Columbia Agonistes
Words scarcely express what relief it was to finally escape Columbia University to turn whistleblower early last year. For the previous eleven years, across a range of prestigious schools, I was a reporter and PR flack charged with making people look good whether they deserved it or not, and oftentimes they didn’t. No doubt I promoted a bunch of dazzlingly impressive minds, but I also helped cover up for a lot of sloppy and misleading scholarship and no small amount of outright prejudice.
Today I stand especially relieved to have jumped ship ahead of Columbia’s calamitous past academic year, by far the most tumultuous and consequential in the university’s history since the notorious riots of 1968. It’s been “an even bigger sh1t show than Mattress Girl,” as I quipped on Twitter. Blow by blow, humiliation by humiliation, my heart has gone out to all of my former colleagues in the impossible position of trying to preserve Columbia’s reputation when it so manifestly deserves most of the embarrassing headlines and withering criticism.
To be fair, many of Columbia’s maladies stem from far beyond its control. The university is more a leading indicator of much broader rot across higher education than itself particularly lacking for what it is. And as sympathetic to Hamas as many students and faculty undoubtedly are, the October 7th massacre in Israel and subsequent response came as a total shock to Morningside Heights and sparked an unpredictably radicalized spectacle. Even a seasoned leader like former longtime Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger would have struggled to contain that fallout, but the university was in the highly unfortunate position of having just installed the hapless Baroness Minouche Shafik, a bland technocratic non-entity, due a little too obviously to her extensive connections with international capital.
In Shafik’s defense, many of the most outrageously antisemitic incidents amidst the roiling protests occurred off campus in the streets, and many of the more vile and violent protestors were not Columbia-affiliated at all but the proverbial ‘outside agitators.’ Columbia is the only Ivy League university in the media capital of the world, and situated in a disproportionately Jewish part of town, so publicity-hungry troublemakers had every incentive to descend upon West 116th Street en masse. But be that as it may, the ambient antisemitism that had long been constant background noise on campus exploded into an acute crisis of pro-Israel Jews being denounced and vilified in the most vicious of terms. President Shafik’s weak, passive, vacillating leadership inspired no respect on either side of the protests, and it was not terribly surprising to see her resign in disgrace last week less than a year after her inauguration.
Yet Columbia is still bleeding, and the Right Honourable Baroness Shafik’s defenestration changes nothing. Whatever glib new figurehead the university coughs up next, the essential problem remains that elite technocrats long ago made a devil’s bargain: many have strived over the years to exacerbate racial tensions and fan the flames of ethnic hatreds to help advance institutional power grabs, never anticipating that it might one day backfire. To seize more control, broad swathes of the governing class long ago abandoned intellectual integrity to peddle a simplistic Manichean fairy tale in which most inequities can be explained by white villains brutalizing non-white victims. They thought they could ride the tiger indefinitely without ever getting mauled.
The brittle dogma of intersectionality and the broader rotten edifice of so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” inherently vilify people of European heritage and thus are inherently antisemitic against most Jews. Nonetheless, Columbia has spent decades tirelessly smuggling irresponsible DEI nonsense into every nook and cranny of itself, including the engineering school, nurturing tribalism and encouraging reflexive scapegoating to wave away complex issues. As professed by the loudest of students and faculty and a veritable army of administrators, the essential narrative is that we’d all already be living in a gloriously equitable and sustainable global society at peace if not for the conscious and unconscious villainy of men, people of European ancestry, and especially men of European ancestry. Lately, the circle of opprobrium has broadened to include other disreputables like TERFs and “white-adjacent” ethnicities.
A few years ago, after a Barnard student was tragically murdered amid a mugging gone wrong in Morningside Park, the outcry on campus seemed strangely polarized. A lot of people were shaken and sad, and there was a well-attended candlelight vigil, but I also heard quite a bit of sympathy for the murderers, middle-schoolers from nearby Harlem. Society had been doing violence to these poor children their whole lives, some argued, and they’d only been lashing out in response.
Probably the biggest PR crisis I personally dealt with during my years at Columbia involved law students who demanded their exams be postponed because of the “trauma” of grand juries declining to indict police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The Law School had initially refused, but after a brief firestorm of protest the weak interim president backed down. The story got a fair amount of play, particularly in conservative media, and my office got blanketed with emails of mockery and contempt. The unflattering headlines probably dinged the school’s fundraising that fiscal year, but internally it was pretty quickly able to smooth things over because of the us vs. them dynamic: who were those racist outsiders to question our enlightenment?
But when it comes to the fraught Gordian Knot that is the issue of Israel and Gaza, there can be no pivoting to some external villain. Regardless of the merits of individual scholars’ work, the overarching narrative that many of the more militant protestors have absorbed is that every conflict boils down to loveable scrappy underdogs heroically battling some odious combination of the Nazis, the Klan, the Afrikaners, and the Evil Empire from Star Wars. Nuance is irrelevant, careful parsing of historical contingencies a distraction, with so very just a cause.
It's a childish, reductionist, thoroughly unproductive worldview, but it’s what they’ve been taught and, even more, it’s what’s been incentivized. For decades elite higher education has been content to hawk whatever was convenient, what brought in the grants and pacified the activists, and some of that has consisted of maligning entire ethnic groups and feeding fierce young radicals’ delusions of grandeur. It was practically inevitable that universities would come to regret dumping substance in favor of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” to quote a famous Columbian. Students really deserve at least a prorated refund for at least the last year, and hopefully alumni will practice their own form of protest.
During my decade plus at Columbia it was my honor and privilege to write official histories of three prominent schools, and it was consistently part of my job to be a go-to person for university history. After countless hours digging through the archives up on the sixth floor of Butler Library, I know as well as anyone how proud a history Columbia has, how great an institution it once was, and how staggeringly far the place has fallen in recent years. I love Columbia and genuinely consider myself its biggest fan, but sometimes when someone you love is destroying themselves the most loving thing you can do is to put them into rehab.
Next: That’s the Ticket
Columbia's dismal re-invention of itself - as a Monastery of Groupthink and playground of spoilt-brat-mobstering - is of course a story repeated (in slightly varying degrees) right across the Western academy. The tragedy is that it has taken conservative-minded grown-ups so long to wake up to what's been going on (for decades now).
The Humanities end of academia has long been the natural home of a malcontent pseudo-intelligentsia - one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. And these types made a beeline for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to stand by as they have entirely colonised them and sheep dipped the rising generations of the professional/managerial elite with their bogus 'Social Justice' race and gender victimhood cults. Heather Mac Donald's 'The Diversity Delusion' (2018) is a great in-depth dig into this... I reviewed it here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
This is a very moving post. It is horrible when you see an institution you love self-immolating as you watch.
So - I applied for Dean of my law school earlier this year. Entirely unsurprisingly to me, my application was rejected swiftly. I hadn’t held any senior administrative positions, so it’s entirely reasonable to reject me. In fact, I am pleased to be rejected, because I applied out of a sense of duty. Teaching and writing are what I love, not administration.
But one of my friends said, upon reading my application letter, “Your first mistake was to mention your courage and honesty.” If that’s how a university is - if courage and honesty are not qualities valued in leadership - then that’s when you get the appointments like Baroness Shafik. Universities don’t want someone who damages their “brand” by being outspoken, pointing out problems and making unpopular decisions - as they themselves trash their brand. Fundamentally, they don’t understand what their brand is.