A Sleazemonger Gives Back

I want everyone who reads this to donate to the Columbia College Senior Class Fund.

Alumni giving is the keystone to the financial health of the University. It supports crucial programs, including the Core Curriculum, financial aid, and need-blind admissions. The Senior Class Fund is about this culture of giving. Over 30 percent of the class has given already. If we reach 50 percent, we not only break the records and prove ourselves superior to every Columbia College class that has come before, but an alumnus will also pledge $10,000 to celebrate.

Give a dollar if you're hard up, and at least 50 if you're one of those private-school guys I know who takes cabs everywhere. I have always admired the men and women of St. A's for the strength of their character and the elevation of their cheekbones, and I trust they will each donate half of their biweekly liquor budget, or approximately $1,836 plus tips.

Look for the Fund tabling around campus to give, or e-mail me at BDL16@columbia.edu and I'll dispatch one of the seven-foot tall female members of the Class Fund Committee to your dorm room to accept your donation in person.

As a member of the Fund Committee, I've gotten the sullen grumblings of some people I've asked to donate from among my friends, associates, and psycho ex-girlfriends. Why should I give any more money to this school, you ask? Haven't I spent four years eating bread and water studying the Scriptures, and now I have loans to repay? You have, and you do. Give what you can. But recognize that Columbia College has been the structure for everything you have prized for four years: the joys, the friendships, your first discovery of the principles of keg operation in the converted wet bar of a Ruggles bathroom.

Think of how many lessons you have taken from your life here, and from three to five books on the cumulative CC and Lit Hum syllabuses. Contemplate making Columbia even better for future classes: celebrate our commitment to great ideas and good times as an elite collegiate life, superior to the cheap beer culture of a Yale, the California colonialism of a Stanford, or the unbridled Soviet communism of an Oberlin. For is it not the Columbia way, even as we criticize ourselves, and as we analyze, categorize, and arrange Columbia complaints, that we are confident at every moment of our kvetching that for 250 years but two there has been no better undergraduate education?

Maybe you recognize something of me in the complaint classifier above. This complaint classifier asks you to give to the Senior Class Fund, last and least, for him. Give in deference to the years of pleasure I have brought you as one of Columbia College's most tireless and preeminent libellists. In these pages I have written cheap one-liners against John Jay Dining Hall, a University professor and the University chaplain, at least three deans, President Rupp, and Julia Stiles. (I am grateful to these individuals for accepting my bile in the spirit of play in which it was offered.) As Columbia excels in every field of endeavor, from the natural sciences to the liberal arts to the exploits of our fencing team, so it has boasted me in the minor enterprise of ludic libel.

I write to you today, however, not as joke-monger and gossiphound. I write as a friend, and as a disciple, of Columbia College. How can I put into words how I have cherished my time here? "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive," said Wordsworth. Yesterday was first semester freshman year. I had a Weimar Cinema course with a visiting assistant professor and sex maniac from Frankfurt. Mike Mellia, whom some of you know, was my suitemate in Carman 606; in the evenings he would play jazz piano next door and offer a guest a gracious glass of Carlo Rossi Paisano, a full-bodied red wine with hints of butter and toasty oak, and a bouquet redolent with antifreeze. I was and am still enchanted with the immediacy of college life: the shock of meeting people like you--people who like you. Everyone I have encountered at Columbia I hold precious, even when I have slandered these individuals in print or in person.

You know all this. But no one knows how to insult Columbia, or most everything else, like I do. So perhaps you will believe me, whose knowledge of what is occasionally wrong with Columbia is as encyclopedic as is my acquaintance with what is occasionally right about Barnard, when I say that we have a great deal to be proud of, of our college, our class, and ourselves. I ask only that each of you, as your duty enjoins and your budget permits, give generously to our class fund. My thanks are heartfelt.

Ben Letzler is a Columbia College senior majoring in
history.