I Hate You! And You Should Too!

It’s clear: our school can’t stop hating and can’t teach itself how to stop. But it’s not clear to me that we should. Other teams have football fight songs—we have racially-motivated felonies. Makes you feel better about losing the Homecoming game every year, doesn’t it? To resolve this question, I have turned to our old friend point-and-counterpoint: to stop hate or not to stop hate.

To stop hate: Devote time and money toward making Columbia’s social life a lot brighter. Why do we solicit donations for football, which (sorry) is of little interest to most Columbians, and not for theater tickets, which are of interest to all Columbians? If people had more to do on a Thursday night, no matter which college or grad school they attend, they’d be less likely to do something desperate.

Two types most likely to hate: groups of intoxicated men and lone, intoxicated men. We all know this to be true and the administration, if it wants to see incidents of bias on campus decrease, should work toward curtailing both of these groups. Allowing women into Columbia was a good start, but now I think it’s time to get a bit more drastic. They could abolish SEAS, for starters. Engineers, when drunk, will be more able and more inclined to plan and carry out acts of wanton abuse and destruction. Just ask them.

Next, scale a bunch of men’s sports programs from varsity back to intramural—we could start with football and basketball. Get jocks to stop applying to Columbia in the first place. Don’t get me wrong—I know a few football players and I like them, but the things I could tell you about them when they drink will make you want to lock up daughters you may not even have, which is precisely the opposite of what you should be doing, because it’s that steady supply of daughters that will keep graffiti and nooses from appearing on doors in Teachers College.

“Fuck for peace.” It’s more attention-grabbing than “make love not war.”

Next—not to stop hate: to encourage all this stuff and enjoy the ride; not to punish the individual acts (like now) but also to make it so that there are more of them than ever (like now); and most importantly, to ensure that Columbia will always be exciting, even without a bar scene, a football scene, or a frat scene. Well, the first thing you have to do is ensure that there is never a football scene, bar scene, or frat scene, but that there are always football, bars, and frats.

Football: solicit about 100 million dollars to move the football field another mile or so uptown—or even to move it to the Bronx entirely. It doesn’t matter who you have to supplant to get it there, just as long they’re poor but... oddly politically connected. Start enforcing the rules that keep tailgating down and come up with a bunch of new ones. Make them really surreal and weird, like “No portable grills, unless you’ve brought cottage cheese and are wearing leather, or argyle socks.”

Bars: nightly raids in cooperation with the NYPD. This will cause bars to lose money. Subsidize them, because crucial to the frustration that leads to hate is that there be bars, but no students, or almost no students, allowed in. Remember, frustration leads to envy, to hate, to vandalism, to fun.

Frats: every year, one frat gets the axe. Nobody knows which it’s gonna be, but one of them is deemed unfit to keep its house. This will encourage a bunch of new frats to spawn, thinking they can take over the vacant housing. And who knows? Maybe they can. It’s a free country.

Also, sell more highly caffeinated coffee on campus. And when there is a controversy gone out of control? Have an open bar at Prezbo’s fireside chat that week. Just a thought.

So now we have the mood set. The students are pent up, they’re jittery, and they have fewer and fewer ways to express themselves on weekends. It’s fun time. Remember safe spaces? No? Good, because we’re going to have Hate Spaces. Every night, Columbia Security will mark off a large section of Low Plaza with ropes and make sure no members of a particular skin-tone or religious creed are allowed to enter for any reason.

We have a major cultures requirement. Let’s use it to get specific about the people we hate. One day it’ll be Muslims, then Australians, then Albigensians. You talk about fun! Columbia Security will have tools with ancient significance to police the area with—for Jewish sects, it’ll be whips and sphinx headdresses; for Christians, lions, and so on. Mechanical engineers will set up a trebuchet inside the Hate Space for lobbing Black-Plague-infested dead-horse chunks into Manhattanville. Where are we going to get the horses? From French people and cowboys. Where are we going to get Black Plague cultures? From the med school—take advantage of the wide diversity that makes the Columbia aegis so renowned. It’s about time we demonstrated we’re mature enough to deserve the opportunity that is being a Columbia student.

Got that? It’s about time we demonstrated we’re mature enough to deserve the fucking opportunity that is being a fucking Columbia student.

Not to impose myself on your precious time and energy, let me conclude by saying: I think that if Columbia is, as many have said, warring against fun while simultaneously creating an atmosphere ripe for acts of hate, they should at least put their whole asses into it and they’ll find that the two go hand in hand. And don’t think for a minute it won’t be entertaining. Can you imagine what these people will be like when they actually graduate from Teachers College? Class, today’s story time book will be Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in English.