1. art and entertainment
2. books and literature
3. textbooks

Vol. CXXXIX—No. 12
Thursday, April 16, 2015
columbiaspectator.com
Vacant storefronts
persist in MoHi
Owners face increasing rents
and challenging summer season
BY TAYLOR SMITH AND
DEBORAH SECULAR
Spectator Staff Writers
RACHEL CHIN FOR SPECTATOR
FOR LEASE
|
Bank Street Bookstore vacated this storefront on Broadway earlier this year in favor of a new, cheaper location .
Barnard psychology heavily reliant on adjunct faculty
BY GIULIA OLSSON
Spectator Staff Writer
The Barnard psychology
department, which is more
than 60 percent adjuncts, cannot hire more full-time faculty until it is allotted more
physical space, according to
psychology department chair
Robert Remez.
With 23 adjunct professors
and 15 full-time professors,
two of whom who are on leave
this spring, the psychology department—one of Barnard’s
most popular departments—
is the only Barnard science
department to employ adjuncts, with the exception
of one adjunct in the biology
department.
Remez said that the
department utilizes adjuncts
to try to fulfill its goal of teaching each of the 75 listed courses per school year.
“No academic department
would be acting responsibly
if they created departments
without providing the means
for students to satisfy them,”
Remez said. “That’s [having adjuncts] the only way
our students can take the introductory courses, take the
middle-level courses, take
the seminars, and have the research supervision that they
need.”
Remez said that the department would ultimately like to
hire more full-time faculty
members, but a space crunch
on the fourth floor of Milbank
Hall—where the department is
Fight for $15 protest seeks
higher adjunct salaries
BY GABRIELLE IORIO &
ANNIE BRYAN
Spectator Staff Writers
While the national Fight
for $15 campaign focuses on
raising the minimum wage in
general, the 300 students and
professors from Columbia
and other universities who
gathered on Low Plaza on
Wednesday also demanded
an increase in the minimum
wage and salaries for adjunct
professors.
Wednesday’s protest coincided with a number of national Fight for $15 protests,
including in Times Square and
Chicago. On Low Steps, before the protesters marched
down Broadway and headed
downtown,
Students, professors, and
speakers advocated for raising
the salary of adjunct professors to $15,000.
“We talk about low-wage
workers, we think about
McDonald’s employees, but
what we don’t think about as
often are the people who teach
our classes at this Ivy League
University,” RJ Pettersen
GSAS ’15, a master’s sociology
student, said.
The protest was the first
major Fight for $15 event on
Columbia’s campus since the
nationwide campaign—which
has gained local support since
it began in New York City in
2012 — first came to Columbia’s
campus in February. Students
from New York University, the
City University of New York,
The New School, and various
local high schools also attended the protest.
“The current poverty wages
and lack of unionization plaguing too many in our society -from fast food workers to adjunct professors—are a barrier
to entry for any upward mobility,” CU Dems Media Director
Jordana Narin, CC ‘17, said in
a message to Spectator.
Protesters held posters and
banners during a speak-out at
Low Plaza before marching to
a McDonald’s on 96th Street
and then heading to Times
Square in order to do spread
awareness across the city on
this issue.
SEE FIGHT, page 6
housed—makes it impossible
to accommodate more fulltime faculty members.
“You can’t hire someone
if there’s no office for them.
They have to be comfortable in
the place where they do their
work. If you want to hire an
empiricist, there has to be either a lab where they can do
experiments, there has to be
a workshop where they can
struggle with their data and
measures,” Remez said. “If
there’s no place to create that
workshop, or there’s no place
to create those offices, then
you can’t really put a regular
member of the faculty in an office that’s 90 square feet.”
But the department is actively looking to expand its
physical space. Remez said
that following the opening of
the Teaching and Learning
Center in 2018, the department will take over space in
Milbank as other departments
move into the new building.
Psychology faculty have
said that the tight quarters
posed difficulties for their
work.
Adjunct assistant professor
Hannah Hoch shares an office with three other professors, which she said can lead
to scheduling challenges and
require compromise.
“It’s very limited and it can
be very challenging,” Hoch
said. “For example, we’re four
people in this office, and there
are times when we would all
SEE PSYCH, page 2
Between exchanging fist
bumps and free samples with customers, Abdusalam Abajebel—
the owner of Oasis Juice Bar on
Broadway and 124th Street—explained that operating a business
one block south of the construction site that is rapidly becoming Columbia’s Manhattanville
campus is as frustrating as it is
fulfilling.
“The reason I opened is not
because I know the business—it’s
about sharing with the community,” he said. “People need more
healthy options.”
Abajebel, who moved to
Harlem from Ethiopia in 2004,
has managed to gain a foothold
and appeal to local customers
with a menu of healthy items he
can prepare without a kitchen in
his tiny storefront.
But, he said, his attempts to
expand his juice and sandwich
store into a full restaurant are
being stymied by retailers who
are unwilling to take his bids
seriously.
Two properties immediately
adjacent to his have been vacant for over three years. Still,
Abajebel said that despite making several offers to retailers that
matched their asking price, he
has been ignored.
Vacant storefronts dot the avenues of Morningside Heights,
and many of them have been vacant for long periods. According
to an analysis performed by
Spectator, of the retail properties that have been vacant on
Broadway, Amsterdam, and
Morningside Avenues between
106th Street and 124th Street in
the past five years, 64 percent
were vacant for longer than a
year. 44 percent were vacant for
SEE VACANCIES, page 2
BY ANNIE BRYAN &
TEO ARMUS
Spectator Staff Writers
While prospective students
moved between events during
Sunday night’s Days on Campus
programming, No Red Tape projected phrases like “Rape happens
here” and “Columbia protects rapists” onto Low Library.
Activists said they held the
event to coincide with Days on
Campus, a visiting weekend for
prospective students, in order to
educate incoming first-years about
sexual and dating violence on college campuses.
But the activists were met by
a bit of pushback from Residence
Hall Director Aaron Hukari and
Graduate Hall Directors Rainikka
Corprew, who arrived at the protest at approximately 8 p.m., just
as the protesters were setting up
the projection. A number of Public
Safety officers also were present
during the protest.
Corprew, who declined to comment, physically blocked the projector from displaying messages
onto Low Library, telling activists
the projection was a safety hazard
because the light was blinding to
individuals inside Low.
As Corprew attempted to block
SPENCER COHEN FOR SPECTATOR
PROTEST
|
Messages such as “Columbia Protects Rapists” were projected onto Low Library.
the projector, she audibly told
the activists, “I feel like I’m being violated in the same way that
you’re defending women’s bodies… It’s like you’re becoming the
oppressors.”
Corprew declined to comment
to a Spectator reporter at Sunday
night’s protest, and she did not immediately respond to a follow-up
email from a reporter asking for
comment.
No Red Tape member Zoe
Ridolfi-Starr, CC ’15, said that the
way Corprew handled the protest
was “disappointing.”
“It is so hideous to look at a
survivor in the face and say you’re
an oppressor,” she said. “To try to
use the vocabulary and the rhetoric we have put our personal stories on the line to put ourselves
on the forefront of people’s attention here and to use it against us is
disgusting.”
Corprew and Public Safety
officers later told activists to wait
until prospective students left campus before projecting onto the library again. Activists complied,
and in response, activists held banners reading “Carry That Weight”
and “Columbia Protects Rapists”
over Low Steps and ledges by Kent
Hall.
Corprew asked a number of
activists for their UNIs during
FOLLOW US
SPORTS, BACK PAGE
WEEKEND, B SECTION
Own that narcisissm
Inside the Bagnoli hire
Something old,
something new
How Columbia’s new athletic
director managed to bag a legend.
The newest exhibit at the Anita
Shapolsky Gallery blends borrowed
pieces of famous artworks and
reinterprets them in a style for the
current century.
Daniel gets honest about his selfabsorption—and wants you to, too.
Fro-Sci has getting students to nap in
class down to a science—literally.
‘The first reason is that
the rents are high—and
that’s the second and third
reason’
Small business owners
throughout Morningside Heights
said that many of the vacancies
are a direct result of increasing
rents, which are beginning to
close the market to small, independently owned retailers.
John Jenkins, an employee at West Side Stationers on
Broadway and 109th Street,
said that the former owners of
Famous Deli, a now-vacant storefront next door, left because they
No Red Tape stages protest during Days on Campus
OPINION, PAGE 4
Challenging Frontiers
longer than two.
Representatives of retail
companies said that landlords
would prefer to find tenants
who can pay higher rents by
marketing their services to the
Columbia, rather than the local
community.
“We want to cater to
Columbia, not the projects,”
Jansen Hafen, a real estate agent
for Newmark Grubb Knight
Frank who once marketed a stillvacant property on Amsterdam
and 122nd Street, said, referring
to the Grant and Manhattanville
Houses, two New York City
Public Housing Authority developments just blocks north of the
vacant property.
But local business owners
said that in many cases, the lure
of the Columbia market is elusive
in practice.
“Three to four months out of
the year, this neighborhood is a
ghost town,” Richard Brun, an
employee at Clinton Supply Co.,
a hardware store on Amsterdam
Avenue and 122nd Street, said.
“You have restaurants that literally close down at certain parts
of the year.”
SEE PROTEST, page 2
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columbiaspectator
NEWS
PAGE 2
APRIL 16, 2015
Textbook price information unavailable across departments
BY CHRISTINE NELSON
Spectator Staff Writer
COMPLIANCE RATES
OFOFTHE
COLLEGE
NONCOMPLIANCE
RATES
THETOP
TOP1010MAJORS
MAJORSIN
IN COLUMBIA
COLUMBIA COLLEGE
Prospective students mixed on
No Red Tape protest
PROTEST from front page
Percent of major required
courses with textbooks unlisted
90%
72%
65% 64%
61% 60%
56%
56% 54%
of textbooks
unlisted*
36%
17%
*in top 10 CC majors
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According to a recent
Spectator analysis of undergraduate courses for the fall
2015 semester, 57 percent of
the courses for the 15 most
popular majors at Columbia
College do not comply with
a federal law mandating that
textbook information be made
available for students on the
University’s course schedule
used for preregistration and
registration purposes.
The Textbook Information
Provision of the Higher
Education Opportunity Act,
which went into effect in July
2010, mandates that higher
education institutions receiving federal funding for financial
aid must list the International
Standard Book Number and the
retail price information of required and recommended college textbooks and supplemental
materials for offered courses.
The provision states that
its intention is “to ensure that
students have access to affordable course materials by decreasing costs to students and
enhancing transparency and
disclosure with respect to the
selection, purchase, sale, and
use of course materials.”
According to textbook
information collected by
Spectator last Friday, for the
top 15 CC majors — which encompassesd more than 75 percent of students for CC’s class
of 2014 — there is a general
compliance rate of 43 percent.
Although the collected data
does not account for textbooks
listed on syllabi or for courses
that do not require textbooks,
professors are provided with
a tool on CourseWorks for
entering in textbook information. The tool also allows professors to indicate whether or
not the course has required
textbooks.
Within the set of top 15 CC
majors, the five least compliant majors are political
science, music, English, anthropology, and sustainable
development.
The mathematics major
had the highest compliance
rate, with over 83 percent of
courses displaying textbook
information on CourseWorks.
Computer science was the
next most compliant CC major,
with more than 63 percent of
classes listing a textbook. The
political science major, however, had the highest percentage of textbooks that don’t list
a textbook at 90 percent.
For SEAS, the department
Top Majors Conferred to the Columbia College Class of 2014
GRAPHIC BY JENNA BEERS
least compliant with the federal law was civil engineering.
In this department, only one of
35 courses listed textbook information. The next least compliant SEAS department w was
biomedical engineering, which
lists textbook information for
two out of 21 courses.
After Spectator reported
that over 65 percent of spring
2015 undergraduate classes in
the 10 most popular majors did
not provide textbook information on CourseWorks earlier
this semester, the University
has created a new protocol
to remind faculty every semester to provide textbook
information for their courses, according to a University
spokesperson.
Melissa Begg, vice provost
for educational programs, posted an announcement to faculty
on Jan. 28 with a reminder to
submit textbook information
for the spring 2015 semester.
“Federal law requires that
the University provide students with information on
the textbooks their instructors expect or recommend that
they purchase. The information must be posted online in
time to help students choose
the courses for which they
will register,” Begg said in the
notice.
Despite the new protocol,
Spectator’s data shows that a
majority of courses still do not
adhere to this federally mandated law.
Robert Lipshitz, the director of calculus for the
math department, said that
the quantity of textbooks required for courses might have
an effect on whether or not
professors would provide the
information.
“Specifying textbooks is
probably easier for the math
department than some other
departments: most courses
only have a single textbook,
and the material taught in
most undergraduate subjects
has not changed substantially
in more than a hundred years,
so textbooks also change comparatively slowly,” Lipshitz
said in an email.
For example, students taking Calculus I this semester
were only required to purchase one textbook, whereas students taking this semester’s Introduction to
American Politics, a political
science course, were required
to purchase eight different
textbooks.
Anna Ghurbanyan, associate instructor in the chemistry
department, said that professors were reminded to post
textbook information during
department meetings.
“Usually that information
we try to post in advance for
the students to have access
early on to plan their summer stipends and academic
expenditure accordingly,”
Ghurbanyan said.
“If it’s a legal requirement, obviously they have to
do it. But it’s also a legal requirement not to go above 60
miles per hour on the highway
and some people do it,” Sunil
Gulati, senior lecturer in economics, said.
Susan Elmes, director of
undergraduate studies in economics and senior lecturer,
said she did not think students
would choose not to take a
class because of the required
textbooks, but recognized the
importance of having the information available for budgeting purposes.
However, students interviewed said that having textbook price information made
available to them during registration would influence
the classes for which they
registered.
“I would not take a class
that requires a textbook that
is out of my price range or that
isn’t available in the library,”
Lucy Saldivar, BC ’17, said.
Some students said that the
availability of textbook information during registration
was less of a concern than the
actual prices of books, especially for courses that fulfill
major or general education
requirements.
“At this point I’m just trying to get classes that fulfill my
requirements,” Ornella Friggit,
BC ’16, said. “Most of the time
I just don’t buy my textbooks. I
either rent them or find PDFs.”
“There’s not much I can do
about it now because most of
my classes are classes I have to
take due to major [and] core.
So now, because of budget concerns I just try to exhaust every available resource to find
a cheaper textbook,” Michael
Miskovski, CC ’17, said.
David Brice, CC ’16 said
that having textbook price information earlier would allow
him time to find cheaper alternatives or, at the very least, a
less expensive course.
“If I could see that I would
have to spend $500 on textbooks for a class, there might
be a chance that I wouldn’t
take it,” Brice said. “I, as a
working-class student at
Columbia University, I do
avoid classes where I am the
only person who is not from
an incredibly wealthy background. And that in and of itself would be enough of a red
flag, perhaps, to let me know
that it’s not something I want
to do.”
news@columbiaspectator.com
the protest. When activists asked
Corprew if they were violating
the Rules of University Conduct,
which are currently under review
and govern protests on campus,
Corprew audibly told them that
“it’s not about the rules, I just need
your UNI.”
It’s unclear if Corprew attended the event in a role to enforce
the Rules of Conduct, as it was
not immediately known whether
Corprew served in an official role as
either a presidential delegate—an
individual appointed by University
President Lee Bollinger—or a divisional delegate—an individual
appointed by a dean or director
of a school program. The Rules of
Conduct say that these delegates
“have principal authority for the
enforcement of these Rules. They
shall warn individuals and groups
whose actions may violate these
Rules and may declare their belief
that the demonstration is illegal.”
As prospective students
left Low Library at 9 p.m. to
board buses for a city tour on
Amsterdam Avenue and 116th
Street, the Marching Band formed
a passageway and played “Roar,
Lion, Roar.”
“It was all so unreal,” Evan
Caplinger, a prospective student,
said. “It was the juxtaposition of
the school spirit and this striking
message against the school. It was
invective against the administration and its policies.”
