Spring Cleaning for Columbia’s Culture

In episode four we discussed endowments: what they are, why they’re important, and most crucially, why some of their characteristics, including their abstract nature and the large time-frames over which they operate, make their significance hard to grasp on an intuitive or “gut” level, making it easy to disregard how fundamentally important they are for institutions like our own.

But like mother always said, money can’t buy you happiness—and likewise, accumulating abstracted capital can’t do us any good unless we put it towards achieving culturally useful ends. But to figure out what those ends should be, we first must know something about the culture at hand. So today in episode five, our launching point will be this question: What is the nature of Columbia’s culture, and in particular, what elements make it unique?

Examinations of this subject often start with the ’68 riots, but that doesn’t delve deep enough. Instead, we should look back to the earliest days of Columbia’s history. It’s bad form to quote Wikipedia in academic essays, but this isn’t an academic essay, so: according to Wikipedia, our original founders launched King’s College in response to the establishment of the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University, across the river. Princeton’s founding “provoked fears of New York developing a cultural and intellectual inferiority.” Sound familiar?

Columbia also has been a fundamentally revolutionary institution since its earliest days. We all know about our famous early alumni, including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. We know (at least vaguely) the roles they played in the Revolutionary War, that quintessential American-style subversion of authority. Hamilton was one of the key authors of the Federalist Papers, the series of essays that provided the intellectual underpinning and justification for throwing off King George’s yoke. In the more recent era, Columbia has been continually part of the intellectual vanguard and the artistic avant-garde, generating original work in areas of human inquiry as diverse as political science (as I noted in my first column, the field was born here) and beat poetry. And we know that Columbia was a hotbed of radical activism in the ’60s, as it is to a lesser extent today.

Finally, Columbia is fundamentally what a Weberian might call a rational-bureaucratic institution, one whose various operations are delimited into specialized divisions and subdivisions that operate according to formal, relatively rigid, and often enumerated procedures—in other words, an organization structured like a machine. Columbia’s professional(ized) bureaucracy developed under Nicholas Murray Butler in the first half of the 20th century and remains with us today. Some sources note with pride that Columbia was one of, if not the first, university to adopt these “business” methods of administration, but I’d wager that if you asked most students today, they’d say that Columbia’s administration is too rigid and formalized, too bureaucratic, for its own—or its students’—good.

These three components—the inferiority complex, the revolutionary complex, and the bureaucratic complex—play a dominant role in explaining the culture of Columbia as we know it today. Think of all the phenomena that can be explained as a product of one of these or of the interaction of two or more of these, or in the case of numerous protests, all three. Some further comments.

First, if you noticed any tensions or seeming contradictions among those components, you’re right. We are simultaneously “the man” and “the underdog,” bureaucratized and anarchized, rigid and free-spirited. These tensions and cognitive dissonances can create troubles for us as we seek to define in specific terms what it is that we should do.

Second, you might also note the tendency we have to define ourselves negatively—against our peers; against the man; against the reigning intellectual, cultural, political, or aesthetic paradigms of the era. Now, negative definitions can be extremely useful—not for naught do we hear frequently about the value of dialectics. But too often this tendency to veer to the margins disregards the value of the establishment. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were any other cultural objects of lasting value.

Third, while the motivation for bureaucratic systematization—increased efficiency and productivity—is a good one, taking it too far results in stymied students and dashed hopes. Columbia has taken it too far.

This column slowly draws to a close. Previous episodes have examined peripheral pieces of this multifaceted institution, but in today’s episode we get at its heart. Cultural tension explains why we feel “a continual sense of disquiet” regarding our school (episode 1), what is holding us back from greatness (episode 2), what’s stopping our leaders from turning the burner on full-force (episode 3; partly explained, probably, by the fact that they don’t want the structure to explode), and what’s making it difficult for us to solicit the endowment we desire (episode 4).

What we need, it should be clear, is to resolve the cognitive dissonance, to create a positive definition of our school—a mission statement, in essence—and to use that newly formulated vision to enact concrete changes to the university’s policies and structure. This episode should have gone a long way toward resolving the dissonance. In episode six, we will have a look at missions and mission statements and take some steps toward a positive definition of greatness, Columbia-style, and in the final episode, enabled by the endeavors at clarification and underbrush-clearing we have until now conducted, we will lay out particular ideas for alma mater’s new mold. Stay tuned.

Mark Holden is a Columbia College junior majoring in political science and philosophy.If It Ain’t Broke... runs alternate Mondays.