The Active Voice
why columbia grads choose the picket over the podium
The only thing America has heard about presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s time at Columbia is that he doesn’t want to talk about it. He rarely mentions his time at the University. Even though he’s been invited by several wide-eyed and eager senior class presidents in search of a graduation speaker, he hasn’t been back to hobnob since he graduated.
When I placed a call to one of his many press secretaries, she was surprised herself at his lack of enthusiasm for the Light Blue. “He hasn’t gone back to Columbia? You mean at all? You’re sure about that?” she said.
His willful disdain for our hallowed halls hasn’t gone unnoticed by students.
“Columbia alums don’t talk about their Columbia past,” said Kwame Spearman, CC ’06, who now attends Yale Law School. “Candidates don’t announce it. I don’t think there’s a dearth of Columbia graduates. We just need to highlight it.”
Hillary has made quite a show of highlighting her Wellesley years. In her attempt to court women voters, she has been back to Wellesley at least twice since 2003, and the picture of her delivering her graduation address as class president oh-so-many years ago is somewhat iconic.
Though Obama’s campaign wouldn’t comment on whether the presidential hopeful was snubbing Columbia or just trying not to actively remind people of the occasional drugs he did during his youth, one thing is clear: associating himself with Columbia isn’t an advantageous course of action in his eyes.
“Columbia has always had a certain taint in the American mind-set,” said professor David Eisenbach, who teaches a course on the history of the American presidency. “It just doesn’t have the same prestige ... that Harvard or Yale has. Americans are more likely to associate Columbia with Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac than any political leader.”
When I met with professor Robert McCaughey, who teaches the history of higher education at Barnard and is the author of Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, he spent the first several minutes debating the premise of my inquiry—that Columbia produces fewer students who go on to hold major public office than our counterparts Harvard and Yale.
“I think if you remove two families from Yale’s count, the statistics would look so different,” he said.
The numbers, though, tell a different story—of the last 42 presidents of the United States, five have gone to Harvard, three have gone to Yale, and two to Princeton. Georgetown and Stanford each graduated one president from their undergraduate schools.
Columbia, along with Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, haven’t. (Though both Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt attended Columbia Law School, neither of them finished their degree here.)
McCaughey though, thinks looking at presidential degrees provides few if any clues as to what kind of leaders Columbia produces and what their degree might mean in the long run of their careers. He attributes the statistics in part to geography and in part to size. Columbia and Barnard, he said, have one of the smallest student bodies in the Ivy League. Both schools have traditionally attracted mostly students from the metropolitan area, while Harvard and Yale bring in students from all over New England and all over the country.
“We weren’t sending graduates back to Idaho to run for office with an Ivy League degree like Yale was,” he said. Instead, our students went on to hold city and state elected and appointed positions.
It didn’t help, he added that the president has traditionally been from an old-money Protestant tradition—the kind of crème de la crème genealogy that Columbia historically has had the most trouble attracting.
“We didn’t educate the WASP elite,” he said.
In many ways, McCaughey and media consultants agree that we’ve made up a lot of lost ground in the last 30 years. This is due, in no small part, to changes in New York City, Columbia’s academic offerings and rankings, and its rising exclusiveness. Twenty years ago, the school was admitting about a third of those who applied, and now we’re admitting less than 10 percent.
Columbia has also created programs to entice students into careers in public service. The Columbia Center for Career Education hosts a non-profit job fair every spring. The Office of Scholarships and Fellowships runs an intensive competition to pick the school’s nominees for the prestigious Truman Scholarship, which provides money to pursue graduate school to exceptional juniors from around the country who hope to pursue a career in public service.
Barnard has created the Barnard College Leadership Initiative, which is designed specifically to educate women for the challenges of undertaking roles as leaders of public service, business, and non-profit groups. The goal of the initiative is obvious—to train students to be effective leaders in a variety of fields—and the approach is academic. Students complete a two-semester seminar and a research project.
According to a Columbia official, 208 of CC and SEAS students were entering law school in 2006, up from 187 in 2005. Though Alumni Affairs does offer an online network and directory that any alum can join and post messages on, it doesn’t make any arrangements to facilitate a candidate’s access to alumni data or the alumni network. As any student (or prospective student, or friend of a Columbia student) will tell you, we’re still way behind the curve. Columbia has one office for pre-professional advising, and no one answered the three calls I placed during business hours, (though I received a call back later in the day each time from the dean in charge of law school advising).
Harvard has 13 separate pre-law offices, one in each house, where students can go anytime for advice. One thing Columbia does have, however, is location.
Former Alaskan senator Mike Gravel is on a campaign bus, headed somewhere to talk to some people about something. He’s the long shot’s long shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nominee this year, and he’s stayed in the race despite his abysmally low poll numbers and negligible fund-raising. He’s also a Columbia alum.
Attending school here, he said, didn’t turn him into a politician.
“I was already steeped in politics when I went to Columbia,” he said. “I had already picked my direction.”
He was drawn to the University because of its location, enrolling in General Studies in 1955, after four years in the army. To make ends meet, he worked full time, first on Wall Street and then as a taxi driver. In New York, he attended Tammany Hall meetings on the Upper West Side.
He doesn’t cite specifics, but says he learned a lot about good government from the University, and in particular from Victor Fuchs, a professor who studied health and economics and now works at Stanford.
