Hostile Takeover

Two weeks ago, Columbia kicked off its 250th anniversary festivities with one of the lavish, event-filled, expensive celebrations that are becoming the hallmark of University President Lee C. Bollinger's reign. While students milled around the giant plywood cake, a small group of community residents protested Columbia's latest plans for expansion, including the ambitious scheme to build a satellite campus in western Harlem.
Harlem residents have the right to be skeptical, given the history of Columbia's relationship to the surrounding community. Behind any talk of expansion lurks the specter of 1968, when Columbia attempted to build a gymnasium on public land in Morningside Park. The plans included one entrance for university affiliates in the front, and a separate entrance--in the back--for community members, meaning blacks. For student protesters and Harlem residents, "Gym Crow" came to symbolize everything exploitive, paternalistic, and racist about Columbia's relationship to the neighborhood.

The Columbia administration justifies the current expansion by saying that it will alleviate Columbia's space crunch and "revitalize" the neighborhood. But an elite university plunking down roots in western Harlem will not bring the kind of economic revitalization that Harlem needs. It will bring higher rents and more gentrification of the sort currently blossoming on Amsterdam Avenue, where patrons can dine on $9 cheese plates and $3 cappuccinos at a variety of hip cafés and restaurants. Does anyone think these establishments have been erected to serve the residents of the General Grant housing project?

There is no doubt that Columbia needs more space, as anyone who started the semester in a Ruggles L-room can attest. But this expansion is not driven by student needs.

Bollinger let slip the real reason for the current Columbia expansion in a recent interview with Crain's New York Business Review, which revealed that with the expansion plan, "Mr. Bollinger wants to push Columbia into the top echelon of universities, alongside Harvard, Yale, and Stanford." Bollinger hopes to recapture Columbia's "illustrious history of scientific research"--like when Columbia professors invented the atomic bomb. "When you look at what the University's standing was in the 1950s, we are not there yet," Bollinger told Crain's. "But we can again define what greatness is."

The current plan calls for an expanded performing arts center and more life sciences research labs, which will certainly benefit students. But these departments have been chosen because they will make money--patent and royalty payments accounted for more than 10 percent of the University's income in the late 1990s.

The truth is that Columbia is a corporation, driven by the same logic of profit and competition as any other corporation. But it does not just make money to enrich the ruling elite of this country--it also produces the next generation of that elite. In its labs it produces weapons of mass destruction, and in its classrooms it produces the politicians who use them. Columbia is a sausage factory for the ruling class, sucking in the children of well-to-do professionals and squirting out the next generation of bureaucrats, diplomats, CEOs, corporate lawyers, free-market ideologues, and university professors. If this is the role of our university, it should not be surprising that it cares little for the needs of students and less for the needs of the surrounding community.

The realization that our university is a factory has always produced revulsion and rebellion in a minority of students. The student revolts of the 1960s were driven as much by anger at the role of universities as they were by opposition to racism and the Vietnam War. Students felt they were being groomed to enter a system that they had come to abhor, a system that thrived on racism, war, inequality, and exploitation. James Kunen, a student striker at Columbia, wrote in his autobiography that "the meaning of the Columbia uprising is that one too many persons has been educated, and one too many wires has linked people's thoughts together, for power to breed power anymore."

In the 1960s, students began protesting war and racism and ended up questioning the role their schools played in society. Columbia students today should oppose the University's expansion into Harlem, while building a movement that will force the University to use its money for things that students really want and need.

Laura Durkay is a Columbia College senior majoring in history.