On 7 September 2026, the day before classes began, President Mnookin sent the Columbia community an update on campus access: a relaunched advisory committee, an increase in same-day guest passes from two to five, and a staffed kiosk at the 116th Street gate from 1 October. The gates themselves stay shut. It came four days after the City of New York told a court it supports reopening the walkway through campus, and a day before some 250 neighbours, students and faculty rallied at 115th and Broadway. Virginia Woolf, who was once waved off a college lawn by a beadle, came to see the kiosk.

A room of one’s own, with a kiosk

By Virginia Woolf, who never crossed the Atlantic, and now begins to see why

I. The turf and the gravel

Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please; it is not a matter of any importance, and in any case the gentleman in the blue jacket did not ask. I had come up Broadway on a September morning on the pretext of buying a pencil — one needs a pretext, walking, or the day becomes a mere errand — and had it in mind to cross the campus by that broad brick walk which the maps still call a street, and to sit for a moment on the steps below the library and think a small thought through to its end.

I did not get so far as the thought. At the gate stood the gentleman, and behind him a device, and on the device a square of black and white which the gentleman explained, very kindly, I must present before the iron would part for me. I had no square. I had, I said, a pencil. He regretted, in a low and silvery voice, that the pencil would not do.

You will forgive an old woman a sense of having been here before. Some years ago — a century ago, near enough — I was walking across a lawn at a place I called Oxbridge when a beadle rose up in a cutaway coat, his face expressing horror and indignation, and I understood that the turf was for Fellows and Scholars and that the gravel was the place for me. Later that morning I was turned from the door of a famous library, because ladies were admitted only if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

I mention this not to complain. I have long since made my peace with the beadle. I mention it because I have now read President Mnookin’s letter of 7 September, and I find that the letter of introduction has been revived, improved, and made electronic. A guest may be admitted to Columbia if furnished with a code by a member of the University. A member of the faculty may furnish up to two dozen. A student, or a member of staff, may furnish five — an increase, the letter notes, from two. Accompanied children under twelve require no code at all, a concession which I, being somewhat over twelve, was unable to use.

The Fellow of the College, in short, is now a QR code; and I am still on the gravel.

II. Of the kiosk

But a kiosk is coming. From the first of October, the letter promises, a temporary Access Service Kiosk — the University has found the acronym, and I shall not spoil it — will stand at 116th and Broadway, “staffed by a welcome team member dedicated to helping Columbia community members, guests, alumni, and visitors navigate campus access requirements.”

I turned this sentence over for some time on the pavement, as one turns a shell. A gate that is open needs no one to explain it. A gate that is shut, and is to remain shut, and yet is visited daily by a small crowd of people who had supposed a university to be a public thing — that gate needs an explainer; it needs a booth; it needs, above all, a welcome team, for nothing is so unwelcoming as a lock without an apology attached. The kiosk is not a step towards the gate opening. The kiosk is the lock, furnished with manners.

I do not say this unkindly. I have known many institutions, and I know that a booth is what an institution builds when it has decided to feel the problem rather than solve it. The letter says as much: the kiosk “will help us better understand the challenges regarding our existing access procedure.” One could, of course, understand the challenges by opening the gate and observing that they vanish. But that would be to skip the kiosk, and the kiosk has already been ordered.

III. Of the committee, which has had more lives than the Manx cat

Then there is the committee. A Campus Access Advisory Committee is to be convened, co-chaired by a Dean of Engineering and — I read the title twice, with pleasure — a Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology. It will include students, faculty, staff, and, this time, the neighbours. It will “recommend the principles, conditions, and practical steps” by which the campus might be made more open, “while preserving appropriate safeguards.” It will report “in the months ahead.”

I say “this time” because the newspaper of the students informs me that this committee has existed before. It was formed in January of 2025 by one interim president; it was paused after three months under the next; in November it was folded, without ceremony, into a committee on safety; and now, in September of 2026, under a third president, it is unfolded again and given two chairs and a mandate. The daughters of educated men have sat on a great many committees, and I can tell you what they have learnt from them: that a committee is the form an institution’s conscience takes when it does not wish to act on it yet. One of the students who served on the first committee put it more briskly than I can. “We don’t need another committee,” she said. “We need a commitment.”

