Coitus of the Stars

Since I am (probably) going to graduate in May, I have been forced to think about finding a job, having a future, etc. In a moment of desperation I turned to the “After Columbia” section of the Web site for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, which consists, primarily, of a completely accurate list of “notable alumni.”

My first observation was that many of the people were dead and thus unable to give me an internship. My next hope was that perhaps someone in one of my classes would grow up to be famous and allow me to leech off them—but the odds on that are worse than you might think. Although the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid only handles CC and SEAS applications, its Web site lists alumni and “former students” (with all the asterisks that implies) from anywhere in the University. Still, this is less disingenuous than the new creative writing program’s carefully worded Web site, which would very much like you to infer that authors like Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, and Federico Garcia Lorca took anything remotely resembling a writing class at Columbia. Hughes did a year in SEAS, Welty attended the business school, also for a year, and Lorca took ESL classes through University Extension. Other name-dropped authors J.D. Salinger and Carson McCullers actually did take writing classes at University Extension (the only place at Columbia where writing classes were offered for most of the 20th century), but were never matriculated undergraduates.

But what lesson is there in all this star-fucking, other than that what everyone calls our “fame-obsessed culture” is predictably reflected in our marketing techniques and that big-city folk are clever with words? First, we can note that the truly interesting people did not make the cut (Jim Jarmusch, Laurie Anderson, and Donald Judd, please).

Of course there is a general whitewashing inherent in any kind of institutional lore. Everyone who has taken the tour knows that Lou Gehrig’s home runs broke windows all over campus; it is less widely known that he spent a semester in the extension program being purged of his various academic deficiencies and then spent a year on the sidelines, ineligible, because he played professionally during the summer. To understand why he would violate the sacred NCAA bylaws, it is perhaps helpful to know that he pledged a fraternity—though fortunately not the one that employed his mother as a cook and dishwasher.

So perhaps we can learn the most from the people on the list who clearly have no interest in being there—not only Barack Obama, but also (at least) Langston Hughes and Isaac Asimov.

In "The Big Sea" Hughes devotes three brief, seemingly effortless pages to the University: “I didn’t like Columbia. It was too big. It was not fun.... The buildings looked like factories.” He does, however, call the 1920-21 version of this newspaper on its bullshit: “When I tried out for the Spectator, they assigned me to gather frat house and society news, an assignment impossible for a colored boy to fill, as they knew.”

Hughes did form a few friendships (most interracial, if only by default) and doesn’t report any particularly glaring racism—at least nothing quite so spectacular as the cross burned in front of Furnald a few years later, in 1924, to protest its one black resident. Spectator reported that, after some friends visited him, “those living on the floor found that he was not a porter, as they had supposed, but a bona fide resident. This discovery caused considerable comment among the students, many of whom are Southerners.”

Of course most students decried the act, and students were the ones who extinguished the fire and knocked the cross down. The Spec editorial board reserved comment until “further facts and adequate facts” came to light, which, apparently, never happened, although the story that the cross-burning was the work of outside agitators “obtained credence on the campus”—how these agitators would have known where Frederick W. Wells lived was not explained.

Asimov, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University, is both a more unlikely and more forceful critic than Hughes, though both endured the same sort of relatively passive discrimination. Asimov began his undergraduate studies at Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, which was started by Columbia as a sort of repository for qualified students who had applied to CC but were, regrettably, Jewish.

But when Seth Low was forced to close, as a result of the Depression, Asimov was allowed to study as a “University undergraduate” (primordial GS student). In 1939, however, this meant that he received a Bachelor of Science degree. When he found out, years later, that this had less cachet than a Bachelor of Arts, he threw a giant hissy and ceased all donations: “Petty? No pettier than they,” he wrote four decades later. Questions like whether or not this is a reasonable response, or if it should really be included in an autobiography, or what kind of person writes a 1500-page autobiography can all be settled later; right now the pressing issue is what to make of all this.

The only real lesson is that there is no way out—once you step on campus, you can be used to sell the University, now or later. So, if you don’t like things and can affect change in a moderately intelligent manner, you should do it. And if you still don’t like Columbia, don’t become famous; if you do, try not to die, which complicates suing.

Robert Ast is a senior in the School of General Studies.
Columbia Babylon runs alternate Mondays.