The No-Win Zone
How Columbia Manages Its Liberal Reputation
In his account of the 1968 Columbia student riots, then-student Frank da Cruz recalls “a carnival atmosphere the first day, with press photographers and reporters from magazines, the local newspapers, etc.” The following day, the story was on the front page of the New York Times. At the time, it was the greatest mass arrest in New York history: seven hundred people in one night.
On the quality of press coverage, Da Cruz observed that “the Post was fair, the News was atrocious, but the Times was beyond belief.”
Last semester, campus revolutionaries might have imagined the spirit of ’68 reborn. During an Oct. 4 speech by Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, whose organization seeks to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico into Texas, members of the audience rushed the stage in protest, abruptly ending the event.
News of the political outburst rippled through campus immediately, and then caught the attention of national news media. Overnight, Columbia was making headlines, and the facts of the story seemed to hardly matter. Fox News aired several segments on Columbia up to two months after the incident, ranging from an investigation of students’ sex lives to a news story from late 2005 about an alleged bias incident. City newspapers and blogs soon jumped on the bandwagon, questioning the integrity and influence of Columbia as a powerhouse institution. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly asked, “Is Columbia University falling apart?”
It’s a fair question. On an historically proactive campus—and one that hasn’t shied from combatting perceived bias before—the extra media attention on Columbia’s respect for the first amendment is indisputably tied to the University.
A staff of 24 people rounds out Columbia’s office of public affairs, the administration’s first line of defense when a media crisis unfolds. In addition to other tasks, staff members send press releases, field calls from alumni and concerned community members, train faculty to respond to the media, and pursue relationships with media sources.
In the two days following the Minuteman incident, the office began releasing daily statements from President Lee Bollinger addressed to students, alumni, and members of the press.
Though vibrant student activism is nothing out of the ordinary for this campus, many alumni phoned in to express their concerns about the specifics of the event. “When I was an undergraduate, if you weren’t in three pitched ideological battles a week here, you were considered to not be pulling your weight. It’s part of our intellectual history of this institution, beyond just the issues of free speech, that this is one of the things that coming to Columbia is all about,” said University Senator and alumnus Bradley Bloch at this past December’s senate discussion on free speech where he expressed his disappointment with the students.
Still, it appeared that Bollinger, who teaches a class on the First Amendment, was taking the matter seriously.
“This is not complicated,” Bollinger wrote in his first statement. “Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to campus. Others have rights to hear them… We are called on to maintain our courage to confront bad words with better words.”
Despite the administration’s best efforts, word of the stage uprising had already leaked to the press. The protest brought Columbia onto the pages of the New York Daily News and two Fox News programmed debates: Hannity and Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor.
“Columbia University is a disgrace,” said Bill O’Reilly on the Oct. 5 installment of The O’Reilly Factor. “It is not interested in free speech or learning. It’s a place of indoctrination… All over the country these kinds of fascist tactics are being used by fanatical secular progressives who seek to impose their own views on others, and silence and/or harm people who oppose them. This kind of anti-American behavior must be condemned by all Americans, and places that allow these hooligans free reign, like Columbia University, must be held to account.” He concluded his address by calling upon alumni to discontinue their financial support of the University.
In the midst of a just-announced $4 billion capital fundraising campaign by Bollinger four days before the incident, can any university afford this kind of public denouncement?
Paul Argenti, CC ’75, Business ’88, and a communications professor at Dartmouth who specializes in reputational risk, isn’t too worried about his alma mater.
“Reputation is made up of three levels: your identity, which is who you are, your image, which is how different people view you, and collective assessments of how students, trustees, professors, and others see you, in which case, Columbia has an amazing reputation,” Argenti said. “Anything that happens in the context of an institution that’s been around for 300 years is very different from what might happen in one you’ve never heard of.”
