Letter from the Editor: Thinking in Public

Dear Reader,

As the Columbia Political Review enters its twenty-fifth year in circulation, I think it’s important that we take stock of how far we’ve come and what lies ahead of us. Our staff began work together in the spring, which coincided with a near-daily barrage of national news headlines about our community and the political strife that has gripped it for over two full years. President Trump began his second term with a direct attack on Columbia, and, by the end of that semester, the University seemed to have all but tapped out of the fight. In the summer, we enjoyed a brief hiatus from our role in the American Opera, but the fundamental issues facing this university remained unresolved through the fall. Now it is winter, and, beyond Columbia’s gates, we have seen greed, violence, and political upheaval algorithmically congeal into a sense of doom that looms over just about every part of life. You know the story: It seems, sometimes, like the world is coming apart at its seams. 

This Editorial Board arrived with the hopes of adapting CPR to the unique dilemmas the average Columbia student has been forced to confront amid campus convulsions, national crises, and international calamity. In some respects, we succeeded; in others, we fell short. But as I reflect on 2025, I could not be more proud of all that our staff has accomplished together: a brilliant and prolific interviews team, a total overhaul of our web interface, a revitalized social media presence, newly defined standards for the editorial process, a new system for anonymous publication, a new constitution, and as always, dozens and dozens of utterly excellent articles by even more excellent student writers. 

This year, we welcomed a record 143,000 visitors to our website, received over half a million views across our social media channels, saw our work referenced in over a dozen academic journals, and regularly appeared in national news outlets defending the principle of free expression on college campuses. We have shattered all the records together, and, I hope, built a publication that is unrecognizable to what it was before. 

At several points, we asked ourselves what exactly CPR is and what, if anything, it should become. Should we adjust our tone to be more sterile or sensational? Should we consider ourselves more an archive of scholarly political analysis at Columbia or a living platform for calls to action on campus? Should we write as students aspiring to professional life or simply as students occupying a particular place and time in history? This is all to ask: should we be mild for our own sake or bold for everyone else’s?

I now recognize that the binary nature of these questions betrays the spirit of debate we seek to encourage here. I came to CPR itching to get people angry in ways that I thought would be productive for the publication’s reach, the strength of its engagement, and, in turn, the health of its mission. Over time and many conversations, I now know that I was wrong to assume that we needed such direction. The identity of this publication has always been in the tension of figuring out what it is and what it should become. Some writers are coldly analytical, others pointed and fiery. But each of us is perpetually learning from the other, whether we read their work with agreement, discomfort, or plain anger. Our culture is not curated, and that is a strength that the publication will only grow into over time. The difference in our moral vocabularies, our commitments, and our aspirations is not a bug in our system, but a condition of learning in a world that defies coherence. 

In that spirit, I want to leave you with a few reflections on the political conditions under which this publication has operated, and will likely continue to operate, as seen from my role as a student and an editor. I remind the skeptical reader (and, naturally, any future employers), that our project is multi-partisan, not non-partisan, at its core. I am an editor as much as I am a student and a human being, and our success—as a publication and as a country—depends on the honest recognition of and reckoning with bias, not its concealment. With that in mind, bear with me: 

In 2025, the genocide in Palestine became the clearest test of what CPR was willing to be. As a student-run publication working at the focal point of the American debate on this subject, we were forced to navigate a campus environment where speech had become the basis for suspicion, targeting, and erasure. Contrary to the insistence of the American and Israeli governments, the killing is not over, and it will continue to carry relevance for the work that we do precisely because it is controversial for me to acknowledge in writing. I could use this letter to once again bring your attention to the continued suffering in Gaza and the persistent inhumanity of the international order, but others are better positioned to testify to those horrors in fuller detail. After years of saturation coverage, the stakes are certainly known to you by now. Instead, I want to offer you some insight into how I have seen knowledge, speech, and learning constrained amid moral crisis and where I believe we can go from here. 

Practically every day during my term, I questioned how my editorial and moral obligations intersected. I was confronted by several Palestinian and Israeli writers with that same question. With every conversation, I was humbled to a new degree, both for what I didn’t know and for what I knew but had been forced to see from a different perspective. 

But when we began receiving requests to remove articles discussing Gaza for our writers’ protection, it became increasingly clear to me that the barriers to enter this conversation were never equally high for all of us. As the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Öztürk, Leqaa Kordia, and many others weighed on the psyche of this community, we were forced to confront an uncomfortable asymmetry that structures nearly every conversation we have. As citizens, we are the chief beneficiaries of a freedom that international students do not enjoy, a liberty not earned through virtue or a good argument, but granted by circumstance. That I can speak as freely as I do with individuals from all sides of an issue is a testament not to some exceptional capacity for respectful debate, but the luxury of American citizenship. 

Eventually, I settled on a conclusion that now seems unavoidable: that muzzling students for their stance against moral atrocity amounts to more than the standard fare of state-sanctioned suppression—it is an attack on learning itself. It contravenes the basic mission of a university and affirms the logic of aspiring dictators, the butchers who would rather sever our access to knowledge than concede an inch of political ground for the sake of human life. Indeed, this is why universities are attacked here and elsewhere, because students are often the first in society to muster the necessary courage to serve as a nation’s conscience.

In that spirit, we refused, sometimes controversially, to exclude any perspective from our coverage, even if we held strong moral objections to its content. No amount of censorship, however morally inspired, seemed defensible as a response to the censorship against which we struggle. I came to understand that every bit of coverage, every morsel of every student’s thought on an issue was valuable, for the sake of historical record and to maintain the basic tension that constitutes the identity of a student publication. I recognized that what we choose to write is inseparable from what we choose to be for one another, for better or worse. Whether that content is regarded by some as, say, colonialist apologia or sympathy for terrorism is irrelevant to the main point: that our identities are composed of the principles we choose to put in print. In the future, I may disagree with this position as I have written it, but I will never regret that I chose to write it.