After prospective students
left the event in Low Library
and headed toward buses on
Amsterdam Avenue for a tour of
the city, No Red Tape members
were allowed to begin projecting the text on the library again.
The text—which was projected by
Illuminator, a politically-oriented
arts collective that paired with the
group as one of its many collaborative art projects—read “Columbia
has a rape problem,” “President
Bollinger: Carry that weight,” “We
deserve a safe campus,” and “Do
you want a rapist as your RA?”
When prospective students returned from their bus tour around
New York City, prospective students told Spectator that they were
ushered directly along Broadway
from their buses to Lerner Hall.
As prospective students entered
Roone Auditorium, a number of
No Red Tape members distributed fliers that advertised the group’s
Teach In.
Activists said they planned
their protest to coincide with
Days on Campus because it was
the most likely time that administration would feel obligated to
react to activists’ demands. No
Red Tape has previously staged
four protests in February at undergraduate admissions info sessions, for which nine members of
the group received warning letters from the Office of Judicial
Affairs on potential violations of
the Rules of Conduct.
“This is the University’s chance
to show off shiny Columbia,” No
Red Tape member Julia Crain, BC
’18, said. “If we can do anything
while these people are here that’s
when they’ll feel most pressure to
make active change.”
Crain also said that the intention of the event was to raise
awareness among incoming freshmen about the issue of sexual
assault on college campuses in
general.
“Prospective students have a
right to know if they will feel safe
at a school they attend,” she said.
“We are arming them with questions they should ask for their
own well-being. Here and at any
school, they have a right to know
the truth about how schools handle these cases.”
Prospective students interviewed on Sunday night had
mixed thoughts about the protest.
For some, like Andrew
Murphy, a prospective student,
No Red Tape’s action was a reminder of the activism that appealed to him about Columbia in
the first place.
“It was powerful,” Murphy said.
“It definitely conveyed a message
where a lot of people’s voices can’t
be heard in an institution like this
where voices should be heard.”
Veronica Brusilovski, a prospective student, said it was abrasive for administrators to hide students from the protest.
“They are trying to make sure
that we don’t know, even though
we do,” she said. “Obviously, we
are connected online, we see everything that is going on, we read
the papers, it’s in every single
publication in America right now.
Obviously we know.”
Still, others said that they
were apprehensive about No Red
Tape’s protest.
Sebastian Espinosa, a prospective student, said that No
Red Tape’s protest could make
Columbia and its handling of
sexual assault cases seem worse
to prospective students than they
actually are.
“Kids are coming here to learn
about the school, learn about its
positives,” he said. “It’s going to
deter people from wanting to
come to Columbia, seeing all this
strife, when there may also be
strife at other schools and people
may simply be complacent.”
news@columbiaspectator.com
As Barnard psychology department waits to expand space, most classes taught by adjuncts
PSYCH from front page
like to be here, but we’ve had
to rearrange our schedules.”
“We’re hopeful that changes
in the available resources, which
will be brought about by new resources becoming available to
the psychology department, will
make it possible for us to enlarge
the full-time tenure or tenure-eligible portion of the department,”
Remez said.
In the meantime, the department will have to depend on adjunct professors—who share offices and are only on campus a few
times a week—to teach the bulk of
its courses.
The number of adjunct and
full-time faculty in the Barnard
psychology department has fluctuated significantly over the years.
For example, in 2012, the department had 16 full-time professors
and 14 adjunct professors.
“You can think of the adjunct
participation in our department
as tidal,” Remez said. “In any given year, the full-time faculty who
are our regulars, will differ in the
number of leaves or fellowships,
or parental leaves, or sabbatical.
When they take their leaves, then
the number of adjuncts participating in our teaching goes up.”
Though adjunct professors interviewed said that they enjoyed
their time at Barnard, the majority
of them said they do not want to
become full-time professors because they hold full-time positions
elsewhere and are compensated
fairly well as adjuncts.
Adjuncts at Barnard teach a
maximum of three courses per
academic year, but most only end
up teaching one or two courses
because of obligations to their
other jobs. On the other hand, fulltime professors, Remez said, must
teach two courses a semester, provide research supervision, and sit
on administrative committees.
“You can think
of the adjunct
participation in our
department as a
tidal. ”
—Department chair
Robert Remez
Abigail Kalmbach, who also
has a full-time position in the
Columbia psychology department
and teaches Neural Modulation,
a course that she designed at
Barnard, said Barnard adjunct
professors are compensated well.
“Barnard does pay a very, very
competitive wage to adjuncts per
class,” Kalmbach said. “It’s different from other colleges where
a lot of adjuncts are adjuncts because they have to be. There’s no
other option.”
Adjunct professor Doris
Zahner, who works full-time at
Advancement for Rural Kids,
teaches one course at Barnard a
semester said she plans to keep it
that way.
“I chose not to go into academia full time. Tenure-track positions are limited,” Zahner said.
“This is the best of both worlds.
I get to to have a professional career, but also get to teach, which
I really love to do.”
Remez said that though adjuncts have been represented as
an exploited class in media lately,
the psychology department’s high
number of adjuncts was representative of how Barnard’s treatment
of its adjuncts differed from the
national majority.
“Our adjuncts have been extremely loyal because the working conditions are great, that’s
because the students are intellectually aggressive, or at least that’s
been my observation,” Remez
said.
giulia.olsson
@columbiaspectator.com
PROFESSOR TYPE BREAKDOWN
Full-time
Adjunct
9.1%
23.7%
60.5%
100%
76.3%
90.1%
100%
39.5%
Columbia
Psychology
Barnard
Psychology
Barnard
Physics
Barnard
Biology
Barnard
Chemistry
GRAPHIC BY ELLORINE CARLE
POOJA KATHAIL / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
ALL THE ADJUNCTS
|
Barnard’s psychology department is largely comprised of adjuncts.
NEWS
APRIL 16, 2015
PAGE 3
Graduate students share experiences with consistently late pay for teaching as union pushes issue
BY EMMA
KOLCHIN-MILLER
Spectator Staff Writer
Graduate Workers of
C o l u m b i a - Un i t e d
Au t o
Workers, the group of graduate students attempting to gain
union recognition from the
National Labor Relations Board,
has consistently cited late pay as
a serious grievance it plans to
address if it achieves this goal.
Spectator has verified four
cases in which graduate students were paid late for their
work as teaching and research
assistants and found many
more anecdotes to this effect
from students who declined to
provide documentation, citing
reasons of privacy.
GWC organizers said a
union could negotiate a contract that would include a
grievance procedure, which
would provide formal steps for
graduate students to take when
paid late.
Funded graduate teaching
and research assistants in the
Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences receive on average
$25,336 per year, two-thirds of
which is awarded as a stipend
in September and January and
one-third of which is administered as paychecks twice a
month. Graduate students reported cases of receiving both
stipends and paychecks late.
Graduate students said they
cannot afford to wait weeks or
months for the stipends and
paychecks, as they rely on the
money to pay rent and buy
food.
University President Lee
Bollinger has said that if late
pay is a problem, a union would
not be necessary to solve it.
“I understand, those are reasonable arguments—my answer
would be we should address all
those things. As our students,
we should not have you be paid
late,” Bollinger said.
Paid Late
Four graduate students were
willing to share and document
their experiences with late pay.
Spectator verified their stories
by reviewing bank statements
and email exchanges with
administrators.
Tommy
Tommy Birkett, a secondyear anthropology Ph.D. student
and teaching assistant, did not
receive any paychecks, which
are meant to come twice a
month, until Feb. 4 in the spring
semester, according to a bank
statement. Graduate teaching
assistants begin receiving paychecks in mid-September each
academic year.
Email exchanges reviewed
by Spectator reveal that in
mid-October an anthropology
department administrator said
Birkett’s application for a paid
appointment as a teaching assistant, which Birkett had filled
out on time in September, was
deleted from the system because the boxes for both “Asian”
and “white” were checked on
an optional race and ethnicity form. The form is built for
students to check only one of
the options. In late December,
however, Birkett’s department
administrator said the application suddenly reappeared.
During the process, Birkett
said weeks went by without
word about the late paycheck.
The department administrator
who dealt with graduate students’ finances went on leave
for a few weeks, and Birkett
said other administrators in the
department did not know what
was going on and would not
connect them with the registrar’s office until late December.
“I was emailing the department at the end of last semester
because I couldn’t pay rent, because at that point I had just run
out of money I had saved. I was
like, ‘You need to pay me now
and figure this out right away,’”
Birkett said.
Ashley
Ashley Nagel, a second-year
master’s student in the School
of Engineering and Applied
Science who recently published
an op-ed in Spectator saying
she has been paid late multiple times, received a stipend
in 2013 that arrived on Nov. 19,
instead of in September when
it was supposed to, according
to her Student Services Online
account statement.
“It just increases
my stress a lot and
interferes with
how I feel my
performance is
academically.”
—Ashley Nagel, SEAS
Though Nagel did not know
what went wrong, she and her
department administrator were
in email contact with the SEAS
Office of Budget and Financial
Planning for almost a month before she received her stipend.
“It just increases my stress
a lot and interferes with how
I feel my performance is academically,” Nagel said of being
paid late.
Jessica
Jessica Lee, a sixth year
Ph.D. student in history, did
not receive her stipend for
this semester, which was supposed to come in January, until
Feb. 24, according to her bank
statement.
Lee finished her five years of
guaranteed funding from GSAS
last year, but secured a teaching assistant appointment with
an institute that would pay her
a stipend. However, when Lee
did not receive pay by the end
of January, she reached out to
an administrator in the institute
and learned that the administrator who had promised her
the stipend had taken a medical leave without telling anyone
about her appointment.
Emails
reviewed
by
Spectator show that Lee was
in contact with the history department, the institute, and the
GSAS Office of Financial Aid for
weeks before she received her
stipend.
“I don’t think anybody is maliciously withholding our paychecks, I don’t think it’s even
that they’re disrespecting us,”
Lee said. “I think that it’s just
easy for things to fall through
cracks, especially when you
have such a broken-up, fractured system like this, and then
it falls on the graduate student
to put the pieces together.”
Olga
Olga Brudastova, a Ph.D.
student in civil engineering,
received her stipend for the
spring semester of 2014 on April
4, instead of in January, according to her bank statement.
Because Brudastova is an international student and did not
have a social security number,
Columbia created a dummy social security number for her file.
However, Brudastova said that
since the number belonged to
another person, an error occurred in the process of her payment and she did not receive the
money.
Brudastova went to her department administrator when
she had received the stipend,
who figured out what had happened. Brudastova said the
system was difficult to navigate even for the experienced
administrator.
“I was lucky to work with
her on that, but even for her,
a woman who’s been working
here for quite a while, it’s a
long time to figure it all out,”
Brudastova said.
Grievance procedure
Seth Prins, a GWC organizer
and graduate student in epidemiology, said the group hoped a
union contract would include a
grievance procedure to protect
students from late pay. Prins
also suggested that the contract include language making
Columbia pay interest to students who are paid late.
“It’s kind of a bread-andbutter contract issue, it’s exactly
what the union should help to
prevent and enforce,” Prins said.
“If someone gets paid late then
they would have a formal grievance procedure to pursue that,
and the University would be contractually obligated to address it.”
Prins pointed to language
in the recent contract between
NYU and its graduate student
union, the only recognized private university graduate student
union in the country, which says
that graduate students must be
paid on time and outlines a general grievance procedure that
graduate students could follow
“accompanied by a union representative” when paid late. The
NYU contract does not award
graduate students additional
compensation for being paid
late.
In NYU’s grievance procedure, the graduate student first
must try to work out the problem through discussion with the
appropriate faculty member or
administrator. If this does not
work, the graduate student or
union representative helping
must send an account of the
grievance to the dean of the appropriate school, who will make
a decision. If the grievance remains unresolved, either party
may appeal to the provost, and if
the provost’s decision is unsatisfactory, either party may request arbitration, in which an
arbitrator from the American
Arbitration Association will
make a decision.
“The union would probably
be able to gather information on
the matter from the students affected and file a collective grievance with the university,” Chris
Nickell, an organizer for NYU’s
graduate student union, said in
an email. “That’s what we at
NYU can now start to do postratification that we weren’t able
to do before we had a contract.”
In Columbia’s case, however,
it is also unclear how much a
grievance procedure could aid
the bureaucratic mistakes that
lead to late payment. According
to a department administrator in
GSAS, the paperwork necessary
for a student to be paid passes
through three offices before being officially entered into the
system at the Human Resources
Processing Center, leaving ample room for mistakes.
In addition, students may be
paid late if they fail to fill out paperwork with the GSAS Office
of Financial Aid on time.
A spokesperson from the
Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences said that late pay is
a rare issue, and often results
from individualized problems.
“The GSAS Office of
Financial Aid considers the
on-time payment of student
stipends and salaries to be of
utmost priority. In the very
few instances in which students receive a late payment,
it is typically for isolated, specific reasons, such as outstanding paperwork or late notification from a funding source,” the
spokesperson said.
However, GWC organizers
and other graduate students
maintain that late pay is a widespread and serious problem.
“Everyone either has experienced late pay or knows someone who has experienced late
pay,” Prins said.
news@columbiaspectator.com
EDITORIAL & OPINION
PAGE 4
APRIL 16, 2015
Moving toward new
Frontiers
The 139th year of publication
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mikhail klimentov
One simple request
BY ASHLEY NAGEL
Oh, Columbia, how do thee infuriate? Let me count the ways.
There are hundreds of ways, big and small, that this
University unnecessarily elevates the stress level of its students—I mean, higher than what one expects from squeezing thousands of the world’s most competitive students into a
chunk of land one avenue wide and six blocks long in the city
that never sleeps. But there is one specific, largely preventable,
and hugely impactful way the University stresses me out, so at
this moment I have but one simple request.
Pay me on time.
Pay your students on time.
Make it your number one priority. Not all of us can afford to
just sit around, work 20 hours a week, and wait three months
for our first paycheck. I’m not working for the fun of it—I’m
working to eat, to pay rent, to pay tuition.
Let me count the number of my friends who are employed
by Columbia and have struggled to get paid. Wait … I’m pretty
sure it’s all of them. I mean literally. Like, the literal use of the
term “literally.” 100 percent of my friends have had issues getting
paid. Some of my friends laugh it off: “Oh, that’s just Columbia,
what do you expect?” But this is my sixth year here (undergrad
and master’s) and my 10th semester of worrying about getting
paid. I’m not laughing anymore. What I expect is to be paid on
time. I am embarrassed for the institution, because this would
be professionally unacceptable anywhere else.
Ph.D.s in particular tend to wait a long, long while after starting here before receiving their initial compensation.
Furthermore, Ph.D.s and M.S. students have been known to
groan loudly upon hearing the phrase “add comp”—additional
compensations—a phrase that may be somewhat less familiar
to undergraduates.
When a teaching assistant is employed by a certain department, they are put on the semimonthly pay cycle. Oftentimes,
the amount they are making is not substantial enough to pay
for their living expenses, so they look for extra income. They
become employed by a second department and after quite a kerfuffle, they are told that they will be paid through an add comp.
An add comp requires the second department administrator or
assistant to submit a request to the primary DA, which must be
approved per paycheck almost two weeks before the pay date,
before being checked off by human resources for final approval.
Columbia, let me ask you...
Why does every single paycheck have to be individually approved by both the primary and secondary DA or assistant if
each paycheck is part of a semester-long contract? Why is that
process not automated?
Make room to take
back the night
BY MALLIKA WALIA
Trigger Warning: This article discusses sexual assault.
Today is Take Back the Night’s 27th annual Rally,
March, and Speak-Out to reclaim TriggerMorningside
Heights as a safe space, free of sexual and domestic violence for all. As a group dedicated to fighting sexual assault, we are glad to see that the ongoing and sometimes
heated conversations regarding sexual assault, across both
our campus and the nation at large, have spurred an honest
effort to institute change. Students and policymakers have
collaborated to demand safer spaces and more effective
preventative and adjudicative policies. And yet, there’s
still much more left to accomplish.
