Stepping out of my dorm on Dec. 14, I was met by five of my friends gathered outside the room of Ella Cook ’28. Flowers lay next to the door and tears streamed down our faces. We stood together in silence — gutted by the tragedy that lay before us and unable to comprehend what we had lost the day before. Ella was my next-door neighbor, classmate and dear friend. Standing shoulder to shoulder with my dormmates, I was confronted with the permanence of the tragedy that took place the day prior.
In the days since, many have remarked on Ella’s exceptional ability to speak across disagreement. Ella taught me lessons about being friends with others not in spite of our differences, but because of them. She bridged ideological divides, seeking to foster authentic mutual understanding. On a campus often consumed by ideology and moral certainty, Ella offered something rarer and more difficult — a truly human understanding of political difference. Her commitment to pushing past the facades of partisanship to the substance of discussion elucidates an antidote to our current political crises.
I first met Ella in my first year seminar, POLS 0821D: “How to Think in an Age of Polarized Politics.” In a class where almost all voices were different shades of liberal, Ella offered a fresh perspective that embodied the importance of the course. After two and a half hours of discussion each week, she and I often walked back to North Campus, continuing our conversations from class. We shared stories of our pasts, discussing our experiences growing up in the deep south of Alabama and northern woods of Maine…