Earlier this week, a group of graduating seniors at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) circulated a petition asking the institution to rescind its commencement invitation to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The letter contends that Herzog is too “divisive” a speaker for the occasion, and that he stands to undermine the day’s spirit of “unity and joy.”

What makes the petition especially difficult to take seriously is how sharply it departs from the actual experience of a JTS education. In my own time at List, JTS’ undergraduate college, disagreement amongst peers has been a core element in the classroom.

In Talmud courses—which are required for all List College students—we learn just how central thoughtful disagreement is to the Jewish tradition. A page of the Talmud itself models a culture of argument: Competing interpretations are presented side by side, minority opinions given serious consideration even when ultimately not accepted, and there is no expectation that a clear consensus will emerge at the end of the discussion.

That same ethos—to list another example—is carried into our history and nationalism courses, where the focus is not on advancing a single vision of Zionism but on confronting the deep and often irreconcilable disagreements within it. We read competing Zionist thinkers — Ahad Ha’am alongside Theodor Herzl; A. D. Gordon alongside Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Each author offers fundamentally different answers to what a Jewish state should be and what it should prioritize. These are not minor disagreements but foundational ones: cultural versus political Zionism, labor versus revisionism, spiritual renewal versus state power.

Discussions are often tense and frustrating, but always substantive. Students frequently articulate differing views from each other and their professors. Those disagreements are not treated as threats to the learning environment; they serve as its very foundation. To ask, after four years of that kind of training, to be shielded from hearing a speaker one disagrees with suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what that education was for.

What should be clear, then, especially at a place like JTS, is that sitting in an audience and being addressed by a speaker does not entail an institutional endorsement of said speaker. To pretend it does is anathema to the very tradition that informs the JTS experience.

Nonetheless, the authors argue that inviting a speaker “with whom many students… vehemently disagree” undermines the mission of the ceremony, but institutions of higher learning, including List College, are not designed to shield students from discomfort, but to prepare them to engage with it.​ What is more, it is understandable that a Jewish institution like JTS specifically would engage with an important figure in Jewish life like Herzog, politics be as they may.

Clearly, my peers do not agree with this fundamental truth. The letter worries that JTS’ invitation reveals the Seminary to be “only for Jewish students who align with a specific political viewpoint.” The authors frame this as a complaint about the narrow bounds of acceptable Jewish discourse, but their complaint, in effect, inscribes narrower ones.

To say that the president of Israel cannot address the graduating class of America’s only pluralistic Jewish undergraduate institution is to define the “diverse Jewish community” so as to exclude the political center of gravity of world Jewry. Of the world’s roughly 16 million Jews, a plurality live in Israel, the Jewish homeland; Another large share, in the American mainstream, hold positions considerably closer to Herzog’s than to the signatories of the letter.

The group of seniors also reduces Herzog to little more than a moral caricature, alleging that he “condones the suffering of others” and incites “violence against an entire nation.” Instead of engaging in productive dialogue with JTS administrators, the letter diminishes complex political realities to a series of buzzwords in a latently transparent attempt to vilify their own institution.

A recent piece in Jewish Currents notes the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory’s suggestion that statements made by Herzog could be interpreted as incitement for genocide, citing remarks made in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. Yet, even within that reporting, the conclusion is comparatively ambiguous to that of my peers, as it acknowledges that Herzog “did not expressly call” for genocide, while noting the importance that his words be read in context. Turning a contested, conditional finding into a moral indictment, as the petition’s writers do, is rather reductive.

The truth is, Israeli presidents do not direct the cabinet, command the IDF, or oversee humanitarian policy. Israel’s chief executive is the prime minister; the country’s wartime decisions run through its Security Cabinet and General Staff. The presidency is largely ceremonial, modeled on the constitutional monarchies of Western Europe. In short, the signatories’ portrayal of Isaac Herzog as a decisive political actor is a grand exaggeration of his authority.

Still, the letter’s most bizarrely ambitious appeal might be one invoking Abraham Joshua Heschel, who taught at JTS for nearly three decades and stands among the Seminary’s most consequential twentieth-century theologians. It quotes his plaintive Vietnam-era question, “Where is God present now?” The authors transcribe a brief, conventionally anti-war excerpt but stop short of acknowledging what might dismantle their case against the Israeli head of state altogether: that Heschel was an ardent Zionist whose 1969 treatise Israel: An Echo of Eternity serves as a theological defense of the Jewish state. It argues that Israel’s existence and security are both a religious imperative and a contemporary manifestation of the divine-human covenant.

To cite him while engaging in performative activism—alluding to a past conflict with which there are few parallels to the contemporary Israeli situation—is not homage; it is, simply put, disrespect. Heschel’s moral urgency was rooted in a lived commitment to the Jewish people and their future, which included a serious engagement with (and support of) the State of Israel. Invoking his name in this context is to misrepresent what he actually stood for and use his legacy in a way that ignores his real commitments.

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One can oppose war in principle while still recognizing the necessity of self-defense. Communist Vietnam is not generally thought of as having posed an existential threat to the United States. In contrast, Hamas presents a direct ongoing existential threat to the State of Israel. Heschel’s opposition to the Vietnam War does not necessarily imply a blanket opposition to all forms of military action, and especially not those taken in defense against groups like Hamas and for the sake of preserving the Jewish homeland.

In any case, JTS is not even doing anything remotely unusual here. Places of higher learning—including JTS itself—have long hosted speakers whose views are controversial, polarizing, and, to some, deeply objectionable. Student groups on campus routinely invite activists, scholars, and public figures who take hardline positions on Israel and Palestine—figures many students view as morally indefensible or even offensive. Those invitations are almost always defended—rightly—under the principles of open discourse and academic freedom. That standard cannot suddenly be abandoned when the speaker is Isaac Herzog. If it is acceptable to host voices that sharply criticize Israel, even in ways many find extreme, it must also be acceptable to host Israel’s president. To argue otherwise is not a defense of pluralism but instead an attempt to impose a one-sided boundary on acceptable speech.

While it is true that commencement is, in some sense, a public expression of an institution’s values—different, one might argue, from a University club inviting a controversial speaker—but, for JTS, those values clearly include engagement with Israel in all its complexity. Inviting Israel’s president to speak is not a betrayal of that mission: It is an affirmation of it. If anything, it precisely reflects the intellectual rigor and pluralistic tapestry of a JTS education, which aims to teach both tolerance for dissent and the capacity to listen and critically engage with arguments one may oppose—bounds Herzog comfortably falls within.

To complete a degree at JTS and then ask to be shielded from a speech is an ironic rejection of this ethos. It is my modest hope that my peers can come to realize this basic point—or else they may find themselves in a dogmatism all too common in Columbia’s broader campus community, contra the complex, the beautiful, and the true.

Mr. Lederman is a junior in the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary and the School of General Studies. He is a guest contributor 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.

On the evening of April 15, in a packed Pupin lecture hall, Columbia’s Democratic and Republican student groups faced off in a debate hosted by BridgeColumbia, spanning issues such as healthcare, foreign policy, immigration, and government bureaucracy.

At an Ivy League university like Columbia, one might expect a debate akin to Oxford’s debate societies, where extensive preparation and oratory polish are put on display. On Wednesday, however, no such debate ensued. The event felt akin to a brash Piers Morgan segment. That said, it was deeply entertaining.

The event began with introductions from each group’s leaders. First to speak was CU Democrats’ President Praharsha Gurram CC ‘27. He wore a relaxed blue button-down and emitted a focused, prepared, anticipatory energy.

Afterwards, CU College Republicans Co-President Jessica Weinfeld CC ‘27 introduced her club as an ideologically diverse group of right-leaning students on campus. Weinfeld, also a staff editor for Sundial, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.

Before beginning the discussion, the BridgeColumbia moderators—Ryan Crawford CC ‘27 and Gia Mercer CC ‘29—introduced the “norms of discussion” for the debate, a sort of friendly warning for the participants, which included: “Listen to listen, not to respond,” “address the statement, not the person,” “avoid interruptions and side conversations,” and “individual representation.” Individual representation refers to the idea that no statement made by any debater is representative of any identity or social groups they belong to. For each topic discussed during the debate, both sides had two minutes for opening statements, followed by a five-minute open discussion exchange.

As we in the audience came to learn quickly, the open discussion portions of the debates felt more like a contentious corner of the Thanksgiving table rather than a serious intellectual exchange.

Immigration

The first issue debated was immigration. The Democrats opened, critiquing ICE officers’ alleged lack of training, the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and overreach into other areas of society, such as airports, where the Democrats contended that agents are unneeded. They also argued that, even if one takes ICE’s stated goals at good-faith value, the agency is not doing a good job of “removing undocumented people” and that the agency should be abolished entirely.

The Democrats appeared prepared for the debate, with extensive printed and computer notes. They were observably eager to argue their points in front of the crowd. The Republicans, on the other hand, spoke largely off the cuff and emitted a more relaxed, though at times unprepared and deer-in-headlights demeanor when faced with common arguments against the Trump administration. The Republicans were on defense from the get-go, struggling to respond to the depth and sheer quantity of the Democrats’ contentions.

In his response to the Democrats’ opening statement, Columbia Republicans Treasurer Salvatore Manella CC ‘26—who joked about his name’s likeness to salmonella bacteria—asserted that “every tragedy is deserving of justice,” referring to the Democrats’ contentions about ICE’s murders of civilians. Manella posited that, despite these tragedies, escalations against law enforcement officers have been increasing for decades and that these events are simply a continuation of this trend. His argument boiled down to the idea that this is just what happens, and that officers’ expectations of violence led them to react more aggressively. This response represents a more general weakness with the Republicans’ contentions throughout the night: They continually relied on Fox News-esque boilerplate arguments instead of engaging with the Democrats’ arguments at face value, using haphazard statistics and flummoxing anecdotes.

While more interesting discourse could have occurred with better preparation, the Republicans’ stated positions on immigration were underbaked at best. Their most convincing argument was that, as students at an elite Ivy League university, we are insulated and don’t fully understand the effects of mass immigration to the U.S. The crowd didn’t seem impressed or open to that point.

Healthcare

The Republicans spoke first in this round. Weinfeld began her speech by defending the American healthcare system compared to those of other countries, citing statistics that wait times in hospitals and for critical medical procedures are comparatively lower in the U.S. About 30 seconds into her statement, Weinfeld began to attack the mainstream progressive idea of single-payer universal healthcare, warning that the U.S. will suffer if it gives up on “free market incentives” that drive medical innovation. She offered less of a Republican vision for American healthcare and more of an immediate attack on progressive healthcare policy proposals.

Weinfeld also pointed out that she had undergone a heart operation in the U.S. that was only possible because of free-market innovation that produced the technology and techniques needed for her procedure.

The Democrats pushed back against this perspective by invoking the greed of American healthcare companies. They passionately expressed to the audience that Americans pay some of the highest costs for healthcare in the world, and that insurance companies rip off Americans for medical essentials such as insulin, which could be mass-produced for less than two dollars per dose.

At one point, CU Democrats Treasurer Adler Rice CC ‘28 dramatically invoked a statistic about how one in three Americans forgoes essential medical care because of high costs: “Look to the right, look to the left. Statistically, one of you had to skip a visit to the hospital because of medical costs,” he said. This was a moment of melodramatic theatrics that made the event feel even more unserious than it already did.

They also pointed out President Trump’s inaction on healthcare policy, reminding the audience of his statement during a 2024 debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris that he had “concepts of a plan” for how to improve American healthcare.

At this point, expressive sighs and eye rolls were traded between the debaters as more partisan or controversial points were made. Because of this, the debate began to feel unproductive, bordering on histrionic.

Foreign Policy

The Democrats began this part of the debate with a simple assertion: The U.S. is more involved in foreign conflicts than “ever” before, most principally Iran and Venezuela. They devotedly posited that Trump’s interventions in these countries are ineffective and unnecessary.

The Democrats also suggested that the billions of dollars being spent on the war in Iran should be spent on healthcare domestically. They also touched on rising gas prices and the deaths of innocent civilians in Iran.

Weinfeld offered a bold rebuttal, claiming that Trump was obliged to go to war with Iran because of the “general shield” they were building up. Then, at approximately 8:49 p.m., an audience member seated in the back of the auditorium began to yell at Weinfeld after she commented that she would rather have oil be more expensive to prevent a “terrorist state” from possessing nuclear weapons. The moderators swiftly hushed the heckler.

Weinfeld also touched on the Democrats’ condemnation of Trump’s Venezuela policy, calling Nicolas Maduro’s abduction and arrest a “perfect operation.” At this point in the debate, it became clear that Weinfeld was the leading voice for the Columbia Republicans. She was speaking and defending her group’s positions the vast majority of the time, with her fellow Republican debaters only chiming in every now and then. The Democrats, on the other hand, had a more even distribution of speaking time across their various team members.

Midway through the cross-exchange portion of this round, BridgeColumbia President Harvey Pennington GS JTS ‘27 interrupted and reminded debaters to make sure they were listening to one another. Towards the middle and into the end of the debate, the members of each team developed a habit of scoffing at the other side’s arguments. Though understandable, this clarified that there was not an active effort being made to respect the norms of discussion established by Crawford and Mercer at the beginning of the event.

The Economy

The Columbia Republicans called the One Big Beautiful Bill “awesome.” Weinfeld highlighted the bill’s inclusion of Trump’s no tax on tips policy and the extension of the Child Tax Credit.

In response, the Democrats went heavy on criticizing Trump’s tariffs. They, with a sense of moral urgency in their tone, detailed the economic costs of global trade wars and farmers who have struggled as a result of tariff policies. As a rebuttal, Weinfeld contended that the U.S. needs to “grow itself out of debt.”

The Democrats claimed that Trump had failed to deliver on the campaign promises that carried him to victory in 2024, citing that inflation is now the highest it’s been since 2022. This was the most mundane portion of the debate, though some interesting arguments were made by both sides.

Federal Bureaucracy

This was the last topic debated. The Democrats pointed out what they perceive to be the hypocrisy of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), asserting that Trump has spent billions on foreign wars. The Democrats also personally attributed the deaths of thousands of Africans to Trump and former advisor Elon Musk for shutting down USAID.

The Republicans, in expected fashion, mainly contended that DOGE has saved the U.S. millions of dollars on alleged ridiculous, extraneous government-funded projects such as “injecting baby beagles with cocaine” and “lizards on treadmills.”

In the final open-exchange portion of the evening, Eira Prakash BC ‘28, Organizing Director of the Columbia Democrats, simply asked how many felony convictions Trump has. When the Republicans answered a separate question asked previously, Prakash asked how many convictions Trump had once again. At this point, Crawford interrupted and reminded her of the norms of discussion.

Participant Perspectives

Weinfeld told Sundial the event “went great,” was “a productive conversation,” and that she “really appreciated being able to give the Republicans’ perspective to a lot of people who probably haven’t heard it before.”

Despite my observations, Crawford believed the debate was productive: “I think this went very well. It went a lot better than what I previously thought. I think we were able to bridge the divide, at least somewhat. I’m happy we were able to bring both sides together.” When asked if there were any areas where he believed the debate fell short, Crawford said: “I think there were moments where people were listening to respond instead of listening to listen.” Here, Crawford is correct. This was a common theme throughout the event that dictated the direction of the conversation on essentially every issue—in other words, resentment took the front seat over respectful argumentation. This was especially true of the Democrats—they came prepared with notes, but generally lacked a civil compass. Between the eye rolls, finger pointing, and scoffing, I didn’t feel terribly proud to be a Democrat that night.

The Columbia Democrats did not respond to Sundial’s multiple requests for comment.

What Was Accomplished

It’s unclear. In all fairness, this was a debate. The event was not branded as a common ground or dialogue event. While the event was not advertised in such a way, it was good entertainment at best. Throughout the night, there were better arguments the Republicans could have made against the Democrats’ positions. In large part, however, the Republicans failed to make compelling rebuttals. This was disappointing, not because I personally sided with the Republicans or hoped that they’d win, but because Columbia is still a hotbed of political tension in desperate need of widespread respect for viewpoint diversity.

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Well-intentioned initiatives at Columbia, such as the Listening Tables, tend to draw the most open-minded, curious, and dialogue-craving. This debate served as evidence that Columbia’s main political organizations do not seem genuinely interested, not even in dialogue, but in doing the work to have a genuinely respectful exchange. Columbia, as editor-at-large Imaan Chaudhry has written about in these pages, has enough dialogue. That said, this debate cemented my belief that civility in political discourse is scarce within Columbia’s gates.

For some of the debate, both sides spoke to each other civilly. However, especially on the Democrats’ side, moments of respect felt deeply performative. When they followed up on one of the Republicans’ answers in a civil manner, it felt like they were waiting impatiently to ask their next “gotcha” question as opposed to actually listening to their opponents. And as the debate progressed, they held back less and less—they pointed fingers (literally) at the Republicans, leveled ad hominem attacks, and seemed to blame them directly for America’s ills.

Middle ground was not achieved; neither side did a great job of actually listening to one another. Even though the Democrats clearly won the debate, the evening felt more like an opportunity for them to blow off some steam at their political adversaries on a campus where liberals and conservatives rarely come face to face.

Mr. Nagin is a senior in the Dual BA program with Trinity College Dublin, majoring in political science. He is the editor emeritus 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.

Editor’s note:

In accordance with Sundial’s byline policy, anonymity is granted only in exceptional cases in which the writer could be seriously harmed by attaching their name to a piece. As such, the writer of this article has met this criterion and has been granted permission to publish under a pseudonym, Colloquious.