Take Back the Night’s active efforts to include a wide
array of voices and experiences have undoubtedly contributed to the immense strength of the movement. It’s
imperative, though, to remember that while we are fighting to make the spaces in which we live and work free of
violence, we must also make room in those spaces for healing. To echo Emma Arett (“Walking out of Butler,” April
15, 2015), we must remember to support survivors, who
are at the very center of our activism efforts.
I’ve been involved with Take Back the Night since my
freshman year. In the two years I’ve attended the Rally,
March, and Speak-Out, I’ve heard dozens of stories of
assault, trauma, and recovery. In these stories, I’ve found
solace. I’ve found a sense of purpose and conviction, both
in my involvement and in my own experiences.
There is an awe-inspiring amount of power in unity. It
is in shared spaces such as the Rally, March, and SpeakOut that survivors and supporters can come together to
reflect upon the uniqueness of our individual stories. It is
here that we can safely express our fears and pains while
also celebrating our and each other’s courage. It is here
that we can reclaim our agency and heal ourselves, while
simultaneously helping others to heal.
As we make room for recovery, we must also make room
for inclusivity. In my time as an activist, many peers have
confided their stories of sexual assault to me. Through
these stories, I have witnessed not only the true power of
support and compassion, but also the ugly, invalidating
If the pay amount is hourly and varies per pay period, why
can’t the secondary DA tack on the extra pay without additional approval every single paycheck? The primary DA has
no idea what’s going on in the student’s second job anyway.
Why is it impossible to have an “emergency” post-deadline approval process so that students who are in economic
hardship, who did NOTHING wrong, do not have to wait
another two to three weeks to get paid because someone
else screwed up? By the time the student is aware anything
is wrong (two to three business days before the pay date if
you obsessively check your my.columbia.edu like me), it’s
far too late to fix things, because the DA approval deadline
happened about eight business days previously.
Why can’t there be a “tentative amount view-on-web”
date earlier in the process so that problems can be resolved
ahead of time? Or surely there is some other way to make
the process more transparent to the student.
Columbia, if your answer is “because that’s the way it is
in Accounting and Reporting at Columbia” (the University’s
horrendously inflexible web-based financial system, with
which I am personally familiar, having worked as an administrative assistant myself ), then I would suggest that
whomever the University contracted to put that system in
place should be rehired to implement some long overdue
upgrades. I want to see systemic solutions.
In the mean time, however, could the admins, assistants,
and HR people make some lists? I know you guys are nice
people for the most part, but … add some calendar reminders? Use sticky notes? Do whatever it takes to guarantee
students aren’t waiting a moment longer than they have to
for their earnings.
The comical upside to all of this is that the same bureaucratic mess, on rare occasions, works in the student’s favor.
It can be forgiven if a student fails to report a mistaken few
extra bucks as payback for the stress of delayed paychecks.
Frustration with the administration also leads to a lack of
loyalty to the University, meaning students are less willing to
donate as alumni (a sentiment expressed by several alumni I
know). The University’s carelessness is quite costly, although
I can’t say that I’m particularly sympathetic.
Pay your Ph.D.s, your post-docs, your Teaching Assistants,
your work-studies, casual workers, lab assistants, research
assistants, tutors, etc. on time. Give us one less stress factor
so we can focus on dealing with all the other stressors at
Columbia.
The author is a second-year M.S. student in the School of
Engineering and Applied Science, studying electrical engineering.
She also completed her B.S. here in the same field in 2013. She
is a Teaching Assistant for three undergraduate courses and is
involved in the Engineering Graduate Student Council.
consequences of sexual abuse. There is a twisted notion
that one’s assault must meet certain criteria to “count.”
Some even contend that a victim must react to such unspeakable violence in a specific, predetermined way, or it
never happened. These are reductionist and exclusionary (not to mention nonsensical) viewpoints that fail to
recognize the individuality of survivorship. There are no
perfect victims. We cannot hope to progress as a society,
or even as a campus, by refusing to acknowledge the various intricacies and complexities of all survivors and their
experiences. We invite everyone to participate and share
their stories. You all matter. You all deserve to be heard.
You all deserve to heal.
These are the core tenets that drive the Rally, March,
and Speak-Out. We hope you can find ways to express
yourselves, to heal yourselves, to love yourselves and each
other, and to reflect on the strides we’ve made in our battles and recoveries. However, again, it’s imperative to ensure the safety of all participants throughout this event.
Unfortunately, that’s sometimes easier said than done.
For example, the presence of the New York City Police
Department (they will be escorting the march) may be discomforting for some. While the NYPD is meant to ensure
Since the November forum hosted by the Committee on
Science in the Core, not much has been publicized about the
pending remodeling of Frontiers of Science. The committee
has been keeping remarkably quiet about their work, which
will have an enormous impact on incoming Columbia College
classes. After having sat through (all right, slept through) the
course and attended the forum myself, I have a personal interest in what the committee plans to make of Frontiers. Perhaps
it’s a twisted form of rubbernecking—after all, wrecks and their
cleanup are fascinating.
As witness to no small number of openly dozing students,
myself included, I often sat in lecture and marveled, “I’m actually going into debt for this.” With an Ivy League bachelor’s
degree going for $60,000, the modern American college student is paying for the degree and not the experience. All the
same, that’s an absolutely miserable way to justify a four-credit
course unpalatable to both science and nonscience majors
alike, yet required for all.
Ostensibly, the course provides two things: knowledge of
“scientific habits of mind”— because, as we all know, critical
inquiry and evidentiary argument is limited to the sciences—
and exposure to multiple scientific disciplines. Instead, I came
away with an arsenal of cocktail party trivia—assuming, of
course, that people sipping gimlets would be willing to listen
to the noises of a sexually receptive female frog, because that’s
the extent of my knowledge of neuroscience. Don’t get how
the two are related? Neither do I, to be honest. I also gained
reassurance that I would not be studying science.
This is where Frontiers is failing. The Core needs to pay
attention to the course’s stakes: An entire class of first-years,
green behind the ears, is first exposed to science at Columbia
through a class that dumbs down the topics it teaches. And yet,
for some reason, instead of nixing Frontiers and leaving the
science requirement, the committee wants to keep Frontiers, a
class warranting more eye rolls than active class participants.
Why does the committee insist on keeping such a useless class?
The committee members present at November’s forum
spoke of needing to balance the curriculum’s depth and
breadth. As it stands, the course lacks both. The jump cuts
between topics and lecturers limited any possibility of meaningful understanding of the disciplines at hand. The topics
themselves felt incredibly arbitrary, selected at random from
a slew of pop-science headlines.
Thus emerges a common complaint: “This isn’t real science.” That’s right, it isn’t. If it were, the course would be titled
Introduction to Science, and that, in itself, is ridiculous. You
can introduce biology, chemistry, paleontology, astrophysics—you can’t just introduce science. So the current title is
fitting—we approach the frontiers of actual science, but we
never quite make it there.
Those of us waiting with bated breath for the committee to
announce some sort of master plan for the future of Frontiers
have heard nothing. What strange assemblage of quasi-scientific topics is taking shape behind closed doors? Has the
committee already decided what Frontiers will look like next
year based on its “prototype” models? And if they have, why
haven’t they made a peep (or a croak) about it?
The only good way to frame a course meant for all majors
with a thousand different quantitative abilities would be to
not have one. Why inflict Frontiers of Science upon an entire
class of first-years? Let the pre-meds take their labs, and let
the undecided put it off for a while as they test out potential
majors. And for God’s sake, don’t assume that humanities students need to have science watered down for us.
The author is a first-year in Columbia College and a former
associate news editor for Spectator.
the safety of the march and protect its participants from
traffic, we recognize that their presence can be triggering.
As always, there will be various, clearly visible student
marshals and a student police liaison who can also address any concerns during the march. We hope the NYPD’s
presence doesn’t deter you from joining us and we deeply
respect the bravery it takes to participate under these potentially uncomfortable circumstances.
Last year, I was a marshal at the front of the march,
leading many of the chants. At some point, I remember
turning around and being awestruck by the passion of
those marching behind me. With each step, they reaffirmed exactly why I do this. I do this because, like many
others, I do not and will not stand for sexual violence. I
do this because survivors of all identities matter and every
story deserves to be heard, acknowledged, and validated.
I do this because I strive to provide survivors with a compassionate and supportive space to heal. I do this because,
with each Rally, March, and Speak-Out, I too am healing.
The author is a junior at Barnard College studying urban
studies and political science. She is the media liaison for Take
Back the Night.
ethan wu / staff photographer
A SPACE TO HEAL | Take Back the Night fights not only for an end to violence, but also to support survivors.
EDITORIAL & OPINION
APRIL 16, 2015
Walking out of Butler
BY EMMA ARETT
Warning: This article deals with issues of sexual violence.
Here’s what it feels like when I get triggered.
I feel like the bottom half of my body is melted ice cream, and all I
can do is sink down to the ground. It’s physical. Spots where my attacker
touched me burn hot and cold at the same time. I become unmoored—
my mind floats away from my body. This is something that I fight every
single day.
Since November, I’ve learned how to manage it. I prepare myself.
I script polite exits and practice my breathing. I’ve grown able to deal
with hearing rape jokes on TV, and I don’t feel as winded when I read
Internet comments that wonder why young women don’t just quit being
so promiscuous. I’m very lucky to have supportive parents, great friends,
and a wonderful Furman counselor—a system of people willing and able
to help me deal with these emotions. But not everyone has the support
to cope with triggers. And when triggered, not everyone has the same
reaction as me. I’m not everyone.
I am a lot of things. These things include: a Barnard sophomore, a dog
lover, a terrible cook. But I’m not every Barnard sophomore, and even
though I love “Kitchen Nightmares,” I cannot speak for every other terrible cook. I’m also a rape survivor. In November 2014, a stranger took
me back to his apartment from a club and raped me. And yet, I am not
every survivor.
No Red Tape organizers are tireless, brave, and brilliant—they’re not
only raising awareness of sexual assault, but also taking concrete steps
toward creating a safer campus. While it’s still difficult for me to participate in their demonstrations, I am excited that there is a resource on
campus that has been so successful in blending activism and advocacy.
After Sunday night’s demonstration, though, I can’t help but ask:
What the hell, guys?
Projecting a reminder of my assault onto Low Library was not only
triggering, but also felt very much like a betrayal. I turned to NRT after it
happened last November, and I was grateful for its support. But Sunday’s
demonstration left me with an all-too-familiar nausea.
As a survivor, I forge a daily path toward recovery. I take refuge in
small victories, small moments when my body feels like mine again, when
my campus or my dorm room or even this city feels like a space where
I can comfortably exist. The dress I was wearing that night stays at the
graphic by alan smithee
bottom of the laundry basket. A professor prefaces a particularly graphic
reading with a “content alert.” If we’re at a party and I have a flashback,
my friends will make sure I don’t leave alone. When I saw the flyers for
the NRT demonstration, I assumed I could avoid it. It wasn’t something
I wanted to confront on a Sunday evening, before a week packed with
school and work. But there is a difference between a rally, for which I can
prepare myself, and something I cannot avoid without gluing my eyes to
the ground. When I see “RAPE HAPPENS HERE” projected onto Low,
without warning, everything comes back up, no matter how hard I try to
push it back down. I try to leave Butler and I am frozen. I try to be supportive but it feels impossible. “COLUMBIA HAS A RAPE PROBLEM,”
but so do I—my rape problem is that I got raped.
When you are a survivor, when you are carrying that weight, it’s dangerous to feel disconnected from the only community you’ve got. But
NRT’s demonstration has left behind those who feel unsafe. It seems
that there is not a middle ground here: Speaking up as someone who
felt unsafe during this protest makes me look sympathetic toward an
administration that’s working against me. Actions like this, however,
demonstrate that NRT views me as another statistic, another number to
put on the handout. If NRT were truly focused on making this campus
a safer space, there would have been a more concerted effort to support
survivors. Not everyone finds it empowering to be reminded of their experiences without a fair warning; other, less graphic slogans could have
been chosen. I don’t know whether the pain I feel right now was taken
into account when this projection was being planned. I don’t know how
this projection served as a “survivor-centered solution.”
I don’t know if it is fair to reopen survivors’ wounds in the battle to
demand change. I certainly did not consent to being used against the
administration. My painful memories are not bargaining chips.
I do not represent every survivor, and NRT does not represent every
survivor. If you are one of us, I hope someone reminds you that whatever
your reaction to their demonstration was, it was not incorrect. If you
walked past Low Sunday night and felt confused, ambushed, or alienated, you are not alone. I wish I were in a place where a projection like
that could make me feel empowered. I’m not.
As we continue to challenge the administration and demonstrate,
I hope all advocates and activists bear in mind on whose behalf they
advocate. I can only hope that if the goal is to advocate for survivors, activists will remain conscious of the diversity of our experiences, of our
recoveries, and of our futures.
The author is a Barnard College sophomore majoring in urban studies.
In defense of narcissism, we’re all guilty of it
S
ometimes, I hate-read David Brooks’ columns.
I’ll read them, knowing full well that I won’t
agree with his arguments, I’ll think his conclusions
are overly moralized tripe, and I’ll just come away
more annoyed than when I started.
So naturally, when I saw that The Guardian
DANIEL
published an interview with David Brooks, I felt
GARISTO
compelled to read it—maybe to confirm my own
suspicions that he was an annoying moralistic
Da n t h conservative, maybe because I was curious. The
o log y
Guardian quotes an excerpt from his new book,
“The Road to Character,” where Brooks admits, “I
am paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am.”
I came away from the interview with a very different perspective
on Brooks, a writer whose column in the New York Times I’ve read for
years, whom I thought I knew. This was a self-effacing, acutely aware,
and still poised side of Brooks that was a far cry from my image of him.
I’d always imagined that the commanding, assured voice of moral
authority behind Brooks’ columns matched the man. Anecdotes about
being a socialist in college, wanting to “ram a knife” into a productive
colleague’s neck, and the frank admission that being hated by millions
made joining the Times the “six worst months” of his life didn’t fit the
picture.
This week, Brooks put out a lengthy column for the New York
Times Sunday Review on what he called his “moral bucket list.”
A fairly uncontroversial column by most standards, it revolved
around Brooks’ humble assertion that he wanted to be a better
person. And yet, vitriolic comments excoriated Brooks for being a conservative and for not using the space to attack the GOP.
Commenters doubted that he was really a conservative, given the
views he espoused.
I had issues with it, as I do with most of Brooks’ columns. I don’t,
for instance, believe that “eulogy virtues” are necessarily more important than “résumé virtues.” But with the Guardian interview in mind,
I had a different perspective on his column. This was a piece Brooks
knew would be torn to pieces by people who love to hate David Brooks
and refuse to actually engage with his ideas. This was a piece from
someone who deeply believes he is flawed and is willing to admit that
to an audience of millions. It was not an infallible gospel that Brooks
thought his readers would guzzle down.
I’ve seen commenters in the past criticize Brooks for his narcissism and paid little heed to it. It makes sense—unlike most of his fellow
high-profile columnists, Brooks frequently references personal details
of his life. He is unusually emotionally and intellectually intimate, a
fact made stranger by the hostility his readers have for him. Because of
PAGE 5
his propensity to share and his ideological differences from his audience, Brooks has drawn claims of narcissism.
On a fundamental level, publishing any column is a narcissistic
endeavor. The presumption that your thoughts are worth sharing with
hundreds of other people (Columbia students, for example), let alone
millions of other people, relies on arrogance. To bring your own life
into the picture and believe that your experiences are worth space on
the page seems even more based in immodesty.
As a result, many prominent columnists shy away from the personal, and especially from the intimate. Sometimes writers will put forth
personal anecdotes to defend a claim—but that isn’t quite what Brooks
does, and it doesn’t draw the kind of reproach he garners.
Brooks is invested in an earnest conversation—even with the
many readers who hate him. Often, he brings in nonessential details
and thoughts to accomplish this. In “The Moral Bucket List,” Brooks
includes a parenthetical: “(I’m a pundit, more or less paid to appear
smarter and better than I really am).” The funny thing about Brooks
is that he actually seems to believe this. It’s not a sardonic joke for the
sake of irony—Brooks truly wants to inform his audience of this reality
about himself.
