// ten-year anniversary //
December 2015
To celebrate The Current's tenth anniversary, we invited our Editors Emeriti to weigh in on Columbia's next ten years:
It's 2025, and Columbia University is appearing in headlines all over the world.
What for?
A Tale of Two Columbias
Bari Weiss, CC '07; David Feith, CC '09; Jordan Hirsch, CC '10
Bari Weiss, CC '07; David Feith, CC '09; Jordan Hirsch, CC '10
When we graduated, between 2007 and 2010, no one knew what a “trigger warning” was. “Check your privilege” wouldn’t have meant anything to the average Columbian. “The Vagina Monologues” was a feminist favorite, not a hated weapon of transphobic hegemony. But campus politics can change fast, as we’ve seen recently at Yale, Mizzou, Princeton, Dartmouth, and beyond.
Alas, it’s all too easy to imagine a newspaper dispatch from 2025 describing a university transformed by manic illiberalism:
In a widely anticipated move, the institution formerly known as Columbia University has officially changed its name to “Pantone 290,” a reference to the color of the school’s former “Columbia Blue” logo. The name change demonstrates “our irreproachable commitment to equality and social justice,” said University Co-President Moon Glampers, a Sophomore majoring in Anthropology, “and finally, it rids us of any connection to the genocidaire of Genoa, Christopher Columbus.”
Erasing all references to the famous explorer has been a University priority for years. Students and administrators long speculated that the school’s new name would simply be “Justice Campus,” but that plan fell through when all proposed definitions of the term proved unacceptable to a holdout coalition of negotiators. “Justice is really just a tool to salve the consciences of the powerful,” said one of the holdouts. “No concept of justice could possibly remedy a lifetime of nanoaggressions, and any suggestion to the contrary is violence. Your ‘justice’ delivered is still my justice denied.”
Hence Pantone 290, a name that one University trustee, speaking on condition of anonymity, called “just empty enough to satisfy everyone.”
Students on College Walk generally voiced support for the change. “It’s another overdue adjustment to create a safer space,” said Senior Sociology major Jack Obin, “and to help atone for this school’s criminal legacy, including, but not limited to, its colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, capitalism, property ownership, competitive admissions, and grades.”
The name change follows the scrapping, beginning in 2017, of “The Varsity Show” and Orgo Night, which had long unsettled students by causing some to laugh. Music concerts and dances were jettisoned, too, after administrators identified them as minefields for cultural appropriation. When a Cuban-American student busted Jamaican dance-hall moves on Low steps during Bacchanal, the resulting outcry was deafening. Yoga classes were cancelled too, of course.
Since 2018, any student who has wanted to dress up for Halloween has received a burlap sack from the Office of Multicultural Affairs. There’s no candy—it was deemed insensitive to the gluten-free and the full-bodied—but students treat each other by reciting passages from the works of Edward Said and Howard Zinn. Valentine’s Day, deemed triggering for the aromantic and asexual students, was nixed in 2019.
As it turned out, those reforms were just the beginning. Led by the Coalition to Rectify Education Equity and Privilege, students in 2018 prevailed over the administration, succeeding in dividing Core Curriculum sections according to race. “Segregated schooling is a historic American right,” one ethnic-studies major explained at the time. In 2020, the Core was scrapped entirely.
At the height of the Core debate, the names etched into the façade of Butler Library—Plato, Rousseau, Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire—were shrouded in black cloth to limit their power to trigger. But in 2021, students and professors from the only remaining departments (Middle Eastern studies, Anthropology and Sociology) enlisted the One Percent to hire workers to chisel off the names permanently.
Formerly known as St. Anthony’s, the One Percent is a flourishing club of students born into wealth but devoted to erasing income inequality and other forms of oppression. They also funded the recent removal of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker sculpture from campus, which students condemned for idealizing the cis male form.
Dining changed dramatically in 2023. The John Jay cafeteria was shuttered and replaced with segregated ethnic cafeterias. Students of Chinese origin eat Chinese. Indians, Indian food. And so forth.