— Alex Nagin, Editor Emeritus

Earlier today, The Columbia Daily Spectator reported on a student who Columbia threatened with discipline for passing out flyers critical of the trustees at a University Senate forum. I am that student.

My case proves that Columbia’s promises to protect free expression mean very little when criticism touches the powerful. I distributed a flyer with publicly available information about the people who govern Columbia and participated in the Senate Forum without causing disruption. My criticism of our leaders was entirely factual, without any contested rhetoric. For that, the University publicly smeared my exercise of free speech as harassment and threatened me with disciplinary proceedings.

I am not the first to experience this repression. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza has intensified, the Columbia Board of Trustees has worked with administrators to arrest, suspend, and expel students for protesting in support of Palestinian liberation and against genocide. The University locked the gates to the Harlem community and collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil. Furthermore, by signing the capitulation deal (negotiated by Columbia professor Jay Lefkowitz, who also negotiated Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal), Columbia made any criticism of Israel’s racist and colonial project disciplinable.

It was with this context that I arrived at a University Senate town hall on shared governance on March 26. During the Q&A portion, I raised my hand to ask why the Senate had not yet taken a vote of no confidence in the Board. I further noted that last semester my friend had received a disciplinary warning for putting up a flyer with the words “The Trustees crushed freedom of speech” and stated that I brought a flyer to pass out containing details about Columbia’s leadership. Days later, I received a notice from the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) stating that I was being summoned to a mandatory hearing about a report filed about me, but was left completely in the dark as to why.

On April 8, the University released a public statement condemning the incident, alleging that I was harassing and doxxing the trustees. I found the University’s weaponization of their anti-doxxing policy against free expression laughable: It is absurd for this powerful institution to claim that handing out flyers with easily searchable information constitutes targeting and harassment.

At an April 10 Senate Plenary on Zoom, President Shipman all but admitted the contradiction at the heart of Columbia’s response to my flyers. She conceded that the flyer “may well be free speech” and suggested that criticism of leadership may be “legitimate.” However, instead of defending that right, Shipman pivoted to saying she would prefer “other avenues” and more “constructive discussion,” because the flyer “felt targeted.”

This logic is absurd. Senior leadership at Columbia is notoriously elusive despite their unilateral power over discipline and University governance, and students are now being told that even though criticism is protected speech, they should not express themselves too directly, too publicly, or too forcefully. In other words: yes, you may have the right to criticize the trustees—but if that criticism makes them even mildly uncomfortable, no matter the veracity of the facts or your supposed freedom of expression, Columbia may still drag you through a fraught disciplinary process. No wonder Columbia is nationally recognized as one of the worst college free speech environments.

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Ultimately, after mounting public pressure, my case was dropped. But this is beside the point. If a student handing out a flyer (the most basic case of free speech) is harassment, then is there any acceptable way to criticize our leadership?

My experience also shows the arbitrary nature of the University’s disciplinary process. Even though Columbia’s Rules of Conduct (§440) affirm students’ right to free speech, the Board of Trustees can enforce or remove sanctions on a whim. This is not surprising—David Greenwald is known to personally review student disciplinary records—but it means that the idea of equity and inclusivity has been weaponized and co-opted to silence activists.

Let me be clear—our leadership is corrupt and rotten to the core. Shoshana Shendelman lied to the FDA about her pediatric drug; Jonathan Lavine, a vulture capitalist who ran Bain Capital, described protesters as supporting “rape and terrorism”; Jeh Johnson was architect of the US drone strike policy that killed hundreds of civilians, was on the board of Lockheed Martin, and claimed during his tenure as DHS head that it would be necessary to “send a message” by locking up mothers and children fleeing violence; Abigail Elbaum—a nepo baby and the Milstein Family’s current representative on the Board—was sued for refusing to refund tenants after Superstorm Sandy; Victor Mendelson is CEO of the war profiteer HEICO Corporation.

After all the Board’s actions over the past two years, nobody has faced meaningful accountability. Our rotating cast of Presidents are mere figureheads—the same Board has run our school with impunity at the behest of Stephen Miller, and influential Zionist donors. The University has consistently privileged pro-Israel perspectives and affiliates over everyone else.

The trustees capitulated to Donald Trump’s authoritarian federal government. Now, they are uncomfortable when students criticize them. It’s high time for the trustees to realize that actions have consequences.

I have a message for David Greenwald, Claire Shipman, the “ghost trustees” like Jonathan Lavine and Lisa Carnoy, and the rest of the Board: You will not get away with using Columbia to protect sex criminals, to gentrify Harlem, and to manufacture consent for genocide.

You tried to silence me, but I will not be silenced. The student movement will not be silenced. We will keep fighting until there is real accountability.

— Colloquious

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.

Disclaimer: This piece does not represent Platypus in any way—neither the Columbia chapter, nor the organization altogether. It is written in a purely personal capacity.

As vice president of Columbia’s Platypus Affiliated Society—a Marxist reading group—I co-organized a March 26 panel discussion examining imperialism, with a specific focus on Iran.

The panel featured speakers from vastly different corners of the left: Arash Azizi, an Iranian writer, academic, and contributor to The Atlantic; Layla Saliba, a pro-Palestinian activist and social worker; Jon Brooks, a representative of the Spartacist League, a Trotskyist group; and Spiros Tsonos, New York chapter executive for the American Communist Party (ACP). It went a full three hours and drew dozens of people from both within, and outside, our University gates.

I opened X on the morning of Monday, March 30 and saw a post about our event from Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia University (DJH), an account with 20,900 followers. It was odd reading this post from an account devoted to exposing antisemitism when, as far as I recall, at no point did anyone speak of Judaism, nor was Israel a primary topic of conversation.

The account baselessly claimed that Platypus’ use of a photo of the 1979 Iranian Revolution in the event promotion evidenced support for the Ayatollah. The post goes on to question, rather suggestively, whether Platypus is “linked to the Iranian regime.”

If DJH had done some quick research—as simple as visiting Platypus’ website—they’d see that the organization is far from supportive of the regime. For what it’s worth, the very day of the panel, Platypus reprinted a letter from the Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan that was highly critical of the Islamic Republic. It ended with the anti-regime slogan, “Women, life, freedom.”

Platypus, however, isn’t about taking sides on geopolitical issues. Erin Hagood, GSAS ‘30, and the president of the entire Platypus organization beyond Columbia, told Sundial that Platypus “doesn’t think anything in a sense. We’re not trying to take positions, we’re trying to reopen questions.”

To the assertion that Platypus might be “linked to the Iranian regime,” Hagood replied in a chuckle: “We only get funding from schools, and then we have $10 a month dues, and it costs $0.00 to get four people in a room and have a conversation. So just in case people wonder where our money comes from, we don’t have any.”

She continued, “If you read the panel description, we ask, ‘Why did some of the left support the Islamic Revolution?’ We ask if it was a ‘mistake’ for the left to do so.” Far from seeking the mindless anti-imperialism all too common amongst, say, the Democratic Socialists of America types, Hagood maintains, “We’re actually trying to get people to justify their anti-imperialism.”

Nonetheless, DJH fired an uncompromising tirade at us: “Columbia Platypus should be shut down immediately. This group’s goal is to encourage extremism and promote violence on campus by sharing radical anti-American ideology.” Promote violence? Shut down immediately? You can imagine our confusion as Platypus’ members messaged back and forth in our WhatsApp group chat. Lamentably, as I’d seen similar rhetoric on this account and those like it before—Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students, Canary Mission, Stop Antisemitism, to name a few—I couldn’t say I was totally shocked.

DJH’s stated goal is to “Put pressure on academic institutions to oppose Jew-hatred by exposing toxic anti-Israel climate on their campuses.” The first part, opposing Jew hatred, is something I’d hope we can all get behind. Columbia has witnessed several deeply disruptive incidents, alienating to many Jewish students—regardless of one’s individual conception of antisemitism—which include the occupation of Hamilton Hall and Butler Library, the distribution of pamphlets straight out of the Hamas Media Office, the drawing of Swastikas, assaults, Khymani James’ notorious “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” provocation, and countless other policy violations.

The trouble is that “anti-Israel” can mean a lot of things. It can entail opposing AIPAC and U.S. foreign aid for Israel, decrying the barbarism Israel unleashed upon Gaza, or simply disliking Benjamin Netanyahu. But in the case of DJH, any association with the left—even on issues unrelated to Israel, and certainly unrelated to “the Jews”—is seen as an expression of antisemitism.

When I reached out to DJH via Instagram, they claimed on April 7 that they chose to disparage Platypus on the simple basis that, “In the experience of our group members, Marxist groups on campus are antizionist and often promote intimidation of Israeli and Jewish students.” That line of reasoning is incredibly faulty. Just because some self-identified Marxists, socialists, or leftists have engaged in antisemitism, however defined, does not mean all actually do. Now, while I’m intellectually informed by Marxism, I’m no partisan eagerly awaiting the revolution; and coincidentally, another influence I have—nationalism (especially through the New Right)—could be accused of the same thing: there are some antisemitic nationalists, therefore all nationalists are antisemites. You could do that, in fact, for any ideological canon, for any party, for any group of people.

The account offered to remove the post if Platypus would confirm that it is “not a supporter of the current Iranian regime and/or terrorism,” which I agreed to in my capacity as chapter vice president. But the next morning, they demanded to see “a post that clarifies publicly that this is the position of the whole group,” as if it were Platypus’ burden to publish that for DJH to correct the record. Platypus would not be publishing any post like that, I told the account.

Ultimately, on the afternoon of April 8, DJH quote-tweeted their original post, stating in a manner equal parts comical and pretentious (spelling mistakes are theirs, not Sundial’s): “Although Platypus’s collaborators and speakers are questionable at best, we were happy to learn that Platypus does not in fact supports [sic] the IRG. Thank you, Platypus for cleaning this up for us, and we recommend that in the future you select your speakers and collaborators more carefully.”

I believe that DJH’s rationale went something like this: the pro-Palestinian protests were dominated by self-proclaimed leftists and left-leaning rhetoric, the pro-Palestinian protests were antisemitic, and so all those on the left must be antisemitic too. Such a train of thought allows for no nuance. It’s the enemy of rationality, universalism, and any remote sense of truth.

It should also be noted that part of the reason DJH chose to attack Platypus—maybe even the sole real reason—appears to be that we invited activist Layla Saliba.

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Saliba is one of our campus’ loudest pro-Palestinian voices, who graduated from Columbia last year. Inviting her does not mean we condone or condemn her, or that we’re involved in our capacity as a University club in pro-Palestinian activism on campus—and certainly not in Jew hatred. Platypus invited Saliba on the pretext of “basic liberalism,” in Hagood’s words. To act as though she should be made anathema, as DJH suggests, is in direct violation of Platypus’ values.

The issue with all of this is that DJH isn’t just another X account—they are one of the most politically influential accounts in the Columbia sphere, and powerful people could read their one-sided exaggerations and baseless smearing campaigns as evidence of something real. Their followers include Harmeet Dhillon, associate attorney general for civil rights and a key figure in the Trump administration’s crusade against Columbia; Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s spokesperson to the U.N.; and Canary Mission, the aforementioned group, which aggregates profiles on “antisemitic” college students and others, often conflating relatively mild and non-bigoted critiques of Israel with antisemitism. Court records show the Trump administration used Canary Mission to target activists for deportation.

In an appearance on Scott Atlas’ show last December, Dhillon said, “For every institution [disguising DEI offices to hide from government scrutiny], we have whistleblowers on campus. We have a great new cadre of creative independent journalists telling us online that this is happening. I read on @X every day what’s going on.” Clearly, Dhillon—the person in charge of civil rights at the Department of Justice—is likely taking cues from X accounts like DJH on who to target.

The day before Mahmoud Khalil was detained by ICE, DJH called Khalil a “foreign student who is one of the leading agitators on campus,” tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and ended the tweet with, “#DeportMahmoudKhalil.”

If anything, my latest interaction with Documenting Jew Hatred further proves that we live in an endless cycle of the worst, most hysterical, and anti-intellectual type of activism, and that at some point, it just has to end. Otherwise, we will continue in the pedestrian misery that has engulfed Morningside Heights as Columbians become increasingly perturbed by the uncompromising antics of both sides.

Mr. Mohammadi is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in American studies. He 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.

Princeton announced in October that standardized testing will be required again beginning in 2027, leaving Columbia as the last Ivy League school with an indefinite test-optional policy.

Initially, it seemed as though test-optional policies could become a permanent switch in the college landscape. Critics of standardized testing argue it favors more affluent students, which perpetuates inequality and limits diversity. According to them, instead of placing so much focus on standardized testing, universities should assess a student’s GPA as a better measure of overall academic success.

However, multiple studies conducted on highly selective private colleges (the Ivies, Duke, MIT, Stanford, and UChicago) show that there is little correlation between an individual’s high school GPA and college GPA or with their financial success following matriculation. Crucially, these studies show that standardized test scores are the strongest predictor of both a student’s college GPA and advancement beyond college.

While eliminating the standardized testing requirement was supposed to promote racial and economic diversity, shortly after going test-optional, most Ivies reversed course and argued that mandatory standardized testing actually benefits marginalized groups. Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell all stated that test scores allow socioeconomically disadvantaged students to demonstrate their academic capabilities. Thus, requiring test scores would reduce inequities and improve the diversity of admitted applicants.

Despite all of this evidence and the new policies at all the other Ivies, Columbia remains test-optional. But why?

For one, Columbia’s decision to remain test-optional might signal that the school favors intellectual profile and curricular fit over raw academic scores. Columbia’s key feature, which distinguishes it from the other Ivies and highly selective private institutions, is, of course, the Core Curriculum. The Core ensures that each student completes a traditional liberal arts education upon graduation. The spirit of the Core is rooted in humanities skills such as close reading, analytical thinking, constructive discussion, and argumentative writing—none of which standardized testing does a particularly good job of measuring.

The demands of the Core means Columbia seeks a different type of student than other highly selective institutions. Because it is mandatory, admissions decisions carry a higher curricular risk than peer institutions with more flexible distribution requirements. A student wholly uninterested in the humanities cannot simply avoid these courses. In this sense, Columbia admissions must predict not just academic success, but sustained intellectual interest and participation in the Core.

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In my two years on campus, I have noticed that even students pursuing STEM majors have a baseline level of interest in the humanities. The nature of the Core discourages students who utterly abhor the humanities while favoring those interested in a full liberal arts education, regardless of their intended major.

Remaining test-optional, then, potentially allows Columbia to admit students who better align with the philosophy of the Core. A student who excels in a specific humanities area may not produce a top-notch 1500+ SAT score, but would be well-positioned to thrive in Columbia’s discussion and literature-based Core courses. Columbia already gauges an applicant’s aptitude for the Core through their short essay questions: Keeping a test-optional policy enables admissions officers to admit these high-achieving humanities students who demonstrate readiness for the Core by evaluating their overall ‘fit’ for Columbia, rather than their competency as measured by a single test score.

There are tradeoffs to this approach. Again, the research cited by the other Ivy League schools indicates that mandatory testing can benefit socioeconomically disadvantaged students and may better predict academic and career outcomes. However, this is a tradeoff Columbia should be willing to make. The Core is not designed to merely certify academic ability or maximize post-graduate earnings; it is meant to cultivate students as thinkers and communicators through sustained engagement with the humanities.

That mission does not align with every intellectually capable student. By remaining test-optional, Columbia prioritizes admitting students who will fully participate in and benefit from the Core, even if doing so sacrifices some desirable statistical metrics. In an era of STEM dominating higher education, preserving Columbia’s unique intellectual identity is worth the institutional tradeoff.

Ms. Rajan is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in political science and economics. 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.

New York. The financial capital of the world, filled with incredible culture, towering architecture, and a lot of gay bars. Each neighborhood radiates personality, from the vibrant nightlife of Bushwick and Flatbush in Brooklyn to the art hub of the South Bronx and everything in between. Then we have Morningside Heights. While not as glamorous as the rest of the city, it is our home for at least four years. It would be a shame not to familiarize ourselves with our own neighborhood and its surrounding areas.

This is where I come in: I am your tour guide for the neighborhood we call home, exploring niche, refreshing, or just plain fun spots no more than six stops from the 116th subway station. You’ll learn about some new places today. Hopefully, once you’re done procrastinating on that dreaded assignment—or, even better, keep procrastinating on it—you’ll go check these locales out. Let’s kick things off with an underrated gem not many people know about. The Hungarian Pastry Shop is located at—just kidding.

What better way to start our day than with coffee and breakfast? Omonia Cafe, located at 2801 Broadway, is a cute coffee/pastry shop. The place has a cozy, welcoming vibe, with Victorian-style patterned plates dotting the ceiling. As someone who is an expert in mochas and has ordered them at every cafe in the neighborhood, Omonia comes out on top. Who would have thought that a place that bakes a large variety of chocolate treats would know how to make an almost perfect mocha? In any case, they also offer a variety of bagels, but for today, I went with their ham and cheese croissant and spinach pie. The croissant was buttery and flaky, the sweetness balancing the savory ham, which was accompanied by a sharp, in-your-face cheddar. The briny spinach filling harmonized beautifully with the pastry’s sweetness. All in all, a warm, nostalgic breakfast.

Feeling bad for having an actual nutritious breakfast instead of coffee with cigarettes, it’s time to burn off those tasty calories. Good thing we have PingPod at 243 W. 99th St. At its surface, it’s a place where you can rent a private ping pong table, but if you look deeper, it’s much more than that. Next to every table, there is a television and a camera that records each one of your epic fails and clips them, a reminder that we all have to lock in. The place has a futuristic aesthetic and is a perfect afternoon hangout spot for you and your friends. The most fun part: converted badminton rackets that are used to pick up the ping pong balls from the ground. Trust me, smashing a racket on the ground to collect the missed balls that made you lose the game is much more fun than it seems.

