Deadlines are now bearing down on me with such pinpoint precision and blinding intensity, the only thing I can rationally do right now is procrastinate. So here goes.

 The other day a former professor invited me to visit her class next week, as Mark Naison, the author of White Boy, is scheduled to be a guest lecturer. This reminded me of the very short paper I wrote for her a couple of years ago on the 1968 student rebellion at Columbia University, and the fun I had doing that paper, which required some archival research into the papers of a number of Columbia professors and administrators of that time. In any event, the paper also led me to a neat web site, Morningside Heights-net. Though I’m not certain whether or not the site is being actively maintained or updated anymore – the most recent additions seem to be a few years old – I found it to be a good place to go for tidbits of local history and commentary on Morningside Heights.

Having lived and/or worked in and around the neighborhood for quite some time now, I especially enjoyed looking at the photographs and pictures of the neighborhood slowly emerging around Columbia, which had relocated from mid-town Manhattan (near present-day Rockefeller Center, apparently) to the Heights in 1897. I found the pictures of building plans and proposals from the 1960s and 1970s especially interesting: the buildings tower above the landscape. Given that Morningside Heights is already at a naturally elevated point of Manhattan, these buildings would have allowed scholars, students, residents – or whomever they were intended for – to float above the city, way above the fray down below.

Some examples:

This is from a plan for East Campus, where what was eventually built – a 20-story dorm –  was fairly close to what was imagined. The current slab runs north-south; its residents overlook the Hudson River to the west and Morningside Park and Harlem to the east. 

(East Campus – Proposed)

 (East Campus – Built)

I.M. Pei proposed building matching towers across Columbia’s South Field, with an athletic center built underneath the field. This was proposed after the Columbia student rebellion of 1968 forced the cancellation of the notorious Morningside Gym project.  Reading up on the history of Pei’s proposed master plan for the campus, it seems that the only thing that came of it, apparently, was an underground gallery / classroom / lounge area that today connects Columbia’s architecture school, in Avery Hall, with its Sociology and History departments, in Fayerweather Hall. 

(IM Pei’s Plan for South Field – Never Built)

 I love this proposal, which would have placed gargantuan towers right behind the main campus of Teachers College, allowing it to loom over TC, Riverside Church, International House, and Grant’s Tomb. Supposedly, the towers would have housed TC’s students and faculty as well as low-income families, with the building in between housing the College library. I wonder about the kinds of shadows that building would have cast.

(TC Plan – never built) 

Columbia’s the dominant institution on Morningside Heights, and if you follow New York City news it’s been making attempts in recent years to move into Manhattanville - a neighborhood in West Harlem that was once a bustling wharf town but later came to house factories, warehouses, small businesses, and low-income families. Many of these businesses and families have been bought out; but there are a few establishments that are still there and are refusing to leave, impeding Columbia’s intentions to build a new campus there. No more looming towers; the plans seem to say: instead, inviting streets, trees, and open, transparent glass!

The future to come? 

I don’t want to comment on the plan, since in all honesty I’ve not studied with great care. However, along with the recent racial and anti-semitic incidents at Columbia and Teachers College, the university’s plan to move into Manhattanville was one of the points that instigate a recent 10-day hunger strike by Columbia students.

Columbia’s not yet attempted to get New York State to use the power of eminent domain to lay claim to the properties it has yet to acquire in Manhattanville, so that it can proceed with its expansion plan. It’s interesting to note that plans for Manhattanville have been around for quite some time now -there are a number of articles from the 1950s and 1960s detailing Columbia’s intentions to participate in the development of the neighborhood. Perhaps, too, the University is mindful of the fact that in 1968, despite using scrupulous legal arguments to justify and legitimize its efforts to build its gym in Morningside Park, it still wasn’t able to save it from student and community outrage.

(Morningside Gym – never built)

Oh lord.

Date: October 9, 2007 4:13:20 PM EDT
Subject: Message from the President – Community Alert

Dear TC Students:

The police were here this morning because a hangman’s noose was discovered on the office door of one of our African American faculty members. The incident has been reported to the New York City Police Department (Detectives Bureau of Manhattan) and is under active investigation by the Hate Crimes Task Force.