When he graduated, he moved back to Alaska and ran for the legislature. He was elected to the Senate 39 years ago.
He’s not one to shy away from his school, or suggest that he received anything less than a stellar education.
“Columbia’s extremely famous. Columbia’s just as well known as Harvard,” he said.
Chris Kulawik, CC ’08 and president of the College Republicans, isn’t convinced that the school is doing everything it can to cultivate relationships with politically minded alums. While he said he knows a lot of students who enjoyed their work at a think tank or on a campaign this summer, he doesn’t know many who know what they want to do after graduation.
“The natural inclination is to be political at Columbia,” Kulawik said, though he doesn’t think it’s a school’s job to push its students towards a career in public service, or in investment banking.
He said the school’s Office of Government and Community Affairs wasn’t able to help the Republicans last year when they were trying to bring Senator Judd Gregg to campus.
“Do I think we can develop better connections?” he asked. “I definitely think so. ... If we took the initiative to develop a network, it would definitely do me a great service.”
Stef Goodsell, CC ’09, has been working for Hillary since her first semester at Columbia, when she answered constituent letters. She too was drawn to the city’s resources, including the opportunity to work for Hillary. Dressed in a Columbia sweatshirt and sweats, she speaks with poise and energy. You can tell she’d be a great cheerleader for your cause, and her school.
She’s been working for the campaign ever since, taking on a full-time staff position as intern coordinator this summer. Last month, she was in Iowa. This week, she’s hunting down the senders of bad checks.
“I started following the presidential election in 1996,” she said. “I was one of those girls who as a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old was impressed and enthralled with Hillary.”
After she graduates, she wants to do something policy or campaign-oriented for a year or two. After law school, she said, she might want to run for office. It’s not something she worries about too much now, she said, besides making friends in the political science department (she is very close to political science professor Judith Russell, who runs Academics for Hillary, and can “go to her for anything”) and working Hillary’s campaign.
“It’s always something that I’m aware of,” she said. “But I’m not like ‘oh I’m not going to 1020 because of my fake ID,’” she said. “I’m cognizant of it, but it’s not dictating my days.”
Ted Kennedy’s cheating scandal (he was caught copying a Spanish test), was mentioned when he was campaigning, but it didn’t prevent him from getting elected. Obama’s supposed decision to use cocaine while in college (he didn’t actually, though it’s commonly believed he did) has not become a serious stumbling block.
Evan Cornog, an associate dean and professor at the School of Journalism who teaches courses on politics and the press, said that more often than not, what you do as an undergraduate doesn’t make or break you as a candidate, though candidates who were Phi Beta Kappa, valedictorian, captain of the football team, or editor of their school newspaper can build that into their narratives as a success story from birth.
Similarly, a particularly scandalous college story may not play well in Peoria.
“It’s hard to imagine anything in Dwight Eisenhower’s undergraduate career coming up in the campaign,” he said. “For younger candidates in more recent elections, more is fair game. There’s more biographical trivia.”
As I’m packing up my bag to leave McCaughey’s office, I ask him one more question. It’s an afterthought, but also an unspoken theme with anyone who speaks about, attends, or even visits Columbia. Columbia—what does this all have to do with 1968?
McCaughey pauses before answering, ticking off the left-wing humanitarian organizations where the students who occupied the building went to work after they graduated.
“That generation stayed true to their ideals,” he said. “They all worked at organizations that fit their beliefs after college ... and they’re the generation that would be running for office now.”
Columbia is supposed to raise a class of students who are committed, if not obsessed, with shaking things up and making the world better.
Perhaps it’s not that Columbians aren’t politically active, it’s that we’re pushing for a different kind of change. In the arena of activism, not politics. In the world, not necessarily the U.S.
Harvard has the Kennedy School of Government, which ranks as one of the best schools in the country if you’re looking for a career as a chief of staff or campaign manager, at least according to U.S. News and World Report. The school boasts such famous (or infamous) alumni and professors as current Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and Bill O’Reilly.
Columbia’s response to that is the School of International and Public Affairs and the Earth Institute, two internationally-focused programs, the latter of which is led by the ever-present Jeffrey Sachs.
Philosopher and poet Mark Van Doren, gay rights advocate and playwright Tony Kushner, and poet and civil rights advocate Langston Hughes all attended Columbia before going on to careers in advocacy.
Ron Towns, CC ’08, is a champion of Columbia as a school that educates its students to go out in the world and make things better. A self-described do-gooder, Towns is studying education and education policy. Last year, he was awarded the Truman Fellowship.
He grew up with a family full of teachers and hopes to be a superintendent of a large urban school district someday, or else go into law and education policy on a federal level.
Though he said he enjoyed the University’s education program (he’ll graduate in May with a teaching certification) and the help he received when applying for the Fulbright, he doesn’t hesitate when I ask him whether Columbia does enough to get its students interested in public service.
“No, not at all,” he said. “There’s a mentality that if you graduate from an Ivy League institution you should make a lot of money. When you go into public service you aren’t making a lot of money.”
He repeats a question he gets asked again and again by friends.
“Why did you go to Columbia if you just want to teach?”
The trend of activism continues today. While our peers at Harvard and Yale are participating in debates and Model United Nations, Columbians are hunger striking and actively debating the implications of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presence on campus.
“Schools tend to lend credibility,” said Kevin Wardally, a New York based political consultant. “Being able to say I’m a Columbia man means something nowadays.”