A little while after my Olympic gold medal performance, I needed to replenish my hunger. Curry King is a hole-in-the-wall place with the best Pakistani food in Morningside Heights. It’s located at 942 Columbus Ave., and it’s one of the many gems people overlook. A tiny, intimate location with an open kitchen, their food options have something for everybody, from cheap and delicious meal menus to spicy, mild, or vegetarian options. I went there during iftar, and I cannot describe the place any better than comforting and familiar. It’s truly a full sensory experience, being hit with the warm smell of curry, the rhythmic music of the region, and the many people breaking their fast during Ramadan. I ordered butter chicken, beef curry with basmati rice, and a side of garlic naan. As for their mission to “make every meal unforgettable,” I can definitely say they have succeeded: buttery, smooth, warm, flavorful, tender, fall-off-the-bone meat that’s perfectly complemented by a mango lassi. The tireless cooks and elderly immigrant ladies who took my order and served me with such kindness and hospitality reminded me that the world isn’t as cold as it sometimes feels. Be nice to your neighbors. Share a meal with them. Put politics aside and recognize the shared humanity we all have. This is what true human connection feels like.

To finish off the day, let’s take a tour to 1264 Amsterdam Ave.: Sipsteria. When I lived in Fairholm last summer, this place was a daily visit for me. With cozy and welcoming decor, they offer a variety of incredible coffees, breakfast pastries, and traditional Georgian cuisine. They also usually offer free treats at the register, which are delicious and always appreciated. It’s a great place to hang out with your friends, do some work, or just look at yourself in their big, rustic wooden mirrors. We’re not here for that, though, because after 6 p.m. the place turns into an intimate wine bar, with warm lighting perfectly complementing the wooden interior. Their small but carefully curated wine selection adds incredible depth to the atmosphere. The selection of European and American wine seems to only highlight the traditional Georgian wine they serve, which all fits together into a comfy aesthetic. Add their weekly jazz nights into the mix—featuring local talent from Morningside and Harlem—and you have yourself the perfect date spot in the neighborhood.

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My experience at Sipsteria motivated me to write this series; coming here every day during the summer and getting to know the wonderful employees keeping the place running made me feel like I was truly part of a community. I want you to feel the same way during your time at Columbia. I know it’s easy to feel negative about the current state of the university, of the U.S., and of the world. It sucks, I’ll be the first one to admit that. But let’s focus on the positive sides of our home and community and be happy about our privilege and the little things in life: our friends, family, random hangouts and side quests, and our procrastination. I hope you check out all the places I’ve mentioned above—they deserve your time. Stay warm, enjoy life, eat good food, and I’ll see you next issue.

Mr. Galbenus is a sophomore 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.

When you talk to conservative women at Columbia, they’re usually not your stereotypical “trad” woman. They aren’t performing the traditional script of normative femininity, faith, and nationalism.

Some of these right-wing girls may be religious, and some may openly identify as conservative. But they appear on the surface to be just like any other Columbian: attending an elite university and—contrary to the trad gospel—nearly all intend to obtain careers post-graduation. Past and current members of conservative clubs at Columbia have gone on to work in finance, law, and medicine—high-paying, ambitious, culturally feminist paths. Many are deeply embedded in the social life of college and the big city: frat parties, sorority events, nightclubs, networking, flirting, tight dresses, exposed collarbones, even the occasional strategic cleavage. Perfectly ordinary behavior for young women in the city—though likely enough to send a Christian conservative grandmother into a tiffy.

So, what actually separates a conservative woman on campus from a liberal feminist?

At Columbia, conservatism clearly isn’t about wearing long skirts, cross necklaces, or domesticity. It shows up in women who are ambitious, socially active, and modern, yet who are increasingly skeptical of progressive gender politics and institutional moral policing.

On campus, many of the most outspoken conservatives are women. The co-presidents of the College Republicans are women, and as vice president myself, I am acutely aware of the irony in my general defense of traditional norms. Conservative women are supposed to be something specific: soft, maternal, private. Instead, at Columbia, they are public, ambitious, and competitive.

The same contradiction appears nationally. Prominent GOP women are constantly criticized, often by their own side, for failing to live up to the ideal they are presumed to represent. Erika Kirk has been attacked for stepping into the role of CEO at Turning Point USA after her husband’s assassination—why wasn’t she home with her children? The comment sections of Candace Owens’ videos scold her for being outspoken and ambitious, while she has often criticized feminism. Similarly, Karoline Leavitt’s combative style hardly matches the imagined soft-spoken conservative woman.

The backlash is revealing. Conservative grievances about these women are almost never about policy (with the notable exception of Owens), but about their violation of the bonne femme archetype.

What does it mean, then, to be a “conservative woman” in 2026? Has she become just another careerist disillusioned with the left but not actually living conservatively? Just another “MAGA babe”? Or a corporate girly who votes Republican but lives indistinguishably from her cosmopolitan liberal peers?

To begin to understand what conservatism truly even entails in Morningside Heights, I interviewed four self-proclaimed right-wing women.

Stephanie, BC ‘27

Stephanie, a junior double-majoring in economics and English at Barnard, described being conservative in pretty conventional terms, such as “leaning towards traditional values—marriage, family, etc. Economically, it means things like lower taxes, free markets.”

When asked to name her top issues, her answers clustered tightly around education, gender ideology, foreign policy, and the limits of progressive moral enforcement rather than bread-and-butter economic populism. She supports “freeing Iran from [the] regime, supporting Israel, lowering taxes, and making college campuses more open-minded to [a] conservative perspective.”

Stephanie further insisted: “I 100 percent consider myself a feminist, in the sense that women and men are equally capable.” She elaborated that “feminism is built on agency, and women should be empowered to follow whichever path they choose.”

Leah, BC ‘27

Leah, a Barnard junior studying computer science, described conservatism as ‘“more logical, more rational” than the more “emotion-based” left.

She also told me that her politics are policy-based rather than identity-based, pointing to transnational continuity rather than American culture war tribalism. Her views are influenced by her family overseas, whose political system is different from the one here.

“They just think [being conservative] is living on the farm with the chicken eggs and whatever and baking the whole day,” Leah reflected, profoundly aware of the way many perceive conservative women. “I want to work…in finance specifically, but I don’t see myself staying in that forever,” she added, “It can be very easy to get sucked into that…You’re 40 and you haven’t had kids yet or you haven’t been able to prioritize your relationships.”

Anna, BC ‘28

Anna, a Barnard sophomore studying economics, resisted being flattened into a partisan label: “I make a strong distinction between conservative, right-wing, and Republican.” For her, American conservatism is not aesthetic or lifestyle-based, but a constitutional commitment. She argued that “true American conservatism is the protection of Enlightenment ideals of natural rights and separation of powers, as dictated by the Constitution.” Continuing, she commented that “much of our national political conflict today is a result of the federal government becoming too powerful.”

She is also unapologetic about her career ambitions. “Having a fulfilling career is very important to me,” she said, but added that “I know my future family will undoubtedly be the most important aspect of my life.”

When asked what issue she feels strongly about, Anna talked about how the “‘intersectionality’ of the LGBTQ movement and feminism in third-wave feminism has eroded women’s rights. The reason why women deserve to have their natural rights protected isn’t because women are the same as men. [It’s] Biology 101.”

Anna, still, identifies as a traditional feminist. She insisted that “third-wave feminism has deviated greatly from ‘true feminism.’”

Jennifer, GSAS ‘26

Jennifer, a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that her “culture has helped shape [her] into someone that values pragmatic policies built on strong virtues.”

“I believe in equality between men and women,” she added. “I wouldn’t consider myself a modern feminist, because I think the movement has shifted from uplifting women to putting men down.”

These interviews point to something deeper than hypocrisy or confusion at the bottom of these women’s decisions to be conservative. They are not rejecting modern life, nor are they trying to fully reenact a pre-modern one. Instead, they are attempting to draw boundaries within modernity, accepting its freedoms while resisting its excesses. The question is not whether conservative women are hypocritical, but why this form of selective conservatism keeps appearing among elite women in particular.

What’s interesting here is that these women are not describing conservatism as a subculture or aesthetic, but as a way of reasoning about institutions, incentives, and limits—a framework often detached from American partisanship.

Stephanie’s primary political issues—“freeing Iran from [the] regime, supporting Israel, lowering taxes”—for example, highlight a broader problem in American politics: “conservative” has become a catch-all label for a cluster of contemporary right-wing positions that don’t necessarily stem from traditional social conservatism. Ask most self-identifying conservatives in 2026 what they care about, and you’ll hear a similar pairing of a geopolitical priority and an economic one. Support for certain foreign policy stances or tax cuts is now treated as inherently conservative, even when those positions reflect partisan alignment or strategic preference more than an inherited philosophy of traditionalism.

Indeed, one of the fundamental issues with American conservatism is that the big tent only coheres if political expedience outranks genuine value alignment. What does it actually mean for a socially liberal, fiscally conservative person to share a movement with a Christian socialist who is socially conservative and fiscally liberal? They might both be labeled “right-wing,” but they are not aligned except insofar as they need each other to win elections and don’t think President Trump is an existential threat to our country. Within that incoherent tent, the conservative woman becomes an especially unstable category.

There is also an implicit moral hierarchy embedded in contemporary conservative discourse: rural trad over suburban mom over urban conservative. Production-based femininity is often treated as more “moral” or “righteous” than domestic life alone or the life of a professional conservative woman. Yet reducing this hierarchy to the claim that “rural trad is superior” is too easy and avoids the deeper tensions at work.

Many women want the benefits of being modern and feminist—career, status mobility, sexual self-determination—while also possessing the political or psychological cachet of being “conservative.” Urban conservative women live lives materially indistinguishable from their liberal peers. They attend the same schools, pursue the same careers, delay family in the same ways, and navigate the same elite institutions. They structure their lives around ambition, education, and career. In other words, at an institution like Columbia, they ultimately succumb to the dogma of liberalism.

This produces an internal contradiction embedded in the phrase “conservative woman.” The image we have of a truly conservative woman would not be a politically adroit, world-beating girlboss. She would be a mother of four in a quiet farm town in the Midwest, embedded in her church. She would never be a public figure. She would not be at Columbia, running a political organization, debating Title IX policy, and networking in FiDi. And I would not be interviewing her.

But what these interviews reveal is that feminist conservatism is a structural contradiction, produced by historical changes that no individual woman can opt out of. The difficulty with modern “trad” or conservative women is rather Tocquevillian: Once subjects of a monarch become citizens of a republic, you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. You can almost never convince people to surrender power they have been given and have enjoyed wielding.

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We are experiencing a historical transformation—women have already experienced post-suffrage politics, post-sexual revolution norms, and post-educational equality. The modern conservative movement can gesture toward tradition, but cannot reconstruct the social conditions that once made tradition organic.

Nowhere is this transformation more visible than on abortion, arguably America’s most contentious issue. Stephanie said simply, “I lean more towards pro-choice.” Jennifer echoed this position while grounding it in social consequences: “I don’t think making people that do not want to be parents, parents, is good for the child’s upbringing or society overall.” Anna, meanwhile, reframed abortion not as a moral crusade but as a constitutional question: “Our bodies are our most sacred form of private property. I don’t think abortion should be a major political debate topic.”

Leah was the only pro-lifer among the women I spoke to, although even here the position is bounded rather than absolutist: abortion, she said, “should be avoided unless the mother’s life is at risk.”

While we may not expect self-identified conservatives to be pro-choice, these opinions are not incoherent with the “traditionally conservative” values we hold conservatives to. At places like Columbia, where progressive sentiment dominates, rejecting the reigning gender orthodoxy becomes a form of boundary-setting rather than a return to 1950.

In elite institutions where there is no church culture, no localized social pressure, conservatism operates as a voluntary alignment and strategic signal, not an inherited role or place-bound obligation. These conservative women simply aren’t church-going, sourdough-making tradwives from the South.

It’s much easier for us to conceive of Columbia’s conservative women as either a “trad” woman or a secret feminist traitor. She is a third type—someone who values elite autonomy while enforcing conservative boundaries. What she ultimately reveals is that conservatism in elite America today has become less a way of life than a strategy for navigating modernity.

Ms. Ma is a sophomore at Barnard College studying English and Philosophy. 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.

A short walk down to 108th St. and Broadway reveals the economic forces quietly shaping—and threatening—Columbia’s backyard. In February 2019, a local diner on one of the corners closed and was converted into a Dunkin’. On the opposite corner, a local taqueria would close a year later and be replaced by Luckin Coffee, the Chinese coffee giant with over 24,000 locations. Meanwhile, on another corner, a small hot pot restaurant was recently traded in for another Chinese fast-food restaurant with plans to franchise.

I’m talking, of course, about the arrival of large chains and big brand names to Morningside Heights, often at the expense of small, local businesses. 108th St. is far from the only casualty: Mel’s Burger Bar, a beloved Columbia nightlife spot, was replaced by a Raising Cane’s; Shakespeare & Co, a popular bookstore on 105th St., suddenly closed last year; and, across the street, Silver Moon Bakery forcibly relocated after disputes with its landlord over rent.

These are just the examples current Columbia students have witnessed. From Pret A Manger and Shake Shack to Hashi Market and Dos Toros, chances are your favorite chain store stands where a beloved local establishment once stood less than ten years ago.

This process of commercial gentrification, however, goes back much further in time. To understand the forces behind it, and how locals and students alike can address the problem, I spoke with Morningside Heights Community Coalition (MHCC) Program Director Dan McSweeney.

“I think the gentrification became very noticeable in the 1990s, not just for our neighborhood, but most or all of New York,” McSweeney explained. “I’ve known the neighborhood for about 55 years. As a kid, the vast majority of businesses were mom and pop shops, shoe repairs, diners… Now, Broadway is starting to resemble more of a mall or an airport food court. It’s not what we want in a New York neighborhood.”

Beyond the loss of local identity and an authentic array of options, replacing small businesses also comes with its economic costs: On Amsterdam Ave. and 108th St., Dan Cohen owns and operates Super Nice, a small bakery and restaurant. He explained that, as a local establishment, Super Nice “employs people who live locally, who spend locally, which promotes other small businesses and keeps money within the community.”

Economists refer to this idea as the local multiplier effect, in which locally owned businesses are more likely to re-circulate money within their neighborhood than national chains. Studies find that every $100 spent at a national retailer yields a $15 return for the local economy, while every $100 spent at a local business yields a $45 return.

New Yorkers likely understood this lesson at one point; during the 1970s and 1980s, the city was rather hostile to big, national brands such as fast-food chains. In 1974, Upper East Side residents collected more than 15,000 signatures to prevent a McDonald’s from opening in the neighborhood, and besides the local opposition, the city’s ongoing economic and crime issues turned off prospective chains. “Back then, all your local establishments were likely owned by your neighbors,” McSweeney told me. “You didn’t have to work for a large corporation to live in Morningside Heights.”

With declining crime rates and a resurging city economy over the 1990s into the 2000s, New York’s growing population, tourism, and foot traffic attracted a variety of chains. In many cases, chains’ greater access to investor money, marketing materials, and brand-name recognition jeopardized their small business competitors. The number of chain retailers and restaurants in the city has rocketed from about 5,400 in 2008 to over 8,000 in 2024—an almost 50 percent increase.

Beyond this citywide trend, several factors may be making it harder to do business in Morningside Heights specifically. Consider Columbia’s growing international student population: “As the University becomes more international, the commercial presence also becomes more international, it doesn’t reflect local ownership,” McSweeney argues. “For example, we’ve seen a lot of Asian-themed restaurants and shops open up, which is great, but I think many of them are not owned by local residents rather than multinational corporations.”

Then, there’s Columbia itself. The University holds a near-monopoly over its surroundings, owning two-thirds of Morningside Heights, yet neighboring businesses have struggled to effectively communicate their needs to the administration. “This new president has an opportunity to improve the tone. The most important thing to do is end the campus closure. It really hurts small businesses, annexing a large portion of the neighborhood and preventing passersby from going from one side to the other.”

Businesses that have voiced such complaints include Book Culture and Morton Williams, both of which are across the street from campus. McSweeney shared that Morton Williams even hired a lobbyist to take on the issue, while many other businesses have refrained from publicly dissenting out of fear of backlash or hostility from the Columbia administration.

That being said, Columbia’s relationship with its neighbors hasn’t been entirely negative. In fact, local businesses in the area have had “positive things to say about” the University as a landlord, citing its openness to businesses’ different operational decisions and how understanding it was with rent payments during COVID. “I believe Columbia wants to support local businesses, but does that mean they have the right to curate the commercial presence in the neighborhood? I don’t know.”

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As the largest private landowner in New York City, much has been said about Columbia’s real estate conquest of Upper Manhattan. If the University really does value, as it claims, “its local community, its new friends and neighbors” and “the possibility for shared growth,” then at the very least, it should lease its growing portfolio of storefronts back into the community’s hands. In the past few years, however, it’s rewarded competitive retail space to Dos Toros and international chains Blue Bottle and Miznon.

Furthermore, the University can help work with the MHCC. McSweeney mentioned initiatives such as increased support for the employee ownership transition of local shops and restaurants, as well as the creation of a workforce development program for local residents.

