Back to School

It's true. I've managed to convince the good people at Columbia University that they should pay for me to be a full-time student for another 5-7 years. While I'm overjoyed to be back in a classroom discussing the types of things people only seem to have patience for inside classrooms, I'm also left pondering the enormity of it all: I am being paid to learn. For me, that reality brings with it some excess baggage in the form of an obligation to make what I learn accessible and interesting to the average Joes and Janes. What follows is my deconstruction of today's events on Columbia's campus, and hopefully it lives up to my stated goal.

President Ahmadinejad's actual speech was greatly overshadowed by two things: first, President Ahmaninehad's presence on campus (and its discontents), and second, President Bollinger's extraordinary "introduction." The energy on campus was not just infectious, but had the distinct feeling of significance that one associates with historic moments. Outside Columbia's gates, shear madness reigned as protesters lined the streets chanting slogans that ranged from the factually inaccurate to the purposefully misleading. One individual held a "9-11-01, Never Forget" sign, either betraying his own ignorance as to who actually perpetrated the attacks, or, more disturbingly, embodying the tendency to reduce our enemies to single categories for easy digestion.

I'm hesitant to offer an equivalent to demonstrate the absurdity here, so suffice it to say that the Iranian president and Osama Ben Laden are not one in the same, but representatives of drastically different ideological agendas. In a similar vein, members of the Jewish community yet again demonstrated an unwillingness to abandon the Hitler paradigm for comprehending enemies. Ahmadinejad is a hateful, fear-mongering despot with an awful human rights records; but he is not, as one e-mail I received proclaimed, "genocidal." This type of reductionism ultimately stems for a disregard of the ways in which "different" people are also different from one another. By dividing our world into "us" and "everyone else," we effectively dehumanize with our indifference.

Inside the campus gates, things were far more peaceful. The coalition of student groups protesting the President's appearance demonstrated a level of nuance that those outside the gate lacked as they launched targeted attacks against specific actions perpetrated by the Iranian government. While powerful in their own right, these demonstrations were overshadowed by the afternoon's main event: President Bollinger's introductory remarks.

His brutally honest assault on the Iranian President's government would have been extraordinary in any forum, but with Ahmadinejad sitting a few feet away, it took on other-worldly proportions. Bollinger refused to be locked into a corner by both affirming the right of the Columbia community to engage Ahmadinejad directly and delivering a critique of the Iranian government that made the Bush administration look bashful. Better yet, he did it without a cry for war, recognizing instead that the Iranian people will in all likelihoods force this increasingly unpopular figure out of office in the next elections.

Despite my attempts to remain on the outskirts of things, take photographs and witness the diversity of opinions on display, I was overcome with emotion twice during the day. Once was at the conclusion of Bollinger's speech, when I, along with the thousands of other students on Columbia's South Lawn, got to our feet to applaud. I felt very proud that in an era tending toward binaries, Bollinger was able to critique all sides and pander to no one.

The second incident was far more visceral, and admittedly far more personal. A group of Jewish students and faculty members were holding a demonstration inside campus which was so different from those going on around them. There were no Hitler or 9-11 signs, just people singing and dancing in a circle with joy and the conviction that overcoming hate and fear is not just a negative process of rebuttal, but also one that must demonstrate life. They ended one song with something quite familiar to many of us, as it is found at the end of a central prayer recited daily by observant Jews: Oseh shalom bimromav, Hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu, V'al kol Yisrael, V'imru, v'imru amen (May he who makes peace in high places, make peace for us and for all Israel, and let us say, amen). To my great surprise, this disinterested observer's eyes welled with tears. Of exactly what, I am still trying to understand, but I know it to be far larger than today's events.