Seizing the Initiative
what the community principles statement means for columbia
“Columbia University is a community of students, faculty, alumni, staff and visitors,” the Community Principles Statement begins dryly. It’s a pretty uncontroversial preamble as they go, but the 159 words that follow—along with the two-year effort spent on one of the school’s more enigmatic and quietly controversial projects—seem to engender a bit less agreement.
Across almost two dozen interviews conducted with current and former student leaders, the statement was labeled “a set of principles we can all gather around,” “an agenda by administrators,” a catalyst “for respectful dialogue,” “sterilized ideas of feeling implemented by skilled bureaucrats,” a “project in its early stages,” a “faltering effort,” and “kind of incomprehensible.”
Indeed, nearly four months after its Halloween-day unveiling, the statement and its parent project, the Community Principles Initiative, occupy an ambiguous role on a campus where hardened cynics appear to outnumber consensus-builders. Some see the initiative as a promising path to strengthening Columbia’s often fragmented community, others as a misguided but well-meaning attempt at the same, while still others as a boondoggle that dramatically misjudges the dynamics of the University’s undergraduate population.
In basic terms, the CPS is a collection of loosely-worded community standards aimed at ensuring civil interaction and discourse on Columbia’s campus. It is the centerpiece of an ongoing, multi-year collaboration (the Community Principles Initiative) that includes student leaders from Columbia’s four undergraduate schools and members of the CC/SEAS Department of Student Affairs. The principles in the document—which consists of five paragraphs and an introduction—are nonbinding.
The roots of the initiative date back to late 2005, when it began to form under the banner of developing a more forceful community response to hate crimes and bias incidents than had previously existed. Student support for the idea coalesced after the vandalism of a Ruggles suite in December 2005, when two Columbia students—Matthew Brown, CC ’07, and Stephen Searles, SEAS ’08—wrote homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic messages on the walls.
“I think that was the initial motivating goal behind this—we wanted to transform the student body in a way that this wouldn’t happen again,” says Michelle Oh, CC ’06 and president of the Columbia College Student Council at the time. “This was one practical measure that could happen.”
As Stop Hate on Columbia’s Campus entered the height of its protests that spring, a group of student leaders began to work with members of Student Affairs to formulate a more lasting response. The two sides would eventually spend a year and a half on meetings and summits developing the Community Principles Initiative and its most conspicuous feature, the Community Principles Statement. After countless revisions by a committee and feedback from a wide range of student leaders, a signed version of that statement was released to the public and displayed on Low Plaza for a day in October 2007.
“The Community Principles Initiative (CPI) has undergone a great deal of thought and development since its inception in 2005,” Kevin Shollenberger, associate dean of Student Affairs and a member of the initiative, says in a statement. “After several student-organized community summits and numerous meetings with student organizations and leaders, a draft of the statement was unveiled this past Fall. Over 30 student organizations signed the statement showing their support for the Initiative.”
While a completed statement now hangs in Lerner, the initiative is still very much dynamic. The CPI’s general committee meets every other Friday, and its various subcommittees continue to work on expanding the scope and reach of the project in targeted areas.
But while the history of the CPS may help to reveal the motivations of its framers, it leaves plenty of questions unanswered about what role the statement should actually play in the lives of the students it is said to represent. Neither a set of statutes, nor a binding creed, nor a pledge subject to a popular referendum, its day-to-day significance and its connection to the community remain issues open to debate.
“I think the statement is sort of a baseline—these are the standards to which we would like to hold ourselves,” Jessie Leiken, CC ’08 and vice chair of the Student Governing Board, says. Leiken sits on the CPI’s statement committee.
“Maybe they [average students] would think of one or two parts of the statement and how they relate to it,” Glenn Thompson, CC ’08 and CCSC’s vice president for communications, says.
But another member of the CPI, speaking on terms of anonymity, voices doubts about its practical import. “To be honest, I can barely remember what the statement says. I guess that speaks volumes. Who’s going to treat it [CPI] seriously if not the people on it?”
Then there are ambiguities in how, if at all, the statement should be implemented. Unlike the University’s various housing, alcohol, and misconduct policies, it’s billed as a nonbinding set of principles. That means that a student can’t be subject to Dean’s Discipline merely for failing to maintain “the integrity of the community as a whole,” for example (something stipulated by the CPS).
This is both intentional and unavoidable: the possibility of giving the CPI the full force of University policy was never seriously discussed during its creation. As Thompson explains, “The statement wasn’t meant to be a code of conduct.”
Alidad Damooei, CC ’09 and CCSC’s vice president for policy, describes the statement as more of a suggested set of principles for staving off conflict.