Finally, New York City’s Department of Small Business Services has the power to designate areas as “Business Improvement Districts,” where money goes to maintaining public spaces while promoting local businesses. Alternatively, business associations are voluntary coalitions of primarily small businesses, used to pool together resources and lobbying power. While the Upper West Side has two Business Improvement Districts, and Harlem has a business association, Morningside Heights has neither.

For all of its real estate, wealth, and political power, the University can and should do much more to protect the local establishments that distinguish the neighborhood. In the face of rising rents, corporatizing tastes, and dissolving neighborhood identities, Columbia has the opportunity—and obligation—to be the patron of Morningside Heights’ unique character and small business scene.

Mr. Baum is a junior in the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary and the School of General Studies. He is a managing 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.

I changed as a person because Columbia mandates exposure to some of the greatest Christian works. When I encountered St. Augustine in Literature Humanities, I was struck by his total reliance on God—“our hearts are restless until they rest in you [God].”

It has been written that St. Thomas Aquinas, a successor of Augustine, “baptised Aristotle.” This is how I feel about Augustine. He redefined for me the conventional understanding of “humanism” within the liberal arts. He changed how I read the Greeks and everything that has come since then—it all leads to understanding ourselves in relation to God.

What draws me to Augustine is his union of faith and reason. His example raises a broader question for Columbia students: how should the pursuit of knowledge be reconciled with the Christian inheritance embedded in texts like Genesis, the Gospels, and Augustine’s Confessions?

Columbia’s pedagogical decision is exceedingly rare in higher education. Even when such texts are included on a syllabus, there is no guarantee they will be taught faithfully. Other sections taught students to dissect these works through modern ideologies or to intentionally undermine writers by aggressively reading “against the grain.” I was privileged to be in a section where we took the ideas and claims as serious and worthy of learning from as the author intended.

There is no one more primed to tackle the relationship between faith and reason in the Core than Columbia’s Catholic chaplain since summer 2025: the Rev. Father John Wilson. I sat down with him at the Thomas Merton Institute, named for the Columbia alum-turned-Trappist-Monk and the 20th-century’s ‘Augustine’ for his Seven Storey Mountain. We talked about his intellectual journey to the priesthood, the influence of faith and reason in the Thomistic tradition, and how he reads Scripture.

Early Intellectual Formation

Wilson grew up in a devout Catholic family in Eastern Connecticut and went to Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts school located in Los Angeles, graduating in 2007 with a degree in political science.

He began to think about the priesthood in college. Through the model of “some very holy priests,” including Pope John Paul II, Wilson recounts a “desire growing in my heart for that kind of service.”

He also credits the influence of the strong Catholic community on campus. There, he learned to “be” more Catholic—beginning to pray the rosary and returning to confession, a Catholic sacrament. After college, Wilson moved to New York to work as a journalist. But after working as one for three years, he felt that the calling to become a priest had not left him. So he responded in 2010, going through six years of training, and being ordained in 2016. Now, along with being the Columbia chaplain and parochial vicar at Corpus Christi-Notre Dame, he is a candidate for a Doctorate of Theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.

Along the way, he also credits intellectual influences, including Augustine.

Wilson encountered Confessions in a required freshman year class during his time at Claremont McKenna.

Wilson read Confessions when he was just starting to deepen his faith, so he found that “he knew St. Augustine” since the Saint’s story “echoed” his own in many ways.

“I was very struck by the way his conscience started to develop, even in the midst of a lot of sins and a lot of mistakes. He was very thoughtful about noticing those inner movements—those pangs of conscience, those moments of regret—which he began to see as the voice of God in his soul. And certainly his moment of conversion was very striking for me to read, because I had been there. I knew what it was like to be reaching out for God but not knowing how to get there, and then to realize all of a sudden, I can’t get there, but God can come meet me.”

Wilson credits Confessions for curing him of some of his “lazy assumptions about human progress.”

“All of a sudden, I was noticing a communion across the centuries—my life is no better than his in all of the fundamental ways. That to me was an experience of the ‘communion of the saints,’ which is a Catholic term that talks about the way that all believers are united in the body of Christ, even across cultures, across generations. And it also taught me what it was like to actually inherit a tradition that was a living thing.”

Throughout his time in college, Wilson looked to both explicitly Christian and non-Christian works as “real conversation partners” with whom he could wrestle over the human condition. In particular, he loves Shakespearean plays. As a political science major, he recalls an appreciation for Henry V. But for Columbia students, he especially recommends Hamlet and King Lear. He sees these two plays, in particular, as “beautiful meditations on what human beings are like and the ways that our sins get the better of us.” In that sense, he added, Shakespeare himself was in many ways a deeply Christian thinker: “I see in them [Shakespeare’s plays] all kinds of reasons why I need a savior.”

When I asked Wilson if he could add a required text to the Columbia Core that he believes all students should be exposed to—besides the Bible, Augustine, and Dante—he mentioned The Rule of Saint Benedict, written by the father of Western monasticism, Saint Benedict around 530.

Wilson made this choice because Benedict “purifies a lot of what is best about the classical Roman tradition.” In particular, he points to the Rule’s emphasis on producing order and regularity in life—not for personal gain or glory, but “to direct the soul to God.” Wilson finds that Benedict’s rule, with its emphasis on “building solid roads through your life on which the soul can more easily attain communion with God,” functioned as “the fundamental text for the rebuilding of civilization through the Dark Ages.”

A more recent thinker who impacted Wilson was Pope Benedict XVI. He learned from him that faith and reason “are both aspects of the search for truth, and that being a man of faith doesn’t mean setting your reason aside, and thinking deeply is not an offense against faith.”

Faith and Reason

Though Aquinas was less influential for Wilson at first, he has since become a central figure in his intellectual journey.

He thinks a good place to start is the outline of the philosopher’s magnum opus, Summa Theologica. Judging the order of its contents, one notices how the Summa “talk[s] about how all truth proceeds from God.”

The people in the High Middle Ages were not so different from us, in that many rejected the complementary nature of faith and reason. Wilson explained that a common belief of the time was that there were truths of faith and truths of reason, with no real connection to one another—as if one could live two different lives governed by two different intellectual principles.

Aquinas rejected this completely: “If we believe that truth is truth, then truth is one,” Wilson said. Expanding on this, he paraphrased Aquinas’s “beautiful definition of truth” as “the correspondence of the intellect to reality.

“I can actually make a judgment that corresponds to things as they are outside of my mind. To know the truth is actually a beautiful way of being in communion with reality. To know the truth is just to be who we are as human beings and to be, in a sense, at one with what’s around us.”

Thus, “both by faith and by reason, everything that exists comes from God.” This means that God willed the existence of things outside of Himself. When we study those things—when we study nature through scientific means—we are studying something that ultimately comes from God, since no truth can exist outside of Him. As Wilson put it, this is how “God teaches us truth, by giving things natures that we can discover.”

An important caveat is needed. Though reason is important, it is not sufficient for either Wilson or Aquinas. God gives us the laws of nature to discover through reason, but He has also revealed Himself to us. A core Christian claim is that God is personal and desires a relationship with His creation to the point where “He had to come chase us down.”

Through revelation, God speaks to humanity about who He is and how we are meant to live. This, according to Wilson’s understanding of Aquinas, is the essence of faith: to “believe God when He talks to us.”

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These moments of revelation occur “in a series of beautiful stages over the course of human history. These stages are narrated in the Hebrew Bible, starting from the book of Genesis” and then culminating “in the ultimate self-revelation.” Genesis and the Gospels, two quintessential works from Literature Humanities, led me to ask Wilson how he understands the reading of sacred texts in a classroom setting.

Though Wilson candidly admits that “I want non-Christians to read them because I want them to encounter Jesus,” he pushes back on the idea of there being a religious versus secular way of reading any text.

The liberal arts education trains students “to have a conversation with the author” and “with someone who disagrees with you.” Regardless of the text’s content, you need to converse with the text so that you may take “the text as it presents itself.” This includes asking: “What is the author trying to do? What is the author trying to say?” And once you do, you can ask, “Does this conform to my experience?”

In that sense, Wilson believes that though one does not need to share Augustine’s faith, an intellectually honest reader cannot do a purely secular reading of the Confessions, since, first and foremost, Augustine is writing about his relationship with God. To ignore that he is “writing as a deeply convicted Christian thinker” would be, to Wilson, to “do violence to the text.”

Similarly, if he were to read the Quran, Wilson explained, he would need “to take very seriously the idea that this text is presented to be the revelation of God to Muhammad.” Otherwise, it would be pointless to read without accepting the goal of the author.

Students are often taught to think of Scripture as “good literature.” Wilson doesn’t disagree. He said Genesis, for example, is “deeply gripping,” something he hopes students recognize “even when it’s mysterious.

“But it would be a mistake to reduce it to its literary form if what it’s actually intending to do is communicate fundamental truths from God about who human beings are and what our relationship with God is supposed to be. So you can look at the stories as stories, but you’re going to start going wrong if you try to yank them out of context and pretend that they’re nothing but stories.”

However, Wilson believes “it’s always a temptation to bring to any work of literature our own presuppositions.” As a fan of Jane Austen, he compared anachronistically reading Genesis to reading Pride and Prejudice as an economic text. Though there are certain insights to be gleaned from a careful socioeconomic analysis, Pride and Prejudice is a love story, and to do otherwise will bring to the text a slew of false assumptions.

This is similar to how Wilson feels about creation stories from other cultures. The Literature Humanities syllabus often includes other creation and flood narratives from ancient cultures, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atra-Hasis Epic. Wilson finds biblical literary comparisons to these other cultures fruitful “as long as they’re kept in their proper place.”

Wilson explains that in these comparisons, one will “discover that Genesis is actually pretty unique. It’s saying something about God, perhaps even in conversation with those other creation stories, and saying something like, our God is not like what those other texts describe the deity, the creator, to be.”

However, upon hearing Wilson’s explanation, an obvious charge against the Christian interpretation of Genesis came to mind: why is it not also anachronistic to read Genesis through the lens of the Gospels?

Appreciating the challenge, Wilson put forth the Christian proposition. He does not “demand that those who aren’t Christians” accept this reading, but he finds it intellectually defensible if one returns to the first question that should be asked of a text: “What is the author trying to do? What is the author trying to say?”

For Wilson and for Christians, “all of the books of the Bible together are a united story, written by one divine author. It’s God’s story about himself and humanity.” Which means that “the best and deepest way to read the book of Genesis is as pointing forward to what happens in the Gospels,” since they form one narrative. For example, when one reads the first two chapters of Genesis as “pointing forward towards Jesus” other elements of the text begin to make sense. Wilson believes this is no coincidence but rather “stuff that’s actually in the text, because the author put it there.”

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When asked about the purpose of a liberal arts education, his answer, I would wager, was not unlike what we have heard from faculty and from our Canon. The purpose is to form “a mind that is trained to be alive to reality.” The mind is important, Wilson explained, because “more than anything else, [it is] the thing that makes us human. It’s the highest expression of our spiritual power as human beings. To have a mind that is awake to reality is about being a flourishing human being.”

Though one can flourish and live a good life without a Columbia or liberal education, Wilson still finds it a “beautiful privilege to be able to think together with the greatest thinkers who have come before.” He added, however, that this conversation must “be in the pursuit of truth—not just the pursuit of clever arguments that you can use to get a good job or impress your friends, but to grasp what is real and what is true, what is good, what is beautiful.”

Our Columbia education can give us many things, but it can—unbeknownst to us—place us on the journey toward faith. I do not expect everyone to take Father Wilson’s Christian propositions at face value. But I hope this conversation fills you with the desire, however nascent, to build a relationship with the greatest story in the history of mankind—with your mind and your heart.

Ms. Chaudhry is a senior at Columbia College studying history. 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.

Last semester, I took Calculus III. I submitted my first problem set without using AI, got a 57 percent, and was flummoxed at the class average of 97 percent. I asked a friend in the class for help, and he responded incredulously: “You didn’t run it through Chat?”

On February 11, I attended a dinner-table discussion sponsored by the Undergraduate Community Initiative and the CC-SEAS Integrity Advisory Board. The theme of the dinner was generative AI: How, why, and by whom it was being used. A good mix of students were in attendance, as well as Dr. Victoria Malaney-Brown and Dean Jonathon Kahn, director of academic integrity and dean of community and culture, respectively. As the goal of the discussion was to talk openly about the subject, I admitted that I had succumbed to the pressure. It was like a dam had broken; around the table, everyone admitted to using AI in their more technically-oriented classes, if not all of them.

My own use of AI had started as a way to catch up to the crowd of already-users—it wasn’t ill-intentioned, and it certainly did not begin as a substitute for doing my own work. After the Calc III incident, I ran all my problem sets through AI before submitting them. The line between using it to catch mistakes and using it to solve difficult problems soon blurred: The nature of AI was such that it quickly made me feel incompetent—it was just so fast, so good at spitting out exactly the right solution, given the right prodding. Eventually, I was using it as a crutch for all the problems I didn’t understand, rather than actually doing the hard work of untangling the solution myself.

It was a bit depressing, we all agreed, that so many bright students were outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs)—despite our best intentions, not a single one of us had managed to avoid the sheer gravity of their usefulness.

There’s a certain disaffection reflected in how ubiquitous AI has become on Columbia’s campus. It’s not that students here don’t know how to think for ourselves—it’s that so many of us choose not to.

The wholehearted embrace of AI in many Columbia circles is not surprising. The process to get into an institution like this one incentivizes certain behaviors—upholding academic standards while excelling in extracurriculars while contributing positively to society while showing some creativity while, purportedly, trying to live a normal life as a teenager. These demands form a perfect storm of misaligned incentive structures: Many students aiming for the ivory tower begin to see life as a series of boxes to be checked and qualifications to be attained rather than a fluid and vibrant path to be experienced.

At Columbia, this manifests itself in the careerist pressures to figure out what you want in life as early as possible and to ‘get a head start’ on achieving those goals. If you don’t know what you want with “your one wild and precious life,” the jig becomes to juggle as many hats as humanly possible. The cost of ‘keeping your options open,’ of course, is time. Columbia students’ embrace of AI shortcuts is reflective of the time compression we experience because we live in a campus environment filled with ambient pressure to be good at everything. The first time you take the easy way out of a difficult assignment may feel like crossing a threshold—except the line was demarcated in chalk and, with each crossing-over, it becomes less and less defined.

We’d like to believe that building guardrails around AI usage in academia is merely a matter of willpower. Some students might claim they “never use AI” as a form of virtue-signaling, a way to mark their stance against the rapid encroachment of the technology on everyday life, but the truth is more complicated than that. When everyone around you is using it to get ahead, holding out might mean you score one or two standard deviations below the mean on every problem set, or you might be spending twice the amount of time on an assignment than your peers.

The efficiency conundrum is not limited to STEM classes—even in humanities classes, where close reading and deep reflection should be the norm, reading an AI-generated summary instead of the text can save students hours of work per class. These instances of ‘losing the race’ eventually add up to a punishment against non-users under the grading schemes that give preference to asynchronous work over synchronous learning. Such a sacrifice might be deemed ‘worth it’ on an ethical basis, but if we are to maintain that education is meant to develop curious, agile, and principled citizens, we would all be better off if our institutional metrics of success were redefined to better meet the demands of living in an age of ubiquitous cognitive outsourcing.

Columbia evidently doesn’t think so—the first sentence of Columbia’s Office of the Provost’s Generative AI Policy reads “Columbia University is dedicated to advancing knowledge and learning, and embraces generative AI tools.” Columbia’s 2026 Teaching and Learning Awards’ requests for proposals are “designed to support faculty looking to integrate new educational approaches and technologies into their teaching and learning practices.” The metafiction of AI has been so successful in selling itself as a learning tool that, instead of asking if AI belongs in “teaching and learning,” the metric for excellence seems to be earmarked for professors figuring out how AI belongs in “teaching and learning.”

Columbia is implementing all of this while researchers have shown that outsourcing writing tasks to AI decreases neural connectivity—leading to consistent cognitive underperformance—and that outsourcing human interaction to sycophantic AI models decreases prosocial and independent behavior. In a compelling op-ed for the Columbia Daily Spectator, Grace Kaste wrote that the University’s “unthinking embrace of AI” is “premised on a conception of the University as a corporation: demand for AI is growing, and if we don’t invest now, we will fall behind.”

As students are forced to play the ‘use-AI-or-not’ game on an individual level based on our fears of falling behind, Columbia is doing the same on an institutional level. Corporate influence aside, it would be irresponsible of Columbia to recklessly embrace generative AI as a panacea for some kind of ‘enhanced learning.’ Elite universities sell a vision of what conventional success looks like: with their power to shape societal narratives around what is ‘worth pursuing’ for the sake of success comes the responsibility to do so for society. As the world becomes increasingly digitized and it becomes harder to distinguish human work from that generated by technology, it has never been more imperative to shape our narrative of success around a vision of human flourishing.

New institutional standards of what constitutes ‘good work’ would realign incentives earlier in the education system so that children are taught to value curiosity, creativity, and actual learning—not just the mindless completion of certain benchmarks to distinguish themselves as worthy of entering the ivory tower.

In fall semester, my assigned Contemporary Civilization professor was, in effect, indifferent to AI. He proclaimed on the first day of class that this was going to be a lecture, not a seminar; said vaguely that he “could tell when something was AI”; and then lectured for an hour and a half on the Pentateuch. Discussion with peers was barely even an afterthought, and all of our (five) exams would be take-home essays. I promptly switched into a different CC section after the second class proved that his methodology was not, in fact, a practical joke.