“Would [the Minuteman protest] in itself hurt Columbia’s reputation? I don’t think so. Is it something the president should be aware of? Obviously, he’s a free speech expert, clearly he’s on top of that situation. To really get things going, you have to have a lot of things go wrong,” he added, citing the tensions in the ’60s and ’70s. “All you have to have is one really bad series of events and things can turn the other way.”
Columbia’s illustrious history hasn’t stopped the press from at least trying to shake things up again.
Douglas Feiden, a reporter for the New York Daily News, has been on the front line of Columbia’s renewed press attention. On Nov. 26, 2006, two articles appeared under his byline. One of the pieces, titled “Free Speech Sacred—as Long as You’re a Liberal?”, reviewed the Minuteman incident. The second, “Wild Sex 101,” investigated the “kinky” sexual practices of Columbia students, ranging from a pornographic clip shown on CTV’s Sexiled to an undercover look at Conversio Virium, Columbia’s 13-year-old BDSM interest group.
The article was a deliberate smear. “Famed as a hotbed of debate over academic freedom, New York’s most elite school is also a playpen for sexual hijinks, sophomoric antics, and the wacky indulgences of the children of the rich,” Feiden wrote. He went on to recreate a meeting of Conversio Virium that had been surreptitiously observed by an anonymous Daily News reporter: “As a female student volunteer stood facing the blackboard, and two dozen Columbians watched, a lecturer who identified himself only as Dov flogged her repeatedly with leather whips, rubber hoses, and a cat-o’-nine-tails,” he wrote.
The Minuteman incident marks Columbia’s first major appearance in the headlines since 2004, when Columbia’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department faced allegations by Jewish and pro-Israel students who claimed that their views had been censored in class by pro-Palestinian professors. Unbeknownst to the university, the David Project, a pro-Israel lobby from Boston, had interviewed numerous students who claimed their views had been censored in class by professors, and had compiled the interviews in a documentary titled Columbia Unbecoming. The New York Sun broke news of the documentary’s existence in early 2005, and a New York Times editorial blasted the University shortly thereafter.
That incidents like MEALAC and the Minuteman protest made national news isn’t surprising, but what of the lesser stories that seem to inexplicably go to print?
Undergraduate sex is hardly newsworthy at Columbia, or any college for that matter, but that didn’t stop Feiden from penning an article about it, or stop O’Reilly from inviting notorious right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on his show to discuss the article. And in December, O’Reilly brought on military veteran Matthew Sanchez, GS ’07, to discuss an alleged bias incident that had been committed against him more than a year prior.
Are these examples of media personalities with axes to grind against the University?
David Stone, Columbia’s executive vice president for communications, attributes the one-note journalistic approach to the fact that the blogosphere has become a viable spot for news analysis. “The way in which media outlets find their niche is to appeal to an audience that wants a specific viewpoint, rather than attempting to be as balanced as possible,” he said.
Feiden declined to comment, while Fox News did not return repeated calls for comment. Stone offered his own theory for why Columbia seems to be getting so much media attention:
“We are in New York City, which is the media capital of the country and for much of the world,” Stone added. “On the up side, many of our professors get quoted in the New York Times, and our Nobel Prize winners get a lot of attention. [But] unlike some of our peer institutions, when something is local news here, it automatically puts it on a national level, when a lot of these controversies over politics and speech are happening everywhere.”
Rodney Benson, professor of journalism and communications at New York University, agreed: at the end of the day, it’s about academics.
“I think university reputations are slow to change, and any particular political incident or new event is not going to make a big difference,” he said. “Reputation is really rooted in the whole history of the institution and the age of the institution. A lot of that reputation has been passed along by word of mouth for a long time. You would want to look at things like how often the faculty at a given school is cited in publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education,” he continued. “Whether the university’s faculty is respected by the rest of academia is crucial.” Benson added that parents consider these factors important when deciding on a college for their children.