Jewish students, condemned to kugel and herring, protested bitterly. When some Israeli students brought in hummus and falafel for themselves, controversy erupted. “This aggression will not stand,” declared the Committee to Rectify Education Equity and Privilege, condemning the Israeli hummus-eaters as “culinary colonialists.”
A mass hunger strike followed. University Co-President Lee Bollinger sought to end it by disinviting Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett from the impending World Leaders Forum. “Sure, I hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in 2007,” Bollinger said, “but obviously free speech has its limits.” Still, protests raged until, after weeks of negotiations, Bollinger announced that Columbia would divest from investments in Israel and suspend all partnerships with Israeli institutions.
Initial details of the boycott were spotty, as Bollinger had negotiated them by phone while on overseas visits to Columbia’s satellite campuses in Qatar and China. But he confirmed Columbia’s boycott plans—the first by a major American university—upon returning to New York from the ancient city of Kashgar, where he inaugurated the Columbia-Tsinghua Center for the Study of Harmonious Development. “Boycotting Israel is a great victory,” said one of the lead hunger strikers, “for progressive values of academic exchange, inclusiveness, and tolerance.”
•••
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Columbia in 2025 could be a far happier, more intellectually serious place. Imagine:
Disturbed by the state of free speech on campus, President Bollinger convenes a commission of inquiry that endorses the January 2015 conclusions of a similar committee at the University of Chicago. “It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive,” they conclude. “Although the University greatly values civility, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”
A handful of enraged students transfer to Brown, but applications to Columbia spike in 2016, as do alumni donations. For the first time, following Princeton’s model, the school replaces loans with grants that students do not have to pay back. The incoming class of 2021 becomes the most financially diverse in Columbia’s history.
Meanwhile Columbia recruits NYU ethics professor Jonathan Haidt to oversee revisions to the Core Curriculum. Amid the convulsions of 2015, Haidt wrote that to improve the intellectual climate on campuses, “The most important single step would be to make viewpoint diversity a priority. . . . Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out nonleftist faculty, and they should explicitly include viewpoint diversity and political diversity in all statements about diversity and discrimination. Parents and students who value freedom of thought should take viewpoint diversity into account when applying to colleges. Alumni should take it into account before writing any more checks.”
One viewpoint worth elevating comes from those around the world who are denied the sort of free-speech rights exercised so liberally by America’s collegiate illiberals. So Columbia starts recruiting dissidents from countries such as China, Iran, and Venezuela to lecture and host regular fireside chats with students. Low Library establishes a legal office to aid dissidents’ asylum claims and highlight Columbia affiliates imprisoned for their ideas, such as former visiting scholar and Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo. Undergraduates vie for volunteer spots filing paperwork on their behalf. Busloads set out to lobby for them in Washington.
The long-running campus divide on Israel in many ways endures. Students and professors continue to single out Israel for condemnations and boycott demands never directed at China, Iran, Cuba, and other authoritarian regimes. But as this double standard increasingly appears anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent (to apply the words of former Harvard President and Obama adviser Larry Summers), most Columbians turn their attention elsewhere. Hoping to connect budding entrepreneurs in America with those in Israel, the Columbia Startup Lab opens a partnership with several Israeli universities.
As for “The Varsity Show,” organizers in 2025 bring in Lin Manuel-Miranda, creator of the long-running Broadway musical “Hamilton,” to direct. Tickets sell out in minutes.
Alas, it’s all too easy to imagine a newspaper dispatch from 2025 describing a university transformed by manic illiberalism:
In a widely anticipated move, the institution formerly known as Columbia University has officially changed its name to “Pantone 290,” a reference to the color of the school’s former “Columbia Blue” logo. The name change demonstrates “our irreproachable commitment to equality and social justice,” said University Co-President Moon Glampers, a Sophomore majoring in Anthropology, “and finally, it rids us of any connection to the genocidaire of Genoa, Christopher Columbus.”
Erasing all references to the famous explorer has been a University priority for years. Students and administrators long speculated that the school’s new name would simply be “Justice Campus,” but that plan fell through when all proposed definitions of the term proved unacceptable to a holdout coalition of negotiators. “Justice is really just a tool to salve the consciences of the powerful,” said one of the holdouts. “No concept of justice could possibly remedy a lifetime of nanoaggressions, and any suggestion to the contrary is violence. Your ‘justice’ delivered is still my justice denied.”
