The Columbia Project

Call me Forest Grump.

I often seem to have some tie with things in the news.

My father had a decades-long business relationship with Columbia University. He was friends with the school’s Purchasing Agent though they couldn’t have been more different. The latter was a squat, round-faced avuncular Irishman and my dad was a tall, powerfully built Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. Jim very kind to my family and gave me a job one summer. My duties involved surveying public campus telephones. I walked around the Columbia campus collecting data and would report back to him every few days. I still recall the poster he had on his office wall.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I thought it made great sense.

We are witnessing the downward spiral of Columbia University.

The images of the takeover of the campus and historic Hamilton Hall by howling, drum beating, keffiyeh and mask clad students and professional anarchists shocked the nation.

Writer, Victor Davis Hanson declared that Columbia has ruined its brand and attributes it to the dropping of SAT requirements and the imposition of DEI.

Ouch.

There were nearly 1,000 graduates in the senior class of my Brooklyn high school.

I knew of one girl who was admitted to Barnard.

Columbia’s standards were so high, only the very brightest and accomplished applied.

Now, I watch a young man, identified as a student leader, broadcast a home-made video in which he says he wants to kill Zionists. (He was subsequently suspended.)

The latest news is that Columbia has canceled its main commencement.

Apparently a small percentage of students was enough to scare the administration into canceling the event for the rest of the students, their families and friends.

I wonder what General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, president of Columbia University from 1948-1953 would have said (rhetorical).

Is it really possible that the top secret Manhattan Project, started on the Columbia campus? (The creation of the cyclotron which led to the building of the atom bomb was created in the basement of Pupin Hall in which I worked.)

I recall walking around the beautiful Columbia Beaux Arts buildings, the mall, wandering along the aisles in the libraries, coming upon books, so rare and unusual they made me gasp.

Today, students and parents considering colleges should think twice about attending Columbia or any Ivy League School school. Activists/terrorists like to target iconic buildings and institutions. That’s one of the reasons they chose to attack the World Trade Center. It was one of centers of global commerce.

Sooner or later Columbia will be renamed.

PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas attended Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba Friendship University of Russia where he defended his PhD thesis “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis (1933-1945)”

Can Columbia be far behind?