It’s not as easy as I would have thought to sum up what I think about the last four years. Why? ’Cause it’s not as if everything is coming to me in one shade. Some of it’s been shit, some of it has been damn good. My head isn’t all that organized with perfect divisions, so to some extent it all blends together and I got this messy recitation of four years of life that really isn’t coherent enough for public consumption. Some things come to me, though—something ought to after all this. Bear with me.
At the time of this writing, I have a total of five classes left, one short term paper, three finals, graduation, a pack-up, a pack-out, and a move down to D.C. I don’t have a job, I don’t have more than a vague conception of what I’ll be doing over the summer and past that. I also have the strong urge to be doing exactly what I want to do, no compromises and no waiting. The idea that I can’t do what I want right now makes me restless.
I’m not worrying, though. I’m a bright kid, I’ve got ideas and I’m going to make it happen. Yeah, I don’t know exactly what to expect from the next year, but I’m convinced that a 22 year-old American in the year 2009 shouldn’t be all that predictable. Unless you are going to law school or medical school, in which case you know what to expect from the next decade of your life, or you have a good job that pays you to do something that makes you happy, in which case good for you, all the best.
Everything is starting to look real sunny these days. I’ve got the best family around, rich friends, and a hot girlfriend. Damnit, what do I have to complain about? I’m getting out of here! Done with classes, done with Morningside Heights, and done with Columbia, like that’s all she wrote. Man, it feels good, I wish you knew. I wish I could express it, but instead I’ll just take this opportunity to take a swipe at the school I’ve grown to love loathing.
Columbia sucks. Housing sucks. The food here sucks. Tuition sucks. Most of the professors suck. The coffee sucks. The parties suck. The sports teams suck. Lerner Hall sucks. The gym sucks. Frontiers of Science sucks. All the other core classes, they suck too. Vampire Weekend sucks. The drug policy sucks. The A/C sucks. The cable TV sucks. The way Columbia treats its employees sucks. The way Columbia treats Manhattanville sucks. Security sucks. RAs suck. The Jester sucks. The Blue and White sucks. Spectator rules. The frats suck. The water sucks. The heating sucks. The snobbery sucks. The selfishness sucks. The elitism sucks. Koronet sucks. Morton Williams more so. The laundry machines suck. Flex sucks. The advisors suck. My queue on Netflix sucks. I don’t directly blame this school for that, but Columbia didn’t help.
Full disclosure, I probably would have plenty to rant about no matter what school I went to. I don’t ‘like’ school. NYU was a close second choice to Columbia and I KNOW that place would have driven me insane. As it happens, though, I ended up here in the fall of 2005, and now, in the spring of 2009, I can’t wait to get out.
This is how I see it: Columbia is a business. It’s a big business, too, with an endowment of over $7 billion as of last year. Now, ostensibly, Columbia—like the other Ivies—is in the business of education, but that’s misleading. The purpose of Columbia isn’t to educate: like all other businesses, it’s to make money. And when you are Columbia University and you are enjoying unprecedented popularity among high school applicants, then why do you need to undercut your bottom line by trying to please your students when you already got them snagged and paying tuition dutifully? Keep campus looking pretty, keep security roaming the streets to keep out unwanted visitors, and agree to lend out the Columbia name in exchange for $200,000, and you’ll keep your paying customers feeling safe and satiated.
That’s all we’re doing here, buying the Columbia name. We want that diploma, we want that Columbia diploma because we believe it will help us get a job, make money, find a wife, have kids, and die a pleasantly boring death. And it will, mos. def. Thank you, Columbia.
It’s a rigorous school for sure, and I’ve had some brilliant professors and kids around me who have indeed changed the way I think about things. But to say that’s what the money buys you is bullshit. I had more work in four years of high school and definitely a more rigorous schedule then, yet it was a public school and my parents didn’t have to pay a cent for me to go there. Going here, I got to be banking on the idea that this is a wise investment, that it was worth buying the Columbia name for me to be able to do what I want to do in the future. I certainly wasn’t doing it here.
Thank you to those of you (you know who you are) who tried to make the best of your time at Columbia and, in doing so, attempted to make it the best time for your fellow students. I know that I certainly tried to make the best of my time here—it just had very little to do with Columbia.
After four years, it comes to me. My expectations for college were very different. I wanted a community. I wanted a sense of solidarity among the students. I wanted to feel an energy on campus, creative and/or destructive. I wanted to feel that we were in this together, that college was ours. But there is no community at Columbia. There is no sense of solidarity. There is no creative energy. Too many people out for themselves.
Very clever on the part of some public relations assistant to make the school’s name Columbia University in the City of New York. No matter what it says, though, Columbia is divorced from New York and separated from the community around it. Maybe that just happens when you have a neighborhood made up of a transient population that is either too afraid or too bogged down by work to leave the neighborhood: you get an insular neighborhood that no one belongs to, only stays in.
Whatever, no hard feelings Columbia. You have your money, and as of May 20, I have my diploma. At this point I’ve got nothing to say, so I guess I’ll leave you with a few farewell puns and the initial symptoms of swine flu: sore throat, fever, body aches, headache, feeling piggish, cough.
C.U. later, Co-lame-bia. Send my regards to Nussbaum. I’m getting the fuck out of Dodge.
Michael Shannon is a Columbia College senior majoring in sociology. sports@columbiaspectator.com
