If there’s any single description that might most sum up the social posture of Columbia University over my eleven-year tenure as an in-house reporter, historian, and PR flack, it is desperate insecurity.
That might sound absurd, at least before the bumpiness of the past few years, given the institution’s 11-figure endowment, global prestige, low acceptance rates, and that it is by some distance the largest private landholder in New York City. But try to see it from Columbia’s institutional perspective: back in the 1950s, it could reasonably consider itself the third most prestigious university in the United States. (Sure, Princeton had more social cachet, but it lacked law or medical schools.) And even though Harvard and Yale clearly outranked Columbia even then, the brass at Low Library could squint at the hard facts and argue that those schools were in relative backwaters over in Cambridge and New Haven rather than the crossroads of the world in Manhattan, just a cab ride from the United Nations. Those competitors hadn’t housed the Manhattan Project, and they hadn’t just had their university president Dwight D. Eisenhower elected United States president. As far as many mid-century Columbians were concerned, especially among leadership, Columbia had fair claim to being the greatest university on earth.
And then came 1968. Decades later the protests and building occupations of that fateful spring would be hailed by revisionists as a righteous uprising exemplifying the very best of the Columbia tradition, but at the time and for many years afterwards it was experienced as an utter catastrophe that alienated alumni, discouraged donations, and cut off a ton of federal funding. At the same time, New York City was going through a rough patch that made Morningside Heights a far less attractive place to go to school, especially for young women.
And so in the ’80s into the ’90s, when the Ivy League as we’ve known it in recent years began to crystallize—going from exclusive places where top students from across the United States could feel they might have a decent enough shot of getting in to ultra-exclusive enclaves where there were so many applicants from all around the world that admissions were a total crapshoot if they didn’t check the right identity boxes or have fabulously wealthy parents—Columbia was to some extent stuck on the sidelines. As an Ivy it became vastly more exclusive along with its peers, of course, but there was a lingering odor of it maybe being a little dubious, a little run-down, a little yesterday’s news. So while previously Columbia could not unreasonably flatter itself into quite possibly winning the bronze in the academic prestige Olympics, it’s had to endure the continual indignity of inexorably slipping notch after notch down the elite social hierarchy.
Forget any notion of competing with Princeton: the aftermath of ’68 demoted Columbia definitively into fourth place. As Stanford increasingly made its way into being a full-fledged honorary Ivy, Columbia was edged into fifth. Then there was the rise of tech, when much of STEM other than medicine and pure academic science had previously been considered a backwater, so M.I.T. muscled its way into the conversation and in terms of name recognition and desirability surely pushed Columbia out of the top five.
And then comes my alma mater Brown, which doesn’t have a law school and offers far fewer resources than Columbia on a variety of levels, but yet still derives a certain aura and desirability from being the supposedly artsy and creative Ivy where celebs’ kids like to go. Opinions will differ, but I would contend that as of my employment at Columbia it had slipped behind Brown to at least seventh place in terms of social desirability of attending as an undergrad.
Before the protests of the past few years, I still would’ve placed Columbia somewhat ahead of the rest of the Ivy League in terms of positive name recognition and perception of prestige, but now the brass at Low Library has to face the reality of free-fall where, Ivy League or not, Columbia has likely dropped well out of the top ten, and may now sit somewhat behind other institutions that it had never been forced to quite consider peers: Tufts, Duke, Hopkins, Chicago, Northwestern, and (egads!) maybe even some of the flagship state schools.
From Columbia’s institutional perspective, then, the past 57 years have much of the time consisted of humiliating erosion of relative social standing. What the brass at Low Library had hoped would be only temporary embarrassment has proved chronic and defining: they feel in their bones that Columbia is second-rate. It was striking working with faculty across the university how few of them were Columbia grads; there were some, but the numbers blatantly implied that Columbia considers its alumni objectively inferior to those of places like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. I always found it hilarious that every door in Columbia Law School’s Jerome Greene Hall was secured with a Yale®-brand lock.