Hence Pantone 290, a name that one University trustee, speaking on condition of anonymity, called “just empty enough to satisfy everyone.”
Students on College Walk generally voiced support for the change. “It’s another overdue adjustment to create a safer space,” said Senior Sociology major Jack Obin, “and to help atone for this school’s criminal legacy, including, but not limited to, its colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, capitalism, property ownership, competitive admissions, and grades.”
The name change follows the scrapping, beginning in 2017, of “The Varsity Show” and Orgo Night, which had long unsettled students by causing some to laugh. Music concerts and dances were jettisoned, too, after administrators identified them as minefields for cultural appropriation. When a Cuban-American student busted Jamaican dance-hall moves on Low steps during Bacchanal, the resulting outcry was deafening. Yoga classes were cancelled too, of course.
Since 2018, any student who has wanted to dress up for Halloween has received a burlap sack from the Office of Multicultural Affairs. There’s no candy—it was deemed insensitive to the gluten-free and the full-bodied—but students treat each other by reciting passages from the works of Edward Said and Howard Zinn. Valentine’s Day, deemed triggering for the aromantic and asexual students, was nixed in 2019.
As it turned out, those reforms were just the beginning. Led by the Coalition to Rectify Education Equity and Privilege, students in 2018 prevailed over the administration, succeeding in dividing Core Curriculum sections according to race. “Segregated schooling is a historic American right,” one ethnic-studies major explained at the time. In 2020, the Core was scrapped entirely.
At the height of the Core debate, the names etched into the façade of Butler Library—Plato, Rousseau, Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire—were shrouded in black cloth to limit their power to trigger. But in 2021, students and professors from the only remaining departments (Middle Eastern studies, Anthropology and Sociology) enlisted the One Percent to hire workers to chisel off the names permanently.
Formerly known as St. Anthony’s, the One Percent is a flourishing club of students born into wealth but devoted to erasing income inequality and other forms of oppression. They also funded the recent removal of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker sculpture from campus, which students condemned for idealizing the cis male form.
Dining changed dramatically in 2023. The John Jay cafeteria was shuttered and replaced with segregated ethnic cafeterias. Students of Chinese origin eat Chinese. Indians, Indian food. And so forth.
Jewish students, condemned to kugel and herring, protested bitterly. When some Israeli students brought in hummus and falafel for themselves, controversy erupted. “This aggression will not stand,” declared the Committee to Rectify Education Equity and Privilege, condemning the Israeli hummus-eaters as “culinary colonialists.”
A mass hunger strike followed. University Co-President Lee Bollinger sought to end it by disinviting Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett from the impending World Leaders Forum. “Sure, I hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in 2007,” Bollinger said, “but obviously free speech has its limits.” Still, protests raged until, after weeks of negotiations, Bollinger announced that Columbia would divest from investments in Israel and suspend all partnerships with Israeli institutions.
Initial details of the boycott were spotty, as Bollinger had negotiated them by phone while on overseas visits to Columbia’s satellite campuses in Qatar and China. But he confirmed Columbia’s boycott plans—the first by a major American university—upon returning to New York from the ancient city of Kashgar, where he inaugurated the Columbia-Tsinghua Center for the Study of Harmonious Development. “Boycotting Israel is a great victory,” said one of the lead hunger strikers, “for progressive values of academic exchange, inclusiveness, and tolerance.”
•••
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Columbia in 2025 could be a far happier, more intellectually serious place. Imagine:
Disturbed by the state of free speech on campus, President Bollinger convenes a commission of inquiry that endorses the January 2015 conclusions of a similar committee at the University of Chicago. “It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive,” they conclude. “Although the University greatly values civility, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”
A handful of enraged students transfer to Brown, but applications to Columbia spike in 2016, as do alumni donations. For the first time, following Princeton’s model, the school replaces loans with grants that students do not have to pay back. The incoming class of 2021 becomes the most financially diverse in Columbia’s history.