The section I switched into had a radically different policy: Participation accounted for half of the course grade, and handwritten exams and reflections accounted for the rest. In the course syllabus, my professor wrote: “After a quarter century of assigning traditional essays, your cohort’s...enthusiastic embrace of?...rapid addiction to?...unthinking submission to?... gAI has forced me to change gears. So no traditional papers.” He assigned us in-class journaling and at-home reflections instead: “writing helps you think and understand the challenging ideas that you are grappling with in a course like this. I’m experimenting with this new approach; we’ll see together how it goes.”

Immediately, I could feel that my classmates were more excited about the work we were doing in comparison to my classmates from the previous section: During our class intermissions, discussions would continue because everyone involved actually cared. There were no complaints if class ran past schedule; people would only start leaving during an unfinished discussion when the professor who had the room next came in and kicked us out. This exercise in communal learning was living proof of Mills’s claim that “livelier impression of truth” is “produced by its collision with error.”

This experience made it clear to me that a university education should not be received in a vacuum. The promises that have been made about AI’s ability to democratize education by offering highly individual experiences are empty ones. The knowledge that AI has to offer—of the encyclopedic or formulaic kind—are what we as humans will, in the future, have the easiest time outsourcing. The truly inimitable wisdom and knowledge that is earned must come from engaging with other people, staying intellectually humble, and observing the world through a lens of perpetual curiosity.

Higher education of the kind Columbia and its ilk stand for was never meant to be frictionless or optimized for efficiency. The classes that have most shaped my worldview have all been discussion-dominant seminars in which I learned as much from my peers as from my professors. Even in larger lecture classes, the ones in which my professors interacted most with their students—like my Intermediate Microeconomics class, in which we’re often asked to do group work on chalkboards—were the ones I was least likely to skip.

Staying faithful to this Socratic mode of education requires Columbia to uphold a commitment of care to its students—one that it is actively undermining by increasing class sizes when resources are already strained, firing researchers, and embracing AI usage in its classes. Instead of encouraging the outsourcing of students’ learning to AI, the University ought to decrease class sizes, make learning a more interactive process, and incentivize professors to grade students in such a way that we can only succeed through actually valuing our work.

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In her 1954 essay “The Crisis in Education,” Hannah Arendt wrote that “We are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home” and “must be constantly set right anew.” The problem of education “is simply to educate in such a way that a setting-right remains actually possible.”

The rapid adoption of AI in society is a test of what exactly this “setting right” entails. The U.S. has been struggling with a numeracy and literacy crisis for almost a decade now. The convenience and easy accessibility of AI simply mean that it has never been more viable to get away with ignoring the downslide. As more parts of our education and employment systems integrate AI into their everyday functions (or outsource tasks to AI altogether), a significant portion of children will begin to believe that they don’t need to acquire any actual skills to ‘succeed’ in life. After all, it’s difficult to try and do something difficult that doesn’t have immediate payoffs when you know that AI could do it better.

The point, then, should be to show students why they ought to care about their education. The old adage is that education is about “teaching you how to think, not what to think.” In the age of AI, I propose that the most salient point of education—the “setting-right” that it is tasked with—is in proving its own utility by teaching us “why thinking matters.” The solution is for professors to design syllabi and grading standards that reflect the value of human creativity, ingenuity, and critical thinking. Turning a blind eye to the ways in which using AI to “offload” cognition might harm learning would be a betrayal of the purpose of education itself; the consequences of this apathy paint a bleak picture of the meaning(lessness) of human life, even supposing a benevolent, abundance-generating artificial general intelligence sometime in the future.

Arendt wrote that “education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin.” Reading it now feels like glancing into an eerily accurate trick mirror from the past, perhaps because the natural endpoint of an overreliance on AI is a total alienation from our own education, from our modes of knowledge production, from our very ability to think for ourselves—a total abnegation of our responsibility to understand.

Universities like Columbia have a responsibility to safeguard the future of education. There is immense institutional leverage to be found in bottom-up policies in syllabi. We ought to set incentives to better manifest a world that we can love—not one in which students are simply efficient cogs in the machine, but one that affirms our capacity as humans to understand what a meaningful life looks like.

Ms. Chen is a sophomore at Columbia College studying linguistics, economics and East Asian languages and cultures. She is the deputy editor 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.

If you stop by the second floor of Ferris Booth Commons around 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday or Thursday, you’ll probably hear raucous laughter spilling from a group of girls gathered at one of the long tables. If you’re curious, that’s the Columbia women’s golf team, devouring omelets after lift in an attempt to make it to an 8:40 a.m. class on time.

As co-captain of the team, I suppose it’s my responsibility to apologize for disturbing the tranquility of the morning—but I won’t. Apologizing would suggest remorse, but truthfully, breakfast after lift is one of the moments I look forward to most during the week.

I can’t pinpoint exactly why I treasure this brief period so much; it could be that I’m quite hungry after working out. It could also be the vibes: Ferris receives a lot of sunlight in the mornings. Or it could be that I simply enjoy spending the little reprieve I have between lift and classes with my teammates. All are probably true.

Perhaps that’s why I’m always taken aback when, after describing my schedule to friends, acquaintances, or people I meet in passing, some inevitably ask, “Why don’t you just quit?”

Admittedly, my tone betrays my frequent exhaustion. I’d be lying if I said I enjoy every moment of being on the team. Three lifts a week, plus Pilates, team meetings, mental performance sessions, team practice, individual practice, travel, and tournaments are a lot to handle—not to mention the fact that we compete in both the fall and spring, and take on the same course load as every other Columbia student. Yet, despite the immense amount of time and energy required by my golf commitments, it has never occurred to me that quitting was an option.

What’s concerning is the implication behind the question: If you’re unhappy, feel challenged, or experience discomfort, just walk away from whatever you’re doing! This premise completely ignores the fact that quitting has ramifications that extend far beyond the individual. A team is a web of interdependence that involves coaches, trainers, teammates, and even future recruits; by committing to play a sport for Columbia, student-athletes are signing up for what they know will be a demanding lifestyle. Abandoning that commitment because the reality of that lifestyle suddenly hits is not a neutral decision: It is a betrayal of the trust that others have invested in you and their expectation that you will bring your all to support the team.

The data shows this struggle extends beyond Columbia. The Harvard Crimson published an article in 2020 revealing that “one in four Class of 2020 athletes quit varsity teams during their time at Harvard.” Similarly, Brown University reported in 2016 that roughly 30 percent of its student-athletes had done the same. These athletes cited injuries, shifting interests and priorities, mental health, and a diminished love for their sport as some of the reasons for quitting.

I’ve had three teammates quit for at least one of the reasons listed above, and I myself have experienced a plethora of these challenges; anyone who looks at my scoring average in college will observe that I’ve struggled quite a bit compared to my junior golf days. As such, I lost a lot of the joy I once felt while competing. Golfweek, which was once to me as The Wall Street Journal is to an investment banker, became just another publication; Sunday nights spent glued to the TV watching the final stretch of a golf tournament turned into Sunday nights spent reading a book or watching YouTube; and personal hardships in my family made me question whether the hours spent practicing were worth sacrificing the time I could have spent with loved ones instead.

Yet, even at my lowest, I’ve never considered any of the challenges I’ve faced reason enough to quit; I was always taught to persevere no matter the circumstances, with career-ending injuries being the only exception. Any athlete will tell you that playing a sport cultivates grit—the strength of character and resolve to endure the hard and unpredictable. So what becomes of this “grit” when athletes arrive at college?

There are many answers to this question. Some recruits underestimate the demands of being a Division I athlete at an academically rigorous institution. Others use their sport merely as a ticket into the Ivy League. However, it seems to me that the issue lies in the culture.

Columbia is known as a premier research institution; the University clearly values academics and career achievement over athletics, a sentiment reflected in the student body. Consider the last time you attended a Columbia football game—I’m sure many have never even been to one. But walk into a career fair, and I’d hazard a guess you’ll find far more people in attendance than you would in the stands of any sporting event.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing: A good education should help students find a job suited to their interests, and I’d argue Columbia does that about as well as it can. However, the utilitarian nature of this culture—the constant evaluation of an activity based on whether it “pays off”—creates a narrow definition of what is worth doing. If playing a Division I sport doesn’t boost your resume, make you happier, or advance your career trajectory, then why bother? If the goal is to optimize for tangible achievement, quitting is the most logical choice.

However, I believe that logic misses something essential.

Some of the most meaningful moments of my college career emerged from situations where quitting would have been the “rational” decision. I once woke up on the final day of a tournament in intense pain as a result of severe bloating and nausea—I couldn’t even get out of bed. However, with the help of my assistant coach, I made it to the course twenty minutes before my tee time, and scraped together a 75 (+2). As it turns out, my score was good enough to contribute toward the team total. Another time, I had six midterms in seven days, with three days of tournament golf included in that time frame. I was so stressed that I brought my notes to the golf course and studied between shots. And, in my freshman year, I admitted to accidentally recording a lower score for myself than what I had actually shot, resulting in my disqualification from the individual standings. I was devastated by my mistake, but that didn’t matter; I had to keep my emotions in check because I was still competing for the team score the next day.

While I place immense value on the opportunities I have to practice persistence, it is not the result of my persistence that matters most, but the “why” that enables me to continue moving forward. For most of my life, any perseverance I demonstrated was fueled by my desire for achievement. I wanted to win, to have the best-looking swing, to strike the ball better than everyone else. It was, in every sense, about me.

The beauty of college golf is that it introduces the notion of team to a sport that is, by design, self-centered. So, when my performance in college faltered for prolonged periods—and with it the purpose I had long attached to playing—I found myself turning toward something larger than my own achievement: My teammates. Had I fixated only on my own frustration during moments of struggle, I doubt I would have had the mental strength to continue. But even when the temptation to throw in the towel reached its peak, the prospect of disappointing my teammates was a far more unbearable reality.

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To get into Columbia, you have to be selfish to a certain degree. Choosing to uphold the commitment of being an athlete at an Ivy League school, then, is a contrarian act precisely because it resists the self-centered pull of utilitarian mathematics. It demands loyalty when desertion would be the easier, more rational choice. It asks us to prioritize others over ourselves, even if the utility we derive from our athletic endeavors may appear, on paper, to be a net loss.

The value of being a college athlete, then, must lie apart from the utilitarian evaluation of happiness and achievement, because happiness and achievement in sports fluctuate and are often fleeting. The true value of college athletics—in being a part of a team and sacrificing convenience for resilience—is the meaning we derive from upholding our responsibilities to others. It lies in the discipline of showing up to lift on time, in giving our best at practice even when we aren’t at our best, and in knowing that we are there for one another.

It’s hard to fight against the pull of the utilitarian mindset, especially when it may feel like we’re surrounded by people who are light-years ahead in terms of academic and career achievements. However, I think we vastly underestimate the importance of engaging in activities that allow us to find meaning in situations where we are not always happy, comfortable, or gaining something for ourselves.

So when people ask, “Why don’t you just quit?” I know they’re not really asking about golf. They’re articulating a worldview shaped by Columbia’s culture, which measures everything by its utility. The blinders imposed by this worldview may yield a certain level of “success” for those who adhere to it, but it comes at a cost. Analyzing everything in terms of its net tangible benefit to yourself creates a myopic version of reality that does little to encourage the pursuit of what is meaningful: honest and purposeful work, developing close relationships, and choosing to display courage in the face of difficulty.

What people don’t see is the van rides to practice filled with laughter, or the thrill of watching a teammate sink a putt on the 18th hole. They don’t see that the joy I find in eating omelets after lift with my teammates is the sort of irreproducible joy that forms only through shared trials, tribulations, and triumphs. It’s a fulfillment unhindered by performance metrics or career anxieties—one I wouldn’t give up for anything.

Ms. Shen is a senior at Columbia College studying financial economics and computer science. 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.

A day without a reply is inconvenient. A week is unsettling. But then silence stops feeling temporary and starts feeling terminal: You stop checking your phone for messages and start checking the news for names.

As the daughter of the single diasporic branch of my Tabrizi family, my phone buzzes with alerts and updates. Death counts, multilateral responses, and diplomatic objectives all blur together in Iran and its international lattice. All we can trust are the rallies taking place beyond Iran’s borders, including the largest Iranian rally in Europe’s history with over 250,000 participants. All we can hope is that our grassroots work counters the foreign militarization of minoritized groups, rejected House bills, the threat of boots on the ground, and Lindey Graham’s confessed lack of a US plan in Iran.

My country is an ethnography answering a single research question: How many years does it take for turmoil-induced action to finally breed development? It is a tragedy that research ethics is more heavily regulated than human rights law. For those of us tied to Iran, the consequences are not theoretical. They are lived, and they are ongoing.

Columbia’s June 2025 Presidential Committee on Institutional Voice claims that though “events in the world may prompt demands for statements of moral leadership, condemnation, support, or sympathy,” the administration has no obligation to publicly respond unless the University’s “paramount values and fundamental commitments” are threatened. This is often used to justify institutional silence during times of political turmoil.

But the current suppression of basic human rights is a direct threat to Columbia’s “paramount values.” The University need not choose nor make a statement on Iran’s political future, but it must defend the conditions that make scholarship possible. When Columbia remains silent while those conditions are violently denied to students, teachers, and researchers abroad, it is not preserving neutrality; it is narrowing the meaning of its own values.

Demonstrations in recent years have not been limited to abstract political slogans; they have emerged from wage disputes, unpaid pensions, rising prices, and workplace grievances. Teachers, students, and labor organizers internationally have repeatedly gathered to demand accountability, and have been detained not for proposing a new regime, but solely for organizing and speaking publicly.

This matters for a university because these are not merely economic complaints. They become human-rights violations at the moment expression is punished: when workers cannot organize, when teachers are arrested for petitioning, and when students are disciplined for public speech. The issue is no longer inflation or sanctions policy. It is whether people may speak collectively about the conditions under which they live.

Student activism has never been foreign to Columbia University. Columbia students have protested war, apartheid, segregation, authoritarianism, and mass human rights abuses for over a century, often shaping national discourse long before governments followed. From Vietnam to South Africa, from ethnic studies to divestment movements, student pressure here has historically forced the University to confront the moral implications of global power. Columbia’s conflict is not with protest itself but with timing and risk. The University has repeatedly articulated moral positions, including issuing public statements after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet it tends to do so only once a broad political consensus has already formed. When a crisis is actively unfolding and public opinion remains contested, the administration shifts from moral language to procedural language, emphasizing neutrality, safety, and policy compliance. The result is a pattern: the University recognizes injustice most clearly in retrospect, but hesitates when recognition carries immediate political consequences. But, Columbia forgets, it does not merely observe foreign affairs; it helps define how they are debated. How can Columbia claim a headlining “commitment to attract and engage the best minds in pursuit of greater human understanding, pioneering new discoveries, and service to society” if it does not defend the conditions that make inquiry possible: the freedom to speak, to assemble, and to challenge authority without fear?

Administrators keep up this tradition because they know it is good in theory but less for their market of donors. Columbia must make its stance consistent and transparent: you either enforce free speech and the right to assembly; or you don’t. Columbia claims the former but acts on the latter. That is why Iran matters to Columbia. What the world casually calls ‘the Iranian protests’ is, in fact, a live test of the very rights this University claims to champion: the right to assemble, to speak without fear, and to dissent against state power.

The language of “unrest” no longer captures what many Iranians experience daily: mass arrests; lethal force; enforced silencing and erasure; and the systematic violation of rights that Iran’s own constitution (which is inaccessible to us outside the country due to the weeks-long internet blackout) claims to protect—freedom of assembly, due process, labor protections—alongside universally recognized human rights. In today’s Iran, these freedoms exist largely on paper. Peaceful protests are suppressed, detainees are denied fair legal process, and workers are punished for organizing. Yet, even as images and testimonies pierce the blackout, a deeper problem remains—one that has haunted Iranian resistance for decades, and now paralyzes a meaningful international response.

As a university, Columbia holds a unique position within the Iranian struggle.

From inside and across the diaspora, there are competing camps: those who demand immediate regime collapse with no compromise; those who argue for constitutional transition and legal reform; those who fixate on dynastic restoration, including Reza Pahlavi, whose symbolic appeal to some in exile is matched by deep skepticism among others who view monarchy—however modernized—as a return to centralized authority rather than accountability. These disagreements are real and unresolved.

Yet this fragmentation has consequences. When no unified political program exists, any government that intervenes risks being understood as choosing a side. And once states choose sides, authorities in Tehran easily portray all dissent as foreign manipulation. The movement is then recast not as citizens demanding rights, but as a geopolitical project.

This is precisely why institutions like Columbia matter. A university is not a government, a party, or a foreign ministry.

As a nonprofit and nonpartisan institution, Columbia does not have to endorse a faction, a leader, or a political outcome. It can do something far narrower and far more appropriate: defend the principles it claims to stand for—freedom of expression, the right to assemble, and the protection of scholars and students from punishment for speech.

The reality is that neutrality is harder to achieve than partiality. Columbia’s post-institutional neutrality investments, divestment debates, disciplinary decisions, and public statements have always communicated values. Additionally, if Columbia declines to defend these principles when they are under active assault, it is not remaining neutral. It is quietly redefining what its values mean in practice. When the University rigorously evaluates human rights claims in some contexts but hesitates in others, it teaches students a dangerous lesson: that human rights are conditional, selective, and subordinate to convenience.

Attempted neutrality toward competing political programs is appropriate. Neutrality toward the suppression of speech is not.

The University has hosted foreign heads of state, advised governments, trained diplomats, shaped sanctions discourse, and incubated policy frameworks that travel far beyond campus. Columbia professors have advised on West Asian policy, sanctions design, international law, development economics, and democratic transitions, sometimes with measurable impact, sometimes with blind spots. Iran has not been absent from this history. But too often, Columbia’s engagement with Iran has been episodic or personality-driven rather than sustained and accountable.

