a harrowing account of his participation in a march of return to Palestine on Nakba Day in 2011, when he was 16. Born into a family of Palestinian refugees in Syria, he recounts how, on the morning of Nakba Day, he had promised his father not to participate in the protests; he would leave his house only to take a trigonometry exam. Instead, urged by his teacher to participate in the commemoration of the 1948 “catastrophe” during which Israeli militia killed an estimated 13,000-15,000 Palestinians and displaced over 700,000, he went to the protest. He saw his father there and was shot in the leg before he could reach Majdal Shams, an Israeli-administered town that sits in the disputed Golan Heights region at the intersection of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. His first thought upon getting shot was that his mother would be furious at him for getting blood on his pants.

The matter-of-factness with which this story is conveyed permeates the entire memoir. Khalil adopts an “aw-shucks” persona, writing of how he had, unwillingly, become “a living martyr,” even as his day-to-day preoccupations centered around his wife, Noor: whether she was safe, whether she could have him there for their baby’s birth. The memoir essentially functions as a personal drama, with the underlying political tension serving as mere backdrop.

To establish the arbitrariness of his detention, Khalil sets out, anecdote by anecdote, to prove, paradoxically, both his mundanity and his exceptionalism. He has a green card and is married to a U.S. citizen: mundane. The “Rubio determination” would seek to deport him for his “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful”: exceptional. In pursuit of this juxtaposition, Khalil often downplays his rhetoric and involvement in activism, despite his insistence that he is not a martyr for free speech but a martyr for Palestine. To paint this as a free speech issue, he argues, would necessitate participating in the erasure of Palestine in public discourse that made possible the circumstances of his arrest.

Ironically, by emphasizing his absolute moderation and ordinariness while watering down his actual involvement in the pro-Palestine movement, his goal seems to be garnering mass sympathy for his specific situation rather than mounting a clear-eyed, principled defense of the pro-Palestine student movement for what it is. By retroactively selecting only the more palatable and mass-appealing parts of the movement to highlight, he does the whole endeavor a disservice.

What is more, Khalil never finds steady ground on Palestine. Beyond broad criticism of Israel, the memoir is absent of his more activist past. Even his involvement with UNRWA—the UN agency that provides humanitarian aid and social services to Palestinian refugees across the Levant, which detractors claim has a suspiciously close working relationship with Hamas—and his emails to administrators are told in a tightly-wound chain of story. Each point is followed immediately by defensive rhetoric seeking to mitigate all criticism, reasonable or otherwise. He defends, for example, the student movement’s use of “from the river to the sea” by claiming that the meaning of the phrase that Jewish students and administrators took issue with—that it could be construed as a “call for Jews to be eliminated”—is actually a call for freedom, justice, and equality. He leaves out his defense of the rallying cry “globalize the intifada,” which, in a New York Times interview with Ezra Klein in 2025, he simply described as a chant for “civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation.” Khalil also claimed that Jewish fears surrounding the phrase are based on “policing Palestinian thought and speech.”

The trouble with such an argument is twofold: One, that Hamas and other similarly militant Palestinian factions have indeed used these terms to incite violence against Israel and its Jewish citizens, and two, that Khalil goes on to similarly police Jewish and Zionist speech, all while claiming his pro-Palestinian speech should not be policed at all.

Near the end of the book, he recounts an anecdote in which he was eating at a restaurant with his wife Noor and was made to feel uncomfortable by a group singing “Am Yisrael Chai.” In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Khalil described “Am Yisrael Chai” as an “Israeli nationalist anthem often chanted by racist mobs while harassing Palestinians.” The song was originally composed as an anthem for Jewish solidarity for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, a group dedicated to Jewish liberation in the Soviet Union. One could argue that the song is merely an expression of international Jewish solidarity in times of hardship and not a veiled racist threat to Palestinians; it is a common hymn in Israel and among the global Jewish community, and it hardly equates to “racism” in and of itself.

The point is that one can’t have it both ways—fear is more slippery than the black-and-white origins of a phrase. The circumstances in which a phrase evolves to become the slogan of different groups with different agendas and capacities for violence condition our reactions to it. Khalil ought to know this well; just as he has faced harassment from Jewish mobs singing “Am Yisrael Chai” in his face, so have Jewish people—especially at Columbia—faced violence and harassment from supporters of the Palestinian cause who chant “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada.” To fully believe in the project of No Land to Stand On, one must pretend as if these contradictions are invisible.

This impulse toward sanitization extends beyond his rhetorical choices and into his legal record. He comfortably gets around the accusation from the State Department that he had failed to disclose his “membership” in Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) by claiming that he wasn’t a “member,” as CUAD is an “informal coalition” with no real roster. But the official question on the application for permanent residency asks, in the broadest possible terms, whether someone has “EVER been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society, or similar group in the United States or in any other location in the world?”

