The Long and Winding Road

My friend Kwame Spearman once introduced me like this: "Tao Tan. Wow. This guy just a year ago was true-blue foaming-at-the-mouth pro-Columbia. I mean, he loved the Core, loved the professors, and as for the administration, well, he didn't love them but always said it was important to be sensitive to their point of view. Now look at him. He wants to get out as fast as possible, and he's considering graduating a year early. He's the perfect example of the Columbia shaft."

Kwame usually makes me laugh, but not this time. Since I started this column a year ago, I haven't been very charitable to an administration that's frequently seen as Byzantine, out of touch, and unresponsive. And why not? It's hard to sympathize with a bureaucracy that seems to convey the idea that it doesn't want your sympathy or support or understanding-just your money. But, put aside Columbia, the bureaucracy, for a second. What about Columbia, the school? There are still great reasons to believe in Columbia and its future.

First, there's an undeniable and unabated flow of energy and talent. Despite being saddled by 19th-century science labs, Columbia still commands, in the 21st, the third-highest number among universities of Nobel prizes in the world. Following World War II, we, at base and heart a liberal arts institution, have faced the likes of Stanford, MIT, and Caltech, with their sweetheart federal funding, their enormous focus on science, and their unceasing expansion and construction, and we have held our ground.

Second, undergraduate education is on the upswing. True, the golden age of Mark van Doren and Lionel Trilling is over, but we are leaps and bounds ahead of the 1960s, when then-President Grayson Kirk described the College's function as simply to "enlarge the reservoir of potential Ph.D.s." It is true that Core classes are still overly staffed by graduate students, but they are both well-intentioned and well-trained teachers. In the 1970s, one CC instructor supposedly got away with teaching Hegel for the fall semester and Marx for the spring.

Third, undergraduate life has been steadily improving. We may hate Rob Lutomski-less Housing and Dining, but just 20 years ago, "on-campus housing" was a joke. McBain, Hogan, 47 Claremont, and a host of other dorms were graduate housing. Broadway didn't exist, and John Jay Dining Hall didn't have Wilma. Barack Obama had to live in a six-story walk-up in Spanish Harlem. Worst of all, there was an insurmountable wall between SEAS and the College, with each school having its own admissions office, student activities office, and housing options. God forbid that those uncultured rats of Mudd should mix with the proper gentlemen of Hamilton Hall.

Fourth, sports. No, we didn't win any more often 20 years ago, but at least going to Baker Field isn't a life-threatening experience today. Before its renovation in the late 1980s, Columbia's football stadium consisted of literally rotting wooden stands first put up in the 1920s. When a strong wind blew, the stadium actually swayed. And of course, while we will always suffer the humiliation of the longest losing streak in the NCAA, today we don't actually have to watch it happen.

Fifth and finally, there's a renewed sense of financial momentum and budding Columbia pride that hasn't been seen for decades. Both reached a low point in the late 1970s, when the brutal cost-cutting measures of the post-1968 recovery struck at the heart of Columbia's educational quality. Entire departments had to be shut down, and no less a faculty member than Eric Foner had to depart for City College-Columbia couldn't afford to grant him tenure. But over the last five years, Senior Fund participation went from nonexistent to 75 percent. Seniors who graduated during my first year couldn't begin to tell me how different the Columbia of 2004 was from the Columbia of 2000.

I'm a member of the Class of 2007. I've had a great time. I think I had a better time than the Class of 1997 or the Class of 1987 and I have very good reason to believe that the classes of 2017 and 2027 will have a better time that I.

Relax, I'm not leaving Columbia yet. But this will be my final column. I've had a lot of fun in the last year, but I will be leaving Spectator next semester to join the staff of the New York Historical Society as an assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City.

Parting words? I'm not very good with those, but Monty Python usually comes in handy: Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. And of course, stand, Columbia, Alma Mater-through the storms of Time abide.