The 2007 Bollinger-Ahmadinejad confrontation is a prime example. While a valuable opportunity for open discourse, the event ultimately reduced Iran to a spectacle of moral theater, one night of clarity without long-term institutional follow-through. Engagement ended where discomfort began. No durable infrastructure remained for Iranian scholars, students, or civil society.

That framework is insufficient.

So what should Columbia do?

Iran’s tragedy is not only that the state kills its people. It is that spreading ideological absolutism has convinced the world to wait for perfect agreement before acting at all. The University must act before this faulty thinking infects their response to Iran.

In the short term, the administration must protect Iranian and Iranian-heritage students academically, psychologically, and legally. Trauma does not pause for finals. Speech protections cannot be selectively enforced. Emergency funding, counseling access, and clear protest guidance are not political acts; they are institutional obligations.

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In the medium term, Columbia should convene without coercion. It should formalize spaces, building on student initiatives like Listening Tables, where Iranians across ideologies articulate minimum demands that do not require consensus on regime change to protect human life: internet access, medical neutrality, release of detainees, independent monitoring.

Administrators must only endorse the institutionalization of Iran not as a crisis spectacle, but as a sustained academic and moral commitment. Fellowships for at-risk scholars. Research on authoritarian resilience and digital repression. Archives that preserve testimony before it is erased. And, critically, a standing standard for how the University responds to mass human-rights violations—regardless of which country dominates headlines.

Students, too, carry responsibility. What is normalized now (i.e., disinformation, selective outrage, performative activism) will become governance later. Taking up space on campus with any and all causes is valuable and necessary. Iran is a blank canvas held up by a ghost regime. Students, pick up your tools (discipline, verification, coalition-building) and get to painting! Make history so powerful that Columbia administrators rewrite it as if they were on your side the entire time.

A university that claims to “advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world” must act when certainty is impossible. Waiting for consensus in the face of mass repression is not neutrality.

And if Columbia truly believes its own motto, In lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen, then it must recognize that the light it claims to offer obligates action when darkness is imposed elsewhere. Iran is only one such place. But a massacre is unfolding there now.

Giselle Sami Dalili is a Master of International Affairs candidate at the School of International and Public Affairs concentrating in development and governance. They are a staff writer for Sundial, and a first-generation American of Azeri-Iranian descent.

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.

In a recent opinion piece in the Columbia Daily Spectator, author Emerson Wolfgang Ellenwood CC’ 28—the Vice President of Finance for the Columbia College Student Council—emphatically condemned the administration’s plan to expand undergraduate class sizes, claiming that such a move threatens Columbia’s “institutional future.” He even urged his fellow students to “not donate a cent if Columbia chooses to expand at this moment.”

Ellenwood’s op-ed was followed quickly by a wider resistance from the Columbia community. On March 5, the Spectator reported on an open letter to the Columbia University Board of Trustees expressing concerns about Columbia’s plans to expand the student body—now signed by over 500 students and faculty members. The letter expressed “strong opposition to the potential undergraduate enrollment expansion” and asserted that Columbia’s current infrastructure is not equipped to handle a larger influx of students.

Ellenwood convincingly argued how increasing the class size will create inconveniences for current students. Of course, everyone agrees that crowded dining halls and increased student-teacher ratios sound unpleasant. However, apart from vaguely referencing Columbia’s “financial troubles,” Ellenwood failed to contextualize the impetus for the University’s decision. In July 2025, the institution settled with the Trump administration to restore federal research funding that had been cut earlier that year. Columbia agreed to pay over $200 million and accept compliance terms that affect university operation—namely, reducing the University’s financial dependence on international enrollment.

In addition to forcing a payout, the Trump administration has cracked down on elite institutions’ international student ratio. The administration circulated its “Compact For Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a letter attempting to impose restrictions on specific elite universities which states that “no more than 15 percent of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5 percent shall be from any one country.” Though this letter didn’t explicitly include Columbia, the message to elite institutions from the Trump administration is clear: International enrollment is under intense scrutiny from the federal government. Refuse to cooperate, and more consequences could follow.

Forty percent of Columbia’s students are international, a significantly higher proportion than the national average for U.S. institutions. Indeed, our international community is embedded into the greater student experience. It’s a selling point that the institution participates in a “dynamic global community.”

However, Columbia’s high number of international students is not solely a result of the University valuing a global community. International students also pay full tuition at high rates: Columbia is need-aware for international students; as a result, it tends to offer them significantly less financial aid than for domestic students. This reduced financial aid results in international students accounting for a higher proportion of revenues from tuition. The Wall Street Journal estimates that, in 2023, economic contributions from international students generated over $903 million in revenue for Columbia (around 60 percent of the University’s net tuition revenue). This revenue is critical for funding research, instruction, and services that benefit the entire student community.

Running the Numbers

If the objective is to lower the percentage of international students over time, Columbia has two options: Reduce the number of international students entering the University, or increase the total number of admitted students while keeping the international population size the same. In other words, they can either lower the numerator or increase the denominator. Since international students contribute a large amount to Columbia’s total revenue, the first approach would create a severe and immediate revenue cliff. Not to mention that, by critically decreasing the international student body, the institution would be undermining their own ideal of being a global community.

The second option is to gradually increase the total number of students without needing to drastically alter the number of international students for incoming classes. By increasing the denominator, the ratio shifts over time without forcing an abrupt decline in revenue for the university. The adjustment in revenue is distributed over several admission cycles instead of being compressed into a single year. While a class size increase could feel significant in a single year, expanding enrollment provides flexibility in shifting the ratio over time without cutting revenue all at once.

From a financial standpoint, expansion is the least destabilizing option available. And, of course, if Columbia doesn’t give in to the demands of the Trump administration, further federal funding would be cut, which only serves to the detriment of current students. It’s no question that expansion is difficult given capacity issues, but the alternatives carry far greater risks to the university’s financial stability and student opportunities.

Misdirected Blame

Ellenwood does not mention the settlement. The argument made does not contextualize why enrollment ratios matter to Columbia’s revenue and research infrastructure: There is a logical gap in insinuating that the expansion’s reasoning is solely due to administrators prioritizing revenue over educational quality. To leap directly from Columbia expanding class sizes to the idea that administrators are making an “attempt at short-term financial gain” assumes a motivation that doesn’t consider the external constraints imposed on the University.

This criticism reflects a broader propensity for Columbia students to default to interpreting administrative action through a lens of bad faith. We misdirect blame at the administration rather than attempt to understand the constraints they face. There is a significant difference between holding leadership accountable and immediately assuming ill intent. By neglecting to consider all factors shaping a decision, student outrage and activism devolve into mere virtue signaling. Worse yet, such signaling detracts from efforts to find meaningful solutions.

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This expansion issue is fundamentally a practical question: How should Columbia balance complying with federal settlement terms and keeping the accounts of a world-class research university in the black? Ellenwood has listed a number of arguments as to why expansion makes no economic sense: higher instructional costs, campus services being spread thin, and a strain on housing. However, we must remember that the administration has access to data—information like housing construction timelines, staffing costs, and revenue from tuition—that students simply do not. The administration has likely used months of modeling and consultation across different departments. It is extremely unlikely that a student opinion column has identified a crucial miscalculation that the institution had somehow failed to notice, especially if that calculation relies on ambiguous and unquantifiable metrics like the devaluation of “campus community.”

The question at hand is not whether expansion has its trade-offs—of course it does. The real question is whether these tradeoffs are less destabilizing than the alternative. Treating this expansion as a moral fault of the institution is a gross oversimplification.

It is understandable for students to raise concerns about housing capacity and crowded facilities, but framing expansion as a betrayal of our student body and calling for students to dissent by not donating to the university in the future only ignores the institution’s predicament.

If students truly care about advocating for our community on this issue, it shouldn’t be a misguided condemnation of Columbia’s administration. The environment created by the Trump administration is what has placed us in this precarious situation. Any serious critique of expansion policy should at the very least acknowledge the financial constraints that are limiting Columbia’s options. Students are free to oppose expansion, but that opposition is simply meaningless noise if we refuse to engage with the unfortunate political and economic reality facing the University.

Mr. Tandon is a freshman at Columbia College studying political 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.

On the evening of April 20, 2024, Columbia student Jonathan Lederer CC ‘26 was assaulted by a pro-Palestine protester inside the campus gates. Minutes later, as he and a group of Jewish students stood near the encampment, masked protesters called them “inbred” and accused them of having “no culture.” On their way out of campus, the group of Jews was told to “go back to Poland,” where their ancestors were slaughtered less than a century ago. The next day, when two Jewish students attempted to enter the encampment, hundreds of students linked arms to “push them out.”

These events are all well documented. It is no grand secret that the encampment participants engaged in, and invited, blatant discrimination against Jews, nor is there much doubt that this all violated Columbia’s policies.

Nevertheless, throughout the encampment period in April 2024, more than 100 faculty members stood guard outside the encampment: blocking Jewish students from entering on the basis of their connection to the Jewish national project, and ostensibly protecting the protest from potential law and security enforcement actions. At first glance, one might reasonably believe that these faculty actions resulted from an ideological alignment with the protesters’ cause. But on April 26, 2024, the University Senate passed a resolution by a wide margin—62 in favor, 14 against, 3 abstaining—that reframed the entire conversation. They resolved to condemn the University for undermining “the traditions of academic freedom and shared governance” when it acted to regulate the out-of-control and rights-violating protests.

On December 9, 2025, I argued in the Columbia Daily Spectator that the University must confront an unresolved question: What happens when professors invoke the concept of academic freedom to defend discriminatory conduct that is unrelated to scholarship? I suggested that a concept of “academic freedom” that protects such conduct while providing cover for rule-violators has lost credibility.

In response, Sundial deputy editor Imaan Chaudhry published a rebuttal, claiming that I had abandoned academic freedom altogether in service of my “immediate cause,” pro-Israel advocacy. She argued that in doing so, I neglected “the principle that safeguards all views.” I believe that her interpretation of my argument misconstrues both its structure and its purpose.

Chaudhry suggests that my argument is structured as follows: since academic freedom has been abused, it must therefore be abandoned. She accuses me of adopting the progressive impulse “to conclude that because abuses occur, the ideal itself is no longer worth defending.” However, this ignores the nuance of my point. In reality, I argued that if academic freedom is indeed construed to legitimately protect discriminatory conduct, then the term has lost its credibility, precisely because it no longer resembles the ideal itself. That distinction is critical because it determines whether academic freedom is being misapplied, or whether it has been expanded to include conduct that reshapes who may participate in the academic community.

Chaudhry and I seem to agree on the context. During the encampments, certain faculty members did more than express “controversial” views. They physically guarded exclusionary protest perimeters and participated in those protests themselves, lending institutional legitimacy to a movement that, in practice, excluded members of the University community on the basis of their ethnic or national identity. When pressed, academic freedom was invoked as a shield. My argument in Spectator, thus, began by asking what follows if that invocation is accepted.

By my logic, one of two things can be true. Either academic freedom protects these professors’ conduct, or it does not. That is a question of principle. Personally, I agree with much of the “conservative” account of academic freedom that Chaudhry invokes. A principle of academic freedom that protects dissenting scholarship from ideological retaliation is worth defending vigorously. That should be obvious, and I have never argued otherwise.

But preserving a principle by virtue requires preserving its intelligibility. If the Columbia community accepts that academic freedom is not meant to protect discriminatory conduct, then it is our responsibility to call out these professors’ misapplication of the term. If, on the other hand, these professors truly believe that academic freedom protects what they’ve done, then I argue that the concept’s scope has been redefined to depart so dramatically from its original purpose—truth-seeking—that it no longer resembles the otherwise defensible principle Chaudhry articulates so well.

Indeed, the burden falls squarely on those invoking the concept to identify what they are referring to when they talk about “academic freedom.” Are they talking about the principle meant to protect what acclaimed Boston College professor of higher education Ana M. Martínez Alemán calls “the faculty’s sovereign claims to determine pedagogical values [and] set research agenda and curricula”? Or is it something broader? Professors who appeal to academic freedom to justify their conduct must either defend a definition broad enough to include discrimination and harassment, or concede that their behavior falls outside its classical bounds.

In collapsing the nature of my argument and reframing my question as a moral crusade, Chaudhry accuses me of reasoning like a “progressive”—admittedly a low blow—and suggests that I am attempting to empower administrators “because they are acting on [my] side.”

But I did not call for administrators to arbitrarily promote my own moral cause. I called for consistency. Columbia acknowledged the encampment as a discriminatory movement. Many students who participated in it and other rule-violating protests were eventually disciplined. My question was whether faculty participation in materially similar conduct is categorically insulated by the principle of academic freedom. That has nothing to do with progressive moralism, as Chaudhry suggests. It is, at its core, a question about whether general rules of conduct apply as they should: generally.

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Asking these questions does not risk “intellectual amnesia.” If anything, allowing a principle to be stretched in the name of short-term political activism, without clarifying its limits, invites even further instability. A boundaryless concept cannot protect anyone reliably. It can only be reinterpreted again and again as power shifts. That is precisely what I want to avoid.

Chaudhry ultimately arrives at her conclusion on the basis of a false assumption. She writes that academic freedom “has consistently been understood not to protect explicit activism outside the scholarly context,” and that this point “is not particularly controversial.” The unfortunate reality at Columbia suggests the opposite: the fact that faculty participation in the encampment is defended in the language of academic freedom suggests that its limits are, in fact, up for debate. Ignoring this reality means blindly defending the term based on purely theoretical ideals, without regard to its practical application. That outcome is far more destabilizing than asking hard questions about its misuse in order to fulfill one of the core purposes of university governance, which is, according to former American Association of University Professors vice president Larry Gerber, “identifying the appropriate boundaries for the exercise of that [academic] freedom.”

In the end, the practical use of academic freedom cannot be entirely divorced from its meaning. When faculty invoke academic freedom to shield conduct which demonstrably falls outside its scholarly purpose, they weaken the principle Chaudhry rightly defends. By insisting that they either defend that expanded definition openly or concede that their conduct lies beyond its traditional scope, I simply sought to insist on conceptual clarity, not discard the principle entirely.

The real question I hope we can ask, then, is not whether academic freedom in its ideal form should be preserved—we should certainly try. It is whether academic freedom in its ideal form still exists.

Mr. Baker is a senior at Columbia College studying Middle East History, and the former co-chair of Columbia Aryeh. He is a guest contributor 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 Reader,

I suggest to the reader as a possible approach, understanding these essays as ones which, for the most part, discuss extremely personal issues on the micro level; nevertheless, when fused with language or art, they transcend the private and address a much larger audience. At that point, they begin to explore emotions and ideas that seem both universal and, ironically, touchingly private.

Benjamin Nagin, my father, published this short editor’s note on April 23, 1993, in Volume 26 of Skidmore College’s student academic opinion publication, Politeia. At the time, he was in his last semester of college, preparing to go to law school. He envisioned his final edition as editor of Politeia to be about how private intellectual fascinations can have compelling universal themes.

I find this observation representative of the underlying connection between the pieces in this issue. Flipping through this edition, however, the reader might notice the opposite of my father’s observation. Our writers are decisively interested in commenting on community concerns or engaging directly with other campus publications via the Op-Ed.

Drawing on her experience as a gun sense activist, incoming Deputy Editor Xinyan Chen unpacks The Columbia Daily Spectator’s response to the tragic shooting at Brown University, refuting the argument that the Columbia administration’s response is demonstrative of institutional elitism.

From an even more local perspective, guest contributor Chloe Hoyle BC ‘26 shares a personal commentary on our community’s lack of reaction to the devastating fire last December at the Ascension Roman Catholic Church. She then goes on to diagnose this as indicative of Columbia students’ disinterest in our neighbors’ lives. Her proposed solution? To make local concerns the core of Columbia’s intellectual doctrine.

And, as he so often does, Sundial Managing Editor Nick Baum explores the history of our surrounding locale—this time, at Old Broadway Synagogue in Harlem, a storied congregation that has been a home to Jews of the area for 114 years. The title of Baum’s piece reflects the congregation’s resilience as one of the last standing in Harlem: “The Little Synagogue That Could.”

Since I can remember, Volume 26 has been sitting on my family’s coffee table. Ironically, I only managed to actually pick up Politeia and read through its contents as I was preparing for my last semester as Editor-in-Chief of Sundial over the winter break. Yes, perhaps I should have been a “better son” and read through the journal sooner. But, as these things go, I read Politeia at the perfect time. 32 years later, as I was scrambling to understand the direction of this January-February Sundial, my father’s note was revelatory.

Thus, I suggest to the reader as a possible approach, understanding these essays as ones that, for the most part, discuss extremely omnipresent issues on the macro level; nevertheless, when fused with history or faith, they transcend the public and address a more intimate audience. At that point, they begin to explore emotions and ideas that seem both private and, ironically, touchingly universal.

For the staff,

Alex Nagin

Editor-in-Chief

Mr. Nagin is a senior in the Dual BA program with Trinity College Dublin, studying political science and Russian. He is the editor-in-chief of Sundial.

Sometimes rhetorical flourishes are so well executed that they can almost fool the reader into thinking an argument is not banal. Columbia Open Discourse Alliance’s (CODA) invocation of “open discourse” and having people “talk to each other” is one of those instances.

