Adam Calder
This fall, a record number of new BridgeUSA college chapters are starting up on campus! Eighteen new chapters, along with their presidents, officers, and faculty advisors set out to improve the political discourse at their institutions. Some have gone quite far in the short period they have been active.
Among those new chapters is BridgeUSA at Columbia University. Those who kept up on the unrest on college campuses earlier this year will likely know that Columbia University in New York was a hotspot for the distress. Students protested for several days; they formed encampments and chanted loud enough to be heard throughout the city. If you were watching on TV, you may have asked yourself, “How can we ever get back to some sense of civility?” Or maybe you wondered, “Will we?”
Eventually calm fell over the campus as students left for the summer and just this month, a new semester began. With it came a new opportunity for political expression: The Columbia University chapter of BridgeUSA.
Following the campus protests last spring, students at Columbia reached out to start a BridgeUSA chapter on campus to help facilitate these necessary discussions that weren’t happening. In the few short weeks since their chapter’s leadership team completed their training from the national team, they’ve been hard at work.
As chapter Vice President, TJ Gill, put it, “We’ve reached out to dozens of other student organizations, we’ve had meetings with Columbia’s administration, we’ve mentioned the club to people we’ve just been chatting with in our dining hall…We’ve tried to embed ourselves in the Columbia community in every way.”
The Columbia chapter hosted their first gathering last Friday, September 20, and are planning for a substantial discussion on the Israel/Palestine conflict in the coming weeks. With a packed calendar and overstuffed rolodex, the chapter team on the Manhattan campus hasn’t taken one moment for granted. And already, those efforts are paying off.
“People have already begun to express their appreciation for what we are offering. In those moments, we’ve already started to make a difference,” Gill said. “During our club fair, several of our classmates came up to us to say ‘thank you’ for what we’re doing.”
Columbia’s formula for success is one of several others that chapters are using to breakthrough on campus this fall.
Approximately 1,800 miles from Columbia University is the University of Colorado-Boulder. There, another relatively young chapter of BridgeUSA has captivated the campus community.
The BridgeUSA chapter at CU Boulder launched last year and since then has hosted a panel on politics with a hundred attendees. They’ve spoken with published authors and hosted a discussion with the Attorney General of Colorado.
When asked how they’ve been so successful, the chapter President, Abby Schaller, said, “It could largely be attributed to the administrative support we have sought out. We now have a lot of professors and other faculty members who know the executive team members personally and are supportive of our work.”
That so many people, students and faculty alike, are rooting for these chapters to succeed should demonstrate that people are ready for new political discourse. One that isn’t so divisive or, at least, doesn’t shut down entire campuses.
Harvey Pennington, the Columbia University chapter President, put it simply, “I’ve noticed that people are yearning for places where they can have respectful conversations on pressing topics.” That is the core of what BridgeUSA offers, and it’s catching on.
As we near the election this fall, we’re excited to see what else our chapters are doing on the ground to engage students in constructive dialogue again.
