“I am not in space and time, nor do I think space and time; rather, I am of space and time; my body fits itself to them and embraces them.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Our bodies take up and embrace space and time, but, within the specific time-space of our university campus, our bodies are defined by who can and cannot be here. Within our gates, bodies have been arrested, infected, and erased, effacing the boundaries between bodies and place. The questions that concern us now, as graduate students at Columbia University, pertain to understanding where we can be if both the space and time of the university we “belong to” keeps telling us that we are not welcome.
This article was born as critique, but has grown into an elaboration of emotion, reflection, and reaction—it is messy because I do not yet know what to think. I embrace this confusion by confessing that I have more questions than answers. By utilizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the nature, condition, and essence of being, I wish to establish an ongoing, critical yet confused, dialogue between him and myself, on what it means to be Columbia. Most importantly, to assert that something must change. In essence, this piece is a reflection on how we be on campus, characterized by a deep feeling of disheartenment, of not knowing my place as an art historian at, within, and from Columbia University.
As matriculated students of the institution we have the “right” to be on campus, but the university is continuously putting up barriers to this right. Our learning is gated, we are fenced into our classrooms and a perfectly curated campus. We are kept within a so-called “peaceful oasis of the life of the mind,” but are increasingly confronted with gates, fences, and security guards to keep us away from certain parts of campus. Just as much as these measures keep us
within campus, seemingly isolated from the wider city and real world, they keep us at arm’s length from the institution and legacy of Columbia. Gates are “unexpectedly” closed for “safety” reasons upon first whispers of a dangerous and threatening peaceful protest. In these situations, a plasticized ID card confirms my status as “CU – Student” by placing a photo that doesn’t quite look like me anymore alongside an image of the Alma Mater, the campus’s pride and joy. A simple ID, a piece of plastic, becomes more containing than barbed wire; proving my right to enter and be within the gates, and asserting that I am a part of and complicit with the institution, but also keeping out the unwanted “intruders.”
During these partial closures, there is a fencing off of the Alma Mater, the 1903 statue by Daniel Chester French personifying education and Columbia’s legacy. Throughout the 20th century she has been painted, stripped, bombed, and healed. Alma Mater finds herself in a cathartic identity crisis much like our own: Should she embody Columbia’s past or future? Is her celebration of education rooted in history or in the modern, present? If even her being is unclear, what should we make of our own? Our “nurturing mother” is both an attestation to student dissatisfaction and revolt and the university’s aim to protect a legacy of “greatness.” In literally fencing her off, the university claims that she must be protected over her own students. An inanimate body of stone over students’ breathing, protesting bodies. This is not to mention the trash cans left around the Low Library steps April 4 after the organized solidarity protest for Al-Shifa. Alma Mater must be protected from certain ideas and positions, and not others; but also must be kept clean and pristine—as if a peaceful protest can only produce trash. Resistance becomes posited as pollution.
When the physical space of our learning—our campus—is telling us that we are not welcome and repeatedly validating our exclusion, we have nowhere to go.
Alma has been in a continuous succession of different times and spaces that embrace her unwavering presence. Her own significance has changed, but she remains the “soul” of Columbia. In fact, our being here and being represented by Alma Mater ties us directly to the legacy and history of Columbia University. Our bodies “embrace” this rhetoric and legacy, assimilating, even if unintentionally, a time-space defined by steadfast, preapproved ideas. Those ideas that do not comply with Columbia’s are not let in at all. Therefore, rather than speaking of campus as a locational space, the right-now as approximate time, and our bodies belonging to these situationally, Merleau-Ponty’s reflection becomes more existential. As students, working at Columbia University in the spring of 2024, our bodies are molded into the ideas and positions fueling the institution. There is no way of extricating our bodies from this campus; even when we leave the gates, we remain students of Columbia. Even our ID cards tell us so.
The issue is that when the physical space of our learning—our campus—is telling us that we are not welcome and repeatedly validating our exclusion, we have nowhere to go. As being is constituted of our space and time, what does it mean for our space, at this time, to be defined by gates and structures that physically divide us from the rest of the city, the rest of our time? That this time and space is no longer ours? That our campus-oasis cannot be so for everyone? This critique becomes as institutional as it is personal, and bodily. We are not in or on Columbia’s campus, but we are of Columbia, even though Alma has been showing us again and again that she does not want us here. If I am fenced off from the ongoing legacy of the institution, how can I contribute to its future? The condition of being closed in, and off, feels that it is affecting my work. I feel stunted, helpless, and embarrassed of the ID that places me alongside Alma. How can I continue to work on a campus that does not want my freedom of speech or body to approach its longstanding legacy? As it is our bodies that fit into different time-spaces, it feels as if there is no hope for Columbia to fit to our needs as current students. Instead, it is implied that we, our bodies, must adapt to institutional positions and histories. This is the dynamic that makes me feel unstable and insecure as an academic: How can I continue to produce work for a time-space that I do not want to embrace, or even be of? They don’t want me but I don’t want them either.
I believe that, ultimately, the first surfaces of critique must be our own bodies. We must question our bodies as vehicles of history and indoctrination. How do we unstick our bodies? Our actions? Our thinking? Can our bodies fit into and embrace a space and time that is not gated by Columbia?
My question remains unanswered; how can we be Columbia University? If you have any ideas, please let me know.
Author’s Note: This piece was written before the events following April 17. Obviously, the feelings of not feeling welcome or feeling like a part of Columbia have grown beyond any potential I had imagined. This issue is about more than gates, fences, and an outdated statue on a closed campus.
I want to thank the brave students in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment because they answered my question. Being Columbia at this time is dependent on those who speak up, out and against. They are rejecting a constraining time space to build their own and stand up for Gaza. This new tent-based campus, The People’s University for Palestine, created a new space at the heart of a hostile campus, making me believe that there are, in fact, ways to be on campus and be at this institution without remaining silent. Personally, they’ve given me hope and a whole new campus to learn to be in and of. 
Agnese Fanizza is a graduate student at Columbia University.
Featured image of Butler Library and the Alma Mater by Jacob Burckhardt via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).