“If people followed the sentiments of the statements, I think we’d have less controversy on campus,” he says. While Damooei was not part of the group that drafted the statement, he sits on the committee planning the next CPI summit, set for fall of this year.
But its nonbinding status doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility that the statement could come into play once a student has been called into a disciplinary hearing on suspicion of statutory violations. According to the Dean’s Discipline procedures for CC and SEAS, the process has two purposes: first, “to determine the accused student’s responsibility for the alleged violation(s),” and second, “for the student to engage in a meaningful conversation regarding their role as a member of the Columbia community.”
Considering this, it seems possible—likely, even, given Student Affairs’ heavy involvement in the creation of the CPI—that the statement might come into play, either explicitly or implicitly, during a hearing.
Sakib Khan, CC ’07 and former chair of SGB, says that in his discussions with members of Student Affairs relating to the CPS, administrators indicated that the statement might be used as “a guiding course for discipline.”
Student Affairs’ vague characterizations of the disciplinary process seem to leave open this possibility. In a 2006 interview on the disciplinary process, Morgan Levy, the assistant dean of judicial affairs for CC and SEAS, notes: “The ultimate goal of the Dean’s Discipline process is to help students understand how their actions have impacted their own life, and the lives of those in the communities around them. ... When students appear at a hearing demonstrating that they understand what they did wrong ... their perspective is taken into consideration when considering sanctions.”
By this standard, could a student then face harsher consequences for refusing to recognize the validity of those community principles? And if that’s the case, does the label of “nonbinding” still stick? The answers aren’t entirely clear.
“I think people are confused as to the difference between Dean’s Discipline and CPI,” says one CPI member, who asked to remain anonymous due to the individual’s ongoing association with the CPI. “They see it as being tied, which is really problematic.”
Khan adds, “There were also some concerns that it [the CPS] wasn’t going to be a large intellectual endeavor, but that it could become a rationale for the University to pursue police actions.”
And then there’s the matter of public interest. Few students seem to be aware of the CPI’s existence apart, perhaps, from the massive copy of the statement hanging from one of Lerner Hall’s ramps. Many of its organizers even concede that the CPI and CPS haven’t permeated the undergraduate body much beyond those directly involved in the project.
“It does seem like a lot of students don’t know what the CPI is or what it does,” says Paula Cheng, CC ’08 and president of the Activities Board at Columbia. Cheng is a member of the branding committee, which is charged with shaping the public image of the initiative. “Community principles are collaborative and don’t exist unless everyone agrees that they exist,” she adds.
Among the student leaders interviewed for this article, there is no clear consensus on how to bring more students into the fold—only an agreement that for the CPI and CPS to work in earnest, they first have to do as much. (What are community principles, after all, without the community?)
“The idea [of the CPI] was to establish a set of principles we can all gather around. I don’t know if that’s exactly what it is,” Thompson says. “What’s required to achieve that is a lot more student buy-in.”
One way to do that, Thompson says, is by introducing the statement and initiative to incoming first-years during orientation week. Whereas older Columbia students may be too jaded or busy to give the CPI serious consideration, he explains, those new to campus should be easier to reach. Still, given the readiness with which Columbia’s newcomers already shirk and scoff at “mandatory” orientation events, that approach could have pitfalls.
Some efforts to advertise the CPI have already been made, while others are still in the works. Last October’s presentation of the statement on Low Plaza, as well as the summit in early November, were among the first, and will be followed by next fall’s summit. In April, the CPI will be co-sponsoring a series of events titled “Art of Community,” aimed in part at increasing the visibility of the initiative. And three of the project’s subgroups—the outreach committee, the branding committee, and the statement committee—are intended to broadcast the purpose of the CPI.
Other elements of the initiative that aren’t strictly connected to the statement offer opportunities to broaden its membership and public reach. For example, Leiken says, the statement committee has begun to focus on developing a Web site built around the initiative that can act as a community hub for the project.
Elizabeth Strauss, SEAS ’08 and president of the Engineering Student Council, says she recently became involved in the CPI’s efforts to address the handling of “tainted” spaces—those in which hate crimes or bias incidents have taken place.
“I think this year a lot of the focus was on unveiling the document,” Strauss says. “And now that they’re out and more a part of the community, we’re getting to focus on a lot of the other parts of it.”
Other student leaders called for the incorporation of students into the CPI who don’t already lead another organization—people “who get involved in CPI for CPI’s sake,” as Damooei puts it—to broaden the reach of the initiative and combat the perception that it’s limited to student leaders.