The TC community and I deplore this hateful act, which violates every Teachers College and societal norm.

Anyone who has any information about this incident is urged to immediately contact (anonymously or otherwise) any of the following:

The 26th Precinct Detective Squad (212 678-1351);
Crime stoppers (1 800 577-TIPS);
John DeAngelis, Chief of Public Safety (212 678-4180);
Janice Robinson, TC General Counsel and Executive Director, President’s Office of Diversity and Community (212 678-3732).

Susan Fuhrman

I, along with other members of the Teachers College community, received this rather terse and in my view rather inertly-worded message late yesterday about this incident. I thought of writing about the incident immediately, but after seeing the rush of on-line commentary I thought: perhaps, at times like this, a moment of shocked silence is perhaps just as well.

Still, I can’t but express shock and distress and outrage at this. I’ve not made it a secret that I attend TC, though outrage is the only appropriate response whereever and whenever something like this takes place. There’s no denying, however, that there’s an added punch when it happens quite literally down the hall from where one studies and works.

We need to know who did this and why. I won’t offer any speculations, because I have no basis for offering any speculations. But it’s amazing to me how quickly this has been turned, by people inside the University and outside of it, into a proxy or symbol for other things. The noose has been explained away in different ways, giving rise to an ‘epidemic of signification’:

- It’s a reaction to political correctness (the prof teaches a course on social justice)
- It’s just another sign that Ed schools are worthless
- It’s just another sign that TC is a joke
- It’s just another sign that Columbia is a left-wing/right-wing joke
- Columbia IS institutionalized racism, what do you expect?
- It’s TC! It’s Columbia! Things like this don’t happen here!
- It’s the result of a conspiracy by the professor, ‘wanting to make a point’
- It’s the result of a conspiracy by a student, ‘wanting to make a point’
- It must have been a deranged outsider
- It’s white-on-black hatred
- It’s man-on-woman hatred
- It’s payback for the Iranian President’s speech at Columbia
- It happens everyday, aren’t we “used to” this by now?

And so on. To illustrate how this event is unfolding, I thought of posting some of the more offensive examples of drivel that’s been posted in various venues in reaction to this event. But then I thought, why respond to ignorance and hate by disseminating more messages of ignorance and hate? We should focus, instead, on the *specific symbolic violence* that a noose carries. And yet, so much of what’s been said, already, is a conscious effort to deflect from this.

There’s going to be a rally, and a town hall meeting, later today. We’ll see what results from this.

One side note: this happened at Teachers College, but it’s just as often being seen by people as an opportunity to evaluate and comment and pontificate on the state of affairs at Columbia University itself. But I’d like avoid generalizations about how this reflects on the whole university, much less even TC – certainly, a lot of on-line commentary has decided to use this to make blanket generalizations about Columbia, which like any complex organization is often more than the sum of its parts.

As an affiliate of Columbia, TC has its own organizational and institutional structure and culture. It’s often decried as an excessively politically correct place, but the idea of TC that gets passed around at moments like this – as a hotbed of student agitation, political correctness and ideological indoctrination – is so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. Sure, I’d agree that the prevailing ‘hallway ideology,’ its institutionalized myths and rituals, tends to skew to the left – but these elements are largely secondary to students’ actual concerns, which tend to revolve around the more prosaic and humdrum goals of getting a degree, getting some value-added skills, and getting a job or just as likely moving up in the ones they already have. Additonally, conflict here is metabolized and regulated by the fact that the school is largely a night/commuter school for professionals (teachers and administrators), with the vast majority of students, 80% female, attending only part-time with only occasional presence on campus. This isn’t to say that a school that consists of largely part-time, female, non-residential, professional students means something like this incident can’t happen, or is any less significant or morallly outrageous. It’s just that these kinds of structural conditions lead to types of arguments and dissatisfactions and debates that have a very different dynamic and flavor than those that take place on the main Columbia campus.

Follow-Up article on the incident here.