Meanwhile Columbia recruits NYU ethics professor Jonathan Haidt to oversee revisions to the Core Curriculum. Amid the convulsions of 2015, Haidt wrote that to improve the intellectual climate on campuses, “The most important single step would be to make viewpoint diversity a priority. . . . Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out nonleftist faculty, and they should explicitly include viewpoint diversity and political diversity in all statements about diversity and discrimination. Parents and students who value freedom of thought should take viewpoint diversity into account when applying to colleges. Alumni should take it into account before writing any more checks.”
One viewpoint worth elevating comes from those around the world who are denied the sort of free-speech rights exercised so liberally by America’s collegiate illiberals. So Columbia starts recruiting dissidents from countries such as China, Iran, and Venezuela to lecture and host regular fireside chats with students. Low Library establishes a legal office to aid dissidents’ asylum claims and highlight Columbia affiliates imprisoned for their ideas, such as former visiting scholar and Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo. Undergraduates vie for volunteer spots filing paperwork on their behalf. Busloads set out to lobby for them in Washington.
The long-running campus divide on Israel in many ways endures. Students and professors continue to single out Israel for condemnations and boycott demands never directed at China, Iran, Cuba, and other authoritarian regimes. But as this double standard increasingly appears anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent (to apply the words of former Harvard President and Obama adviser Larry Summers), most Columbians turn their attention elsewhere. Hoping to connect budding entrepreneurs in America with those in Israel, the Columbia Startup Lab opens a partnership with several Israeli universities.
As for “The Varsity Show,” organizers in 2025 bring in Lin Manuel-Miranda, creator of the long-running Broadway musical “Hamilton,” to direct. Tickets sell out in minutes.
// BARI WEISS is an associate book review editor at the Wall Street Journal.
// DAVID FEITH is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal based in Hong Kong.
// JORDAN HIRSCH is a student at Yale Law School and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.
// DAVID FEITH is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal based in Hong Kong.
// JORDAN HIRSCH is a student at Yale Law School and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.
The End of the Core
Sam Kerbel, GS/JTS '11
Sam Kerbel, GS/JTS '11
2025? 2020, 2017, may be far away enough. Let’s work with what we have.
It is difficult to ignore the fiery storm of PC culture and trigger-mania, phenomena ever the more salient at Columbia University, one of the last and most visible holdouts of the Core Curriculum. This past April, several students wrote an op-ed in the Spectator insisting that Ovid’s Metamorphoses “contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.” They list a series of proposals to make discussions more inclusive– not about what texts should be taught, as is often the focus, but how.
In some ways, these sentiments echo the founding spirit of the Core. Contemporary Civilization was created in 1919 upon recognizing, as written in the Columbia University Quarterly, that students “should be stimulated to reflect on present-day problems very early in their study.” Its success lay not solely in the content but, more importantly, in the instructors’ ability to educate themselves and convey the material with “enthusiasm.” Frequent meetings took place to evaluate how the course was progressing.
Core courses, at their best, are spaces for exploring humanity’s potential, beautiful and ugly, light and dark, using a shared canon of texts that transcend immediate concerns yet contain the power for relevant, rich discussion. Like any ecosystem, their success begins with the buy-in of all participants, students and instructor. Establishing goals and standards from the outset can help ensure an abiding, collective trust–without which discussion of challenging material invariably devolves into a miasma of asterisks and conditionals and first-person qualifiers, individuals talking into a vacuum instead of seeking genuine dialogue, speaking about themselves instead of the texts.
This trust cannot, therefore, be codified by labels and warnings and designated spaces, whose reflexive borders are finite and cannot, should not, be expected to safeguard the infinite range of human experience. The benchmark cannot rest on the disclosure of each party’s life story, a compulsion which is itself offensive and gratuitous. When debate over a text’s aesthetic value does not consider the plight of the wronged, is that an intentional offense, or an opportunity for an outside voice to emerge, for the particular to become universal? How can such a perspective simply be assumed? Isn’t this very assumption distasteful?
In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the local halfway-house has a dictum that “everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” This virulent tendency, antagonist of openness and progress, cannot be understated. Its logical end is silence. Trust begins with an understanding that difference—and its variegated symptoms of perceived exoticism, ingrained imperfection, comforting self-assurance—does not signify apathy or opposition but, rather, offers a portal for enlightenment. Without this understanding, the Core, for many years a symbol of shared pedagogical heritage, may meet its match.
