Global Branches Need Sturdy Local Roots

Illustration by Ramsey Scott

Growing up as an expat brat in the United Arab Emirates really doesn’t do much for your sense of self identity. Instead of reinforcing my parents’ Indian heritage, I instead came to occupy the nebulous space of a third-culture kid. Shuffling somewhat awkwardly between national boundaries, third-culture kids are easily identifiable by their three passports and “international school accent.” There is a sense of being from everywhere but not really belonging anywhere, always global yet never local. Despite this, Dubai’s multiculturalism is something that I’ve really come to value. And when looking at colleges, Columbia did seem a touch more cosmopolitan and politically diverse, and just a bit less provincial, than Anytown, USA. The brochure looked good too. Students, scholars, and ideas from all over the world plus the privilege of being in a city as culturally rich and alive as New York? This, to me, was the power of a global university—it could root itself locally and still open its branches globally.

Yet two years in, sometimes Columbia feels a little like an institutional version of the third-culture kids I used to know. We’re ostensibly located in West Harlem and global on paper, but still not rooted, as we live in something of a privileged bubble. Rather than finding students interacting and learning with our local community, you would be hard-pressed to find students that venture up past 122nd Street. Meanwhile our University blithely continues with its unjust, exploitative, and yes, frankly racist expansion into the largely black and Latino community of West Harlem. This abuse of power seems oddly incompatible with the projected image of Columbia as a thoughtful and conscious member of the global community. I can’t help but agree with last year’s hunger strikers who said, “We want to be at school in the city of New York, not making New York City more like this school.”

What then makes Columbia the global University it purports to be? With study abroad programs in Paris, Berlin, and Shanghai, and agreements with scores more campuses, we could hope to find it in the spirit of cross-cultural exchange. Yet while these programs may temporarily bring in exchange students, our ability to attract international students is otherwise sorely lacking. Unlike comparable schools that do not discriminate based on citizenship, Columbia’s punitive financial aid system effectively excludes most international students who need aid. This results in a less economically diverse student body, which doesn’t do Columbia’s global reputation any favors. When I told people I was coming here, the standard reaction would invariably be to joke about my becoming a drug trafficker before asking me why I didn’t apply to Harvard instead. A straw poll of my international friends unsurprisingly reveals similar responses across the board.

And then there was the Ahmadinejad debacle. Bollinger’s repugnant opening remarks showed a blatant lack of any regard for either his guest or the premise of academic exchange in itself. Suddenly Columbia University was in the international spotlight, but many of us were ashamed to be a part of it. I did find the offer of a visiting professorship to the newly freed alumnus Kian Tajbakhsh incredibly positive. Maybe a worthwhile cultural exchange bereft of political machinations is actually possible? Yet when a group of Iranian university chancellors extended to Bollinger an invitation to visit Iran and engage in a similar debate, he not only refused, but reportedly forbade any of Columbia’s professors from accepting. Even the fact that Bollinger spoke at all at a World Leaders Forum event is in itself remarkable. Yes, Ahmadinejad’s views and Holocaust denial are utterly reprehensible and indefensible, but this in no way justifies Bollinger’s duplicity. Why is he so quick to condemn Ahmadinejad, while refusing to even comment on the deplorable views of former Minuteman Jim Gilchrist when he came to campus last autumn? Similarly, why was Ahmadinejad so castigated, while Pakistani President Musharraf was fawningly welcomed with open arms just two years before?

We were told that this time was different, and that the lofty ideals of free speech must be upheld. Perhaps we should start thinking about academic freedoms within our own University first, starting with the silencing of the MEALAC department. These biases were made all the more troubling with last week’s events in Gaza, which saw the Israeli army kill close to 100 besieged Palestinians, aided with U.S.-supplied tanks and warplanes. If Columbia ever plans to realize its aspirations of being a truly global University, it will need to have the courage to not capitulate to political pressure and instead stand independent from American foreign policy.

Other universities appear to be favoring expansion on a global scale, with NYU, Yale, and Sorbonne all opening up satellite campuses in the UAE. These universities mostly follow in the wake of the “American University of City” formula that currently populates the Middle East with its liberal arts institutions. Although this has its positives, there are invariably concerns about this hegemonization of the tertiary education experience. Others prefer to chalk it up to the inviolable and inevitable advance of globalization. While Columbia doesn’t appear to have any similar plans in the pipeline, I was intrigued to come across a press release that said, “Globalization implies not just an increased velocity and scale, but a re-centring of the globe, as it were.”

This is promising in that it suggests a re-evaluation of our currently Eurocentric and tokenizing curriculum. Yet before we try to establish ourselves in the global community, let’s take a look inside and around our own gates. To paraphrase a Students for a Democratic Society paradigm, let’s first build a free university before we look to free society. Even as we think globally, let’s first begin to act locally. As the report itself acknowledges, it is “often easier for universities to study change than to undergo it.” So let’s start changing, Columbia.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.