On February 4 CODA’s founders Aum Desai CC ’28, Nikos Mohammadi CC ’28, and Chloe Hoyle BC ’26 penned an op-ed in The Columbia Daily Spectator. CODA, for those who are unfamiliar, is “a non-partisan, student-led coalition dedicated to strengthening our capacity to uphold free speech and open inquiry.” In their piece, they invoke Columbia’s rich history in contrast to the last two years, proclaiming that undergraduates lack dialogic skills and that this deficit is intellectually damaging.

It sounds nice that the CODA leaders are rising to the challenge against their ideologically homogenous peers by proclaiming that we just need to talk to each other. To be clear, I do not take issue with emphasizing dialogue and ideological pluralism: I work as a Listening Tables fellow and write for Sundial. However, I take issue with this sanctimonious tone that presents a widely accepted principle as novel, while simultaneously oversimplifying the problem at hand.

CODA has diagnosed the problem as merely a lack of dialogue. Their solution, as articulated in their op-ed, is to create a new initiative for fostering such dialogue that Columbia is so clearly lacking. While this sounds laudable, universities and research centers around the country (including Columbia) have already been installing dialogue programs, such as Dialogue Across Difference and University Life’s Campus Conversations. In these spaces, I have engaged in countless moments of successful dialogue on secondary matters, from news headlines to university drama.

I struggle to believe that CODA is doing anything conceptually different from these other efforts. The writers’ claim that “if we can imagine a university brave enough to exchange ideas, then we ought to try to build it,” implies not only that Columbia is presently failing in this regard, but also that such bravery is largely absent from existing understandings of the University’s purpose. The suggestion that a new “durable civic infrastructure for dialogue” must now be constructed subtly positions CODA as the primary—or even first—architect of this effort.

What CODA fails to realize is that young people do not need more dialogue: They need more convictions. The first prerequisite for disagreement is belief. People cannot talk to each other or contribute to an intellectual conversation if they have no convictions of their own. CODA’s emphasis on dialogue as the problem does nothing to rectify the underlying issues of the modern university, and instead exacerbates them by drawing attention away from the core problem.

Allan Bloom, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, penned a now ubiquitous op-ed for the National Review in the 1980s diagnosing the nihilism of young people. He argued that young people are being taught by their universities to believe in a moral and intellectual relativism that casts all ideas as equally worthy of consideration. The problem with this logic is that it leads to an inability to judge truth-claims, which, in turn, leads to a total confusion as to how one ought to live their life.

Forty years later, this issue has yet to be resolved. College-age students lack the capacity to make judgments because judgment requires choice, and choice requires commitment. The result is a crippling decision paralysis that prevents students from committing to beliefs, habits, religions, and relationships. We also see this manifest in the classroom: Many lack the confidence to share their thoughts on assigned readings in seminars. If they can’t commit to opinions in low-stakes environments like Core classes, there is little reason to believe they can form opinions on larger moral or philosophical questions.

The problem of the past two years was not protests, as CODA’s leaders claim. In fact, one could argue that the protests, however misguided, represented moments in which students stood for something. They reached conclusions, made moral judgments, and attempted to act principally. In a strange way, I would much rather share a classroom with a leftist—despite how misguided I find many of their views to be—than with the passionless, amorphous, nihilistic average young person. At least the leftist activist acknowledges that certain ideas are better than others. And commitment, not dialogue alone, is the true precondition for serious intellectual life. We can argue about what is right and wrong, but if one does not even believe in a right and wrong, there is no point in conversation.

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I would compare the difference in types of belief most closely to St. Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between credere Deum and credere in Deum. Some beliefs are intellectual assents, propositions held at a distance and subject to revision. Others are beliefs “into” something: movements of the heart, soul, and body oriented toward the Good. In other words, our deepest convictions are not opinions we hold, but commitments that shape the way we live. These latter beliefs are not inculcated across a dialogue panel. CODA and similar dialogue-based initiatives risk flattening this distinction by treating all beliefs as equally debatable.

I should be able to believe in the existence of certain moral laws without being obliged to have to “both sides” the claim. I find it offensive that some of my most deeply held truths, the ones I order my life around, are expected to be dissected and reduced to matters of “dialogue” and “disagreement.” It often feels as though, with just enough talking, I am supposed to be persuaded to abandon or amend them, as if they were merely another intellectual abstraction. Taken to its logical conclusion, this hyper-emphasis on “dialogue” produces intellectual hysteria. This is where a person cannot decide on even minor policy or political opinions without compulsively remaining “open” to every possible argument and rebuttal, endlessly deferring judgment without ever accepting an answer.

This is why Desai, Mohammadi, and Hoyle’s op-ed’s reference to civil rights leaders like John Dewey as exemplars of Columbia’s tradition of open discourse is so puzzling. This is my first time hearing about such a tradition. The “point” of the Core is not to teach students how to “argue their way toward understanding across texts, traditions, and moral disagreements.” Core classes are not debate clubs. Nor should they be treated as a buffet of opinions. The point of the Core, at least according to Columbia’s promotional material, is more closely related to developing the person and instructing them in a non-disciplinary environment.

More to the point, civil rights leaders represent the opposite of what CODA describes. They were not merely participants in dialogue, holding opinions open to revision. They made substantive claims about truth and justice and devoted their lives to it. One does not dedicate himself to the civil rights movement if he thinks he can simultaneously hold a middle ground with a segregationist.

CODA’s purpose is another reproduction of Bloom’s worries about the modern university student. Overemphasizing and mechanizing dialogue reproduces relativism. We should not chastise those who believe that there is a right and wrong out there. These are the types of trailblazers that for better or worse, shape our world. They are what make Columbia a remarkable place.

Ms. Chaudhry is a senior at Columbia College studying history. 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.

“I think these people are representing a small portion of the Iranian people,” a keffiyeh-clad student tells me of the Columbia Iranian Students Association’s (CISA) pro-Pahlavi messaging at their protest last month.

Here’s what I observed at this demonstration: An organization, like the broader diasporic Iranian “resistance,” caught up on ideological dogmatism, a hyper-aggressive posture, and the inability to let go of the past. CISA’s fundamentally bourgeois disposition, in Columbia’s current performative protest climate and CUAD-indoctrinated subculture, are preventing them from achieving any implicit message beyond “Ayatollah bad, West and Reza Pahlavi good.”

First, we must look back to history: Iran is a unique place with a long and oft-fraught history of achieving genuine self-determination, and it’s not as simple as being against the Ayatollah.

The year is 1953. Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Kermit is in Tehran, where he is the head of Operation Ajax, a CIA effort to oust Iran’s democratically elected, nationalist-socialist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The supposedly “anti-Communist” coup—the first such U.S. foreign intervention—succeeds. The West maintains control of Iran’s oil industry, and the Shah is effectively reinstated as the absolute monarch.

For the following two decades, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi rules Iran with an iron fist. His SAVAK thugs—the secret police—barge into homes in the middle of the night, dragging teenagers away from their weeping mothers for merely owning a copy of The Communist Manifesto. The Shah organizes lavish parties for foreign dignitaries to which ordinary Iranians are not invited, running a bill in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 1979, profoundly disappointed with the pro-Western status quo that appears to subvert the national good, the Iranian people rebell—never mind Mossadegh’s more tame nationalist socialism—but, now, for a full-blown Marxist-Islamist Revolution. Despite the secular attitudes of many Iranians at the time, a whopping near-99 percent vote in favor of the Islamic Republic. And, as a quick glance at Iran’s political situation today will indicate, the Marxists didn’t fare too well following the Revolution: What Iranians got instead was a hard-Sharia, tyrannical, and kleptocratic theocracy. It’s impossible to talk about the protests happening within Iran, and those organized by the diaspora, without understanding this history.

Fast forward to 2026. Since the new year, an enormous number of Iranians have been killed for protesting on the streets. The Iranian government claims that over 3,000 have been killed, while the U.S.-based Iran advocacy group the Human Rights Activists News Agency reports that over 6,500 are dead, with some figures reaching almost 40,000.

Today, diasporic Iranians and their ideological allies will—admittedly, not without some reason—parrot the line, Oh, everyone protested about Gaza, why is nobody protesting about us? Republican Zionist personality Eyal Yakoby wrote a now-viral tweet on January 10, “BREAKING: Live look at Columbia University after they learned that over 2,000 unarmed Iranian civilians were massacred by the Islamic Republic,” showing a picture of an empty Butler Lawn.

CISA posted a screenshot of Yakoby’s tweet on their Instagram page, saying that they would organize a protest once they got back, as classes were not in session for winter break. On Friday, January 30, they held a protest at the Sundial. Unfortunately for them, what ensued was not much better than Yakoby’s provocative meme.

I got there shortly after 1 p.m., already freezing. A dozen or so students were leading the protest, and another dozen were echoing their chants: “Free Free Iran,” “Freedom for Iran,” “Fight for Iran/Pray for Iran/Do Something for Iran.” Later, a moment of silence was held for the “40,000 innocents” who had perished at the hands of the regime. Surprisingly, they did not carry the simple lion and sun flag of pre-revolutionary Iran—which, by this point, is a universal symbol of resistance against the Islamic Republic. Instead, a version of the flag was flown that included the crown, as well as a blue flag with the coat of arms of the Pahlavi dynasty.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, has not condemned or even admitted to his father’s atrocities, a period far from the “democracy” he claims to champion today to a Western audience, and which Roya Hakakian, for example, conveniently whitewashes in the pages of The Free Press as “a lost and, in retrospect, cherished era.” Pahlavi tweeted on January 9 directly to Iranians in Farsi, “Those of you who were hesitant, join your fellow compatriots on Friday night (January 9 - 8 PM), and make the crowd even larger so that the regime’s repressive power becomes even weaker.”

He went on: “I know that despite the internet and communication cuts, you will not abandon the streets. Be assured that victory belongs to you!” The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal praised him, alleging that he took “a risk” in calling for the protests. What that “risk” precisely was is hard to imagine. The people who took the risk, in my mind, were clearly the Iranians who bravely protested the regime, many even before Pahlavi’s call, and far too many of whom perished—not Pahlavi, who simply put out a tweet, perhaps from the comfort of his $3.1 million estate in Potomac, Maryland.

Columbians assembled in the middle of campus with the politically-charged Pahlavi coat of arms. That’s why it didn’t make much sense when the CISA girl with the bullhorn proclaimed that the protest wasn’t political and was meant to unite everyone: “I turn now to the Iranian community, to the Iranian diaspora, both at Columbia and across the United States. We must put aside our differences. We must come together as one for a free Iran. I believe there is a space for us to come together, irrespective of political stances or religion, in order to support the Iranian people in their fight for freedom.”

The slogans continued: “All eyes on Iran,” “Zan Zendegi Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom), “Be the voice of Iran.” At some point, the girl chanting chuckled, “I’m running out of ideas…but.” And then the rhetoric escalated, not only to “Down with the Islamic Republic,” but to “Death to the dictator!” After a few tries, however, I think they realized how hostile their language was. The protesters quickly changed their chant to a more tame “down with the dictator.”

Speaking to organizers after the protest had finished, they told me that there was a “diversity of opinions” amongst the organizers, despite the explicit pro-Pahlavi messaging. On “death to the dictator,” and how it could turn many off from supporting them, I was told, “That’s okay,” and that, “One of the things that I think should be a key takeaway from today’s protest is that we are amplifying the voices of the people who’ve been suppressed in Iran, right? So when you chant ‘marg bar dictator’ in Iran, you die.” When I asked her, the girl who had chanted “death to the dictator” stuttered and didn’t know what to say.

Elisha Baker, CC ‘26, a prominent Zionist activist, told me that he was in attendance ​​because, “as a Jew and as an American, and as someone who benefits from the privileges of this country, I think this is a cause worth standing up for. And it’s also worth noting that the Islamic regime in Iran has inflicted terror on Americans, on Jews, on Westerners across the world, and the struggle of the people of Iran is a struggle that extends outside of the boundaries of Iran as well.” Baker told me that pro-Israel groups were not involved in organizing the protest, but that he nonetheless felt an “obligation” to be there. On the flag of the Pahlavi dynasty, Baker didn’t have strong feelings, saying, “Look, I’m just here because I want to support the Iranian community on campus and stand with the people of Iran,” and that he didn’t know much more.

As I looked around, one student was wearing a keffiyeh. Though certainly not uncommon on our campus, this struck me as particularly odd for this protest. That’s because Gaza and Iran are two causes that share few activists, and as you’ll see from a quick scroll on X, many pro-Pahlavi and anti-regime activists engage in incredibly dehumanizing and anti-universalist rhetoric against Muslims and Arabs broadly. Take prominent X personality and former Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari, who told us to “never trust an Arab Muslim,” specifically Emaratis, whom she alleged were “just as backwards and savage as the rest of the 7th century savages.”

Similarly, earlier this month, Christiane Amanpour, a CNN journalist who grew up in Tehran, confronted Pahlavi in an interview at the Munich Security Conference about the fanatical, trolling dogmatism of his supporters. The Pahlavi-ists responded by proving her point, heckling at her: “Khak bar sahr-e-toon! Cheghad as shomah-eh lajan ma bademoon meeyad!” (“Shame on you! How much we f**king detest you maggot scum!”), “You are a disingenuous journalist, shame on you!”, and “You decided to lobby for regime!” They did so because she had apparently “disrespected” the protesters in Iran and the “crown prince”—all for simply questioning him in an hour-long interview. Never mind Amanpour’s many previous hard-hitting interviews of Islamic Republic officials over the past three decades, or her refusal to wear a headscarf when speaking with the late President Ebrahim Raisi in September 2022, leading to the interview’s cancellation.

There are many other examples—mostly along the lines of “I am not Muslim, I am Persian!” or “We are Aryans!”—but I shall spare the reader further snippets of racialist commentary on X.

Angel, CC ‘29—the keffiyeh-donning kid from earlier—told me that he was there to support the people of Iran, though from the get-go—unprompted by me—he said, “I kind of object to the Kingdom of Iran’s flag.” Contrary to the protest leaders’ claims that the crisis in Iran was “simple,” he acknowledged that Iran was a “complicated situation,” and supported the idea that the people of Iran “should decide for themselves” free from U.S. intervention. On the topic of his keffiyeh, Angel said he was mostly wearing it because it was cold that day, but that it is nonetheless always “political” to wear one at Columbia, and that the protest organizers had told him to take it off.

Still, for his disagreement with the pro-Pahlavi messaging and the demand that he remove his keffiyeh (he clearly had not complied), he stayed. I found his willingness to put aside political disagreements with the protest organizers and show up for the Iranian people somewhat commendable. This, of course, does not reflect too well on CISA.

“Obviously, they’re people here at Columbia who have the funds to be here, who are part of the diaspora, who haven’t experienced the conditions of Iran firsthand,” Angel continued. “I haven’t either. And so I think it’s kind of concerning that they sideline the keffiyeh. They also mentioned during their speech some of the other issues concerning funding proxy wars, directly referencing Iran’s support for Palestinian fighters in Palestine.” He added, “Obviously, I just think of it to be really silly.”

Ignoring that Angel uses the euphemism “Palestinian fighters” for Hamas terrorists, the keffiyeh is indeed also complicated. On the one hand, for Iranians, it is a controversial symbol based on its usage by the Ayatollah. Still, to make enemies because of this garment alone makes little sense in the current moment, especially as many diasporic Iranians hope for more individuals to join their cause. Bottom line: if they’re implicitly referencing the pro-Palestinian protests and don’t want anyone to wear a keffiyeh at theirs, they’d be better off just shutting up.

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This, as I would find out, is exemplary of a disconcerting pattern of ideologically dogmatic behavior from CISA. As they were planning their protest, per a tip, they also wanted to pressure the administration into somehow firing tenured professor Hamid Dabashi simply for his assertion on Al Jazeera that Mossad was helping orchestrate the protests in Iran, even though an Israeli operation to install Pahlavi has been corroborated by extensive reporting from Israel’s paper of record, Haaretz, and Mossad presence on the streets has been corroborated by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Mia Feizbakhsh, BC ‘26, the co-president of CISA, confirmed to me in a voice note that “there are members of the general body of CISA, and board members, who had wanted to create a petition to pressure the administration to fire Hamid Dabashi” over his Al Jazeera interview but, following a vote, they decided against doing so “at this time.”

We are being told that now is the time to unite for Iran. We are being told to never mind that Pahlavi is clearly at the helm of this movement, that there will be a time to decide once the Ayatollah is done with. We are being told not to ask questions about potential U.S. bombing, invasion, and regime change—despite the fact that we don’t have good answers about all the chaos that may ensue following it.

Pahlavi claims an invasion would be “humanitarian.” What a profound oxymoron, I think to myself, and theft of the Iranian people being able to eventually stage a rebellion or reform movement independently, of which they can look back in a few decades and be proud. Furthermore, the goal of full-scale, dramatic regime change may also be a shortsighted one. As Sohrab Ahmari writes, what remains in Iran is now best described as a “ghost regime,” economically decrepit, its proxies diminished, merely parroiting out slogans nobody even believes in anymore, so unlike the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall, what is much more likely is an “ending is one in which more nationalist elements within the current regime take over, with or without a little push by outside powers.”

But perhaps the Iranian people—especially diasporic Iranians, in Los Angeles and at elite institutions like Columbia—have already forgotten of Mossadegh, of the Shah’s tyranny, of 1979 (or perhaps they never really cared, and their bourgeois families were always happy with the Shah, which is undoubtedly the case for many). And so, if we follow their lead, maybe the endless cycle of chaos, despair, and bitterness is to ensue, for Iranians to continue—as the old adage goes—“az chaaleh dar-aamadeem oftaadeem too chaah” (we came out of a pothole and then fell into a well). Maybe the Iranians are condemned, after fifty years of suffering under the current tyrannical regime, to return to the dynasty they had in the 70s (or some 21st century adaptation thereof): for it to have all been for nothing at all.