It is difficult to ignore the fiery storm of PC culture and trigger-mania, phenomena ever the more salient at Columbia University, one of the last and most visible holdouts of the Core Curriculum. This past April, several students wrote an op-ed in the Spectator insisting that Ovid’s Metamorphoses “contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.” They list a series of proposals to make discussions more inclusive– not about what texts should be taught, as is often the focus, but how.
In some ways, these sentiments echo the founding spirit of the Core. Contemporary Civilization was created in 1919 upon recognizing, as written in the Columbia University Quarterly, that students “should be stimulated to reflect on present-day problems very early in their study.” Its success lay not solely in the content but, more importantly, in the instructors’ ability to educate themselves and convey the material with “enthusiasm.” Frequent meetings took place to evaluate how the course was progressing.
Core courses, at their best, are spaces for exploring humanity’s potential, beautiful and ugly, light and dark, using a shared canon of texts that transcend immediate concerns yet contain the power for relevant, rich discussion. Like any ecosystem, their success begins with the buy-in of all participants, students and instructor. Establishing goals and standards from the outset can help ensure an abiding, collective trust–without which discussion of challenging material invariably devolves into a miasma of asterisks and conditionals and first-person qualifiers, individuals talking into a vacuum instead of seeking genuine dialogue, speaking about themselves instead of the texts.
This trust cannot, therefore, be codified by labels and warnings and designated spaces, whose reflexive borders are finite and cannot, should not, be expected to safeguard the infinite range of human experience. The benchmark cannot rest on the disclosure of each party’s life story, a compulsion which is itself offensive and gratuitous. When debate over a text’s aesthetic value does not consider the plight of the wronged, is that an intentional offense, or an opportunity for an outside voice to emerge, for the particular to become universal? How can such a perspective simply be assumed? Isn’t this very assumption distasteful?
In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the local halfway-house has a dictum that “everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” This virulent tendency, antagonist of openness and progress, cannot be understated. Its logical end is silence. Trust begins with an understanding that difference—and its variegated symptoms of perceived exoticism, ingrained imperfection, comforting self-assurance—does not signify apathy or opposition but, rather, offers a portal for enlightenment. Without this understanding, the Core, for many years a symbol of shared pedagogical heritage, may meet its match.
// SAM KERBEL works for D.E. Shaw & Co. He lives on the Upper West Side.
And Nothing's Changed
David Fine, CC '13
David Fine, CC '13
The podium sat empty on the Manhattanville Campus as the gathered press awaited President Lee C. Bollinger’s arrival. It would be the first time that Bollinger addressed the media since STC occupied Hamilton Hall a week earlier.
The night before, a masked student crouched in front of Alma Mater. She took a can from her bag and, after a quick few sprays, ran back toward Hamilton Hall in the eerie silence. It was the seventh day of the occupation and Students for a Timeless Core had repeated their act of vandalism every night, despite the intense security surrounding the campus symbol. Indeed, Columbia Public Safety officers soon turned around and saw what had happened only a few feet away. A large flashlight had been painted on the statue, with the words hastily scrawled below in blue: “in lumine tuo videbimus lumen.”
Tension mounted early that semester when the University finally removed Thomas Jefferson’s statue from campus. Students ringed the statue and had to be forcibly removed. Things only spiraled down from there, as the Provost’s Select Committee on Tuition Costs issued its report. As expected, the committee recommended several cost-cutting measures, but it mainly took aim at the Core Curriculum. No longer would students attend seminars, but rather weekly lectures. Attendance would be compulsory, and reading required, but no tests administered. Like in physical education classes, grades would be based entirely on attendance.
A portion of the student population protested—loudly and often—forming the Students for a Timeless Core, picking a flashlight as their emblem. When Bollinger announced that he’d follow the committee’s recommendation, the students stormed Hamilton Hall and had been there ever since. The occupation struck a chord in a global discussion about the cost of education and academic freedom that had been brewing over the previous couple of years. STC’s sleek videos, acts of tasteful vandalism, and VR tours of Hamilton Hall went viral. Soon the entire world was rallying around the Core.
