Columns

OBASEKI | Leaving A Promising Cornell

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For a fruitful educational and developmental experience, strive for that which seems impossible but is feasible with a steadfast dedication to the concept of free speech we all look to champion: a common sense for civil discourse. 

Columns

Sandford | Days of Future Past

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I am a historian by trade, borne back ceaselessly into the past. As such, various professors have beaten into me the fact that my writing needs what we in the industry call a “So What Question.” The question that I’ve had on my mind since the beginning of this year is what comes next?

Columns

ELF | The Spring Encampment: Failed Revolution or the Only Way to Live? (ft. Spencer Beswick)

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There was never revolutionary potential in the Liberated Zone. I wrote in April that there were always two likely outcomes: that Martha Pollack would dismantle the encampment outright, as police did at Columbia and UCLA, or that she would trust in the existing cultural order to prevent the demonstration from reaching any sort of leveraged position in negotiations. Pollack’s stall tactics succeeded — ahead of the summer recess, the Coalition for Mutual Liberation called an end to the encampment last week. 

That my piece received heartfelt recognition from within and outside of the encampment should indicate some acceptance by proponents of the Liberated Zone that the demonstration would fail. Did it mean nothing, then? Was it a disingenuous attempt by privileged Ivy League students to virtue signal, with little concern for its success?

Columns

WILSON | Ghosts of the Encampment

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“Yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire.” — Thomas Pynchon ’59

When Cornell’s encampment is uprooted tonight, green and yellow patches of deadened grass will remain on the Arts Quad for some time — subtle discoloration indicating that at some point, something was here. After a few weeks at most, the grass will be mowed and grown anew, removing this temporary imprint. In three years, virtually all of the undergraduates who experienced life within our Liberated Zone will have graduated. Soon enough, our story will be reduced to the same vague murmurs of disquiet that eventually subsume all student protest movements.