Post #18

Columbia is Showing the World How to Move Forward!

This week’s “Columbia News” is out and contributing writer James Schamus has some thoughts…

So, I suppose everyone got the email with this:

Now, actually, I think respectful, structured dialogue and exchange are good things, and appreciate efforts such as those Professor Coleman is putting forward; and yet, something about the “Columbia setting an example of how to move forward” framing here does beg the question: Moving forward from what? I guess from, like, this?

And this?

Of course, moving forward is never easy:

But none of this what-we-might-be-moving-on-from stuff is actually addressed explicitly in Professor Coleman’s essay; and speaking as an adult survivor of various trust- and team-building “retreats” in my other, corporate life, I’m perhaps overly allergic to some of the ways otherwise laudable conflict management techniques can be deployed to redirect energies from, uh, let us say, well, whatever they redirect energies from. I was certainly struck by one particular passage in the essay, heralding a “particularly impactful” activity:

Because, I guess, after you’ve punished and expelled a healthy portion of your student body, and put the fear of God into the remaining cohort about what, and where, and when they can raise a voice, naturally ye olde teame buildinge volunteer stuff tends to work just great, even better, I think, than the usual scavenger hunts.

So, again, while respectful listening and the exchange of ideas is all good stuff, I wonder, as Columbia “moves forward,” maybe we ask for just a bit more “looking backward”? Maybe, even, a little accountability and reflection about how and why all the “emotional regulation, active listening, and persuasive communication” pictured in the photo accompanying the essay is taking place (or, one might say, “encamped”) on that particular lawn?

One gets the sense that “moving on” and “trolling” are conceptually more closely linked than one at first imagined. But who knows—hard to say what the nature of the discussion pictured is, though one assumes the topic probably was not:

In any case, Go Lions, and,

… if you ever do encounter a graffiti wall at Columbia, just make sure you don’t scrawl anything over the margins onto an actual wall, or write anything too spicy – you may find you won’t be able to swipe back in to our “safe space” ever again.

JS