The trustees had called an emergency meeting for later that day, and Bollinger decided he must break his silence. The lecture hall in the Manhattanville campus was humming with energy, hundreds of cameras with millions of eyeballs behind them. It all went silent when Bollinger walked into the room and then, suddenly, an eruption of laughter. Bollinger looked down and realized he was absolutely, completely, and unreservedly naked.
He began to run out of the room but tripped and fell on the floor—with a jolt Lee C. Bollinger awoke, clammy in his bed. “Just a dream, just a dream,” he chuckled, “students occupying Hamilton over the Core, ha!” Nevertheless, to reassure himself, the president got up, turned on his desk lamp, and reviewed the speech he was actually going to make tomorrow: “Good morning, it’s 2025 and the state of our school has never been stronger. With the streamlining that we successfully implemented to The Core last year, and the five new Global Centers we’ve opened this year, our University is well on its way to becoming the premier institute of higher education for the 21st century and beyond…
The night before, a masked student crouched in front of Alma Mater. She took a can from her bag and, after a quick few sprays, ran back toward Hamilton Hall in the eerie silence. It was the seventh day of the occupation and Students for a Timeless Core had repeated their act of vandalism every night, despite the intense security surrounding the campus symbol. Indeed, Columbia Public Safety officers soon turned around and saw what had happened only a few feet away. A large flashlight had been painted on the statue, with the words hastily scrawled below in blue: “in lumine tuo videbimus lumen.”
Tension mounted early that semester when the University finally removed Thomas Jefferson’s statue from campus. Students ringed the statue and had to be forcibly removed. Things only spiraled down from there, as the Provost’s Select Committee on Tuition Costs issued its report. As expected, the committee recommended several cost-cutting measures, but it mainly took aim at the Core Curriculum. No longer would students attend seminars, but rather weekly lectures. Attendance would be compulsory, and reading required, but no tests administered. Like in physical education classes, grades would be based entirely on attendance.
A portion of the student population protested—loudly and often—forming the Students for a Timeless Core, picking a flashlight as their emblem. When Bollinger announced that he’d follow the committee’s recommendation, the students stormed Hamilton Hall and had been there ever since. The occupation struck a chord in a global discussion about the cost of education and academic freedom that had been brewing over the previous couple of years. STC’s sleek videos, acts of tasteful vandalism, and VR tours of Hamilton Hall went viral. Soon the entire world was rallying around the Core.
The trustees had called an emergency meeting for later that day, and Bollinger decided he must break his silence. The lecture hall in the Manhattanville campus was humming with energy, hundreds of cameras with millions of eyeballs behind them. It all went silent when Bollinger walked into the room and then, suddenly, an eruption of laughter. Bollinger looked down and realized he was absolutely, completely, and unreservedly naked.
He began to run out of the room but tripped and fell on the floor—with a jolt Lee C. Bollinger awoke, clammy in his bed. “Just a dream, just a dream,” he chuckled, “students occupying Hamilton over the Core, ha!” Nevertheless, to reassure himself, the president got up, turned on his desk lamp, and reviewed the speech he was actually going to make tomorrow: “Good morning, it’s 2025 and the state of our school has never been stronger. With the streamlining that we successfully implemented to The Core last year, and the five new Global Centers we’ve opened this year, our University is well on its way to becoming the premier institute of higher education for the 21st century and beyond…
// DAVID FINE works at a technology startup in NYC called Placemeter, which uses real-time video analytics to measure pedestrian and vehicle traffic in cities throughout the world, and was most definitely not born out of a George Orwell fever dream, he swears.
The Bollinger Free Speech Zone
Jeremy Liss, CC '13
Jeremy Liss, CC '13
I don’t need to guess what the headlines will say ten years from now. A university administrator recently leaked to me a McKinsey report commissioned by President Bollinger titled “Columbia 2025.” This confidential report analyzes current trends in student activism and offers detailed recommendations for future university policy. Below is a model press release drafted by McKinsey:
“Columbia University is proud to announce the establishment of the Lee Carroll Bollinger Campus Free Speech Zone. The largest of its kind, this 100-square-foot amphitheater will set the stage for vigorous debate over challenging ideas.
