How Columbia Lost Touch with Reality

Walking through the 116th Street gates, it is very easy to be taken aback by how different Columbia’s acropolis-like environment is from the hustle and bustle of New York City. Universities are supposed to be institutions set apart from the rest of society by a focus on knowledge with the ultimate goal of applying that learning to the outside world. Columbia has gone (and will continue to go) about this task diligently, but at the same time this University faces a crisis of conscience—it is developing a culture that eschews real-world problems and instead is focused on the insignificant, the radical, and the absurd.

Last year, the University was overtaken by a wave of ’60s-inspired radicalism. I place emphasis on the word “inspired” because unlike 40 years ago, these radicals had very few meaningful issues to spark their passion. The struggle of the hunger strikers—fought not over a war, a draft, or a policy of segregation, but rather against the much more pressing issue of a non-autonomous ethnic studies department—started because a few instances of racist graffiti were interpreted to be the result of “systematic racism” on the part of Columbia. Despite being unable to provide any arguments to support their assertions other than vague claims of the Core’s “Eurocentricity,” the hunger strikers were nevertheless able to capture the campus discourse with nothing other than a slight change to the Major Cultures requirement—which was already in the works—to show for their efforts.

I realize that most students have probably heard these arguments before—possibly in my previous articles. The reason I am bringing up these events again is because I believe they point to a fundamental disconnect between our university’s goal of fostering constructive critical thought and the actions of a small group of radicals blinded by their outdated ideology. These incidents are not isolated occurrences. They are part of a larger movement within Columbia that lends credence to a variety of outlandish beliefs, invariably creating the necessary circumstances for radical actions to occur.

Ironically, Columbia’s culture of petty radicalism is largely engendered by the University itself, which practices a flawed form of political correctness in an attempt to placate certain individuals and groups who claim to represent minorities on campus. A good example is the existence of “safe spaces” for various minority groups. Now, I have no issue with subsets of the community maintaining an area for the purposes of programming and socializing—my problem is with the fact that these places are designated as “safe,” thereby implying that the rest of campus is “not safe” for the minority in question. In my opinion, the existence of designated “safe spaces” is highly counterproductive, fostering schisms through divisive rhetoric instead of attempting to heal them. Moreover, “safe spaces” are a huge political faux pas for Columbia, which has unwittingly bought into the specious logic of radicals claiming that this institution is so systematically discriminatory that it needs places where minorities can be “safe” from everyone else.

What we can see from the “safe spaces” example is that political correctness is anything but apolitical. Instead of trying to create an environment of true equality and tolerance, the Columbia administration is mistakenly furthering a policy balkanization, twisted now to favor organizations that claim to represent the interests of historically oppressed minorities. The great mistake here is that by accepting the logic of the radicals, we are inadvertently reinforcing their fictitious world at Columbia, where sensationalist stunts over petty issues somehow attain the title of legitimate protest.

The most recent example of political correctness spawning absurd radicalism came several weeks ago, when Spectator published an editorial critiquing the focus of Queer Awareness Month. The article was not intended to malign the queer community, but was meant to be constructive, advocating an educational focus that Spectator felt would help the queer cause amongst heterosexuals. Yes, the article had factual inaccuracies, but the spirit was positive and certainly did not warrant the response it received from several queer groups, in the form of protests and “outrage.” Yet it is not surprising that in an environment where individuals can be categorized as “straight allies”—does that mean the rest of us are enemies?—any deviation from the standard positions of minority groups can be classified as hostility.

Ultimately, instances like these show us how the climate of political correctness at Columbia creates a hypersensitive radicalism that is largely out of touch with the realities of discrimination in the world. If activists truly want to fight injustice, they should be directing their fervor toward the real oppression occurring in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, not the convenient target that is Columbia University. For too long, the moderate majority of Columbians has outsourced its responsibility to promote tolerance and equality to these groups, failing to recognize the fact that they are often more interested in furthering their own agendas through rhetoric and vitriol than in actually dealing with the problems we expect them to confront. If we want Columbia to continue to have a positive effect on the outside world, we need to stand up to petty radicalism and deal with the important issues of the day from a realistic perspective, not a fictitious one.

Jon Hollander is a Columbia College junior majoring in economics. Reasonably Right runs alternate weeks.