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.
Read Full Article »