#1 Worst Alumnus EVER
History may be written in the lives of a few great men, as philosopher Thomas Carlyle suggested, but apparently Columbia students know next to nothing about history.
To be sure, the University has a storied legacy of sordid individuals. Hypocritical, fear-mongering lawyers. Icons of corporate malfeasance. A guy who poured napalm on people.
But look at Columbia in a different way and you’ll see a different thing. It’s a legacy of countless anonymous students who didn’t vote in our “Name the Number One Worst Alumnus” poll.
The mechanism that made this catastrophic apathy possible is the Internet. Not that thing people sometimes use in useful ways. Rather, it’s that thing students use to read articles and then not participate in the easily accessible voting drive that accompanies them.
And we really did not participate in it. We as a school submitted only 26 votes. Pat Buchanan and Barack Obama received six apiece to lead the pack, which just goes to show that even the people who did vote were idiots. Clearly Hafizullah Amin is the worst. He killed thousands of people. And clearly Barack Obama shouldn’t even have been on the list, because he is a beacon of hope for America.
Who did this? Who would read an obviously thoroughly researched story that practically begs for votes, and then refuse to click the right bubble in a poll? Who thinks sending a one-line e-mail just isn’t worth the trouble? Who refuses to take seriously an obscure, little-read page filled with confusing half-hearted jokes that should have ended before this paragraph?
The answer is, you do. And for not doing a thing that I vaguely envisioned you doing last week, Columbia’s worst alumnus of all time is you.