Columbia’s 10 Worst Alumni EVER
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Pat Buchanan
School of Journalism ’62
An insane conservative commentator, Buchanan first made his name as an adviser to President Nixon. He tried to convince him to burn the White House tapes, but apparently wasn’t very persuasive. He has run for president three times and has always failed horrendously, perhaps because he wants to abolish the Department of Education. He famously hates immigrants, gays who want basic human rights, and for some reason, Martin Luther King Jr. During his 1996 presidential campaign, he actually carried around a pitchfork.
Martha Stewart
Barnard College ’63
One of Barnard’s most famous alumnae, Stewart has proved that even in today’s world a woman can still be an excellent homemaker. She also manages to balance her famous domestic skills with criminal deceit. In 2004 she was convicted of obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and two counts of making false statements, charges related to an insider trading scandal. The Spectator has called her “the single most successful businesswoman in American history,” but obviously Oprah is more successful, and not a convicted felon.
10 Soviet Spies
Various Years
Because of the craziness of the McCarthy era, it’s not clear if all of these people actually were spies, but all seem to have had Soviet ties in some way. Whittaker Chambers, a drop-out, was definitely a spy, but some conservatives like him because he ratted out other spies, like Alger Hiss. Morris Cohen helped the USSR get the bomb by stealing secrets from the Manhattan Project. At least five other accused spies passed through Columbia, and three went to Barnard, but they may not be guilty, so let’s not name names.
Charles Van Doren
Professor
The son of famous Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, Charles received a Masters in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in English, both at Columbia, before becoming an English professor. In 1957, he won $138,000 over the course of several months on the game-show Twenty-One, but as it turns out, NBC had been feeding him the answers the whole time. After lying to just about everyone, he admitted the deception before Congress and lives to this day in utter disgrace.
Scooter Libby
Law School ’75
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr. may or may not be guilty of the five felony charges he faces, all of which relate to the Bush administration’s cover-up of the Valerie Plame scandal, but he has been indicted. He is also affiliated with the Project for a New American Century, which supported and perhaps even helped cause the Iraq War. When not ruining America, he found time to write a frighteningly bad novel called The Apprentice, which contains the line: “They’re very pretty girls. One was quite striking in the bath.” And that’s not out of context.
John Jacob Astor III
Attended at Some Point
Arguably the most pointless member of the Astor dynasty, John III did very little with his life, but he still managed to be despicable. He was basically a slumlord who was successful primarily because he had a lot of money from the outset. Although his father handed him giant piles of money for nothing, he gave very little to charity. Think Scrooge with weirder hair.
Roy Cohn
Columbia College ’46, Law School ’47
Cohn’s life brought nothing but misery to everyone it touched. He played a prominent role in the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and later became a high-ranking member of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s staff. After ruining McCarthy by instigating the Army-McCarthy hearings, he settled into a life of exposing gay men despite his own probable homosexuality. Before New York disbarred him for unethical conduct, he represented such luminaries as Donald Trump and John Gotti. The blue-haired lawyer on The Simpsons is supposedly modeled after Cohn, as is the self-hating gay man in Angels in America, the play by Tony Kushner, CC ’78.
David Horowitz
Columbia College ’59
Horowitz is a conservative commentator who thinks that universities in America are just too darn liberal. He wrote a book called The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a McCarthy-esque list of people who disagree with him but have better resumés. He also once wrote in FrontPage Magazine, in response to the NAACP suing gun manufacturers, “What’s next? Will Irish Americans sue whiskey distillers, or Jews the gas company?” He admitted that the second analogy doesn’t really make sense, but he used it anyway, because that’s the kind of guy he is.
Hafizullah Amin
Teacher’s College, Master’s Degree ’57, dropped out of doctoral program
Perhaps the only Columbia alumnus to participate in two separate bloody coups, Amin helped Noor Mohammad Taraki overthrow the government of Afghanistan in 1978 before betraying him in 1979. He spent most of his brief rule battling Islamic insurgents by killing entire populations of villages and dropping napalm on rebel soldiers. The Soviets finally executed him for crimes against the Afghan people and installed a pro-Soviet leader, all of which contributed to their eventual war in Afghanistan. During his reign he instilled contempt and fear in Soviets, Americans, and Afghans alike.
Barack Obama
Columbia College ’83
The son of a Kenyan and a Kansan, Obama has set the political world ablaze with a dynamic mixture of thinking big, working hard, and inspiring a nation. After several years of civil-rights work in Chicago, he entered the world of politics, where he has ascended to the position of U.S. Senator and started a presidential bid. As dazzling as that success is, however, he has equally stellar academic credentials: in addition to earning a Columbia degree, he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and has taught at the University of Chicago.