Ashes to Ashes, Blow to Blow - February 15, 2026

On today’s agenda: A less-than-inspiring galvanization for collective action, and an oxymoronic double entendre (politicians debating ethics).

By Rocky Rūb

As Claire Shipman’s fashion idol, Nancy Pelosi, once said, “There’s no point in saying ‘good morning’ because it certainly is not one,” and not just because we received another Wellhub advertisement in our inboxes this week. In case you’re a little SCAB and haven’t heard about the greatest injustice our students have ever, EVER, suffered under the University administration: there was recently an attempt to move Spring 2026 Commencement from the Morningside Heights campus to Baker Athletic Complex. That’s right, performative Marxist, if you thought deploying the NYPD on peaceful protestors (TWO YEARS IN A ROW) was bad, then how are you going to respond to a ceremonial venue change?! Don’t you know that the visibility issues on campus are what makes the event valuable? We’ve all read Adam Smith, and you don’t need to be a quant to know about scarce products and consumer markets—or is it the other way around? The floods of emails and social media comments have forced the commencement team, aka, the Canceled Commies, to reevaluate their decision on the chosen venue. A decision will be reached later this week. 

Otherwise, Pre-Professional Representative, Andrew Puthumana, CC ’28, presented a club recruitment standardization proposal for CCSC to pass that would mimic that of our business minded brothers and sisters at Penn! Some of the topics for debate include: centralizing the application process to a standardized USL club recruitment form, limiting interviews in terms of quantity and technical scope, mandatory transparency reports, and adding an NSOP segment about club education at Columbia, for “managing expectations for the club process, in that, your worth is not determined by what club you get into.” It’s not hard to see where Puthumana is coming from, but just to speak to his last point, your worth is absolutely determined by the clubs you get into. That’s why everyone in The Blue and White is so hot and cool and creative and smart and witty and basically everything that everyone at Spec is not! But other than that maybe your club affiliation doesn’t actually matter? Email your class representatives today to weigh in!

Your CCSC spent the majority of this week’s meeting debating the ethics of this reform, which oddly, inadvertently resembles a debate on the ethics of coke. “The least you can do is educate students who are new to this process,” said University Senator, Liane Bdair, CC ’28. Senior Class President, Sarayu Bethemcherla, CC ’26, responded to Bdair, “Speaking from my experience, I was President of POLIS for a very long time, and to get it established on campus was a long, long process.” It became unclear whether Bethemcherla knew that she was not, in fact, being interviewed for a student club during this discussion, referencing her noble efforts to spiff up the pre-professional political community on campus: “There were very few places where you can have and build a community for whatever (political) like-minded interests.” 

If I may, I’m pretty sure Democrats and Republicans can partake in the bumpin’ that lifestyle (iykyk), just not members of the Green Party. Bethemcherla continued, “So my suggestion would be to try to help build out an infrastructure for guidance for those specific types of organizations.” It’s not about the reasons one chooses to partake, but how best to support them in their journey of self-discovery. 

However, Puthumana did state at the beginning of his proposal that he, “had some discussions with friends at Penn, and they feel that clubs can kind of shirk the policy pretty openly… and that’s up to Penn for enforcing that, but there’s different ways we can enforce it as well.” Narc alert! At the end of the discussion, which was tabled in the interests of time, a decision was not reached. 

In other news, my favorite day of the year is this week: Ash Wednesday! It’s the start of a blissful forty days of justified complaining for dumping your vices—I’m not, not giving up Ketamine! Until next week!