The question is meant to serve as a screening against terrorist groups, foreign political associations, and those potentially involved in espionage activities. While one can argue for or against the inclusion of CUAD as an association worth flagging, by any honest measure, someone active in the movement for Palestine who has served as a go-between for CUAD and the Columbia administration should answer “yes” to that question. Khalil forgoes honesty and relative innocence in service of claiming absolute innocence, but the truth is more complicated than that.

There’s no question that the situation inside the ICE detention centers is inhumane: Many detainees have described filthy conditions, frequent beatings, moldy food, and other forms of abuse. However, that isn’t where the center of gravity of Khalil’s story lies—he spends considerable time trying to convince the reader of the infallibility of the student movement and the cleanliness of his own record. He claims that only the pro-Israel and Zionist students on campus provoke confrontations, conveniently leaving out the fact that the pro-Palestine faction at Columbia has its own share of controversial provocateurs, including the now-barred Khymani James, who has said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

What these elisions and misdirections ultimately result in is a sense of vague aimlessness. It is not that Khalil does not have convictions: His work with the British Embassy in Beirut and UNRWA, as well as his participation in the CUAD sphere, proves that he has activist chops. The disappointment lies in the fact that, in pursuit of the appearance of moderation, he is willing to water down his actual commitments to Palestine. In essence, the rosy history he paints has made this memoir vulnerable to his own critique: He has made this an issue of free speech instead of Palestine.

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While it’s easy to understand why Khalil has chosen to do so—he is still undergoing legal proceedings and trying to fight his deportation—the pressure of writing his innocence into legitimacy has made the memoir read more like a legal defense brief cloaked in the mere aesthetics of dissent than any real testament to the nuances and harsh realities of activism. It’s a shame, because there’s a strong case to be made that the deportation case against Khalil is unjust without needing to whitewash his history.

As Khalil himself has mentioned, he is a permanent resident and is offered First Amendment and due process protections per Supreme Court precedents Bridges v. Wixon and Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding. The law used to justify his deportation is sufficiently vague that it vests unilateral discretion in the executive branch, allowing it to bypass criminal courts entirely. Using this artifact of the McCarthyite era to suppress defensible non-citizen dissent sets a dangerous precedent. The Constitution, according to some legal scholars, should already protect Khalil’s right to speech, no matter how controversial, which makes the sanitization of his own narrative all the more unnecessary and frustrating.

Nowhere in the memoir does he pick a true hill to defend with any real stakes. All of the emphasis is on how peaceful the protestors are, how reasonable it is to want to express oneself in defense of Palestinian liberation, and how absurdly the government has misconstrued the case against him. It sets out to prove Khalil’s exceptionalism rather than to defend his rights despite commonplace and reasonable critiques. Through it all, there’s an inkling that’s reminiscent of when one retells a story over and over again, forgetting to include certain uncomfortable truths enough times until one truly believes that the abridged story is all there is.

No Land to Stand On never commits fully to being a manifesto for the Palestinian cause. It is deeply mired in its indecision between functioning as an apologia for moderates in the Palestinian activism scene—a role inescapably intertwined with protecting Khalil amidst his ongoing legal turmoil—and the expectation that, as a book authored by an activist, it must serve as some artifact of Palestinian resistance in a hostile and normatively pro-Israel Western society. Ultimately, it achieves neither.

Sundial received an advance reader’s copy courtesy of Picador.

Ms. Chen is a junior at Columbia College studying linguistics, economics, and East Asian languages & cultures. She is a deputy editor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

If you walk into Earl Hall—Columbia’s center for religious life—descend the flight of stairs on the right, take a left at the end of the basement’s slender, sterile-lit hallway, and duck into a cozy room consisting of two couches and a table, you will have just reached the first-ever general body meeting of BridgeColumbia in September 2024. The club, where I serve as director of outreach, is the University’s chapter of BridgeUSA, a nationwide organization with chapters at 125 schools and whose mission is to promote “viewpoint diversity, responsible discourse, and a solution-oriented political culture” on America’s college campuses.

BridgeColumbia’s humble beginnings stand in stark contrast to its accomplishment just earlier this August: In Philadelphia, a crew of its board members arrived at the BridgeUSA National Summit as nominees for the organization’s “Chapter of the Year” award.

Accomplishing such a feat in anti-polarization work, at a campus as polarized as Columbia’s, is no easy task. “Our first-ever meeting was in literally the only room we could find,” explained chapter president Harvey Pennington GS/JTS ‘27. “It was a discussion on the southern border. We made each board member bring a friend, but in the end, only about six people showed up, and half of them were doing homework the whole time.”