Yet, commenters didn’t connect with the admission. I suspect many
felt as I initially did—that it was a deflection, a self-deprecation to ward
off criticism. One of the top comments dismissed the very notion behind Brooks’ column: to be a better person.
“Who’s got time for all of this tortured self-improvement?”
“Most of us aren’t quite as self-involved as Brooks thinks we are.”
“I can only imagine that Mr. Brooks is projecting.”
While Brooks looks inward, most columnists and most people—
myself included—look outward and draw on our experience as a prop
to defend an argument. Our narcissism and belief in the importance of
our views is cloaked by the issues we engage with. But this is nothing
more than paralipsis. We do no more than add emphasis to ourselves
and our own prestige when we write without acknowledgment of this
fact.
Narcissism is inescapable even if we’re not interested in introspection. Writing this column about Brooks is easily the most self-absorbed
thing I’ve done all week, and I spent several hours this weekend applying to internships and worrying about my future. But I don’t think that
has to detract from its value.
So maybe we should take a leaf out of David Brooks’ book, and be
honest with our narcissism. At the very least, we’ll be able to check that
off our moral bucket list.
Daniel Garisto is a Columbia College junior majoring in physics. He
is a former editorial page editor for Spectator. Danthology runs every
Wednesday.
Ben and Viv, don’t waste
your term
BY JOE LUTHER AND CONNOR ROHAN
Howdy, Columbia. Pleasure talkin’ to ya. Heard y’all students got a
couple rascals over there, Ben Makansi and Viv Ramakrishnan, who
recently won your Columbia College Student Council executive board
election by running a satirical campaign. Well, we’ve got a bit of experiential knowledge and wisdom to bestow upon your feisty little kings, so
buckle up, sit tight, and treat our word as law.
On February 19, we were elected Georgetown University Student
Association president and vice president without a legitimate platform or budget. Following an unprecedented satirical campaign, we
somehow managed to garner 54.1 percent of the total vote by the final round of instant runoff voting. We assumed office on Mar. 21 and
have been absolutely killing it ever since. But this isn’t about us. It’s
your time to shine.
Ben and Viv, I hope that you both realize what a unique opportunity this is. You’ve been elected to represent every individual enrolled
in Columbia College while having absolutely no campaign promises to
uphold. The expectations are low, institutional precedents are out the
window, and you can easily deflect difficult questions by responding with
a joke, a laugh, or a disarming smile.
“Hey, that sounds like unmitigated liberation from the confines of
yore!” you guys both probably said in unison and verbatim upon reading
this. However, with your lack of responsibility comes responsibility—you
have engendered an unprecedented moment in CCSC history where a
permanent and positive cultural shift is within reach. You have the ability
to set the tone in the room, whether that be in meetings with students,
administrators, or fellow members of the CCSC, and in doing so, you set
the tone for the entire organization. Do not take that lightly.
We also don’t mean to shortchange you the impressive feat of winning any election. You won not because some enlightened message that
you propagated hit a sweet spot in your constituents’ hearts, but because
what you’re saying is different, it’s funny, and you understand rhetoric.
That being said, don’t get sucked into the CCSC world and lose your roots.
You’re about to be inundated with an incomprehensible bulk of information from the status quo ante—your task is to filter all of it through the
satirical lens that made you so attractive in the first place, while casting
a critical eye upon CCSC precedent. Remember: The success of satirical
candidates is tethered to institutional dysfunction, so don’t get swept up
in CCSC’s bullshit.
Another tip: Carve out some time for yourself. If you don’t mark off a
couple hours of “me” time in your calendar every week, you’re going to
go nuts. Every second of every day from 9 a.m. to 12 a.m. is going to be in
high demand, and the free 15 minutes or half hour that may pop up here
or there is going to be spent answering emails. As satirists, I’m sure that
you value thinking time in order to hone your craft. But one consequence,
expected or not, of joining CCSC is no longer having time to think, IF you
fail to take protective measures.
The election of iconoclasts will invariably ruffle a few student
government feathers. While your blank slate is critical in engaging
students from all corners of campus, and helping them reimagine their
relationship with student government, it’s imperative to work with
those who already have institutional knowledge and experience. We
discovered that some of the most committed and passionate student
advocates on campus have been working within our student government for years. So just because you’re new and different, yadda yadda
yadda, doesn’t mean that there has to be a purge. In fact, the best
course of action may be to do just the opposite: Use this opportunity
to give people the autonomy that they, as experts in their respective
fields, need to make a difference. A bottom-up approach, in which the
cabinet members drive the policy, is bound to pay more dividends than
a president and vice president micromanaging from the top. Have faith
in those that you work with, and they’ll have faith in you.
While we appreciate that our one month of formal experience gives us
the authority to dictate sage advice from our seat of wisdom, we recognize
that we are not in uncharted territory. Across the country, it would appear
that we are in a period of student-government upheaval. Georgetown,
Harvard, and now Columbia have all witnessed the rise of satirical candidates, and maybe that’s a good thing. As Thomas Jefferson would have
said if he were alive today, “the tree of democracy must be, from time to
time, refreshed with the wit of satirists.” Satirical tickets can’t win year
after year, but they can make a difference.
Ben and Viv, you both have the opportunity to shape a student government which is engaging, responsive, hella tight, down-to-earth, and, gosh
darn it, fun! Change the culture, preserve yourselves, keep CCSC in line,
and be proud of the message that you’ve sent Columbia. In the brightest
alcove of our office hangs a single piece of computer paper that reads,
“It’s Just Student Government.” Hold that message dear, my friends, and
don’t let it go. Now go kick some ass.
P.S. And since we’re here, one last piece of advice: If start-up tech
companies want to “sit down” with you, just ignore them. You’ll be happy
you did.
Joe Luther and Connor Rohan are the Georgetown University Student
Association president and vice president. Luther is a junior majoring in
government and minoring in psychology and sociology. Rohan is a junior
majoring in government and English.
NEWS
PAGE 6
APRIL 16, 2015
About 300 students, faculty take to Low to call for higher minimum wage, better pay for adjuncts
FIGHT from front page
SPENCER COHEN / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
FIGHT FOR $15
|
About 300 students took to Low Steps to call for a higher minimum wage.
“There’s so many adjuncts
that I know who can’t make it.
They’re going from school to
school to school, working at
3 or 4 different schools, and
they’re still below poverty
wage,” Elizabeth Owen, TC
’01 and an adjunct professor
at Teachers College, said.
Owen, who serves as an adjunct because she is paying off
her student loans, said that in
each class, she teaches 40 to
50 students—each of whom
pay more in tuition than she
makes as her salary.
“It’s not fair to the students,” she said. “We don’t have
the time to give them. We don’t
have the energy, we don’t have
office hours, we don’t have an
office to meet them in, we’re
sponsoring their Master’s project and we don’t have the adequate time to put into it.”
An adjunct professor at
Barnard College—who asked to
remain anonymous out of concerns for job security—said that
the disparity between tuition
and pay for adjuncts is upsetting.
“I’m also a parent who’s
paying for a kid to go to a
prestigious university much
like this one,” the adjunct
professor said. “The disparity
between what they charge me
to send my kid to school and
what I’m earning at the same
time—it’s infuriating.”
The adjunct professor said
that the University fails to properly compensate the amount of
work adjunct professors do,
with wages or with benefits.
“The people who do an enormous amount of teaching here
are really independent contractors basically with no health insurance, no job security and so
on,” the adjunct professor said.
“We’re not really paid for anything really outside of the classroom time and there’s a lot more
that goes on that we have to do,
so I just think they’re not doing
the right thing in the way that
they treat adjuncts.”
At the speakout, undergraduate students said they shared
the concerns expressed by adjunct professors.
“This is an issue for students, it’s an issue for professors and it’s an issue for anyone who cares about a better
economy for everyone,” Ben
LaZebnik, CC ’18 and an organizer with Columbia Fight
for 15, said.
In addition to undergraduate student organizers
from the Fight for 15 movement, many of the protest’s
attendees came from the CU
Dems or fossil fuel divestment groups such as Barnard
Columbia Divest for Climate
Justice, which was formerly
known as Barnard Columbia
Divest.
“Climate justice is impossible in a system that prioritizes
profit over people,” CDCJ organizer Elana Sulakshana, CC
’17, said during the speak-out.
“Communities devastated by
poverty wages and mass incarceration are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate
change. The fight for 15 is the
fight for a livable planet.”
For others, though, the
movement holds a more personal meaning.
“In high school, I worked in
fast food and I didn’t think it
was right to see my co-workers
have to balance two jobs and
have to work overtime in order
to just barely make it,” Ja’da
Young, CC ’17, said.
“It’s important for students
to get involved because a lot
of us are also workers affected
by this,” she added. “When we
graduate as well we’re inheriting this economy, so it’s important to advocate for what
we believe is right and what
we want.”
news@columbiaspectator.com
New internal procedure with judicial board among proposed Rules of University Conduct revisions
BY DANNY LI
Spectator Staff Writer
The University Senate rules
committee released the first
draft of revisions to the Rules
of University Conduct on the
USenate website Tuesday, three
days prior to the sole town hall
devoted to reviewing the proposed revisions. Following the
town hall, the senate will vote
on the proposed revisions at the
May 1 plenary.
The Rules of University
Conduct provide disciplinary
guidelines that apply to demonstrations. They are meant to
balance the rights of free expression with the proper functioning
of the University.
The draft of revisions proposes a new internal procedure
that transfers adjudicatory power under the Rules of University
Conduct from deans and thirdparty hearing officers into the
hands of a judicial board comprised of students, faculty, and
administrators.
While the revisions recommend drastic changes to disciplinary procedures, few revisions
were made to the language defining the violations themselves.
After repeated delays, this
draft comes one month later
than the original projected release date of March 14, which
was announced at the Feb. 7 senate plenary.
“There’s always some copy
editing or last-minute review that
we have to do,” rules committee
co-chair Christopher Riano, GS
’07, said regarding recent delays.
The committee quietly added
the draft in the form of an internal link to the senate website’s
event description for Friday’s
town hall meeting on the proposed revisions. An email was
sent out to subscribers of the
USenate listserv announcing the
release Wednesday morning.
The committee also did not
summarize the revisions contained within the draft for public
analysis in any form, leaving students to compare the proposed
draft to the existing rules on their
own.
Here are the proposed changes to consider before Friday’s
town hall.
Limited Changes to
Violation Criteria
The proposed revisions do not
significantly alter the language
used to describe violations.
Students have long criticized
the rules for failing to clearly
distinguish between and define
simple and serious violations of
the rules. Students found responsible for serious violations may
be subject to a number of more
serious sanctions. The sweeping language used to define rule
violations was seen by many students as a loophole administrators could use to arbitrarily punish protesters severely.
To address these concerns,
the committee deleted the violation that punishes students for
aiding others in rule violations.
Lacking a clear definition of
what exactly constitutes an interference with University facilities, the entrance blockage violation has been cited by students as
being particularly problematic.
The current rules don’t specify
how long a student must block a
passageway before being charged
with a violation, beyond distinguishing between “a very short
period of time” for simple violations, versus “more than a very
short period of time” for serious
violations.
The only proposed change
made to the entrance blockage
violation in the proposed revisions is the deletion of the word
“very” in “a very short period of
time.”
Unclear Role of New
Sanctioning Officer
After the validity of charges
has been determined, the revisions explain that the newly
created position of sanctioning
officer “shall have primary responsibility for the sanctioning
stage.”
However, inconsistencies in
the draft’s language leave the
exact authority and function of
the sanctioning officer unclear.
When describing the role of
the new appeals board, the draft
explains that the board is responsible for appeals “from decisions or sanctions imposed by
the Rules Administrator or the
University Judicial Board and
may overturn, affirm, or lessen
the sanction of the University
Judicial Board.”
The excerpt above does not
attribute sanctioning power to a
sanctioning officer, instead implying that this authority is given
to the judicial board.
New Internal Process
Under the current rules, the
rules administrator may refer
students to either the informal
Dean’s Discipline process or an
external formal hearing, judged
by a hearing officer, outside the
purview of the University.
The released draft proposes
the replacement of these two adjudication processes by a single
internal process that involves
three new actors: a University
Judicial Board, an appeals board,
and a sanctioning officer.
The move toward a single
internal process addresses students’ concerns over Dean’s
Discipline for its lack of procedural protections, explicit guidelines, and transparency.
Judicial Board
The five-member University
Judicial Board judges the validity of all charges of rule violations
and is comprised of at least one
student, one faculty member, and
one administrator. Members of
the Judicial Board are appointed by the executive committee of
the USenate.
The two remaining spots on
the board are left to the discretion of the executive committee.
At the April 2 plenary, University Senator Marc
Heinrich, CC ’16, urged the committee to fill the remaining two
seats of the judicial board with
a student and faculty member to
avoid placing too much power in
the hands of the administration.
While the proposed revisions
say that “no one of these groups
may constitute a majority of the
University Judicial Board,” they
do not address Heinrich’s concern. Heinrich emphasized the
importance of student and faculty representation on the board,
especially given the dean-filled
composition of the Appeals
Board.
New Sanctions
Under the current rules, respondents charged with serious violations of the rules are
sentenced to a minimum of suspension. In response to student
concerns over the inflexibility
of sanctions, the committee has
proposed widening the array of
sanctions available to the sanctioning officer.
Respondents responsible for
serious violations are subject
to the full range of sanctions,
which now include community
service, removal from University
housing, and University facility
access restriction. Those found
responsible for simple violations are also subject to these
new sanctions, with the exception of expulsion, suspension,
and the newly introduced sanctions “restriction from University
employment” and “revocation of
degree.”
While sentencing guidelines
have been broadened, the draft
eliminates sanction definitions.
The current rules provide descriptions of each possible penalty for rule violations. New possible sanctions are introduced
without detailed definitions.
Conflict of Interest
Provision
SAHIBA CHAWDHARY / FILE PHOTO
A NEW RULE
|
The University Senate rules committee released the first draft of Rules revisions.
The proposed appeals board,
which can overturn, affirm, or
lessen sanctions, would be comprised of three deans of a school
or division.
At the April 2 plenary, the
committee explained that the
proposed revisions would include a conflicts-of-interest
provision that would prevent the
dean of a student’s school from
serving on their appeals board.
While the released draft does
contain a conflicts-of-interest
provision, it does not explicitly
refer to the appeals board.
Rather, the provision would
allow respondents who believe
that any individual involved in
the disciplinary process has a
conflict of interest to request of
the rules administrator that the
individual be removed from the
process. The respondent would
make a similar request to the
Office of the Provost if they believed the rules administrator
had a conflict of interest.
Despite efforts to mitigate
bias, some students have expressed concern that any involvement in the adjudication process
by deans would still present a
conflict of interest.
In addition, the proposed
draft lacks a defined mechanism
for replacing individuals who
have conflicts of interest, simply
saying that the rules administrator will “take steps to address the
conflict in order to ensure an impartial process.”
Appointment of Rules
Administrator
The draft proposes a subtle
change to the appointment process of rules administrators. The
revisions call for a rules administrator who is “appointed from
the Office of the Provost.”
This change may safeguard
against student concerns of a
rules administrator appointed
from a dean’s office or any other administrative office that involves close interaction with
students.
Administrators who maintain
relationships with students, such
as deans, may have conflicts of
interest when it comes to the application of the Rules of Conduct.
Rights of the Respondent
The released draft addresses
concerns about the lack of explicit procedural and due-process
rights for respondents by creating rights guidelines.
The proposed revisions list
rights guaranteed to respondents
throughout the internal process,
including the rights “to the presence of an Advisor throughout
the process,” “to adequate time
to review documents during and
following the investigation,” “to
refrain from making self-incriminating statements,” and “to introduce evidence into the record
and call witnesses on one’s own
behalf.”
To address concerns about
the inaccessibility of legal counsel, the draft also says that “the
University will arrange for a volunteer attorney-advisor if the respondent so requests.”
