Resisting Abstraction: Towards a Truer Cosmopolitanism

It’s time Columbia trades our globalizing tendencies for true love of thy neighbor.

Image: @FDNY on X

The night before I left for my freshman year of college, my dad sat my brothers and me down in the living room and proceeded to play The Chicks’ quintessential anthem “Wide Open Spaces.” Tearing up at the refrain—“Who’s never left home? Who’s never struck out? / To find a dream and a life of their own / a place in the clouds, a foundation of stone”—we let the somber truth of the song sit in the air. To be homesick for a place you still inhabit—oh what a feeling!

The next day, after moving into my dorm, I felt no more settled in a new place than I had in my childhood home the night before, my things in boxes, already loaded into the car.

The “Wide Open Spaces” my dad had envisioned for me weren’t merely geographic; they were intellectual. As a senior, I can attest that the University has provided an education that has enabled me to see the world at scale—not as a collection of discrete experiences but as patterned and analyzable events. Yet, in learning to see New York as interconnected systems, I lost touch with the place itself. I can discuss how Harlem’s gentrification works in theoretical terms, but I don’t know the names of anyone who has been displaced because of it. The vocabulary for describing the global has replaced the vocabulary for describing the local.

This abstraction isn’t confined to the classroom; it is reflected in how Columbia structures student life itself. The University divides life into three spheres, each competing for one’s finite resources of time, attention, and care. There’s academic life, which produces the relatively autonomous struggle for grades and accomplishments. There’s social life, where duties are taken on voluntarily but shed when they become inconvenient. This at-will connectedness can often feel alienating when we view relationships as discrete and atomized—especially when social circles don’t always overlap with other aspects of life. Then there’s New York. We consume it in restaurants and cafes, clubs and bars, and museums for photo-ops. It is a place to wander in our free time: a site of transaction, but not a locus of obligation.

These circles do not complement one another; they compete. Academic life offers the promise of quantifiable rewards; strong grades now translate into post-graduate jobs and admission to graduate school. Social life, too, is often justified only insofar as it produces opportunities for advancement and careerism. By contrast, meaningful engagement with a place like New York demands a willingness to show up repeatedly without an obvious payoff. The untimely obligations of community disrupt optimized calendars. Thus community is actively discouraged by the University, both structurally and through our abstracted mode of education.

Without localized learning, students fail to develop neighborly attention: the habit of looking first toward the needs of those closest to you. When your education centers on broad theories that divide populations into dichotomous categories, such as the oppressed or oppressor, you lose the capacity to see the person in front of you as an individual. An overly theoretical knowledge produces a peculiar blindness: Columbia students can articulate sophisticated theories of community while possessing no actual duties of obligation to their own. When a crisis strikes their own block, they remain unaffected. They do this not because they’re callous, but because they’ve never been taught to see people as neighbors with particular needs and particular claims on their concern.

In December, a large fire broke out on 107th Street and Amsterdam, displacing 25 households and 46 individuals. I learned about the fire in real time through my church’s group chat—our parish is just a block from the building—as members relayed updates while it was still unfolding. Friends who lived in the building were panicking. Churches and community organizations across the Upper West Side opened their doors, provided food and supplies, and most importantly, asked: Who needs help? What do they need?

The Columbia Daily Spectator—a behemoth campus paper, generating over $200,000 in annual revenue—published one article on the fire. Its focus? The temporary closure of Thai Market restaurant, a student favorite, located below the apartment building. No mention of the displaced residents, or follow-up on what they needed. No recognition of community efforts that students might join.

The problem wasn’t editorial oversight. The intellectual habits Columbia cultivates did not enable us to register the fire as newsworthy beyond as a disruption to us as students. The people displaced weren’t viewed as neighbors requiring attention, but as background to campus life. This framework, which recognizes systems rather than people, permits us to walk past a crisis and notice only its inconvenience to us.

This is not simply a lack of empathy; rather, it is the logical outcome of an education that has severed knowledge from the conditions that make genuine care possible. Columbia students encounter this framework already through Literature Humanities’ inclusion of the Gospels and an ethical vocabulary used in debates about justice and obligation. So, while you don’t need to be Christian to understand the importance of community, teaching Christian social ethics as a theoretical framework and not a lived practice obscures its purpose.

The Christian love of neighbor resists the totalizing pull of abstraction. It depends on rootedness and limits, on knowing people by name, recognizing familiar faces, and understanding the texture of a particular community’s struggles. This kind of love cannot be performed at scale. Unlike the measurable outcomes celebrated by our institutions, Christian love operates beyond the logic of investment, which measures success through returns. You cannot possibly measure the value of comforting a grieving friend or being greeted with flowers at the end of a performance. Prayer, too, resists measurement; its significance exceeds worldly ends. Yet, it’s not a kind of sentimentalism opposed to reason; it is reason’s perfection.

The Greeks affirm this too. In an Aristotelian sense, the good life is lived among neighbors, and practical reason is formed through engagement with the particularities of daily life.

Education exists in place and yet demands a kind of unrooted cosmopolitanism, both in attitude and in obligation from its students. It is not that global care is antithetical to localism, but the habits of mind inculcated in the University—to aspire for the global at the expense of the local—challenge the kinds of people we ought to be shaping through higher education. Wendell Berry, an environmentalist, author, and farmer, has critiqued this tension in universities for decades. The universities’ promise of “upward mobility” trains students to leave home for “better places” rather than equipping them to serve the communities they inhabit and make their homes better. The global demands unfettered ambition, large-scale change, progress, and advancement. The implicit message is clear: intellectual seriousness scales up, not down. To apply your education to the problems of your own neighborhood is to think too small. In necessitating broad theories, we blind ourselves to the problems right in front of us. Yet even in describing what is true through theoretical frameworks, we miss hearing stories of why it is the case. We’re taught that meaningful work means changing the world, as if the world were something other than the accumulation of particular places, each requiring patient attention.