Anonymity followed naturally from this logic. As the Trump administration escalated its campaign against student journalists and activists—some of whom have been gracious enough to speak with us—our team was confronted time and again with a chilling effect that directly hampered our mission of representing the full breadth and depth of political thought in this community. While nearly all of our international students wanted to comment on their own life experiences, moral quandaries, and political prescriptions, very few had the resources to gamble their lives and livelihoods on those beliefs and the probability of retaliation. With Columbia’s administration having apparently given up the struggle for academic freedom, it became clear that we needed to take protective measures on behalf of our writers. Accepting anonymous submissions became that middle ground, albeit controversially so, because it allowed us to preserve the option for students to express themselves without requiring that they endanger themselves for the mere opportunity to speak.

It would be dishonest to conclude this letter without addressing the broader political trajectory in which our work is situated. It is defined by a total crisis of sincerity: the failure of our institutions to close the widening gap between the values they claim to uphold and the behavior they are willing to defend when those values become inconvenient. There is no better example of this failure than in Columbia University’s retreat from principle in the face of external political pressure and reputational panic. Our institutions speak the empty language of inclusion, dialogue, and intellectual independence fluently, even as they retreat from those principles when their costs come to bear. What results is the collective realization that our trust has been placed in systems that we cannot fully understand, systems that never really had our interests at heart. 

With the perceived legitimacy of these institutions all but eroded, the American political scene every day reaches new heights of spectacle, grievance, and cruelty. As a young person, I have seen crudeness become synonymous with honesty and malice mistaken for courage. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that figures such as Nick Fuentes are ascendant because of their cruelty, not despite it. They tap into an apparent authenticity to which no organ of the political establishment can lay claim: the narrative of perpetual “martyrdom” and “resistance.” They weaponize the very forms of victimhood and agitation that the average Columbia student is accused of miring themselves in. They claim a monopoly on saying what nobody else is willing to say, with the “sincerity” of someone who has very little left to lose. 

The election of Zohran Mamdani signals a related but fundamentally different shift on the left, away from managerial restraint and toward something more forceful. Whether Mamdani delivers on his promises remains to be seen, but his election has unquestionably opened up a new, apparently viable path toward a program of hope without naïveté. He embodies the direct inversion of a Nick Fuentes, not just for the substance of his political message, but because he insists on using the language of solidarity, dignity, and inclusion that has become so exhausted by misuse in the public consciousness. This rhetoric is sincere as it is risky: its reach may be limited either by the political sensibilities of the five boroughs or the fact that it often lends itself to elite capture rather than meaningful progress. 

Put more plainly, these figures gain traction because they speak to our universal disgust with the insincerity lurking between the lines of every email, every statement, every press release that we are fed by the fixtures of society that are supposed to be closest to truth. They do not win because they are always right; they win because they are willing to say plainly what our well-funded universities, corporations, and governments refuse to admit: that moral language without risk is just branding. When political chaos is proven not to be an aberration of “the times” but the rule of history, we are left without a word of our own in response. Others will be there to speak for us. For better or for worse, politics has occurred and will continue to occur in extreme, essentially colloquial terms—far from the high-minded theories and predictive algorithms you will find in your seminars at this hallowed (or perhaps hollowed) institution of higher learning.

So, what does that leave us with as students? Do we keep shouting into the void, hoping for some charismatic figure to come out of the woodwork and save our democracy? Do we compromise our analysis so that it fits more cleanly into the confines of an Instagram Reel? Do we just wait for the cycle to exhaust itself? Absolutely not. In my experience, the most impactful work begins closer to home: the stubborn insistence on thinking clearly, writing honestly, and refusing to conflate safety with virtue. 

That work is rarely glamorous and almost never rewarded immediately. It takes shape in long drafts, hard conversations, and the discipline of standing with an argument even if it comes at the expense of popularity. But it endures. It is the work that fosters in us intellectual habits that do not collapse under pressure and communities capable of tolerating disagreement without casting it as betrayal. Whether our articles are exploring pragmatic politics or the moral dilemmas of our time, every single one of them is a stab at truth taken by a student who hasn’t yet succumbed to cynicism or blissful ignorance. This work is not mere pre-professional portfolio padding; with all of its risks and no pay, it is sincere in the truest sense of the word. 

Even if it feels like the world is coming apart at its seams, your persistence represents the thread with which we can stitch together a new world entirely. What has given me hope this year has not been institutional rebellion or electoral salvation, but the daily evidence that students here still know how to tell right from wrong, fact from fiction, and sincerity from empty promises. Every one of you has stunned me with the seriousness with which you approach the world and your refusal to look away from what matters simply because it may be difficult to address. This seriousness undergirds a sincere optimism, that a better world is possible and within our reach. 

Navigating these issues has been the singular honor (and challenge) of my time at Columbia, and I thank you for the chance to experience it alongside you. I leave this publication not believing that we have solved the problems that lie before us, but confident that we have learned how to face them without compromising our intellectual integrity or our responsibility to one another. 

I wish Soumya, Shreya, and Arvin the best of luck as they take on this work. I am certain that they will build upon all that we accomplished together with even greater tenacity, humanity, and heart. Whatever shape the Columbia Political Review takes next, I trust that it will continue to be what it has been at its best this year: a place where, even as risks abound, students insist on thinking in public. 

Signing off,

Adam Kinder, Editor-in-Chief, 2025