While the proposed guidelines do include a protection
against self-incrimination for
respondents, they do not extend
the protection to witnesses, a
concern students have raised in
the past.
Reserved Powers and
President Authority
The reserve clause in the current rules dictates that “disciplinary matters not specifically
enumerated in these Rules are
reserved in the case of students
to the Deans of their schools.”
This clause would be eliminated under the proposed draft,
addressing concerns that such a
clause gives administrators unchecked authority in disciplinary
matters.
However, the proposed revisions do not address criticism
of presidential emergency authority. The draft upholds the
University president’s “emergency authority to protect persons
or property,” which some have
interpreted as a blank check for
presidential action.
Protection for media
When the rules committee
summarized its proposed revisions at the April 2 plenary,
Heinrich also called for a measure that would explicitly protect
members of the press covering
protests.
“At a recent action, there was a
warning given to members of the
media, and I am very concerned
about no protection,” Heinrich
said at the time. “We can work
out some system to figure out
[who is press]. I agree there
shouldn’t be a blanket protection,
but that’s something that would
certainly give me pause in voting
for this.”
These concerns are left unaddressed in the released draft.
Future Discussions on
the Rules
The proposed draft dictates
that the rules committee will assemble every four years to “facilitate a public discussion, engaging
faculty, students, and staff, about
whether revision to the Rules is
merited.”
news@columbiaspectator.com
Weekend
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT • THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2015 • PAGE B1
‘Past and Present Perfect’
combines modern,
classical art
BY KELSEY ABLES
Spectator Staff Writer
What’s the difference between a Manet and
a Goya? Anita Shapolsky Gallery’s show, “Past &
Present Perfect,” seeks to capture the lack of proficiency in art history, bringing together four artists
of vastly different styles and varying mediums all
under the idea of emulating the great masters and
creating a new narrative out of something old.
Featured artists include painters Russell Connor
and Michael Dominick, sculptor Mark Gibian, and
street artist Swoon.
“Young people occasionally call it a ‘mash-up,’”
Connor said of his paintings. They place well-known
works of art together on the same canvas to generate a new narrative.
Connor began as a student of renowned abstract
expressionist Josef Albers. He then went on to discuss art on television from the Boston Museum.
Afterward, he chose to depart from abstract expressionism, and instead began to copy from classical
master painters.
“I don’t pretend to be able to copy the technique
of the masters. I mean, these guys are geniuses. I say
the ideal viewing distance from my work is 3,000
miles from the original,” Connor said.
While the idea of strict copying might sound
boring, Connor is able to put his personality into
these pieces. Of switching to this kind of painting,
Connor said, “It let me to use a little humor which
was missing from my abstract painting.”
“I play with art’s popularity,” Connor said. He
works mainly from pieces that would be known to
anyone who has taken an introductory art history
course, and hopes that viewers will recognize the
paintings he uses but think, “There’s something
wrong with it.”
However, using mainstream art as a ground for
copying has its complications. Art critics often comment on the practice of going to a museum, seeing
the most famous piece in the collection, and leaving
feeling ‘cultured.’ Charles Baudelaire was particularly known for this mindset.
When asked if he shares this mindset and how he
ILLUSTRATION BY TIFFANY FANG
feels about this practice, Connor said, “Apart
from Baudelaire’s righteous scorn for superficial art masterpiece worship, there is much
to be said for focussing on one work at a time.
As Leonardo [da Vinci] told us, ‘Art is a mental thing’ and serious art can reward study of
its symbols, its references, and its influences
as much as its color and design.”
This thoughtful approach is a rarity in
the digital world of fleeting, endless images.
Connor also posed the question: “What
would Baudelaire say about the practice
of shooting a quick selfie with a ‘mainstreamed’ work instead of spending time
with it and asking questions?”
As for the widespread “lack of proficiency
in art” Connor says, “We still have difficulty
telling a Manet from a Goya. ... That gives me a
kind of playground where I can work and enjoy
myself.”
And he certainly does enjoy himself.
One of the works featured in the show, “Hands
Off The Polish Rider,” makes a joke of the attribution issues surrounding the “Polish Rider,” a work
typically attributed to Rembrandt. When he heard
that Rembrandt’s claim on the piece was being
questioned, “I sprang to his defense. ... It’s a joke
with some serious intent behind it because it has
to do with attribution.” Connor made this painting
of Rembrandt working on the “Polish Rider,” made
up a story of how it was discovered that Rembrandt
did indeed make the piece, and even went as far as
to publish the story in the New Yorker.
Beyond humor, these works really play with the
relationship between the past and the present. In
“Playing With The Big Boys,” Connor depicts Picasso
at work on “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” This is a
young Picasso, pictured at about the age he would
have been at the time he made Les Demoiselles. “He
looks very different from the Picasso we all know,”
Connor said.
Connor’s “War and Peace” brings recent history and art history together. He combines Manet’s
SEE PAST, page B2
WEEKEND
PAGE B2
Best
of
APRIL 16, 2015
Art Galleries
While tourists and native New Yorkers alike would undoubtedly agree on the cultural significance of famous art museums like the
Metropolitan Museum of Art or MoMA, the city is home to many equally compelling galleries that are often overlooked. These galleries are only a sampling of the various smaller venues that boast experimental, thought-provoking art as worthy of your time as
any Monet. —AFRODITE KOUNGOULOS
Hauser & Wirth
Gallery
Matthew Marks
Gallery
With outposts in Zurich, London, and
Somerset as well as in New York, Hauser &
Wirth aspires to spotlight up-and-coming
contemporary artists. The now-famous Ida
Applebroog and Louise Bourgeois displayed
their work at Hauser & Wirth, both pioneers
in the art world who believed strongly in discussing themes of politics, violence, gender, and
sexual identity through visual art. More current
artists like Monika Sosnowska continue to challenge the definition of traditional art and painting, displaying sculptures that deal with time
and space after simple paint and canvas began
to feel constraining. Part of Hauser & Wirth’s
success is due to its hesitance to confine art
only to paintings—the huge sculptural installations allow viewers to more fully immerse
themselves in the art.
Though the gallery also has two other location in Los Angeles, the Matthew Marks
Gallery was largely responsible for transforming Chelsea into the art hub it is today.
With a 9,000-square-foot, two-story gallery
space, the gallery specializes in Its 1991
“Artists’ Sketchbooks” exhibition included
works by the famed Louise Bourgeois, Cy
Twombly, and Jackson Pollock. More modern artists who also showed work at the gallery include photographers Nan Goldin and
Andreas Gursky, as well as painter Jasper
Johns. Part of the gallery’s great reputation
stems from owner Matthew Marks, whose
tenacity and serious appreciation of the arts
attract many artists.
ILLUSTRATION BY WENDI LU
On Stellar Rays Gallery
The On Stellar Rays Gallery takes its
name from a ninth-century text by Iraqi
philosopher and poet Al-Kindi called “de
Radiis” (“on Rays”). The poem explores
ideas of Greek philosophy and physics, specifically how astral rays affect our perception of the physical world. Exhibits on display, like Athanasios Argianas’ “Swimmer’s
Arms Are Oars,” indicate a similar sense of
Mary Boone Gallery
redefining and pushing the boundaries of
the physical. Argianas’ minimalist sculptures—as well as past exhibits featuring
computer-designed graphics and video installations—make thoughtful nods to their
historical predecessors. However, the use of
multimedia and technology keep On Stellar
Rays’ offerings standing on the cutting edge
of the art world.
Founded in 1977, the Mary Boone Gallery in
SoHo was dedicated to showcasing the work
of promising young artists. It expanded to the
truck garage across the street in 1981 after two
successful artists who had shown at the gallery achieved international recognition, then
later moved up to Fifth Avenue and 57th Street,
plus expanding to another Chelsea garage after
SoHo became less of the artistic hub it used
to be. Some currently recognizable big names
in art jump-started their careers at the Mary
Boone Gallery—one of the most notable being
Roy Lichtenstein, who displayed his “Mirror
Paintings” of the 1970s there. Other big names
represented included Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Jeff Koons, and Barbara Kruger, but the gallery
boasts an equally diverse spread of new artists,
staying true to its original mission.
Exhibit crosses
genres via sculpture,
painting, graffiti
PAST from front page
COURTESY OF BALLET HISPANICO
HERITAGE
|
By combinig traditions, the group is able to redefine boundaries and celebrate what it means to be a modern Latino or Latina.
Ballet Hispanico to capture modern Latino culture through dance
BY CAUVERI SURESH
Spectator Staff Writer
In their 2015 season at The Joyce, Ballet
Hispanico is once more pushing the boundaries of
common conceptions of Latino movement, dance,
and culture. Explaining his intent going into this
season, Artistic Director Eduardo Vilaro said the
company works to “deepen awareness of Latinos
and Latino artists with works that reflect the cultures of the artists.”
Program A, running April 14 to 19, is a mix of new
works and returning crowd-pleasers, all commenting on “the new millennia of Latino—what is Latino
dance, what are Latinos thinking about,” Vilaro said.
“I continuously look to have the art develop a dialogue about not only dance, but Latino culture.”
Vilaro describes the piece, choreographed by
Rosie Herrera, as an exploration of the experience of
the modern Latina woman. “In ‘Show.Girl.,’ which is
a New York premiere, this young Cuban-American
choreographer is celebrating a work that speaks to
Latina identity and also the struggles Latinas have
in a male-dominated world,” he said.
Kimberly Van Woesik, who has been with the
company since graduating college four years ago,
felt the piece dealt with important aspects of being a woman today. “We’re representing women,
how women are portrayed, the things that are demanded of women in our society,” she said. “And
then we’re also representing how we feel because
those stigmas are placed on women—how do we
deal with that, how do we face that, how do we suppress those moments when you just want to scream
because you’re expected to do all these things. We
are always on, women are always expected to be
doing something.”
Company member Christopher Bloom found
that he underwent a similar process when working on the world premiere of Miguel Mancillas’
“Conquer.” The piece is an exploration of the animalistic side of humans that we often ignore or
repress but which, as Mancillas shows, can teach
us more about the way we interact with our world,
specifically in understanding the need to conquer
other places and peoples.
“The movement came quickly. He would show it
to us and that would come. And then it was drawing
out things that we don’t acknowledge very much,”
Bloom said. “He’s interested in looking at human
beings and reducing them to animal instincts dichotomized with our rational thoughts. It was a
process of convincing yourself to go to places that
were uncomfortable, interpreting very human
movements through the instincts of an animal. And
again, he was interested in, ‘How genuine can it be?
How much can it not be put-on, but how much can
it come out?’”
Mancillas worked with the dancers to achieve an
emotional vulnerability that allowed them to delve
deeper into the idea of approaching the world using
instinct and reason in equal measure.
“I feel like we can listen to the body and understand much more about what is around us,” he said.
“Sometimes we forget the animalistic side of humans and we don’t listen to instinct. Because of that,
we destroy a lot of things because we don’t think
we are like animals. The body really understands
much more, I think.”
The program finishes with “El Beso,”
choreographed by Gustavo Ramírez Sansano, described by Vilaro as a fun, celebratory way of looking at an aspect of Latino culture: the kiss and its
many iterations.
Program B, running April 21 to 25, is the Joyce
premiere of Ramírez Sansano’s reinvention of
“Carmen,” called “CARMEN.maquia”.
“It’s Picasso-themed so the design elements are
starker, everything is in black and white like someone was drawing with a pencil,” Vilaro said. “We
remove the red, the ruffles, the iconic, and allow
the movement and dance vocabulary to develop the
characters and develop the story.”
“I’m obsessed with Gustavo’s vision and his
creativity and musicality. It’s such a masterpiece
and I’m so humbled to be able to perform it,” Van
Woesik said.
This premiere, marking Bloom’s first time in a
leading role, was an opportunity to find his voice
in a role that has been played by many. It was also
another instance of Ballet Hispanico’s commitment
to creating genuine movement and emotion.
“It had been done in the past and I could have
easily sat there and watched the video, and mimicked the previous Don José, the original Don José,”
Bloom said. “Gustavo’s guidance was, ‘No, do this
role your way. Take experiences from your life
and build it based on who you are and build this
character off yourself so it can be most genuine.’ His goal is for the emotional aspects of the
work to really be generated from inside of us as
opposed to deciding on a character and playing
that character. He wants it to come from a very
authentic place.”
cauveri.suresh@columbiaspectator.com
“A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” and Picasso’s
“Guernica” creating an image of an apathetic
looking bartender standing before a gruesome
image of war. “She represents us and the idea
of going on living happily while around us
somewhere else in the world people are dying
unnecessarily,” Connor said of the newly contextualized woman in the peace. He made the
work after the Bush administration instructed
everyone to keep living normally despite the
invasion of Iraq.
In his “The Docent” series, Connor employs
“Girl With A Pearl Earring” as a museum docent.
“Girl With A Pearl Earring” has been called the
“Mona Lisa of the North.” This inspired Connor
to first introduce “Girl With A Pearl Earring” to
the Mona Lisa. From there he placed the “Girl
With A Pearl Earring” in galleries around the
world. When choosing paintings to place her
with, Connor said he said he wanted “what kind
of painting might need an explanation.” He then
said, “I put her in front of a Kandinsky at the
Guggenheim and I’m anxious to hear what she
has to say about it but I guess I never will hear.”
“These are really just fantasies about art history possibly with a little wit now and then,”
said Connor. These fantasies capture the show’s
theme of past and present as he brings works
from long ago together in a way that creates a
dialogue about contemporary issues.
In Gallery 2 of the show, the other artists
also look to their predecessors for inspiration.
Michael Dominick uses oil, molten iron,
white-gold leaf, and charred paper to create abstract images. Citing Kant, Duchamp, Kandinsky,
Yves Klein, and Pollock to name a few, Dominick
relies heavily on randomness to transform “the
chaos of experimental foundry practice ... into
visual poetry.” His work has a psychology to it
and seems reminiscent of the automatic writing habits of the surrealists. “I am fostering the
creation of art that would not be possible if left
solely to rational human cognition.”
Mark Gibian brings together nature and
industry with metal sculptures that are “abstract, and evocative of natural forms.” With
the help of engineers and architects, Gibian
has done large scale works that can be seen
around the world. The titles of his works like
“Contrapposto” and “Venus” carry a sense of
historical nostalgia
Street artist Swoon is interested in the relationship between people and their built environments. She places screen printed and
paper cut out portraits on urban buildings.
Swoon’s art looks to Indonesian fabric design
and German and Japanese woodblock prints
for inspiration.
“Past and Present Perfect” runs until June 13,
2015 at Anita Shapolsky gallery at 152 E 65th St,
New York, NY 10065
arts@columbiaspectator.com
WEEKEND
APRIL 16, 2015
PAGE B3
All the feels: the
disonnect between
Internet and
emotions
T
COURTESY OF FLOWERS GALLERY
AWKWARD
|
The artist, who has cerebal palsy, seeks to make viewers challenge their preconceptions by representing herself in an “awkward” manner.
Lucy Jones challenges beauty standards through self-portraiture
BY KELSEY ABLES
Spectator Staff Writer
In a world of ideals, being called “awkward”
can seem isolating and insulting, but artist Lucy
Jones looks at awkwardness as the norm rather
than the exception.
“I think I pick up on how awkward it is to
be human,” Jones said of her work.
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan,
Flowers Gallery is showing eight of Jones’ selfportraits. The show is named after one of the
eight pieces in the show, “How did you get on
this canvas?,” which features two side-by-side
images of Jones capturing what the press release calls “conflicting versions of herself.”
“It’s very striking and very indicative of
where she is at this moment,” curator Brent
Beamon said.
According to Beamon, a number of works
were selected due to “the colors, the palette
that she used, and even representing certain
time periods in her life.”
The colors Jones uses are captivating,
even overwhelming. Jones compares herself to Matisse in that she does not use color
symbolically.
“I often use complementary colors and the
tones of each color are very important in my
work,” Jones said.
The show spans 25 years of Jones’ life and
traces her evolution as an artist.