Eighteen months later, BridgeColumbia convened again in the auditorium of Earl Hall: This time, they were joined by roughly 170 students from Columbia and six other universities in the region for a day-long event. “Bridge the Northeast,” the March 2026 summit for which Pennington and the rest of the club had been planning since the previous July, is one of several large discussion-based initiatives the club has organized.

This past semester, the chapter also hosted a heated debate between Columbia’s Republican and Democratic student groups, drawing in over 200 attendees. Finally, just recently, it announced its inclusion in the official new student orientation programming this coming semester.

Indeed, the meteoric rise of such a passionately pro-dialogue and pro-free-speech student club may be an inflection point for a Columbia campus culture infamously known for neither.

“When they announced we had won chapter of the year, I think we literally jumped up,” vice president TJ Gill CLS ‘27 explained. “The first thought in my mind was how we were able to accomplish this in spite of so many obstacles: the number of student groups who didn’t want to work with us, the students who looked down on the work we were doing, the number of obstacles that the administration threw… it was very gratifying.”

This past year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s College Free Speech Rankings ranked Columbia 256th out of 257 schools for “free speech climate.” The only institution that fared worse was Barnard College. While the ranking’s architect, Sean Stevens, placed the school’s “F” free speech grade “far more on the administration than what the students have done,” the report also blames “a lack of student understanding in First Amendment principles,” whether that be the several classroom disruptions or the student-led intrusion into Butler Library. These instances are examples of the “heckler’s veto” in First Amendment lingo, where crowds of students deny other students their own right to speak or study freely.

Criticism of BridgeColumbia has come from both the left and the right. In a Sundial op-ed published this February, staff editor Jessica Weinfeld CC ‘27 took issue with the club’s discussion, originally just titled “Genocide?”, taking place on the evening of October 7 last year. Likewise, in a Columbia Daily Spectator op-ed, Jacob Gold CC ‘27 argued that clubs like BridgeColumbia advocate for an “empty civility” that “obscures” the free speech problems posed by the administration. (Although I myself have yet to see Gold at any BridgeColumbia event.)

Ironically, the club’s attempts at hosting discussions on hot-button issues have regularly placed Bridge in the position of uncovering barriers and inconsistencies in how the administration handles student expression.

On the one hand, then-Columbia President Claire Shipman declared the administration’s “enduring commitment to freedom of expression,” going as far as to say that “we believe in difficult conversations at Columbia.” However, Pennington described the administration’s support as “limited,” even admitting that the club’s biggest challenge “was navigating our relationship with the administration.”

“They may often claim to have concerns about security risks and student pushback. In the case of our October 7 discussion, they flat-out canceled it. Yet a few weeks later, we co-hosted that same event with the Alexander Hamilton Society, and it ended up going really well. Meanwhile, for Bridge the Northeast, the campus gate closures made it extremely difficult to bring in so many non-CUID holders. Bringing media onto campus for the event, too, was made pretty difficult.”

Of course, that didn’t stop Columbia from posting about said event on its social media. “It’s not that they’re against dialogue work, but rather that they’re inconsistent with it,” Gill said. “There are moments where they’ve been legitimately helpful, but then there’s been moments where we’ve faced obstacles that no one really told us we’d face, and times when things were just a lot harder to face than at other schools because of this extra layer of administrative bureaucracy.”

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Despite such hardship, most students could tell you that Bridge is far from the only dialogue-ist club on campus. From the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance and the Listening Tables to the University’s Campus Conversations and Dialogue Across Difference initiative, buzzwords of “dialogue” and “discussion” have become mainstays of the undergraduate vocabulary. Such a trend has not been without criticism, and whether the market for these ‘d’ words has been oversaturated remains another question.

At the very least, for Pennington and Gill’s corner of the Columbia free speech movement, the desire to arrive at discussions on controversial topics and engage in uncomfortable conversations has been apparent amongst a growing number of students. Revealed by the rising popularity of its events and seemingly confirmed by its “Chapter of the Year” award, there is a mounting demand at Columbia for productive disagreement or, at the least, disagreement that is processed through a conversation rather than through a classroom disruption or library incursion.

If the inflection point has indeed been reached, and the paradigm of “dialogue-ism” has indeed won over large portions of the student body, it remains to be seen how the administration, for all its previous inconsistencies, will follow suit. “I just want to better understand how they can tangibly support dialogue groups on campus,” Pennington summarized. Free speech and open discourse could have a stable future in Morningside Heights, but to get there, students’ and administrators’ priorities must align on what is worth protecting.

Mr. Baum is a senior in the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary and School of General Studies, studying economics and Jewish history. He is the editor-in-chief of Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.