By building this free speech zone, Columbia hopes to honor the legacy of former University President and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger. Columbia has a long history of protecting dissent and unpopular beliefs.”
Over the past decade, student activists have successfully expanded “safe spaces” to encompass dorm rooms, dining halls, and finally classrooms. Controversial subjects once considered fair game are now deemed triggering.
In the Bollinger Free Speech Zone, however, many of these taboo issues will see the light of day once again. Planned discussion topics include the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, fiscal responsibility, and books about men.
The Bollinger Free Speech Zone cements Columbia’s place at the forefront of campus free speech. It demonstrates the university’s commitment to the belief that, in moderation, a culture of intense inquiry generates lasting ideas. All members of the Columbia community share a responsibility both to challenge and to listen, when in the free speech zone.
To maintain a spirit of unrestrained discourse, the Bollinger Free Speech Zone will be designated off limits to the press.”
“Columbia University is proud to announce the establishment of the Lee Carroll Bollinger Campus Free Speech Zone. The largest of its kind, this 100-square-foot amphitheater will set the stage for vigorous debate over challenging ideas.
By building this free speech zone, Columbia hopes to honor the legacy of former University President and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger. Columbia has a long history of protecting dissent and unpopular beliefs.”
Over the past decade, student activists have successfully expanded “safe spaces” to encompass dorm rooms, dining halls, and finally classrooms. Controversial subjects once considered fair game are now deemed triggering.
In the Bollinger Free Speech Zone, however, many of these taboo issues will see the light of day once again. Planned discussion topics include the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, fiscal responsibility, and books about men.
The Bollinger Free Speech Zone cements Columbia’s place at the forefront of campus free speech. It demonstrates the university’s commitment to the belief that, in moderation, a culture of intense inquiry generates lasting ideas. All members of the Columbia community share a responsibility both to challenge and to listen, when in the free speech zone.
To maintain a spirit of unrestrained discourse, the Bollinger Free Speech Zone will be designated off limits to the press.”
// JEREMY LISS is currently in his third year at Yale Law School.
There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Max Daniel, GS/JTS '14
Max Daniel, GS/JTS '14
It’s 2025. The United States just saw an overhaul of its public education system under the Sanders/Warren administration. Public universities are now tuition-free, but private universities are under rising pressure to greatly subsidize or eliminate their tuition as students flock to public colleges for their higher education. Harvard’s huge endowment led them to implement this, but now Columbia is grappling with this issue as other Ivies make moves toward becoming tuition-free.
Reminiscent of Columbia in the late 1960’s, images of students raising banners, blocking administration offices, and chanting slogans broadcast around the world. Students are staging sit-ins outside the President’s office, and College Walk is swamped with activists and protests. Walkouts interrupt classes and lectures, and department heads and eminent professors sign petitions while others threaten to leave the school altogether. Big donors are pulling out of proposed endowments, and the Department of Education is under increasing pressure to curb their support of private institutions that have the financial means to offer free tuition but do not.
At the same time, students are afraid to speak out. Big student recruiters like JP Morgan and Citigroup are angry with the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ implemented by the Sanders administration, and they threaten to not hire Columbia students since their tuition will be paid for by increased taxes on big financial firms and see this policy as unfair.
The University is in a state of chaos. All parts of the system are engaged in a roiling debate that threatens the institution’s stability. Efforts to increase economic diversity on campus have been in effect for nearly a decade, but the rising specter of free tuition—and the question of who will foot the bill—is the most contentious issue at Columbia since the Vietnam War. Like all the great debates at Columbia, this one reflects deep-felt moral issues of the student body at a crossroads with the administration’s policies. The tug-of-war between the organizing power of students and the strong-arming of the Board of Trustees sees no party letting up. In the midst of a campus on edge, however, debate is thriving as never before, and students aptly identify this as the core of the Columbia experience. And of course, campus publications remain steadfastly at the center.
