Summer News Roundup: The Safety Rainbow
Summer News Roundup: The Safety Rainbow
Public Safety has color-coded campus access, which will surely solve all our problems.
The following was published as part of Sundial’s Summer 2024 News Roundup, a collection of humorous takes on the news you missed.
→ It's an “orange” type of day!
Our beloved administration announces a new system for understanding campus access.
In response to prolonged and total shutdowns of Columbia’s campus during a totally regular and quiet semester, Columbia’s Public Safety department has a plan. A brilliant, showy plan to ensure that nobody gets frustrated when they don’t communicate properly—a plan that washes away all ambiguity! It makes up for all the times they shut down frat row when they could be using their energy on, I don’t know, more important things.
Columbia has opted to color-code the level of campus access.
Public Safety’s scale is a twisted rainbow. Now, it is my job to interpret it, so here it is:
Green means that campus is totally open, which will be never.
Yellow means that campus will be open, maybe. Oh, and some entrances will be closed, probably. You may find yourself circling the campus several times if you found the line outside of Lerner to be too long. You will try to guess which entrances will be open, but there will never be a logical system; it will be gate roulette, like the staircases of Hogwarts.
Orange means that campus is open to CUID holders only, as well as to select members of Within Our Lifetime who want to celebrate their marriage on the West Lawn.
Red means that campus is only open to essential workers and those who live within the gates, such as protestors who make it onto the lawns and keep a tent up long enough to establish squatter’s rights.
Columbia Chief Operating Officer Cas Holloway, whose sleep was obviously disturbed by the crickets protesters released in his apartment building in August, also announced a companion mobile app called ReopenCU, which will also be color-coded in accordance with an affiliate’s level of campus access.
Every day, affiliates must open the app and attest individually that “1. I am not carrying any tents. 2. I am not carrying any hammers. 3. I am not carrying any fart spray chemical weapons.” Upon successful completion (it’s unclear which requirements need to be satisfied) they will be issued a “Green Pass” that they must show to Public Safety officers upon request. I can already see the Spectator headlines forming: “Columbia students’ campus access to be determined by color.” (Okay, to be clear there is no app but wouldn’t it be just a tiny bit funny if things came full circle for us seniors, who entered college with the ReopenCU app?)
We got a preview of how this will play out when, on August 12, the University went into “orange” status due to “reports of potential disruptions at Columbia and on college campuses across the country.” What are these “reports,” you may ask?
One possibility is that they’re just responding to a singular quote from a protest organizer. “Encampment is now our new base, as in the past, it used to be protests. Students would do protests every day, but now, kind of, encampments is the new base for us,” Mahmoud Khalil, a student negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, told The Hill.
Another possibility is that the administration is preparing for a new strategy. Some, including the Young Democratic Socialists of America, have acknowledged that the encampment strategy “did not win.” So, YDSA has called on their university chapters, which includes Columbia’s, to hold a “Student Strike for Palestine,” i.e. skipping class, something students totally won’t do if the administration makes it 10 times harder to get into campus.
So, it seems that the color-coding system is just based on vibes. Maybe it’s the gym teacher mentality: Just like how the whole class has to run laps because one guy was goofing around during pushups, now the whole school has to tune into the daily color announcement ceremony every morning because a couple people took an unapproved stroll through Hamilton. Cas Holloway can easily wake up and say, “You know what, I think this is a yellow kind of day!” extending the arms of the Low Leviathan to close one gate. Or he could spin a color wheel to set the vibe: If it’s red, so be it. Maybe some students will complain of racism. But the vibe is the vibe—even if the administration completely misses it.
Despite its philosophical flaws, protests will undoubtedly test this new system throughout the year. And hey, you never know, maybe…just maybe…this safety rainbow will shine through the clouds and change the world. But it will probably just annoy the shit out of everyone.
Mr. Engel is a senior at Columbia College studying history and a staff writer for Sundial.