That fundamental sense of inadequacy and inferiority explains why I had a job on campus for as long as I wanted one: Columbia’s primary structural advantage against its competitors was its location in Manhattan, the nation’s media center. There were always interesting and/or famous people passing through NYC who might pop uptown to give a talk, and Columbia was hungry to promote and glorify itself as much as possible. No other elite school spent nearly as much time or money embellishing its story, because they didn’t feel such need to. There’s little doubt in my mind that the infamous rankings scandal of a few years back, in which Columbia was proven to have manipulated statistics to goose its position in the U.S. News & World Report list of top schools, had been precipitated by senior leadership. The notion that Columbia had climbed up to the #2 spot was preposterous to the point of laughability.
I like to poke fun at Columbia’s recent succession of hapless temporary presidents—the Baroness Minouche Shafik, the head of the university’s medical complex Katrina Armstrong, and presently former ABC News television personality Claire Shipman—but they deserve some credit for doing the very best they could in an impossible situation. The real villain of the story, the pied piper who led Columbia down the primrose path to disaster, is longtime university president Lee C. Bollinger, who had the good fortune of stepping down after twenty years just a few months before the horror of October 7th, 2023, catalyzed a new era of campus chaos. A talented fundraiser, Bollinger had been a solid enough president for his first few years, but eventually became obsessed with raking in money and building a series of grotesque new university buildings up north at the exclusion of all other considerations.
Much of Lee Bollinger’s tenure can be likened to that of President Joe Biden: a distracted chief executive asleep at the switch as rot festered all around him. Academic and intellectual standards were already shockingly diminished when I reached campus in early 2011, and had only gotten that much worse by the time of my departure in 2022. The most vociferous ethnic animus was celebrated and encouraged so long as it was the right demographics being demeaned and demonized. As a heterosexual male of European descent, I faced a consistently hostile environment and not a day went by that I didn’t experience various “microaggressions” of students and colleagues casually noting that people of my basic description were inherently worse and of less value than people with different ancestry and/or sexual preferences. I don’t know why Lee C. Bollinger failed to ever step in to address that ubiquitous fact of campus life; perhaps as a straight white male himself he thought speaking out for treating everyone with decency would endanger his position and pet projects, or perhaps he is an earnestly prejudiced person. Either way, he had countless opportunities to become that stitch in time that could have saved nine, and his feckless negligence made the recent crisis inevitable.
I wince each time I pass the “Lee C. Bollinger Forum” building on the new “Manhattanville Campus,” visible from the 1 train when it goes aboveground near 125th Street. Not only is it aesthetically monstrous, and not only did its construction needlessly displace a bunch of poor people and a convenient drive-through McDonald’s by the entrance to the West Side Highway, but Lee Bollinger’s leadership simply does not warrant that sort of recognition. He’s arguably the worst president in Columbia’s nearly three-century history, leaving the institution on the very brink of calamity, and iconic former president Nicholas Murray Butler must be spinning in his grave. If I were interim president Claire Shipman, I’d strip the Bollinger moniker from that hideous building and stash his portrait at Low Library in a broom closet somewhere, never to be seen again.
While I do have some significant qualms about some of the Trump administration’s assault on elite higher education (I hated to see funding disrupted for the incredible scientific research conducted by brilliant scholars I used to cover at Columbia Engineering, for instance), Columbia eminently deserves a reckoning, good and hard. The appalling antisemitism so inescapable over the past few years is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the fashionable prejudices Columbia went out of its way to promote and inculcate over the past fifteen to twenty years. So I was disappointed to see Columbia wriggle out of substantive accountability with a pittance of a fine of merely $221 million, pocket change for an institution with a near-$15 billion endowment. The university spent years championing and actualizing vicious discrimination against men and against “overrepresented” people of East Asian, European, and South Asian heritage, so a fine of much less than a cool billion is essentially letting Columbia get away with murder.