Reminiscent of Columbia in the late 1960’s, images of students raising banners, blocking administration offices, and chanting slogans broadcast around the world. Students are staging sit-ins outside the President’s office, and College Walk is swamped with activists and protests. Walkouts interrupt classes and lectures, and department heads and eminent professors sign petitions while others threaten to leave the school altogether. Big donors are pulling out of proposed endowments, and the Department of Education is under increasing pressure to curb their support of private institutions that have the financial means to offer free tuition but do not.
At the same time, students are afraid to speak out. Big student recruiters like JP Morgan and Citigroup are angry with the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ implemented by the Sanders administration, and they threaten to not hire Columbia students since their tuition will be paid for by increased taxes on big financial firms and see this policy as unfair.
The University is in a state of chaos. All parts of the system are engaged in a roiling debate that threatens the institution’s stability. Efforts to increase economic diversity on campus have been in effect for nearly a decade, but the rising specter of free tuition—and the question of who will foot the bill—is the most contentious issue at Columbia since the Vietnam War. Like all the great debates at Columbia, this one reflects deep-felt moral issues of the student body at a crossroads with the administration’s policies. The tug-of-war between the organizing power of students and the strong-arming of the Board of Trustees sees no party letting up. In the midst of a campus on edge, however, debate is thriving as never before, and students aptly identify this as the core of the Columbia experience. And of course, campus publications remain steadfastly at the center.
// MAX DANIEL is currently a graduate student in History at UCLA. His research explores the interplay of diverse ethnic and regional identities among Sephardic Jews. He previously served as the JDC Jewish Service Corps Fellow in Moldova.
I, Global
Joshua Fattal, CC '15
Joshua Fattal, CC '15
At the start of this academic year Columbia opened the doors of its 50th Global Center; More than this, the Core Curriculum in Morningside Heights has finally become a truly global curriculum. Students have learned to respect not just the popular underdogs—workers making minimum wage, transsexuals, Palestinians—but all the others around the world worthy of attention as well: the Yazidis in Iraq, the Baha’i in Iran, the dissidents in Moscow. Cognizant of oppression everywhere, students have even begun to do the unthinkable: protest the stabbing of innocent Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, rally in support of American soldiers valiantly fighting ISIS, fear for the religious freedom of Christians forced to perform marriages they can’t sanction. The care that the student body has begun to show towards human beings everywhere, in whatever form they come, simply because they are human, is surely worthy of the headlines Columbia is making today.
But the press is misleading (is it ever not?). Columbia students may have become aware of the struggles of all the many others, but they have become far less aware of themselves. They have become so aware of the tentacle-like reach of the existing and inscrutable structures and systems that surround them that they have lost their ability to speak out against any thing or one. They have become so worried about not reducing those in distant lands to flat figures, that they have become flat figures themselves. Classes have become humdrum; perhaps, students today fear, the rich white heterosexual male in the room has troubles that no one knows, and by arguing against his position on Plato, we may disrespect his very being? Better to stay silent than to stir the pot, has become the Columbia motto.
To be fair, Columbia deserves its current praise: many thought the day would never come when students would finally look carefully at the issues, and recognize the victimhood that exists on both sides, on every side. That even oppressors are often oppressed. But this does not mean that there is no right and no wrong. And having the guts to parse what is right from what is wrong today, in 2025, has become the hardest task of all.
But the press is misleading (is it ever not?). Columbia students may have become aware of the struggles of all the many others, but they have become far less aware of themselves. They have become so aware of the tentacle-like reach of the existing and inscrutable structures and systems that surround them that they have lost their ability to speak out against any thing or one. They have become so worried about not reducing those in distant lands to flat figures, that they have become flat figures themselves. Classes have become humdrum; perhaps, students today fear, the rich white heterosexual male in the room has troubles that no one knows, and by arguing against his position on Plato, we may disrespect his very being? Better to stay silent than to stir the pot, has become the Columbia motto.
To be fair, Columbia deserves its current praise: many thought the day would never come when students would finally look carefully at the issues, and recognize the victimhood that exists on both sides, on every side. That even oppressors are often oppressed. But this does not mean that there is no right and no wrong. And having the guts to parse what is right from what is wrong today, in 2025, has become the hardest task of all.
// JOSHUA FATTAL is the Class of 2018 ASPIRE Cybersecurity Scholar at the NYU School of Law.