Ultimately, until the broader anti-Ayatollah movement gets organized around core principles aside from mere fanatical support for Pahlavi, rejects explicit anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry directed to these people as individuals and not just “joking around,” and stands up for universal principles, it’s hard to imagine how they might achieve their own stated goal of grassroots support. For now, we may find that protesting in designer labels will do nothing much at all.

Mr. Mohammadi is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in American studies. He 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.

An essay in Sundial from fall 2025, “Orienting Ourselves With ‘Disorientation’,” reflects on an anonymous pamphlet distributed to new students during orientation week. The pamphlet, titled The People’s Disorientation Guide, presents itself as an activist’s survival manual—anti-administration, pro-Palestinian, and aimed at preparing students for life at Columbia. TJ Gill CC ’22, CLS ’27 contends that despite the pamphlet’s extremities, it reveals something larger: an uneasy, chilled state of campus dialogue following an administrative crackdown on student activism.

Gill defends the “current necessity” of the pamphlet, framing it as the vital continuation of an activist culture now chilled by administrative reprisal. Even if we’re critical of the pamphlet’s contents, he argues, we must be wary of suppressing an “activist ethos on campus,” since in his view, such activism enables students to meaningfully engage ideas and sharpen their convictions.

Yet this diagnosis misses the mark. The pamphlet is indeed a warning sign, though not in the way Gill imagines. It’s not evidence of silenced activist voices so much as a persistent reflex to shy away from critical dialogue. What must be safeguarded is not merely the presence of activism, but its quality. Quality activism operates in good faith, persuades through reason, and displays a willingness to engage opponents. Upholding that standard is ultimately the responsibility of students, not administrators.

To see why the author’s reflection misreads both the pamphlet and the state of campus dialogue, it’s worth looking closely at what the pamphlet actually contains:

1. A note equating Columbia with weapons manufacturers that “drive” colonial war;

2. Protesting tips advising students to conceal identifiable features;

3. A poem titled “Intifada Incantation”;

4. A QR code linking to a list of “anti-Zionist therapists”;

5. A disciplinary bingo card (“get interim suspended…”); and

6. “Critical thinking questions,” such as “How are you going to redistribute wealth?”

The document makes sweeping normative claims without substantiating them or engaging opposing views. The essayist, however, collapses the distinction between safeguarding the pamphlet as a form of expression and treating it as a meaningful contribution to dialogue.

To be sure, students should never feel restrained from peaceful activism within the bounds of law and university policy. Moreover, concern about administrative intervention in student advocacy is not altogether misplaced. Anxieties are understandable in light of the murky grounds on which the Department of Homeland Security intervened in activists’ immigration cases. Emotional or disruptive protests are not necessarily shallow, nor is Columbia an independent arbiter, given the donor and political pressures shaping its enforcement.

Nonetheless, Columbia’s policies aim to foster dialogue within the reasonable bounds of a shared intellectual community. The Code of Conduct affirms this purpose: “that all members of our community may engage in our cherished traditions of free expression… the right to demonstrate, for example, cannot come at the expense of the right of others to counter-demonstrate, to teach, or to engage in academic pursuits.” The administration’s recent updates to the rules—prohibiting disruptive protests in academic buildings and requiring participants to identify themselves when asked—are reasonable measures to uphold that principle. The past year has shown that without clear bounds, activism can become a monopoly of space and ideas rather than a means of persuasion.

Gill’s argument rests on a shaky assumption: that changing activist tactics reflects a dampened discourse. He writes: “this is why the guide is so vital in this moment: It exists as the most robust embodiment of the Palestinian cause right now at Columbia… However, an anxiety underpins the movement, stifling the shrill confidence that once defined it.” But the loss of “shrill confidence” doesn’t signal the silencing of activists; we should not conflate the vehemence of protest with the vitality of discourse. Nor should we lament its “stifling” without confronting the dysfunction it produced: occupation of academic buildings, vandalization of libraries, and, at times, the expression of open antisemitism.

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Notwithstanding the claim of a “dissolution of the broader activist ethos on campus,” the culture of activism at Columbia remains vibrant. In recent months, students have hosted fundraisers and gatherings for Palestine, commemorated the victims of October 7, and championed causes ranging from environmental reform to healthcare justice. The University lists nearly thirty active student groups devoted to “Politics, Activism and Advocacy.” Off campus, Columbians campaign for mayoral candidates, protest throughout New York City, and push for reforms in Morningside Heights. Even the administration is exploring how emerging technologies might foster dialogue among students. The tone may be less brash, but the culture remains fertile for vigorous advocacy.

The People’s Disorientation Guide misses an opportunity to join that culture. Instead of provoking inquiry or persuasion, it offers conclusions without reasons and sidesteps the hard questions first-years should be asking—for example, about the nuance of administrative power in protest, the growth of the university bureaucracy, or the expanding use of AI in academia. Compare the Guide’s anonymity with Alexander Hamilton’s pseudonymous pamphlets at King’s College; though polemical and written in a different era, Hamilton used pseudonymity to strengthen a reasoned argument, whereas the Guide uses it to evade critique. Anonymity can be warranted when risks are material, but the Guide fails to offer basic mechanisms of accountability: citations, a signatory collective, or a channel for reply. In fact, versions of The People’s Disorientation Guide have circulated at Columbia for decades. Its reappearance, then, reveals less about the current climate of advocacy than a persistent temptation for dissent without the burden of critical thought.

To recalibrate toward a culture of meaningful dialogue, students must ultimately take responsibility; the administration is not the primary obstacle. Encouragingly, new student-run outlets like Sundial already model this spirit. Students could build additional forums for quality activism. Where, for example, is Columbia’s version of the Oxford Union? The University, for its part, can also adopt viewpoint-neutrality policies, define clearer disciplinary rubrics, and publish guidance for how it will or won’t support visa-holding students when their immigration status is challenged. But evolving the culture of activism on campus will ultimately depend on students’ willingness to operate in good faith, persuade through reason, and engage those with opposing views.

As new Columbians orient themselves on campus, their challenge is to build a culture of dialogue and activism that honors our university’s intellectual tradition.

Mr. Simler is a 2022 graduate of Columbia and a guest contributor 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.

In classes, conversations with friends, and every edition of Sundial, we debate freedom of speech: whether it is under attack, what it protects, and where its limits should lie. Yet we rarely ask the most important question: What does it mean to actually engage with free speech? The answer, I propose, is one you might not expect: comedy and laughter.

Comedy is uniquely designed as a free speech medium. When a comedian, a classmate, or a friend makes a joke, they are not only exercising free speech but testing the waters of “acceptable” ideas in the presence of others. As such, on a theoretical level, true comedy represents the essence of free speech—the open expression of ideas, uninhibited by the fear of repercussions.

Yet implicit—and sometimes explicit—cancel culture on our campus and beyond stands in opposition to this ideal. Cancel culture is particularly detrimental to comedy because it is fundamentally incompatible with an art form that depends on risk-taking and experimentation with the presence of an audience. When the audience is poised to censure “unacceptable” speech at any moment, comedic experimentation suffers.

The consequences of this cultural phenomenon have been clearly felt by comedians. Take Dave Chappelle, for example, who was accused of transphobia due to jokes in his 2021 Netflix stand-up special, “The Closer.” Or consider Nimesh Patel’s 2018 performance at Columbia, which was cut short mid-performance after organizers deemed a joke about gay black men too offensive to allow him to continue.

In contrast to the response from the student organizers of the event at Columbia to remove Patel from the stage, Netflix’s decision to keep Chappelle’s show on air reflects the culture we should strive for. Despite the onslaught of calls to remove Chappelle’s show from Netflix, it not only remained on the platform but became its most-watched comedy special of all time up to that point, and was also nominated for two Emmys. Netflix’s decision reflects the broader principle that a belief in comedic transgression is also a belief in free speech. Like all speech, it is not Netflix or any other group’s job to preemptively determine what comedy is acceptable to platform. That task belongs to society.

Comedy not only illustrates the principles of free speech in action, but also offers ways to foster a more open and thoughtful exchange of ideas. With this in mind, I offer three insights from the world of comedy that Columbia students ought to embrace to improve our campus’s free speech environment.

Insight 1: To laugh, or not to laugh, that is the only question.

Jerry Seinfeld, arguably one of the greatest comedians of all time, recently pointed out that “Comedy is an extraordinarily simple binary outcome event. It’s funny, or it isn’t, and nobody cares really about anything else.” To many of us, this statement seems antithetical to how our peers judge humor today. It feels like Columbia students care about many issues related to the joke, not merely whether it was funny or not. Is the joke harmless or harmful? Is it “punching down?” Does it align with our political or moral sensibilities? The list goes on and on.

Seinfeld argues, however, that all of those objections, and Columbia students usually have plenty, are really just excuses for what we dislike most: a joke that doesn’t make us laugh. When we reason that a joke was harmful or offensive, we are often explaining the more basic truth—that it simply wasn’t funny. In the end, a joke succeeds or fails based on the binary outcome of laughter or silence.

Because of this, good comedy is uncancelable. Not because it is above criticism, but because its value is measured in laughter rather than ideology. Comedians can say almost whatever they want—they just have to be funny. A comedian may lose listeners because they made a joke that was both offensive and not funny. They’re not being canceled for the words of the joke itself, but because of how those words landed.

Comedy ultimately demonstrates that risk-taking isn’t just acceptable, but it can actually be highly rewarding, so long as the goal is to make people laugh. This logic applies outside of comedy as well. We should be willing to engage in ideas and politics that make us uncomfortable, so long as we are doing so in the spirit of genuine truth-seeking. The University is meant to be the quintessential space for this kind of uninhibited pursuit of truth, through rigorous debate and exposure to ideas that challenge us. That’s why it is only in a healthy campus environment that both free speech and comedy can thrive.

Insight 2: Comedy clubs are not safe spaces—and that’s a good thing.

When my friends and I pile into Comedy Cellar, a Greenwich Village staple that attracts some of the best comedians in the world, only one thing is certain: If you’re not ready to get made fun of, you probably should find something else to do with your night. The best stand-up comedians I’ve seen at the Cellar create a dynamic interplay with their audiences. Nothing delights them more than mercilessly making fun of the very people who paid good money to see their show.

The experience can feel uncomfortable. It’s certainly not a “safe space.” And that’s exactly the point. Choosing to be an audience member means being vulnerable enough to laugh at yourself and, for just a moment, not take life too seriously. Ironically, the antidote to safe spaces often leaves everyone feeling more comfortable than when they first arrived. Moreover, the same people who can laugh at themselves are also the ones confident enough to question their own beliefs without fearing that their sense of self will fall apart. We would all benefit from cultivating the kind of secure humility that stand-up comedy requires of its audience.

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Insight 3: Comedy is a powerful way of bringing people together.

More important than laughing at yourself is finding moments to laugh with others. Comedian Victor Borge once wrote that “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” Laughter creates a sense of connection by signaling that, despite all of our differences, we can in fact see the world in the same way, even if just for a moment. On a campus that often finds much to disagree about, we ought to seek out more opportunities to laugh together.

While writing this piece, I hoped to hear from Columbia’s own comedy clubs about their beliefs on these issues. However, Columbia’s comedy clubs declined to speak to me—even anonymously—about how they navigate Columbia’s polarized environment while creating their art. While disappointing, this refusal perfectly illustrates the problem. If the very groups meant to push boundaries and take risks won’t talk to Sundial, it’s not hard to imagine that the average Columbia student would also be unwilling to embrace discomfort and take similar risks.

When defenses are down, ideas move freely through humor. Comedy reminds us of how free speech functions in action. That’s why my recommendation for Columbia students is simple: take comedy seriously. Seek out comedy clubs or watch stand-up specials by comedians who tackle controversial issues. You’ll step outside of your ideological safe space, learn to laugh at yourself, and become a more open-minded and happier person because of it.

And to the comedy clubs themselves: Consider the larger role your work plays on campus and the sort of comedic environment you want to cultivate. The health of your craft is a litmus test for the campus’s broader willingness to engage with free speech.

As Peter Ustinov once observed, “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.” Its seriousness lies in how it teaches us to take risks and to practice humility through vulnerability. In its most authentic form, comedy models what discourse on our campus can and should look like—if we are willing to embrace it.

Ms. Rosenthal is a senior in the Tel Aviv University Dual Degree Program studying Middle East History 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.

I recently came across BridgeColumbia vice president and Sundial staff writer TJ Gill’s piece, “Can We Talk About the Genocide Question?” on his club’s attempt to hold a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bridge is a campus group dedicated to fostering dialogue on different issues, and in the article, Gill describes the hoops that the Columbia administration made Bridge jump through before ultimately cancelling the discussion.

First, I want to start by congratulating Bridge for finally succeeding in holding what was by all accounts a thoughtfully run and honest discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is shameful that the administration delayed them for so long and apparently attempted to suppress the discussion. At Columbia, clubs should be allowed to hold discussions and events, no matter how offensive someone might find them to be.

Second, as the co-president of the Columbia University College Republicans (CUCR), I want to clarify our club’s promotion of this event.

The original poster promoting the event featured the word “Genocide?” over a bloodstained outline of Israel and Gaza. CUCR leadership informed Bridge that we could not, in good conscience, endorse an event that was advertised like an accusation against one party instead of an open discussion. We also expressed concerns that the chosen date and time—the very evening of October 7—coincided with the timing of Jewish holiday services, ensuring that no religious Jews would be able to attend the event and express their views.

We were presented with a new poster reading, “What Does October 7th Mean to You?” and were told that Bridge had changed the wording and image to be more welcoming. CUCR then endorsed the event and encouraged its members to attend. At the time, we did not know that the poster change was due to the administration’s pressure and the forced rebranding that Gill described in his piece. We did not know that Gill believed the new poster to be “a betrayal of our members,” and that Gill considered the new flyer “tepid” and “more sterile than a hospital room.”

In fact, given that the new flyer depicted the Temple Mount, the religious site that Hamas cited as justification for their barbaric attack on October 7, 2023, and perhaps the most important religious flashpoint in the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it didn’t seem to be avoiding any discussion of the conflict’s long, bloody violence and religious overtones. When I visited the Temple Mount a few years ago, I was shouted at by Palestinian men and guarded by rifle-carrying Israeli soldiers as we Jews were forced to wear garments with Holocaust-esque yellow stripes. The experience was certainly not “tepid” or “sterile.” Instead of a forced rebranding by the administration, I thought that the new poster was a genuine attempt to invite a more balanced discussion.

When I spoke to Gill about Bridge’s original decision to use the “Genocide?” poster, he told me that Bridge had assumed that they were finding some middle ground in part because “both sides were getting offended”—Zionist students at the accusation of “genocide,” and anti-Zionists because they were angry that the “genocide” label was even being questioned.

I believe this logic is faulty. By judging the middle ground to be where both sides have an equivalent emotional reaction, one allows the more emotional side to set the terms of the debate, ceding ground to those who are more volatile and apt to get offended.

On Columbia’s campus—where pro-Palestinian rioters have violently taken over buildings multiple times in the past few years, and professors, citing emotional distress, have repeatedly cancelled classes after Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024—judging by emotion gives the advantage to a hyper-emotional left. Additionally, the emotion-driven false “neutrality” punishes conservative students on campus for being less easily offended and valuing rational discussion more than some of our extreme peers.

In this particular case, to advertise a discussion of the incredibly complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a discussion of whether Israel’s actions constitute “genocide” clearly and immediately puts right-leaning and Zionist students on the defensive, framing the entire conversation around a certain accusation against Israel. It would be like advertising a discussion with the question, “Is Trump Hitler?” or “How racist are the police?”

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Bridge states that their mission is to build a community in which “students from across the ideological spectrum can engage as a group working together to understand…various perspectives.” If they are really serious about inviting in students from across the ideological spectrum and building community, Bridge would be best served by advertising discussion questions that leave room for both sides of a given issue, rather than exhibiting a bias towards one side or the other.

A quick review of their Instagram reveals that for other discussions, Bridge has managed to produce neutral advertisements with astonishing regularity. Examples include posts titled, “The Era of Zohran: Sunrise or Twilight in NYC?”, “Golden Age or Hellscape: Is the New Right, Represented by Figures Like Charlie Kirk, Good for Our Country?”, and “AI and Public Policy: Threat or Opportunity?” Even for discussions that weren’t advertised by presenting two equal sides, Bridge’s other posts have neutral, subject-defining titles like “The Trump Administration Wants to Instill Federal Oversight of Columbia University,” “A Discussion on Death and Political Violence,” and “The Rise of Red Pill Men.” Only for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did Bridge seem to bias their advertising, perhaps because of the subject’s history of emotional reactivity at Columbia (including the aforementioned building takeovers and lawsuits that have cost the University millions).

If dialogue groups at Columbia use the standard of emotional volatility to find the “middle ground,” they will almost certainly find themselves with discussion questions that are biased in favor of the left. And not because of any objective fact pattern, but simply because we right-leaning students on Columbia’s campus are used to functioning in an overwhelmingly left-wing environment. We value mental resilience and strive not to be easily offended by the many accusations hurled at us and our beliefs.

I’ve heard so many wonderful accounts of Bridge providing space on campus where people can come together for honest discussions. I hope that in the future, fair discussions can begin on balanced ground, free of the heavy-handed intervention that we all oppose from Columbia’s administrative state.

Ms. Weinfeld is a junior at Columbia College studying political science and creative writing. 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.