Herr Kant, I understand, wrote to the President in July with three requests, of which the first was to open the gates. This letter is the answer to the first request, and the answer is: a committee, five guests, and a booth.

IV. Of the word “safety”, and who holds the keys

Now I must be fair, for the letter is a fair letter, and its author is plainly not a jailer by temperament. She writes that “while safety and security of our community are of the utmost importance, they are also not our only considerations.” She writes that “openness, exchange, and engagement, with one another, with our neighbors, and with the wider world, are also fundamental to who we are.” And she writes — this is the sentence I would have underlined, had the gentleman let me in far enough to find a desk — that reopening “will also require us to resist framing the choice as one between an open campus and a safe one.”

Quite so. I agree with every word. And yet the gates are the frame. For three years the University has said, with every locked bar, that the choice is precisely between openness and safety, and that it has chosen; the letter asks us to resist a framing which its own iron makes every morning at eight o’clock. One cannot, I think, argue against a sentence while continuing to build it.

I have some experience of the word “protect.” It was the word that kept me off the turf and out of the library and, for the better part of my life, out of the university altogether. The street, I was told, was not safe for me; the world was not safe for me; I was to be kept, for my own good, behind a door to which someone else held the key. The argument was always sincere. It was always made by the person with the key. And it was always, when one examined it, an argument about the comfort of the keyholder, decorated with concern for the person locked out.

The letter speaks of “those who value the sense of safety and stability that our current measures have provided.” I do not doubt them. But a sense of safety is a feeling, and one does not remove a public street from the public in order to provide a feeling to the people who happen to be inside the fence. If the University has a duty to protect its community from harm, it has that duty on both sides of the bars; the neighbours are not a weather system.

V. Locked out, and locked in

I wrote once, walking back from that library, that it is unpleasant to be locked out; and that it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

I thought of that on Broadway. The students are inside. They have their codes; they are the ones who may furnish five guests, whose younger siblings need none. And they are also the ones who are assigned me — Mrs Dalloway, I am told, in the spring, in a course called Literature Humanities — and who will read of a woman who says she will buy the flowers herself, and walks out into Westminster on a June morning, into the swing and tramp and trudge of the city, without a code, without a guest authorisation, into what I once called the vast republican army of anonymous trampers. That is the book. That is the whole book: a woman who may go out. Assign it, by all means. But it is a curious thing to hand a nineteen-year-old a novel about the freedom of the street and then require her to present a square of black and white to reach the lawn.

Mrs Dalloway’s party, I might add, would have exceeded the same-day limit.

VI. On being told it will not be fine tomorrow

There is a family in another book of mine who wish to sail to a lighthouse. The child is six. His mother says yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow; his father says it won’t be fine; and the trip is put off, and put off, and the war comes, and the mother dies, and the boy is sixteen before he sets foot in the boat. It is a novel about deferral, and about the particular cruelty of the reasonable man who is always right about the weather.

The President’s letter is a reasonable letter. It is right about the weather. There is no single policy change, it says, that will achieve the balance overnight; it would not be responsible to make significant changes without carefully considering their consequences; the committee will help in the months ahead. Every clause is true, and together they add up to: not tomorrow.

But the gate at 116th Street is not a lighthouse; one does not need a fair wind to open it. It was open from 1967 until the autumn of 2023, and the sky did not fall, and the University in those years produced a great many of the people now writing to the President to ask for it back. The city’s own lawyers have said this month that the walk is a walk and belongs to the walkers. The committee that is to study the question has been studying it, on and off, since January of last year. Whatever is to be learnt about opening a gate has, I think, been learnt.

I said once — it is the line they put on tote bags — that you may lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. I stand by it. But the mind, alas, has legs, and the legs would like to cross College Walk. Open the gates, Madam President. The kiosk may stay; someone will want to know where the library is.

Virginia Woolf
(Late of Bloomsbury and Rodmell. Still not permitted on the grass. Set for Literature Humanities in the spring — the lighthouse, you will recall, is reached in the end.)