FROM THE EDITOR
CRACKING THE PRISM

Somehow, Columbia manages to be both parochial and international. We boast a large number of international students, host global leaders, and pretend to fashion solutions for the “poverty problem” in classrooms. But whenever really global problems do intrude on Columbia life, it is as though we are surrounded by a prism: news from outside arrives slightly fractured.

Twice this semester—when President Bollinger revoked Ahmadinejad's invitation to the World Leaders Forum, and when students protested Jim Gilchrist's speech—questions that in the outside world are about life and death became, at Columbia, questions about free speech. Free speech is easy, and right, to defend but in these cases it was not especially relevant. The central question what does it mean to invite people who, in the outside world, work not through speech but through violence, to our campus? was ignored.

These highly public controversies should also not obscure other problems of a would-be global university, like ensuring adequate financial aid for international students, or responsible investment that doesn't fund genocide in Darfur. Nor does being a global university absolve it of its obligations at home, whether to the employees of the Faculty House or the residents of Manhattanville.

President Bollinger is undoubtedly right when he claims that Columbia is inextricably linked to the rest of the world. But “the world” isn't something we can talk about in classrooms. Drawing up grand schemes to end poverty isn't enough—we must approach the world with a consistent ethical responsibility that applies as much on 125th Street as in Africa.

E. Alex Jung,
Editor