“Early on when I was using myself, I would
only ever paint the top half of me and I didn’t
really like looking at myself in the mirror. It
took me a few years to bring together the two
halves of me—the very sorrowful half and the
more contented half,” Jones said.
Jones has cerebral palsy, but it has not
stopped her from spreading her art and ideas
across continents. The progression of Jones’
disability is visible in her portraits. In “Lucy
Jones with Her Walking Stick” and “Standing
Alone,” Jones depicts herself with a cane. Later,
in “Wheelie,” she depicts herself standing beside a wheelchair.
However, Jones does not depict herself relying on these devices. In “Standing Alone,” she
is not even touching the cane. Rather, they are
used as symbols.
“[Her cerebral palsy is] a part of who she is
and her life. ... It definitely informs her work.
... I don’t like to say disability because I don’t
think that [Jones] necessarily likes that term,”
Beamon said.
On the nature of this content, Beamon said,
“It is a sensitive subject matter because you
don’t know how people might react to it. They
might think that it is awkward, as she says the
‘awkward beauty,’ but they might be too focused
on the awkward nature of it and not find beauty
in it. ... I think when people come in it’s all
about their own life experience and that would
inform how they react to her work.”
On the surface, Jones’ self portraits are
simple in content, often just a figure standing
before a solid colored backdrop, but they are
packed with emotion. “I think the fact that they
are her up there, they are not a fictitious person, and they are not of someone else, it’s the
actual artist that’s creating the self portrait—I
think that ... has a lot of weight to it,” Beamon
said.
Another layer of emotion is added in how
Jones addresses the viewer. “There is a painting
called ‘You’ where I’ve used mirror writing on
the canvas, so people have to work out what I’ve
written. It says, ‘Who the hell are you?,’ which
is me confronting the people who are looking
at the painting,” Jones said.
Jones uses text more frequently in her later
works. She does not just add text to a painting
but rather does so as to emulate what text looks
like in a mirror. “I ... use the mirror writing to
be awkward because I am profoundly dyslexic
and it makes it harder for the viewer to read.
The dyslexia is about the unseen difficulties
that the outside world can’t see, whereas they
can see the physical difficulties,” Jones said.
Jones’ self portraits are honest. They do
not hide from the “awkward,” the uncomfortable, and encourage viewers to challenge their
preconceptions.
“There is so much imagery about the idealistic figuration in the world. I would like people
to pause and think about the awkward and see
the beauty in that,” Jones said.
These self-portraits by Lucy Jones are on
view in “How did you get on this canvas?” at
the Flowers Gallery at 529 W. 20th St., New York,
NY 10011 until May 9.
kelsey.ables@columbiaspectator.com
his week, I learned that
“TFW” is Internet slang
for That Feel When. As in,
“TFW you rush to Chipotle
only to find that they JUST
closed 5 minutes ago ...”
SALLY
Apart from making me feel
GAO
old and out of the loop, this
In Modern
neologism inspired some reflection on the host of feelingsPar l ance
themed expressions that have
come into vogue. A nostalgic picture that crops up
on Facebook might prompt you to comment, “So
many feels!”; a very sad movie kicks you “right in the
feels”; when somebody tells you an anecdote, you
might say compassionately, “I know that feel.”
All of these expressions either call for empathy
or express it. Nowadays, it’s not only important that
we have feelings—it’s equally important that others share our feelings. Compare TFW to the older
but very similar-looking abbreviations FTW (for
the win) or WTF (what the fuck)—expressions of
exultation and exasperation, respectively, but not an
invitation to empathize.
Like “turn down for what” (which is another
prime example of the kind of Generation Z-speak
that I was belatedly aware of and would never actually use myself ), “That Feel When” is slightly ungrammatically correct, short for “that feeling when.”
I think there’s something appealing about the word
“feel” or “feels” as opposed to “feelings.”
“Feels” evokes the present tense verb, suggesting
that whatever you’re experiencing is active, immediate, heart-squeezy. The top definition for “feels”
on Urban Dictionary is “a wave of emotions that
sometimes cannot be adequately explained.” “Feels,”
then, are stronger than feelings.
When we have feels, we want to reach out to others, either to seek reassurance that they can relate
to our experiences or to assure them that we relate
to theirs. When scrolling through Yik Yak, I’ll often
smile at a funny or clever post, but those I actually
upvote are rarer—they’re the ones that I personally
find true.
People say that social media is where we go to
show off. That may be the case, but more and more
often, it’s also where we go to show solidarity. Take
the Columbia University Class Confessions page
on Facebook, which has already received almost
4,000 likes since it was created a month ago. Class
Confessions is all about kicking us right in the feels,
and if that’s all it takes to get the Columbia community to support and be more understanding of
their financially struggling schoolmates, then that’s
a great thing.
However, it’s possible that phrases like TFW also
trivialize feelings or replace our feelings with stock
expressions. There’s something slacktivist about
showing solidarity by pressing “Like” on every post
on the Confessions page, and I wonder if FLIP’s
fundraising efforts, though successful now, will see
declining enthusiasm once the Confessions page is
replaced by the next happening thing. We may believe that our feels are sincere, but phrases like TFW
are so easy to detach from that the danger of spreading them too thin very much exists.
Sally Gao is a Columbia College senior majoring in
English. In Modern Parlance runs monthly.
Columbia alumna, comedian Grace Parra discusses talk shows, diversity in late-night TV
BY AFRODITE KOUNGOULOS
Columbia Daily Spectator
Afrodite Koungoulos: Could you speak to your
experience in organizations while you were at
Columbia? I’m interested in hearing about how
you got into comedy.
Grace Parra: Yeah! Comedy was the very first
thing I found at Columbia. I remember mostly
the first week that I was there, there were auditions for the improv troupe. I was like, ‘Oh,
I don’t think I’ll get this, but this is amazing.’
Once you’re in an improv show, you’re in it for
all four years, so I was so lucky that my extracurricular life at Columbia was defined very
early on by that one audition. It was the greatest thing, not only for my time at Columbia but
also afterward, it was with me. And then the
Varsity Show happened—I forget the timeline,
but I want to say that a couple months right
after that.
AK: Did you have any sort of strong interest in
comedy before you came to Columbia? What
sorts of things did you do in high school? Or
did you find it more strongly after you came to
school here?
GP: I definitely found it most strongly at Columbia.
Columbia was when I was like, ‘I have to do
this as a career; this isn’t just a side project.’
I went to an all-girls Catholic school for high
school, and I think when you’re in a structure
that’s all women like that, especially in a high
school setting, girls end up taking the roles that
are traditionally female or traditionally male.
Every school is going to have the jock and the
bad boy, the goody two-shoes, the court jester.
I was never a popular kid but I remember there
being a popular girl, and I was maybe like a
freshman, who early on identified me as funny…
So I fell into that role, but I wasn’t doing comedy in high school. I did a lot of theater for sure,
but not improv.
AK: Could you speak to your work post-grad? Like
the ‘Really Late Morning Show’?
GP: So the ‘Really Late Morning Show’ is a live talkshow that I did in LA for many years with one of
my dear friends, Paul Light... That was really my
way of being like, ‘I know I want to be a late night
talk show host. And I don’t know how people do
that, but I’m just going to do that myself because
I’ve got this amazing co-host and friend and we
have the resources’—which is not financial, by
the way, it’s more like being able to email a bar
and say, ‘Hey, can we do a show at your shitty
bar?’ and they’ll be like, ‘Yeah of course, that’s
fine.’ We did the show for many many years at
the back of a shitty bar in Hollywood, but that’s
really where I cut my teeth.
AK: What drew you to this idea of doing late-night
TV? You’re currently doing ‘White Guy Talk
Show’ and I would love to hear more about your
experiences with that and where the appeal for
you is in talk shows as a comedic genre?
GP: My first professional experience with working as an assistant at Conan… One of the main
things is the transitory nature of late night,
where every day is a new show and requires
you to be tapped into what’s going on in the
zeitgeist and in culture and the world. I think
there’s a real appeal because there aren’t a lot of
women in late night. I was always challenged by
the idea of doing something that other people
weren’t… Daytime tends to be more stoic and
presentational in nature, but late-night is just
silly, and I really am drawn to silly and absurdist
humor.
AK: There’s sometimes a tendency for people to
COURTESY OF FUSE TV
IMPROVISATION | Parra credits joining an improv group during her time at Columbia with helping jump-start her career in the comedy world.
get up in arms about humor, where it’s like, ‘Oh,
we can’t attack white guys!’ So I’m curious to
see if you’ve gotten any kind of backlash from
people about this.
GP: You know what, no, I don’t think so. There
are a few tweets that come up every now and
then where somebody will be like, ‘White Guy
Talk Show? What’s next?’ Most people I think
are kind of tickled by it, which is how we felt
about it. It’s not saying, ‘Down with the white
man,’ or ‘White guys suck,’ you know? It’s calling out the certifiable fact that most late-night
talk shows historically have been and presently
are hosted by white guys. To do a late-night
talk show that isn’t hosted by a white guy and
whose ideology is about promoting diversity,
with a title that’s wry... people think, ‘Oh, I get
it; that’s great that you’re calling it out,’ which
tends to be the reaction we get.
afrodite.koungoulos@columbiaspectator.com
WEEKEND
PAGE B4
Flipside
Guide
APRIL 16, 2015
WHERE IT’S AT
Time: Various
Place: AMC Theaters
Cost: $15
Rating: »»»«
COURTESY OF DANIEL LANDIN
BIONIC
|
While Domhnall Gleeson is the big-budget star, newcomer Alicia Vikander convincingly balances between human and bot.
‘Ex Machina’
Film puts arthouse spin on classic
sci-fi flick
BY MARLEE FOX
Spectator Senior Staff Writer
WHERE IT’S AT
Time: Various
Place: 10 Lincoln Center Plaza
Cost: $15
Rating: »»»«
COURTESY OF DOGWOOF
CREATIVE | Tcheng humanizes the fashion industry by depicting its workers.
‘Dior and I’
Frederic Tcheng’s film a realistic
depiction of struggle, legacy, success
As far as fiction goes, perhaps no trope is older or more natural
than the classic monster story. From Medusa to Voldemort, legends
of beings that are just a few degrees from human have haunted and
mystified campers and moviegoers alike for thousands of years. But
while werewolves and vampires trace their roots back to days of
old, there’s a different kind of monster specific to the last 50 years
or so, one that has managed to raise even more questions about the
definition of humanity and its implications: the robot.
Humanoid robots have been the subject of a whole canon of
films and literature over the past few decades, and Alex Garland’s
new film, “Ex Machina,” is perhaps the newest addition to the list.
The film follows Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a young programmer
at Bluebook (the film’s version of Google) who wins a corporate
lottery. The prize is a week with Bluebook’s founder and computer
genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac) at his remote mountain estate. Upon
his arrival, Caleb learns the true purpose of his visit when Nathan
reveals his latest undertaking, the creation of artificial intelligence,
and casts him as the human component in a Turing test to determine whether or not he has truly succeeded. Over the course of
the 108-minute film, Caleb engages in a series of interviews with
Nathan’s masterpiece: a svelte, endearing automaton named Ava
(Alicia Vikander).
While Caleb’s task is in no way simple, it gets even more complicated when Ava, taking advantage of a mysterious power outage
that disables Nathan’s surveillance equipment, warns him not to
trust his human host. Ultimately, Caleb will have to choose between
his two companions and, surprise surprise, decide which one is
more human than monster and vice versa.
As a whole, “Ex Machina” is sleek and cerebral, with little action
or outright conflict up until the very end. Instead, the film revolves
around its stunning visual effects and well-crafted dialogue. Since
there are only three speaking characters in the film, practically all
dialogue falls into one of two conversations: Caleb and Nathan, or
Caleb and Ava. Of the two exchanges, the second is significantly
more interesting.
Despite her co-stars’ comparative fame, Vikander is the real
standout of “Ex Machina.” The film’s entire premise depends on
her ability to convince the viewer of Ava’s humanity, and she succeeds with flying colors. Delivering each line with a coolness that
is equal parts chilling and charming, she encompasses the conflict
between man and machine. Visually, Ava is clearly a machine—
her transparent torso reveals her blinking circuitry, and her body
whirrs as she moves. Yet her flashes of insecurity, humor, and curiosity betray flickers of humanity that allow her to pass the most
important Turing test of all: that of the audience. While Caleb tests
Ava, we’re testing her, too, and it’s essential to the film that she pass.
As a consequence of her achievement, every minute without
Vikander on screen feels like a minute wasted. When Caleb is not
interviewing Ava, he’s drinking or hiking (or both) with Nathan,
throwing around heavy-handed banter that feels more like a
Contemporary Civilization discussion post than anything else.
(It’s hard not to roll your eyes when Caleb looks out over a rushing waterfall, vodka in hand, and mutters, “I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds.”) For all its triumphs, “Ex Machina” is unable
to strike a perfect balance between showing and telling and ends
up trying to do a little too much philosophizing for its spectators.
While it may not be perfect, “Ex Machina” has almost certainly
carved out a place in the science fiction canon. Stylish and surprising, it manages to nod to predecessors such as “I, Robot,” “A.I.,”
and “Her” while maintaining its own identity in the lineup. In the
end, “Ex Machina” manages to bring something new to the conversation, and that alone makes it worth seeing.
“Ex Machina” is currently playing at AMC Loews Lincoln Square.
marlee.fox@columbiaspectator.com
BY ANTONIA GEORGIEVA
Spectator Staff Writer
Spring is in the air, and Dior fashion house is on the verge of
a momentous transformation. After a scandal involving the dismissal of the house’s former creative director John Galliano about
a year prior, the whole fashion world has its eyes fixed on the first
haute couture collection by the newly appointed creative director
Raf Simons. Deemed a modern minimalist designer, Simons has
been met with a great deal of skepticism by many in the fashion
industry—no one expects him to be able to step into the shoes
of the founder of the iconic brand so well. Fashion enthusiasts
worldwide are holding their breaths in anticipation of his crucial
first impression.
That was the spring of 2012 and, luckily for us, the same pivotal moment in which Dior decided to open the doors of its iconic atelier to filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng. The result is the young
French director’s latest work, “Dior and I,” his first attempt at
solo directing. A 2007 graduate of Columbia Film School, Tcheng
is no stranger to the fashion world—his previous projects include
fashion documentary films such as “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has
to Travel” and “Valentino: The Last Emperor”—but “Dior and I”
is perhaps the strongest example of Tcheng’s sensitive eye for tension, detail, and storytelling.
Raf Simons was appointed to the position of creative director
just eight weeks before the Dior fashion show, giving him an almost impossibly small amount of time to complete his introductory
collection. Tcheng does a great job of capturing the pressures that
everyone involved ostensibly felt. The film portrays the elaborate
creative process at every level: from the original idea through the
first line on the page to the last pin in each dress or suit. We see
Simons’ unconventional process of coming up with the designs—
he merely relates his ideas to a team of designers, each of whom
draws and presents sketches for Simons to choose from—and then
it’s all in the hands of the seamstresses, while the rest of the team
is concerned with finding and decorating the right venue.
Tcheng devotes a great deal of time to depicting the men and
women who physically assemble the spectacular collection. The
Dior premières, or head seamstresses, are perhaps under the same
amount of pressure that the creative director is, if not more. They
not only manage their team but also somehow balance the intense
demand to adhere to the deadlines for the collection and uphold
the high quality and standard of Dior before their private clients.
In effect, Tcheng humanizes the high fashion industry by highlighting the people whose immense devotion to their dream occupation
brings these haute couture designs to life.
Finally, “Dior and I” handles the idea of legacy by expounding
on the relationship between past, present, and future. Simons, who
represents the future of the fashion house, finds himself challenged
not only to complete a collection from scratch in just eight weeks,
but also to be conscious of the immense tradition he inherits by
doing so. Tcheng guides the viewers through footage from the 1956
memoir “Christian Dior & I,” which is sometimes artfully projected
on a toile, meaning “dress gown” in French and also serving as a
colloquial term for “movie screen.” By reminding his viewers of
the company’s genesis, Tcheng is able to illustrate just how high
the stakes were for Simons with the ghost of Dior past constantly
overhead. In their accomplishments, both Simons and Tcheng have
managed to honor history while creating it themselves.