If Columbia wants to resist the impulse to globalize the minds of its students, it must take the localist concern for rich duties of obligation seriously. This requires a shift toward rooted commitment, to be not merely a university “In the City of New York” but actually of the city.

I propose three tangible ways Columbia might recover the true purpose of education as Aristotle understood it: for the formation of the person capable of living well in community. Knowledge, in this view, serves life—it does not replace it. By grounding abstract learning in the concrete practice of community participation, we can become better citizens—not citizens of nowhere, but as people capable of the patient, humble work of loving actual neighbors in actual places.

Columbia must first reconsider its posture toward the neighborhood it inhabits. The physical barriers that now define campus life—locked gates, CUID-only events, and the fortress mentality that has intensified in recent years communicate to our neighbors that we are here to extract from the city, not to participate in it. The bureaucratization of campus access has made Columbia an island when it should be a porous institution. We need not abandon all security measures, but we must ask: What are we communicating when our default posture toward our neighbors is suspicion rather than welcome? A university that walls itself off from its community cannot claim to be forming citizens.

This separation is mirrored in the University’s approach to student engagement. Columbia requires students to fulfill a Global Core requirement, but rarely mandates engagement with our own backyard; in contrast, Barnard has a “Thinking Locally” requirement which encourages students to engage with the city, even if superficially. Imagine what would change across the University if Columbia required sustained engagement with a single local institution, not as a short-term service project or for resume-building, but as an ongoing commitment to be embedded in the life of the neighborhood. Students could be paired with local schools, non-profits, churches, synagogues, small businesses, or athletic leagues, not as outside experts but as genuine members, learners, and neighbors. Let students discover that the most challenging intellectual work often happens not in the seminar room but in the messiness of daily life. This is a different kind of engagement than activism or advocacy; it’s the slower, more patient work of building relationships and being present, even with those who may hold opposing views. Being in a community has a tempering effect. It teaches us to soften when so much of what we learn in the classroom is binary. To be truly present requires setting aside the binary frameworks of the classroom in favor of the complexity of actual human relationships, where people are neither wholly right nor wholly wrong, and where our obligation to them precedes our agreement with them.

Yet, these efforts would remain hollow unless Columbia reexamines how it defines success. The University’s career services, alumni networks, and institutional news consistently elevate outcomes of mobility and scale: careers like consulting, finance, and prestigious fellowships abroad. While these paths are not inherently misguided, they condition students to equate excellence with prestige and ascension through the corporate ladder rather than genuine virtue. A university shaped by Aristotelian or Christian insights might ask different questions. Are alumni stewards of the institutions and communities they inhabit? Do they exercise responsibility over people, not just portfolios? A humanistic approach to career counseling would involve individualized reflection on a student’s values, their sense of vocation, and the obligations they have assumed that shape their mobility.

Columbia could make this shift visible in investigating the substantive lives of its alumni. Alumni spotlights and commencement narratives should emphasize lives of sustained contribution and celebrate public service in ways big and small. Career advising, too, could broaden its definition of flourishing to promote opportunities for genuine fellowship in community rather than mere pre-professionalism.

College, at its best, is not an escape from obligation but the assumption of a new one: a deliberate, if temporary, commitment to a place and the people who inhabit it. To be a thinker, then, one must avoid mistaking means for ends. The mistake lies not in learning widely, but in mistaking learning for an end in itself. Thought is meant to clarify how we live, not excuse us from living well with others. When knowledge is detached from virtue and community, we risk becoming solitary—the kind of people who can’t depend on others, so we must order soup for delivery when we’re sick or Uber to the airport alone. Our successes are ours and ours alone; we become the life of the party of one.

The alternative is not parochialism or anti-intellectualism, but an intellectual life properly ordered. Our capacity for abstraction should deepen our capacity for love, not displace it. A true cosmopolitanism begins at home, grounded in the understanding that one cannot love humanity in general without first learning to love particular people in particular places.

My dad played “Wide Open Spaces” because he knew I needed to leave—to learn and build my own foundation of stone. But the song’s wisdom isn’t just about leaving, it’s about what comes after. Wide open spaces teach us something, but only if we eventually carry what we’ve learned back to a place small enough to know us by name. The question Columbia must ask itself is whether it is forming people capable of coming home, or whether it is producing permanent wanderers, equipped with every intellectual tool except the one that matters most: the ability to belong.

As I have begun to imagine my life after college, I have felt an increasing apathy toward the prospect of endless mobility that so often passes for success here. Rather than asking only where opportunity is greatest or prestige most concentrated, I have found myself asking different questions: Where am I known? Where am I needed? What obligations have I already assumed, even if informally, through friendship and shared life? These are not questions encouraged by a globalizing education, yet they have come to feel decisive.

In small but deliberate ways, I pushed back against abstraction by committing myself to communities. Being part of a church community has required me to show up even when it is inconvenient, and in helping start a new club, I’ve invested in relationships that aren’t always easy. Thick obligations, the kind that feel like family, have fundamentally reshaped how I think about tradeoffs. In these choices, I have learned that rootedness is not the absence of ambition or commitment to academics, but rather an ordering of these competing priorities toward something durable and lasting. To belong somewhere is to accept limits and, within those limits, to discover the conditions of genuine responsibility and love. The task then, of the University and of us, is not to abandon its commitment to academic rigor but to make space for other fundamental commitments in social life and place. If Columbia students are to find their very own foundations of stone, we must individually and as a university address the value of rootedness and place.

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Chloe Hoyle is a senior at Barnard College studying political science. She 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.