I Want Out, But I Can't Get Out

I should not be in the School of General Studies.

It's not that I think I'm too good for GS. Please-so long as we're all sitting in the same lecture halls, taking the same exams, and fighting with the same pseudo-fascist administration over things like housing and financial aid, it's the height of arrogance to assume any hierarchy among Columbia's undergraduate schools. It's not that one is any better than the other-it's that they're different. And that's why I don't belong in the one I'm in.

I can't speak for everyone in List College, the undergraduate program in which students simultaneously work towards a degree in Judaic studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a degree at GS or Barnard. But I can speak for myself. And GS students simply inhabit a different world than I do-the real one.

My University Writing class included an Israeli veteran, a Scottish journalist, and a professional fashion designer. Being able to interact with these people and learn from them turned a class that is widely considered one of Columbia's worst into one of the pleasant surprises of my first semester of college. But the massive gulf in life experience, as well as our diametrically different reasons for being at Columbia, had me wondering why I was being grouped with them and how marginalized-insulted even-they must have felt, on some level, being grouped with me.

The School of General Studies is an extraordinary institution. At this year's GS convocation ceremony, GS Dean of Students Mary McGee read off a list of incoming students' past and present careers, along with some of the real-world experiences some of my fellow 2010's. This list was impressive and staggeringly long-an indication that I was among an incredible group of students.

But being in GS does more than reinforce the notion that it is a kind of dumping ground for incoming Columbians who can't be categorized-in many respects, it actually makes it that dumping ground. If GS wants to be known as the best undergraduate college for nontraditional students in the country, it needs to follow its raison d'etre and get rid of people like me, who are 18, straight out of high school, and "nontraditional" only because a JTS education has been construed that way for purposes of bureaucratic convenience.

If JTS wants to be known as the best undergraduate Jewish studies program in the country, it has to clarify its relationship with Columbia and refuse to resign itself to a flawed system in which its students have multiple advisers, multiple registration processes, and multiple GPAs. Rather than affiliating with a specific Columbia undergraduate school, the joint degree program should become its own independent undergraduate institution sensitive to JTS students' very specific needs.

Right now, the GS/JTS program stands in sharp contrast to its counterpart at Barnard, which is infinitely more in line with the educational goals of both institutions. Nobody in the Barnard/JTS program is switching careers or on military reserve duty-but everybody in Barnard/JTS is looking for a Jewish and secular education. The Barnard program has coherency to it because it specifically caters to those who want to go to both an all-women's and Jewish college. Far from being coherent, the GS/JTS relationship looks like a proverbial marriage of convenience by comparison.

Of course JTS could never have its own undergraduate program at Columbia. The logistics of it are prohibitively complicated. Who would oversee, or for that matter pay, a joint Columbia/JTS administrator? And I'd hate to think about what the creation of several new joint program-specific jobs would do to our tuition.

It makes no logical sense for me to be in GS, just as it makes no practical sense to actually undertake the commonsensical changes I'm proposing. But this is the paradox underlying any successful bureaucracy. Columbia and JTS clearly botched their opportunity to really get their relationship right-but the fact that said relationship has survived for over 50 years means that it's the best one we can expect, and the best one we will ever have.

This unfortunately explains far too many things at Columbia, from administrative whims to a lack of adequate financial aid to the still-ambiguous Columbia-Barnard relationship. The ties between the schools are less than clear and perpetually unresolved. But this relationship, like the 50-year-long partnership between GS and JTS, is evidence of the bureaucracy's remarkable ability to create the conditions necessary for its own long-term survival, while Columbia as a whole embodies a sad and paradoxical reality: that bureaucracy is at its very best when it's dead wrong.