Columbia Inc.

More than ever, top universities have engaged in a power struggle to appear to be the best university possible. In the premier colleges, this has led to record-breaking numbers of applicants and low acceptance rates, exploding endowments, booming construction on college campuses, absurd advertisement campaigns, and a growing administration to cope with it all. In other words, colleges are getting more and more stuff. At a time like this, however, it is necessary to stop and ask ourselves: Is this the way a university should behave?

We are now at a crucial turning point in our University’s history. We’re not only bigger, more selective, and more prominent than ever before—we’re also quite rich. Our endowment dwarfs many countries’ GDPs. Our total assets surpass $11 billion. Just this year, Columbia’s fundraising campaign increased its goal from $4 billion to $5 billion. The Manhattanville expansion will cost over $6 billion, likely displace at least 5,000 people, and cover an area of 17 acres.

Yet throughout this spending mania, spending on academics has decreased in almost all universities in the U.S.­­—and Columbia is no exception.A disproportionate number of professors are actually lecturers, adjunct faculty, or visiting professors. This is a national trend. While the quality of these educators might be comparable to those holding a tenured position, their time, money, and dedication are not. Often, these teachers have engagements at other colleges in the city in order to make ends meet. They are assigned too many classes and too many responsibilities to truly devote themselves to helping their students understand the material.

But Columbia isn’t like this, right? Even if it is, shouldn’t we have more professors because we are wealthy? Not so. While Columbia’s brochures boast that our student-faculty ratio is 6:1 overall and 3:1 in the physical sciences, anyone would be hard-pressed to find a class in which there are even nine students, let alone three. Although the student-faculty ratio doesn’t necessarily translate into average class size, most classes in the physical sciences—especially the non-seminar and lower-level classes—have a class size of around 100, and many departments have too many students and not enough teachers.

The money that would typically go to educational needs is now being spent on sparkling new buildings, new administrators, new “centers,” and PrezBo’s seven-figure salary, which, at $1.75 million, makes him one of the top 10 highest-paid college presidents in the U.S. and the highest-paid in the Ivy League.

While Columbia’s administration cannot directly allocate the funds that are donated to the University, it does have control over the proposals that go out to solicit this money. So a proposal to create a new $100 million business school building is pitched to donors. Instead, proposals should be made to create more tenured positions or at least to renovate existing buildings. The reason proposals are not made for tenured positions or renovation is because these prospects are simply not as glorious as a 14-story interdisciplinary science building.

Columbia, doggedly following the trend, is acting more like a business than an educational institution. We spend money on making our school look pretty, while we are more empty on the inside than we would like to admit. Not only do we not have professors that can give more time and more resources to their students, but we use the money that is donated to us by the public to evict thousands of people from their homes and create more gated grounds of exclusivity.

While Columbia is far better than a vast majority of colleges from an academic standpoint, we are heading in a bad direction. The administration has to refocus on students and de-emphasize the physical aspects that hide the lack of academic attention. We don’t need more “pretty” (read: ugly) new buildings, or new global centers, or a new campus. We need more professors, we need to start looking after our community, and the administration needs to focus on us, the students, not on the well-being of Columbia University Inc.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.