“Dior and I” opens in select New York theaters on April 10th.
antonia.georgieva@columbiaspectator.com
WHERE IT’S AT
Time: Various
Place: 1634 Broadway
Cost: $85
Rating: »»«
COURTESY OF JOHAN PERSSON
HEADLESS
|
The production is split into two three-hour plays, one of which details Anne Boleyn’s rise, the other her downfall.
‘Wolf Hall’
Royal Shakespeare Company offers
dynamic interpretation of novels
BY KALLY PATZ
Spectator Senior Staff Writer
A network of crisscrossing metal bars looms over the Royal
Shakespeare Company’s two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s awardwinning novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” Placed in another
production, a series of cubes hanging over the stage might be overlooked.
But when speaking of King Henry VIII and his wives, metal bars can only
suggest cages. And as our gaze travels upward, we can’t help but ask the
irresistible question: Who’s the next body?
Split into two three-hour plays—one detailing Anne Boleyn’s rise, the
other her fall—the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production is an epic
event. But the nearly six hours Mike Poulton’s script requires isn’t wasted.
By spending time in little, insignificant moments, the play manages to
remove the veil of mysticism and power cloaking the grand players in
the history of King Henry’s court. A shorter production would risk losing the play’s best moments—chats by the fireplace, pranks on the king’s
messenger, gossip between ladies in waiting—in favor of broad gesturing
and summation.
Viewed from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell (Ben Miles), an
ambitious but inconsequential lawyer at the edge of court life, the main
events of Anne Boleyn’s (Lydia Leonard) rise to King Henry’s (Nathaniel
Parker) favor take place in the shadows. Historians and novelists have
painted dozens of masks upon Boleyn in attempts to explain how exactly
she managed to push King Henry’s first wife aside. She has been called the
guileless seductress, the victim of powerful family figures, the ambitious
intellectual, and the hideous witch. Rather than choosing a new name
for Boleyn, “Wolf Hall” presents her as the unknown.
Literally wearing a mask in her first appearance, Anne is constantly
performing. She is an autonomous figure in yellow making strategic
steps—to the front of the stage, into King Henry’s arms—between scenes.
Like courtiers peeking behind curtains, we see her progress through
glimpses in the half-dark. Propelled forward by the rapid beats of a drum,
she stalks like a predator in the jungle. It’s only when she grasps her prey
that she tumbles into a fit of giggles, as though obliviously enjoying the
conversation of her powerful partner.
We only see the effort and confusion behind her seemingly imminent
rise through our closeness to Cromwell. Though he spins words as easily
as the figures around him, Miles plays a character that is always human.
As he moves into the king’s inner circle, Cromwell still scratches his head
and bumbles. He dooms Henry’s first wife with a few kind words; Anne
still seems to think Cromwell is her hope as he leads her to the tower;
sentencing a friend to prison, he explains, “I’m locking you up for safekeeping.” Even as Cromwell’s actions make him one of the most vicious
figures onstage, he remains our only friend. And like the courtiers he
moves, we cling to him accordingly.
This is the real success of Poulton’s script—that we come to care
so deeply for someone so objectively monstrous. As Cromwell orders one execution after another, we make excuses for him—that
order did seem necessary, yes, that suitor really did have to go. We
can’t seem to turn on the character who shared a joke with us just
one scene earlier and tussled his son’s hair in the last act. We hold
him too close.
As Cromwell transitions from a bystander to a player, we see the once
choreographed and emotionless courtiers in full light. If Mary Boleyn
existed in the 21st century, she might seek a reality TV contract. George
Boleyn bulls around stage like a drunken frat boy. King Henry becomes
a scared child whimpering in white pajamas and fearfully glancing at
the figures advancing towards him: Speculating with Cromwell about
how the noble families will war if Henry fails to produce an heir, he says,
“They haven’t gone away, you know—those people. They stand in the
shadows watching me.”
Looking over the stage from a box or the mezzanine, you begin to feel
like one of the powerful puppeteers he fears—seeing without being seen.
But amid the shadowy heads of the orchestra, you can’t help but notice
the invisible crowd surrounding you and glance up at the metal bars. The
question, at first casual, begins to seem vital as we watch the ax fall on
Boleyn’s suitors: Who’s the next body?
After the heads begin to stack up, adding another becomes nothing.
As Cromwell hands King Henry the sentences against his wife’s lovers,
a life becomes a signature, a casual motion—a capitulation to the man
standing behind him in the shadows.
kally.patz@columbiaspectator.com
APRIL 16, 2015
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NEWS
PAGE 12
APRIL 16, 2015
Vacant storefronts persist in Morningside Heights, with 64% of vacancies lasting longer than a year
‘Sphere of influence’
Real estate agents said
Columbia’s presence in the
neighborhood has allowed landlords to raise rents and still feel
assured that they will eventually
find tenants to fill their vacant
properties.
Aaron Gavios, co-chair and
partner at Square Foot Realty,
said Columbia’s “sphere of
‘They come in, they study,
they use the resources, and
they leave’
Meanwhile, local business
owners said the perception
that Columbia offers an extensive customer base is largely
unfounded.
“They see Columbia in the
area and they think it’s good for
business,” Malaeb said. “The
truth is it’s not as good as they
think.”
Brun, the employee at Clinton
Supply Company, said that proximity to Columbia does not guarantee success, citing students’ inconsistent presence and patronage
as challenges for local businesses.
“A lot of landlords would love
to advertise that way, but the
bottom line is, these restaurants
will open and they will close,”
he said.
“Students really don’t leave
much behind in a neighborhood,”
STOREFRONT VACANCIES
Amsterdam
could not afford to stay.
“The landlord wants to put
high rents and chain stores in
there,” he said. “I’m pretty sure
we’re going to be gone, too.”
Meanwhile, other businesses have had to downsize to stay
afloat.
Possibilities@Columbia,
on Broadway between 111th
and 112th Streets, moved into
a smaller storefront right next
door to its old one earlier this
year.
According to employee
Furhan Babar, the store, which is
now called Parties and More, has
undergone more than a change
to its name.
“We’ve actually had to cut
down on a lot of merchandise,”
he said. “The card selection—we
had about eight racks, now we
only have two.”
He added that it is likely that
a chain will fill the space formerly occupied by Possibilities@
Columbia.
“I don’t know exactly what
they’re asking for, but it’s around
double what we used to pay,” he
said.
“You can’t have a small business with a high rent,” Wassim
Malaeb, a business partner
at Samad’s Gourmet Deli, between 111th and 112th Streets
on Broadway, said.
“All these small businesses
that’s leaving—one day they’re
going to beg them to come back,”
he said.
influence” extends far from its
campus.
“Columbia University’s had
a huge influence over the whole
area—from 100th Street to 135th
Street. From the river all the way
to Frederick Douglass,” he said.
“And that sphere of influence
for whatever reason has been
growing.”
Square Foot Realty prominently advertises the proximity of the vacant property on
124th and Broadway to the
Manhattanville expansion on
its website.
Ed Kamenitzer, from
Kamenitzer Real Estate Group,
has been marketing the space
that once hosted Vareli, on
Broadway between 111th and
112th Streets, for the past two
months.
“Columbia’s exciting,” he said
of the area surrounding Vareli
and its potential draws for tenants. “Most of the kids are either
very bright or very substantial,
or both.”
Broadway
VACANCIES from front page
STOREFRONT HAS BEEN
VACANT FOR:
LESS THAN 5 MONTHS
6-11 MONTHS
12-17 MONTHS
18-23 MONTHS
24-29 MONTHS
110th Street
30-35 MONTHS
MORE THAN 36 MONTHS
GRAPHIC BY LEAH JACOBSON
he said. “They come in, they
study, they use the resources,
and they leave.”
He added that the replacement of small specialty shops
with fancier restaurants has
more to do with landlords
changing their outlook than with
any actual success that businesses experience once they move in.
“It has to do with the expansion of ‘restaurant rows,’” he
said. “It’s a new ideology.”
Restaurant rows, like the one
that has emerged on Harlem’s
Frederick Douglass Boulevard
in recent years, are stretches of
artisan, higher end restaurants.
“The landlords know they can
charge two times or three times
the rent for a restaurant,” he said.
Malaeb said that while students’ inconsistent presence
is a challenge in Morningside
Heights, Manhattanville is
a different retail landscape.
Landlords there are waiting to
see what effect the Columbia expansion will have on their ability
to raise rents and still find tenants who are willing to pay.
“The landlord is waiting to
see what the area is going to be,”
he said. “They don’t want to get
stuck with a lower rent… They
can be choosy.”
And that may be the problem
facing Abajebel, who has still
yet to be offered a real chance
at renting the properties next to
his juice store.
“Starbucks and Dunkin
Donuts, it’s very easy for them,”
he added. “The chains can do
whatever they want. But individuals, trying to be entrepreneurs,
it’s very hard for them.”
news@columbiaspectator.com
MILLIE CHRISTIE DERVAUX / SENIOR STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
EMPTY | The former site of Maoz Vegetarian on W 111th and
Broadway is one of many empty storefronts in the neighborhood.
APRIL 16, 2015
SPORTS
PAGE 13
Following sweep, softball looks to regroup at home
BY CHASE LEVITT
Spectator Staff Writer
FILE PHOTO
OLD SCHOOL | Former Light Blue relief pitcher and current Spectator columnist David Spinosa discusses baseball’s deep roots at Columbia University.
Baseball: the sport of the red,
white, and Light Blue
U
nless you’re
DAVID
SPINOSA
a dedicated
baseball histoS p i n
rian, then you’re
C ycl e
unaware that
baseball—which
kicked off its 2015 season in Major
League parks around the country
last week—is just as ingrained in
Columbia as it is in the fabric of
New York City.
And unless you’re well-versed in
the Columbia’s history, then you’re
unaware that baseball lies at the
absolute epicenter of the Light Blue
athletics program.
Baseball itself was not invented
by Union general Abner Doubleday
in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.
Robert Henderson, a sports historian, helped to debunk that myth by
publishing his book “Ball, Bat and
Bishop, the Origin of Ball Games”
in 1947. He argues that “baseball” branched off from rounders, the popular English game,
and Henderson credits Alexander
Joy Cartwright as the pioneer in
America’s pastime.
Cartwright, despite being a New
York City bank clerk, took to the
streets of Manhattan for bat-and-ball
games, and later took charge of the
Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New
York. It was a ragtag team of mostly
volunteer firefighters, but this new
sport swiftly rose to prominence.
By 1845, Cartwright and his
teammates had developed lasting rule changes, such as 90-foot
baselines and fair and foul territory. (They also eliminated runner
pegging, which maybe MLB should
reintroduce.)
A year later, the Knickerbockers
organized the first official baseball game at the Elysian Fields
in Hoboken, New Jersey. They
promptly lost by the laughable
score of 23-1 to the New York
Nine—a group of cricket players.
The inaugural game in Hoboken
helped to spawn the sport’s growth
throughout the metropolitan area,
and just over 20 years later, baseball descended upon Morningside
Heights. With it, Columbia started its intercollegiate athletic
After dropping four games to
Princeton last weekend, the softball
team will look to regroup as it hosts
St. Peter’s and Cornell for a six-game
home stretch.
Columbia (11-21,
5-7 Ivy) hopes to get
strong showings from
softball
its offense, which
was shut out 3-0 and
2-0 in the first and
last games of the Princeton series,
respectively.
Though the Light Blue offense
was clicking—it slugged three home
runs on 10 hits in the second game—it
couldn’t capitalize, losing that contest
in a 14-5 blowout. And when the Lions
started getting hot—scoring a run in
both the second and fourth innings in
the third game—they couldn’t keep up
the tempo, falling 3-2.
After the lackluster run production, the Light Blue will put its focus
on its offense in preparation for its
upcoming home games.
“We’re going to continue talking about being one-pitch-and-oneball worrying,” head coach Jennifer
Teague said after Sunday’s games at
Princeton. “Every at-bat is a process,
and those processes are made up of a
bunch of one pitch at-bats.”
For Columbia, the four-game weekend stumble was a bit out of the ordinary. Prior to facing the Tigers, the
Lions had won seven of eight games,
peaking above .500 in conference play
for the first time in the season.
St. Peter’s, by contrast, has
seen losses turn monotonous. The
Peacocks (1-25) have lost their last
20 straight games, its lone victory
coming over a month ago. While St.
Peter’s outhits the Lions in each of
the major hitting metrics—batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging—abysmal pitching counteracts
the strength at the plate.
Its pitchers have recorded a 7.62
ERA, ranking 278th out of 289 D-I
softball teams. Last weekend, the
team gave up 31 runs in a shortened
12-inning doubleheader against Iona.
Cornell (9-19, 3-9 Ivy) has also
seen poor pitching sink offensive success. The Big Red got off to a slow
start this month, dropping its first
seven games. Despite posting a .327
team batting average, a .395 on-base
percentage, and a .465 slugging percentage, the Big Red sit in last place
in the Ivy League South Division.
Though better than the Peacocks’
rotation, Cornell’s starters haven’t
been able to put away opposing batters with ease. They’ve handed out
a conference-high 116 walks—a tally
more than twice that of Columbia—
and have accumulated a 6.18 ERA.
Columbia will first face St. Peter’s
on Thursday for a doubleheader before playing two doubleheaders
against Cornell. Play on Thursday
is scheduled to start at 3 p.m., and
weekend play is scheduled for 12:30
p.m. both days.
sports@columbiaspectator.com
program—staking baseball’s claim
at the center of the University.
The Lions’ first baseball game
actually came on a diamond field
at our old Midtown campus on
Madison and 47th, as the Light
Blue edged NYU 43-21. (Ridiculous,
right? Imagine trying to get 27
outs when the pitcher must loft
the ball to the batter. Think men’s
league slow-pitch softball—without
gloves.)
In 1868, Columbia played four
intercollegiate contests, against
NYU, CCNY, and Yale. A year later,
the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional baseball club, and by 1876, the National
League of Professional Baseball
Clubs was established. Yet, despite
the sport’s growth across America,
Columbia began to lag behind.
Without a consistent place to
play, the Light Blue couldn’t compete again until 1884, when the
Lions moved to the Polo Grounds in
Northern Manhattan. For that brief
period of the time, the Lions graced
the same fields as the New York
Giants and the New York Yankees.
Columbia later returned to campus in the early 20th century, playing on the South Field, where Lou
Gehrig routinely hit home runs at
Alma Mater’s feet (standing at the
upper west corner of South Lawn,
where home plate would’ve been—
that’s over 400 feet!) Finally, baseball
descended upon Andy Coakley Field,
where Columbia hosted the first live
televised athletic event in 1939. Later
renamed Robertson Field, it is the
current home of our two-time reigning Ivy League champions.
With baseball in full swing
across the country, tip your hat
to a sport that is a sacred part of
both New York City and Columbia.
Whether you root for the Yankees,
Mets, or any other team, remember that baseball is not only an
American pastime, but also a
Columbia one, as well.
David Spinosa is a Columbia College
senior majoring in English and a
former pitcher for the Lions baseball
team. Spin Cycle runs biweekly.
GENE FEDORANKO / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
DOING IT ALL | Sophomore Tonia Wu leads the Lions into the home stand after pitching in three-of-four contests last
weekend, garnering 10 strikeouts and hitting a home run.
PAGE 14
SPORTS
APRIL 16, 2015
COURTESY OF IVY LEAGUE ATHLETICS
LOVE-ALL |
Across the Ancient Eight, men’s tennis is upping its game, and becoming a force to be reckoned with. Columbia leads the conference, which boasts seven schools ranked in the top 75.
At the top of its game: the meteoric rise of Ivy League Tennis
BY KYLE PERROTTI
Spectator Senior Staff Writer
When Columbia men’s tennis won
its second consecutive Ivy League
Championship in 2010, it did so as the
No. 45 team in the nation, and the other three
ranked Ancient Eight
men’s
teams were all at No. 65
tennis
or worse.
