What Happens Now

-- By NilePierre - 09 Apr 2025

A lot has happened since this semester started, and it all leads to me questioning how much I am willing to stomach before I am willing to make a change. Tensions on campus heightened following the encampments on main campus last year. Since then, Columbia has seemed to shrink in the face of national news and potential controversy. Last spring and fall, I shrunk too. I felt as though I had too much to lose. A Black girl with a deceased mother, an elderly father who will never retire, and a mountain of student loans. I need big law. And that felt okay. It felt like a smart plan. It felt safe.

Then Trump got into office. Columbia didn’t just shrink, the institution folded. Faced with a clear threat and flex of power from the administration, Columbia did nothing to fight back. What’s the point of the prestige and legacy the school touts to potential students and alumni? The label of 'ivy league" was supposed to mean something, but seeing Harvard follow suit truly challenged my understanding of elite institutions. Why even be a private institution if we fold to public pressure? What’s the point of having an endowment if we won’t use it? I quickly realized the board and administration of this school will never protect the identities and privacy of its own students when it's inconvenient to do so. No one with power will speak up because they, like me, feel like they have too much to lose.

This semester, things started to feel like too much at Columbia. The encampments are gone, but nothing has changed. We have to tap our ID's and give the school access to our locations just to get across campus from the train. There’s constantly a wall of rails around Alma Mater. What was once a symbol of academic freedom is caged in. We walk past it every day like that’s normal. I’ve been told by security at Jerome Greene Hall, “if you forget your ID one more time, you won’t be let in.” What has happened to this place, and what are they doing with my information? All of these measures that are supposed to make us feel secure just make me feel more anxious and stressed. I’ve never felt more unsafe at a school.

And now that lack of safety is spreading to firms. Affinity groups are disappearing. The very groups the firms touted in my face to recruit me have vanished. I might be the last generation of diversity scholarship recipients from big law. Firms that were supposed to be leaders are the first to fall under the pressure of this administration. The silence is loud. The fear is obvious. It’s a clear reminder that these could never be spaces of radical progression when they’re so deeply intertwined with capitalism. They want us to believe that we belong, but not if it costs them anything.

So how much is enough for me? I must be reaching my limit. I can’t keep pretending like I don’t see what’s happening. I can’t wait for the people who I perceived as having more power than me to take a stand. The truth is, most of them won’t. They’re scared too. They’re protecting what they’ve worked for. We’re all afraid of something, and we all answer to someone.

But I can make small changes on my own. I’m figuring out what that looks like now. I don’t have all the answers yet. But I do know that being silent is not going to protect me. Playing it safe hasn’t made me feel any safer. So I’m starting to look at what I can do differently. I’m starting to reimagine what success might look like, and who I want to be in the face of fear. Maybe it starts with saying something. Maybe it starts with saying no. Maybe it starts with remembering that I’m not the only one paying attention.

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.