This year’s bad press doesn’t seem to be affecting the University’s reputation tangibly—just yet. Eric Furda, Columbia’s director of alumni relations, reported that donations to the University have not recently declined, and that it does not appear that negative press attention has affected the University’s overall financial well-being. Just this week, the Spectator reported that for the fifth year in a row, Columbia College received a record-breaking number of applicants.
Furda admits, however, that while Columbia’s general reputation might be safe, times of media scrutiny and political controversy do tend to be the most hectic ones in his office. In the aftermath of the Minuteman incident, Furda received approximately 200 e-mails from alumni and donors, 25 percent of which expressed positive sentiments about the way the University was handling the issue.
“There are always high emotions [after an incident like the Minuteman protest], and we want to respond to individuals with an on-time response,” he says. “Still, we also want to step back, and maybe be a little more thoughtful, and show what dialogue is like on the college campus. That takes a little bit more time.”
Furda said that striking a balance between responding quickly and responding thoughtfully is “probably the biggest challenge we have, and honestly a frustration that some of our alumni express. But when you want to understand the larger framework of why something happened, which is what alumni often want to know, that takes a process. It’ll take a meeting or two with student leaders, with the academic deans and the faculty.”
In the end, however, alumni frustrations tend to amount to just that: frustration.
“So far, it’s been fine,” he explained. “But we still have to be very careful in how we respond to people, because the potential for loss of funds is always there.”
Today, the 1968 riots, which protested the University’s complicity with the Vietnam War as well as its poor relationship with the surrounding community, are remembered fondly as a positive symbol for student activism.
“When you speak of the ’60s, there’s a certain allure there for a lot of young people, and Columbia may have benefited from that over the long term,” said Robert Siegel, CC ’68 and a senior host of the NPR program All Things Considered. At the time, Siegel was an anchorman covering the riots for WKCR, Columbia’s
student-run radio station.
While the ’68 riots may now have a nostalgic glow, the immediate repercussions were more serious—and expensive.
“My impression is that the admissions office looked more favorably on applicants who were less likely to be protesters,” said Siegel. “Parents didn’t want their kids going to Columbia is what I recall hearing from family members at the time, and faculty members considered it an affront to them.”
After suffering from intense media scrutiny, the University, feeling anxious about its image, began a $20 million renovation to improve the quality of its
much-criticized residence halls, despite being in extreme financial difficulty, according to a September 2005 issue of Columbia College Today.
The renovations, however costly, did eventually generate positive press for the University. In 1970, the New York Times reported that “at Columbia, the rooms into which two students crowded are now singles, there are new television lounges on most dormitory floors, there is new furniture everywhere and, since last year, each room has its own telephone.”
Siegel said he believes that Columbia’s temporary decline in reputation was likely due to the event’s magnitude.
“The Minutemen conflict does have implications because of the free speech issue, but it’s a tiny incident in comparison to ’68. At that time, if you had asked anyone in the country who remotely followed the news where a major protest had gone on, they would have said Columbia. Today, you’d have to ask specifically about a campus scandal, and then the top one would be Duke. If Columbia even came in second, it would be a miracle,” he says. Basically, prestige wears well.
“Look at what happened at Harvard,” Benson adds. “Its president got a lot of bad press, but that didn’t hurt Harvard’s reputation.” Duke University, which has come under fire due to rape allegations leveled against several members of the school’s lacrosse team, received the second highest number of applicants in its history this year.
Though the actions of last semester have illicited strong opinions from Columbia students and alumni, there is little indication that anyone is rethinking the value of their degree just yet.
“This doesn’t say you can’t get into deep trouble and that it doesn’t affect people’s perceptions of the University, though,” Argenti warned.
Joseph Sullivan, CC ’86 and Law ’89 may have put it best when he told the Spectator last semester that, though he thought the students acted “like a bunch of animals,” he didn’t think it would affect the University or his relationship with it.
“I just gave them like $250 a week ago ... I’d only stop giving if they changed the Core Curriculum,” he said.