An end of the academic year note from the Faculty Co-Directors/Board Co-Chairs Brian Larkin & Jennifer Wenzel

The Varsity Show is an annual student-produced satirical musical sendup of the year’s events at Columbia. In this year’s edition, titled “Morningside Heist,” the plot featured a scheme by the Trustees to use a memory-destroying ray gun to erase public awareness of recent hits to the University’s reputation. After seizing $440 million, a louche outsider installs himself as the king of Kings College and mandates the wearing of orange neckties; dissenting students are locked up in a laundry room. The plot begins to turn when a professor reminds the students that they already have the tools to free themselves and save the University. “We’ve Been Here Before,” the students sing, as they recall the fundamental lesson of the Core Curriculum: the past is here to guide you. This ode to liberal arts education was among the many surprising yet deeply moving moments in “Morningside Heist,” which even featured a wonky (and crowd-pleasing) explanation of the tripartite structure of shared university governance that is currently under threat.

As a sign of the times, two things stand out about “Morningside Heist.” First, the show and its enthusiastic reception suggest that many students are fiercely angry about Columbia’s current perilous situation, with the blame directed squarely at the Board of Trustees, former Board Co-Chair and current Acting President Claire Shipman, as well as the federal government. Second, the student performers and audience seemed profoundly grateful for the education they have claimed at Columbia, cognizant of the potential of traditions of humanistic thinking to meet the challenges of the present.

The show highlighted the extraordinary times that we are living through at Columbia. Recent developments at the federal and university levels have had immediate effects on all our operations at the SOF/Heyman, from the intellectual to the practical. We would like to give some sense of what this situation means on an everyday level for our community.

The fact that the United States, Columbia University, and The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities draw students, teachers, and researchers from across the world has long been a source of strength. The detentions of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and the targeting of Yunseo Chung and Ranjani Srinivasan have had a seismic effect on so many Columbia affiliates, neighbors, and visitors. The consequences for our intellectual community are multiple and vast. What does it mean for a humanities center to serve the university and broader communities under such circumstances? In pragmatic terms, we have found ourselves weighing multiple kinds of risk for our Fellows, our speakers, our audiences, our staff, and the SOF/Heyman itself. Ongoing restrictions on entry to campus create daily logistical challenges for hosting events and fulfilling our mission to offer a hub for humanistic thinking open to all. But we have also had to consider how security regimes at the university and federal levels might intersect in unpredictable ways, with consequences for our community. International speakers have been unable or unwilling to cross the U.S. border; other invited speakers have chosen to join a cultural boycott of Columbia for its perceived abdication of free speech.

These changes and the dangers they represent go to the heart of what public scholarship is and can be. Cumulatively, they create a climate of suspicion and danger in which the work of the university takes place. For some, it raises the question of whether we should be operating at all, given the extremity of the times. It is our opinion that we should. What, after all, is a university for?

Given these challenges, it is a matter of pride that the SOF/Heyman organized or co-sponsored some 100 events this year. This is not to say that business as usual is continuing. There is nothing about the present moment that is business as usual. But it does mean that the work of the Center and the Society is ongoing. These range from book presentations of John Ma’s study of how the idea of the Greek polis was replicated across the Black Sea to Frank Guridy’s study of the role the sports stadium played in protest, politics and play; to Jonathan Beller and Ali Musleh’s discussion of the logistical role of media in the war in Gaza; to Anna Kovalova’s exegesis on a new database of pre-Soviet cinema in Russia. At the close of this year, we bid farewell to SOF Fellows Véronique Charles and Xavier Nunn, as well as to Buell Fellow Maura Lucking. We also welcome new Fellows who will join us in the Fall: Aamer Ibraheem and Alexis Stanley, who will pursue projects examining the role of reincarnation and memory amongst Druze in the Golan Heights and the role of the performing body on the stage in enlightenment France, as well as Buell Fellow Chelsea Spencer, who works on the role of capital and credit in Gilded Age US architecture.

Looking ahead to 2025-26, we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Society of Fellows, with events throughout the year around the theme “Humanities in the World.” There may not be a time in the nation’s history when this theme has been as urgent and under assault as it is now. But as we look around at formidable and seemingly unprecedented challenges on campus, in the nation, and across the world, we hear the voices of those whose names surround us within the gates. We’ve been here before. The past is here to guide you. Millennia of humanistic thinking can help us meet this moment.