Flash forward to
2015, and Columbia, 5-0
heading into its final weekend of conference play, is again poised to win the championship for the second straight year.
But this time, there is one key difference. The team reached a program-record
No. 11 ranking in mid-February, and all
season long, multiple Ancient Eight teams
have seen some of the highest rankings in
their respective program histories.
Columbia head coach Bid Goswami,
who has been at the helm of the Light Blue
since 1982, said that the heights the league
has reached in 2015 are unparalleled in
his tenure.
By historical standards, it is rare to
have even three Ivy League teams in the
top 75. Just a couple of weeks ago, before
the Ivy teams began beating up on each
other in conference play, seven of the eight
squads were ranked in the top 75.
“At one time, there were five teams
in the top 40. It was unheard of 30 years
ago,” Goswami said of the Ancient Eight
this season. “There would be two teams,
at the most, in the top 75—so everybody’s
playing a better schedule, there are a lot
of younger coaches who are very aggressive, and the recruiting has been unbelievable. All put together, this is a much better
league.”
Columbia assistant coach Howard
Endelman, CC ’87, played on the Light
Blue as a part of Goswami’s first recruiting class. In 1987, the team reached an atthe-time record ranking of No. 15, a mark
that wasn’t surpassed until this season.
During Endelman’s four years as a Lion,
Columbia and Harvard vied for the title
each season, leaving the other teams in
the dust. This year, Endelman says each
match is a battle.
To Endelman and many others, the
biggest difference has been the schools’
dedication to resources that have enabled
their programs to compete with the nation’s elite. Goswami said that some of the
country’s best tennis facilities are located
at Ivy League schools and went as far as
to call Yale’s Cullman-Heyman Tennis
Center the Taj Mahal of collegiate tennis
venues.
“The coaches are really good, all of
our competitors have incredible facilities, and I think the entire league … has
better financial aid, which has allowed a
lot of families to be able to consider the
Ivy League when they used to have to go
get a scholarship at a non-Ivy school,”
Endelman said.
One program that is enjoying one of
the best years in its history has been Penn.
Under veteran head coach David Geatz,
the Quakers enjoyed their highest-ever
ranking this year, and even defeated thenNo. 16 Penn State back in early February.
“At 39 in the country, we were the highest-ranked team Penn ever had,” Geatz
said of the Quakers, whose prior record
was No. 51. “So the good news is, this is
the best team Penn’s ever had, in terms
of ranking, but the bad news is, the Ivy
League is so much better that 39 in the
country … gets you fourth place probably.”
Geatz points out the program Goswami
and Endelman have built at Columbia as
the gold standard of the conference—the
carrot all the other Ivy League schools
are chasing. He said that he roots for the
Lions every time they aren’t playing the
Quakers, because he knows that the more
success the Light Blue has, the better it is
for the whole league.
“Columbia, right now, is the jewel of
the Ivy League,” Geatz said. “It’s the program that everybody wants to beat and
everybody wants to be like.”
Along with the increased dedication of
funding and resources, many believe that
the newfound success of Ivy League tennis is due to a new, hungry crop of young
coaches. Over the last five years, there has
been an influx of coaches from some of the
top conferences in the country, including
the Big 10 and the Big 12.
One of those coaches is Silviu Tanasoiu,
who has been the head coach at Cornell
since 2011. Before coming to the Ivy
League, he earned Big 12 experience as an
assistant coach under former pro player
John Roddick at the No. 1 Oklahoma.
“Being at Oklahoma as a player, and
as a coach for five years, and competing
against the teams I had the chance to
there, it creates a mindset … a certain way
of training, a certain way of competing,
and a certain way of recruiting,” Tanasoiu
said. “We’ve been trying to replicate that
in a much better academic environment.”
Before the younger crew of coaches arrived, the existing regimes each stepped
up their efforts to pursue and provide financial aid for foreign prospects. Many
coaches say that it used to be rare for a
foreign player to come to their programs,
but now it is commonplace. Tanasoiu’s
Big Red, for example, features four foreign players at the top of its singles lineup.
Although the league is the best it has
been in recent years, teams are still hungry
for more. Goswami said that he wants to
see the league continue to improve and
compete among the nation’s elite conferences. Teams in the major tennis conferences, such as the Pac-12 and the Big 12,
usually climb in the rankings quicker because they play top-20 teams regularly.
David Benjamin, the executive director
of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association—
the association that compiles the national
rankings—has an abundance of Ivy League
experience. After playing for Harvard,
Benjamin took the head coaching position at Princeton in 1974, where he led the
team to a No. 9 ranking—a feat no Ivy team
has since accomplished—at the end of the
1980 season.
“What happens is, as the conference
gets stronger, it brings the level up of the
teams that weren’t quite as strong, just so
they can be competitive,” Benjamin said.
“That’s certainly the case with the Ivy
League schools. The quality of players,
along with the time and focus and ability
of the coaches with recruiting…is really
quite different than, say, 15 years ago.”
Benjamin added that he believes that
the Ivy League has reached new heights,
but he also admitted that things will likely
plateau for the Ancient Eight before any
of its programs have the chance to break
into the top five.
“There are factors besides having really good players that come into the equation,” he said. “One, there is academic
pressure on the students when they go to
Ivy League schools. Secondly, the standard of admission is more rigorous.”
The Ivy League may have trekked into
unfamiliar territory over the last five years,
but the sentiment from players, coaches,
and fans seems to be that—regardless of
the prospect of a plateau—given the current trajectory and momentum of the
teams, the only way to go is up.
“I think it will keep improving,”
Tanasoiu said. “Because I think there’s not
a better way for someone to spend four
years of their time during one of the most
important transitional phases of their
life than in an excellent academic setting
that also has high standards from a tennis
standpoint.”
kyle.perrotti@columbiaspectator.com
NIA BROWN FOR SPECTATOR
DIGGING FOR SUCCESS
jewel of Ivy League.”
|
Columbia’s lasting success makes them “crown
APRIL 16, 2015
SPORTS
PAGE 15
AD Pilling, Villanova head coach Andy Talley played crucial roles in Bagnoli’s arrival
HE’S HERE from back page
search committee, Pilling reached out
to his good friend, Villanova football
head coach Andy Talley. The two had
become acquainted during Pilling’s
tenure, from 1997-2001, as an associate athletic director at that school.
Pilling specifically sought out Talley,
who coached at Brown from 1973-78, as
a source of Ivy League football wisdom.
Despite a 37-year absence from the
Ancient Eight, Talley still maintains
ties to the conference. Given that experience, Pilling thought that Talley
had the insight to help.
“If you don’t understand Ivy League
recruiting, if you don’t have a concept of
the academics, the culture, the national
scope of the University, the programs,
and the competition, you have a twoyear window to learn all that stuff and
then you just get eaten up,” Talley said.
When Pilling got in touch with his
old friend, he asked for guidance, or to
be directed to someone who could talk
about the unique challenges of navigating the world of Ivy League football.
Although Talley had been out of the
Ivies for some time, he had just the
man to indoctrinate Pilling into the
ways of the Ancient Eight.
That man was Al Bagnoli.
Talley has known Bagnoli since his
earliest coaching days at Union over
three decades ago, but got to know him
even better recently, especially since
the coaches have battled each other
on the field each of the last 12 years.
Talley knew that he had been out of
the Ancient Eight for some time and
could be out of touch, but Bagnoli was
the perfect man for the job.
Just a few days later, Pilling, called
Bagnoli from his home in Provo, Utah.
At the time, Bagnoli was working an
administrative job at Penn, where he’d
only recently retired from coaching
the Quakers football team—the team
with which he established his legend.
According to Bagnoli, Pilling bounced
a litany of questions off of him, but he
was happy to help his former crosstown rival and friend.
“I didn’t think anything of it,”
Bagnoli said. “I thought I was doing
my friend a favor. Andy wanted me to
talk to him, and I was happy to.”
It wasn’t long before Pilling secured
the athletic director job, finding himself face-to-face with the coaching vacancy left after the departure of former
head coach Pete Mangurian amid allegations of player abuse. That’s when
he reached back out to Bagnoli. Days
after his hiring was announced, Pilling
hopped on a train to Philadelphia to
meet with Bagnoli. After that, he never met with any other candidates. He
didn’t need to.
“He had that fire in his belly,” Pilling
said. “That was one of the things that
struck me as a real positive strength.”
But while Pilling prepared to make
the pitch to Bagnoli, many wrote off the
62-year-old as a viable candidate for the
position. Bagnoli had retired after a 23
successful years at the helm of Penn
only three months earlier. There, he had
won nine Ivy League Championships
and compiled a 148-80 record.
To move from the mountaintop of
Ivy success to the reeling Columbia
program seemed a risky move to some.
But Bagnoli found the decision to
take the head coaching job at Columbia
easy.
Since leaving the Quakers’ sideline,
Bagnoli had been working as director of
special projects for the athletics department, but found himself missing the excitement of coaching. “After just three
and a half months, I was like, this isn’t
too exciting just doing administrative
work,” Bagnoli said.
Talley said that some people in particular have trouble with retirement because one never can know whether or
not they are ready until they take that
step.
He said he noted signs of that in
Bagnoli, and he even thought early on
in Bagnoli’s retirement that perhaps
the Columbia job would be the ideal
fit for his friend.
Talley went as far as to say, given
the location and the formidable nature
of the task at Columbia, that the gig
is perfect for a driven coach with Ivy
experience such as Bagnoli.
“Had Al transitioned into a position
at Penn where he was playing golf and
smoking cigars and kissing babies and
shaking hands with people, he might
not have taken the job,” Talley said.
“But I don’t think that was so. I think
he still had that drive.”
For both Pilling and Bagnoli, the
timing couldn’t have been better. Amid
the tumultuous turns of the program
and athletics department—including
Murphy’s and Mangurian’s resignations—the hire fell perfectly into place.
After talking to Bagnoli in
Philadelphia, Pilling quickly arranged
a meeting with University President
Lee Bollinger in order to work out the
contract details. Then, to the shock
and delight of Columbia football fans,
Bagnoli was named the new head
coach of Columbia Lions football.
“He had a phenomenal, proven
track record,” Pilling said. “It was very
fortunate on our part that he had made
that transition into administration, but
he still desired to coach. So, when he
was compared to anyone else under
consideration, it was obvious that he
understood what it took to be a champion in this league.”
Regardless of how it happened, one
thing remains clear—the resounding
sentiment is that Pilling found the best
possible person to dig Columbia football out of its current rut.
“The one thing that I would say
is, as a coach who has been in the Ivy
League and been an eastern football
coach for years and years,” Talley said,
“I pretty much know the territory well,
and they have chosen the absolute best
candidate.”
Muneeb Alam contributed reporting
kyle.perrotti@columbiaspectator.com
MICAYLA LUBKA / SENIOR STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
A NEW PARTNERSHIP
|
After M. Dianne Murphy and Pete Mangurian’s resignations, newcomers occupy two of the top spots in the athletic department.
Hampered by pitching miscues, baseball drops winnable game to Rutgers
BY ELLORINE CARLE
Spectator Staff Writer
The baseball team was stunted in its
charge out of the bullpen against Rutgers
Wednesday afternoon,
falling 7-4 on the Scarlet
Knights’ turf.
The Light Blue (19- baseball
12, 10-2 Ivy) managed
to get on the board first
behind a solo blast from
junior outfielder Robb Paller, but the
lead wouldn’t last long.
Poor control from the mound negated
the 1-0 lead and allowed Rutgers (12-231) to surge ahead. After surrendering a
single on the first at-bat, first-year starting pitcher Zack Bahm walked the next
two consecutive batters, loading the
bases.
Bahm left the game without recording a single out, and fellow rookie Bryce
Barr took over for the Lions, hoping to
escape the jam. A sacrifice fly scored one
before another pitching miscue—this
time a wild pitch—got another Rutgers
run across.
Pitching continued to doom the Lions
all afternoon, as head coach Brett Boretti
substituted in eight separate hurlers.
Another walk, four hit-by-pitches, and
two wild pitches continued to give the
Scarlet Knights extra chances to do
damage.
Rutgers capitalized on these cracks
in the Lions’ defense, scoring its runs
in the first, second, and fourth innings,
during which the majority of the errors
occurred.
“We put ourselves behind the eight
ball in the first inning and Rutgers got a
couple runs to take the lead, we did that
really the first couple innings,” Boretti
said. “We made it hard on ourselves and
we had to come from behind, but it was
a little too late at that point.”
Though first-year shortstop Randell
Kanemaru followed Paller’s home run
with his own two-run blast, the rest of
the lineup struggled at the plate, earning just six hits on the game. A fourthinning, six-run deficit sealed the Light
Blue’s fate.
“I think offensively we tried to do a
little bit more than maybe we needed
to,” Boretti said. “We tried to maybe
overswing a little bit, pitch selection
wasn’t as good as it could have been.”
The Light Blue’s offense then suffered through five hitless innings, while
Rutgers accumulated the rest of its runs.
In the second, the Scarlet Knights
transformed two hits, along with a wild
pitch and hit-by-pitch from junior lefty
George Martin, into another pair of runs.
In the fourth, Rutgers opened things
up with a pair of singles. A fielding error
by senior outfielder Gus Craig and a
plunked batter a piece from junior Willis
Robbins and sophomore Garrett Roberts
brought home a pair of Scarlet Knights
runs.
The Light Blue bullpen found some
rhythm in the second half of the game,
allowing just one hit over the next four
innings.
On the offensive side, the Lions
picked up their pace in the seventh.
Craig smacked a double to left center, followed by Kanemaru’s homer to
cut Rutgers’ lead to 7-3. But the rally
ended when sophomore Will Savage
grounded out into a double play to end
the inning.
The Lions began to put a comeback
together in the ninth inning. A double
from junior first baseman Nick Maguire
and a throwing error put runners on the
corner with one out. An RBI single from
first-year catcher Lane Robinette scored
one, but two consecutive fly-outs ended
the inning and the game.
“I thought we could have come with
a little more focus as far as being able to
make it a more competitive game early
on, more so than it was,” Boretti said.
The Lions are back at home this weekend in a four-game series at Cornell. First
pitch is slotted for noon on Saturday.
sports@columbiaspectator.com
GENE FEDORENKO / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
SOLO SHOT
7-4.
|
Junior outfielder Robb Paller’s home run was his team’s only run over the first six frames. A late rally wasn’t enough to come back, and they fell,
SPORTS
THURSDAY, APRIL 16 • PAGE 16
GEORGE WU / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
HE’S HERE
|
Last fall, Al Bagnoli retired after 23 years at the helm of Penn’s football program. A string of events, beginning with an old friendship and a phone call, brought him to back to football.
How the Columbia Lions football team landed Al Bagnoli
BY KYLE PERROTTI
Spectator Senior Staff Writer
Timing is everything—at least it
is if your name is Peter Pilling or Al
Bagnoli.
Last winter, both Pilling and Bagnoli
were in need of some major help. What
began with a mutual friend and a small
favor quickly turned into a chain of
events that neither could have predicted, allowing both men to provide
the other just what he needed.
The outcome was as fortuitous as it
was unlikely, leading up to the hiring of
Al Bagnoli as the head coach of a backsliding Columbia football program. But
the process began long before anyone
even considered Bagnoli, who had just
retired after a long and successful career at Penn, a serious candidate for
the job.
Pilling was among a handful of finalists to replace then-athletic director M. Dianne Murphy. He knew that
Columbia’s most urgent need was a serious overhaul of the football program,
and that in order to secure the job, he’d
have to be able to present the administration with a viable solution—no
small task, given the state of the program, currently riding a 21-game losing streak.
Pilling, though an Ivy League outsider, is no stranger to Columbia’s
woes.
“We’ve had some challenges historically with the football program,”
he said. “And making sure that football was going the right direction and
competing in the Ivy League was an
important priority.”
Prior to his final interview with the
SEE HE’S HERE, page 15