Letter From the Editor: Pursuing the Human
Reflections on inheriting a vibrant newsroom
Dear Reader,
My first time meeting the entire Sundial staff was in a small classroom that resembled more of a walk-in closet with a conference table and chairs. It was September of 2024, and after a year of unparalleled campus unrest, this cramped-in group of five or six writers was supposed to be the voice of a new culture at Columbia: a publication that sought to contend with and challenge pre-existing ideas, rather than reaffirm them.
The rest of that room’s writers now having graduated, I can’t help but think of them as Sundial completes its second year on campus having grown to nearly 50 writers, illustrators, media managers, business associates, and more. Through it all, I knew Sundial was fulfilling its mission when I’d pick up the latest issue and find at least one article I disagreed with.
As the semester wanes down, I’d especially come to appreciate not just the diversity of viewpoints and content put forward by our staff, but also their diversity of ambitions and futures. “An aspiring linguist and an aspiring economist walk into a newsroom” sounds like the start of a punchline, but that’s where Xinyan and I find ourselves as we take the reins from Alex, Emma, and Imaan.
We consider each of them to be some of our biggest role models on campus, and the three editors emeriti each offer one last ‘swan song’ in this issue befitting the intellectual journey they have respectively explored at Columbia. While Alex explores his formative experience taking Russian with Professor Tatiana Mikhailova, Emma uses both her experiences in the classroom and in college golf to re-examine the importance of a college education. Imaan, meanwhile, engages both her faith and philosophical worldview in critiquing the activism and ideology of both conservatives and progressives on campus.
Moving forward, there’s something empowering in knowing that, over the summer, our staff will be working in various research assistantships, volunteer work, business internships, and everything and anything in between. It reveals that we’ve (unknowingly) assembled a team of future leaders in starkly different fields and industries, united by a joint interest in restoring intellectual rigor and diversity to Morningside Heights.
Columbia’s careerist tendencies have become a bit of a truism, but as many students can relate to, this has led to clubs and extracurriculars serving no purpose other than to be another bullet point somewhere on the resume. In this issue, staff editor Emeric Chang reflects that this thinking has even seeped into Columbia’s cultural groups and our romantic ecosystem.
However, this is exactly what has made being a part of Sundial such a breath of fresh air. With a team of writers and thinkers representing the fields and interests of the student body rather than a pre-professional ambition for writing itself, we have published a beautiful spectrum of perspectives carrying insight from all corners of life.
As you’ll see, many of the pieces in this issue carry a distinctly immediate and personal analysis. Staff writer Giselle Sami Dalili critiques Columbia’s disingenuous attempts at accommodating disabilities; senior editor Uma Rajan explores mandatory discussion sections and their empty role in her educational journey; and staff editor Jessica Weinfeld investigates Columbia’s moral and legal shortcomings as a landlord. This issue examines how we can stay attached to our humanity and sense of self in a system that may often otherwise prefer us to be conveniently impersonal and faceless.
When considering this tension between human interests and systemic pressure, I like to think of the famed writer Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to a high school student who wrote him a letter in 2006: “Practice any art… fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” Ever since the time I spent cramped in that walk-in closet, my soul has grown immensely, and I have Alex, Emma, Imaan, Xinyan, Oren, and the rest of the Sundial staff to thank for that.
For the staff,
Nick Baum
Editor-in-Chief
Mr. Baum is a junior in the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary, studying economics and Jewish history. He is the editor-in-chief of Sundial.