Stand, Columbia!

Apr 04, 2023

Lately I’ve been accused of hating on Columbia University, but I still feel like its biggest fan. Having spent the bulk of my career there, eleven years across four schools, I got a panoramic view of the academic-industrial complex I couldn’t have found anywhere else. If I’m critical of the place it’s because I’ve chronicled its proud history and am in unique position to see how profoundly it’s falling short.

Which isn’t to say that Columbia is any worse than its prestigious peers—between the venerable Core Curriculum and sheer scale it’s probably somewhat better than most—but that it exemplifies how the fabric of upscale dialogue has come apart at the seams. Basic standards of debate and deliberation are increasingly deemed dangerous: the role of today’s universities is to reinforce what everybody who’s anybody already knows.

Columbia was already a rather sad and intellectually moribund environment by the time I arrived in 2011, even worse than Brown just a few years earlier. Yet, jaded as I thought I was, the utter collapse of discourse over the next decade was breathtaking, picking up speed after Obama’s reelection and then especially the Trump upset. However I felt about such dramatic decline, it was my job to sell the dream and pretend vibrant conversations were still happening, and for the most part journalists and alumni were happy to believe.

Can anything be done to salvage higher education? Structurally not much, with too many true believers and perverse incentives baked into the system. But that segment of university leadership and tenured faculty who privately know better could certainly show some more courage in standing up for freedom of expression, and concerned alums get a lot more involved. Like many formerly great institutions Columbia still retains capacity to be better than it is, with such resources and talented people around.

Step one is for alumnae/i to stop giving money, and instead devote time and attention pushing alma mater to restore higher standards. Not being rude, but resolute that even the most nostalgic alum cannot in good conscience donate to institutions that have abandoned their commitment to open inquiry.

So much of how unreasonable zealots were able to seize control of academic administration was that few else bothered to show up for what is often tedious and thankless work. But for all their ideological investments and billion-dollar endowments even top university programs remain money-hungry organisms highly responsive to pressure. It doesn’t take too many conscientious alums to make them take notice, and incentivize changing course.

The glory days of American higher education are long gone, never to return, but there are still opportunities to help stanch the bleeding. For better or worse places like Columbia will continue selecting, shaping and credentialing tomorrow’s leadership class for the foreseeable future—however quixotic, it’s at least worth the attempt to carve out space for genuine discussion. Who knows, maybe some good old-fashioned collective action could actually make a difference.

Next: The Ivy League Has Gone Mad