I should emphasize that I’ve become a persona non grata up in Morningside Heights, at least outside of heterodox circles, and no longer have eyes and ears at Low Library. But, were I to speculatively venture a guess about the mood of Claire Shipman and other senior leadership right now, I’d have to think it’s some combination of sheer exhaustion and grateful astonishment that they somehow landed such a sweetheart deal. Like a cat suddenly getting bored with batting at a sparkly toy, the Trump administration abruptly moved on before Columbia received anything near its just desserts.
Columbia’s drastic decline in social status at last became a sort of advantage: the university has become too marginal to matter as much as it once did. Humbling Harvard is the real prize, and slapping Columbia around but a minor sideshow. I suspect that many on campus are quietly relieved—not only did they evade much in the way of serious accountability for the abundant wrongdoing of recent years, but they may well quietly support many of the reforms that they now have cover to blame on the Orange Ogre in the White House. Having to constantly placate and pacify the woke hordes was a grueling slog that a lot of people are probably pretty glad to leave behind.
Can Columbia lick its wounds and work back to its former renown? I doubt it. One 1968 was bad enough, and the antics of the past few years have perhaps permanently persuaded much of the country that Columbia is but a middling Oberlin on the Hudson. The university still sits on desirable Manhattan real estate, but the looming likelihood of a Zohran Mamdani regime seems poised to cast New York City back to the bad old days of the 1970s, or worse. Because it is an Ivy League school, and a lot of people are desperate for that gold star on their LinkedIn page, I wouldn’t bet against Columbia eventually clawing its way back closer to the top ten. But I expect it will always remain the Ivy with an asterisk, the place that managed to self-abuse itself from near the top of the Ivy League heap to its rock bottom. Low Library has made its bed, a lousy and flea-bitten one, and it will be gratifying to see Columbia have to sleep in it.
Was pleased to be reprinted in filmmaker Ted Balaker’s The Coddling of the American Mind substack.
Next: American Ninja Bore-rior
If you encounter the argument that it's unfair (or even illegal) for the feds to cut scientific grants just because a university itself has refused to protect Jewish students, you can refer the interested party to the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 (which was passed by a Democratic Congress over Reagan's veto). The feds today are simply following the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Restoration_Act_of_1987
The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, or Grove City Bill, is a United States legislative act that specifies that entities receiving federal funds must comply with civil rights legislation in all of their operations, not just in the program or activity that received the funding.
More about this issue:
https://lawliberty.org/the-road-to-campus-serfdom/
"Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects.
As a result of this change in law, all subsequent presidential administrations have enjoyed enormous leverage over universities. Any violation of Title VI or Title IX anywhere within the institution, as defined by an administration, puts a university at the risk of the loss of all federal funds in all its operations."
The bill has come due for Columbia's transformation into the Edward Said School of Applied Jihad. $221 million may be peanuts but at least it comes with a free side of schadenfreude.
What a great read from inside the cloisters. As super average Southern California parents of a Columbia grad (Class of 2017), who scraped the bottom of the barrel, for his education, by working nonstop, my husband a small non-union electrician and me, lead pool photographer (at the time) for Harvey Mudd University and other editorial work -- I appreciate the breakdown of C.U.'s demise. Our now 30 year old son, has never really wanted to talk about his experience at C.U. He felt completely let down by the school's promises. He actually wrote for the Spectator in Jr/Sr year but it's all been wiped out with the change-over of their system. He said he could care less if he ever sees his work again. Much of it was changed (by force) before publishing. One pompous and mighty professor tried to take him down with a bad grade -- for asking a question (or "challenging" the professor). He fought tooth and nail to graduate with a Biological Anthro degree, earning every top accolade, then collapsed when he got home. It was a long recovery period. He went back to the city a few weeks ago, for the first time since graduation, and met up with Dr./Prof. Shapiro on campus. If it weren't for this incredible woman and her dedication to her work and students, I don't know how he would have survived. She informed him that the powers that be are trying to eliminate her area of study/teaching. He said Columbia didn't deserve her. Anyways, I agree that with the Mayor election to come, the city will decline again, as it did in the 70's. Then someone, much later, will come in and clean it up. Possibly be persecuted later. Then it will decline again. The history of man. Cheers.