WHAT A YEAR AT COLUMBIA TAUGHT ME

An Indian journalist at Columbia University navigated a tumultuous year, learning unusual life lessons

- M. Sriram

Universities tend to lean left—and in liberal, diverse New York City, Columbia even more so. After Trump’s win, the atmosphere at the campus was funereal.

(M. SIRBAU)

When I got the acceptance letter from Columbia University, it was a dream come true.

I did not for a moment think that the very education I craved would risk becoming a footnote in a fight for democracy, free speech and pluralism: things journalists purport to represent but rarely see tested so severely and awkwardly.

I left for New York in August 2024, days after Minouche Shafik stepped down from the university’s presidency. The Israel-Gaza war had sparked waves of campus protests; Shafik had failed to quell protestors or satisfy their demands, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine sides reportedly found her handling of the situation inadequate. Through September, I followed raging online debates but struggled to grasp the enormity of events around me, a tragicomic failing for a journalist, in part because I was wearing my student cap again: devouring dense economics and accounting textbooks.

On 7 October, the one-year anniversary of Hamas' attack on Israel, severe protests erupted again. Our access to campus was curtailed to two main gates, where we would have our IDs checked by uniformed guards on a random basis. But things still felt manageable.

I was at The Hamilton, a faintly lit, wood-furnished bar near Columbia the night of 5 November when Donald Trump stormed back into The White House. Throwing back beers, my friends and I refreshed the New York Times app every couple of minutes to see if their election needle would move towards Kamala Harris, whom everyone around me was supporting. This was supposed to be the closest election in decades, whose results could take days, if not weeks to verify. We knew by 11 pm.