Whether or not these attempts are successful, some on the project say CPI’s troubles run much deeper than publicity. According to four separate student leaders—all of whom requested anonymity due to their continuing involvement in the project—many current CPI members feel the initiative lacks a clear sense of purpose, that the principles are too vague or difficult to understand, and that the agenda has become increasingly administration-driven since its original organizers graduated.
“I really hate this. This has been so difficult because ... we really don’t know what CPI is,” one member says, adding, “No one can tell you what they [the principles] actually are.”
According to the same student, members of the CPI disagree on the direction of the project, with some questioning whether the initiative’s particular brand of community-building is suitable for Columbia in the first place. “Everyone just kind of assumes that you want community, but how students and administration envision that is very different,” the student says.
According to a second member, the year-by-year turnover of the initiative’s undergraduate membership—a common hurdle for student organizations and leaders working on long-term projects with the administration—has allowed the agenda to become increasingly dominated by members of Student Affairs. (As of May 2007, all of the student leaders originally involved in the project had graduated.) Others challenge this claim.
“There are ... both administrators and students, who buy in and think this is really important, and then I think there are students and administrators who are there kind of because of the cachet or because of the way it looks,” Leiken says. “But I’m not ready to say that it’s administratively led. I just think that there could be more enthusiasm from all sides.”
The administration’s approach to the CPI, says the first student, has been modeled largely on a similar endeavor at American University, where the students are said to be so polite that they stop cell phone conversations and turn down their headphone volume when passing one another in the hall.
“The problem is that this is such a different school and such a different group of people,” the student says.
That vision seems to be playing out first and foremost in residential programs, several CPI members noted. RAs have been asked to develop miniature sets of community principles for their floors. Often, Strauss says, these rules can be as simple as not leaving dishes in the sink.
But another CPI member—more skeptical—linked ResLife’s strong emphasis on the CPI to the “War on Fun,” the expression widely used by students to describe the apparent administrative tightening of alcohol restrictions in Columbia’s dorms, event spaces, and fraternities.
“I think that there are some people on the committee who think that’s the point of CPI,” one CPI member says, “but a) I don’t think that’s the goal, and b) I don’t think that’s an attainable goal, even if it were.”
Two CPI participants also described an incident in which Student Affairs apparently invoked the CPS against a member of the Blue and White. According to both, SDA encouraged one of the magazine’s leaders to rein in Bwog’s anonymous-commenting feature—known to produce sometimes pointed and vulgar exchanges—characterizing it as a violation of the Community Principles Statement. (At one point, the CPS reads, “Members of our community act with honesty by accepting accountability for their words and actions.”)
“In subsequent meetings with SDA there’s been no mention of the CPS and no CPI member has ever contacted us or leaned on us to change Bwog’s comment policy,” Anna Phillips, CC ’09 and current editor in chief of the Blue and White, says in an e-mail.
“Bwog is not affiliated with Columbia—it’s entirely independent—and while comment policy is something that’s frequently debated among staff members we generally feel that restricting comments might limit debate and freedom of expression, which is the purpose of the blog,” she adds.
“CPI is not meant to be lived by regular students but by model activists who fit SDA’s ideal,” says one former student leader. “Democracy is sloppy, messy, hurtful, petty, and that’s how people think and how ideas play out. And they want everything to come in the form of polite memos—not essays or thoughts or claims or data—but sterilized ideas of feeling implemented by skilled bureaucrats.”
In light of these alleged cases, several student leaders have expressed concern that what was intended as a non-binding statement has seeped into formal policy, and that the original point of the initiative—to act as a mechanism for addressing the sorts of hate crimes and bias incidents that have plagued Columbia’s campus in recent years—has fallen by the wayside. As evidence, one member pointed out that the CPI’s Educational Response to Bias Incidents Committee has been dormant recently.
“I think that a lot of people have sort of lost sight of it being about bias incidents,” another student leader says. “I don’t want to condemn it—it feels misguided about what its goals are and unsure about how to realize its potential.”
Others challenge the notion that administrators have exerted undue influence on the process or misused the statement.
“It’s sort of an interesting way that the students and administrators work together,” Damooei says. “Everyone on the committee is equal. They plan on playing a role in terms of backing student initiatives. ... They [the administrators] definitely don’t control the direction of CPI at all.”
While Student Affairs declined to comment on specific allegations or applications relating to the CPS, SDA’s Shollenberger says in a statement, “The major goal of CPI is to encourage dialogue on how we can all, students and administrators alike, contribute to a greater sense of community. To realize this goal the committee explored ways to incorporate the concepts of CPI into both student and administrative programs.”
Shollenberger adds, “Our work in this area, however, is far from complete, and the committee continues to identify opportunities to partner with student organizations to increase awareness of the Community Principles Initiative.” \\\