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.
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