F E AT U R E
Searching for the Activist Ivy
Does Columbia’s political scene today live up to our reputation? BY COLE CAHILL
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t’s a sunny afternoon on College Walk in 2003; the birds are chirping, Lerner Hall still has that new building smell, and the post-9/11 student body at Columbia has politics on the brain. Abram Handler, CC ’07, broke down a typical scene in a Spectator op-ed: Near the sundial is the Spartacus Youth Club, “a wacky clan of socialists who proudly assert to be the party of the Russian Revolution.” Members of the International Socialist Organization distribute pamphlets in Lerner. Lining the brick path of College Walk, protesters call for revolutionary Black liberation and “the defense of North Korea against the tyranny of the United States.” This is certainly not a Columbia that I’ve ever seen. Compared to this depiction, today’s College Walk seems downright conservative. I keep my eyes peeled for campus uproar, protests, and direct actions, but with the major exception of the Student Workers of Columbia strike last fall, in-your-face political work is a rare sight at this University. Student groups promoting any political cause, let alone groups promoting the violent overthrow of the American state, are few and far between. The deterioration of radical political activity here is indeed a relatively recent phenomenon. In the decades after the 1968 uprisings, Columbia sustained active chapters of radical student groups—organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, and Lucha, a radical Latinx student organization, all had active membership through the 2000s. The University’s radical reputation gained national traction, too: In 2006, after student protesters rushed the Roone Arledge Auditorium stage during a speech by the Minutemen, a vigilante border patrol group, Bill O’Reilly invited the president of Columbia College Republicans to debate the editor of this magazine on The O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly called Columbia the “University of Havana North,” and the leading light of the "left-wing jihad.” This characterization was generous, to say the least, but it aligned with a politically radical public identity for Columbia ubiquitous in the post-9/11 years. The “activist Ivy” image persists today in Co-
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lumbia’s and Barnard’s branding—a student I spoke to recalled their tour guide telling them to expect a protest, a counter-protest, and a counter-counter-protest on any given afternoon—but the political climate on campus today is decidedly out of step with that claim. Perhaps more strikingly, the supposed Gen-Z vanguard leading the new era of radical leftwing politics is largely invisible. These are the students who were in high school for Trump’s election, who organized March for Our Lives walkouts; students whose earliest years of legal adulthood were marked by a global pandemic, a national uprising for Black liberation, and an attempted right-wing coup-d’etat of the federal government. December’s Harvard Youth Poll found 33% of Americans ages 18 to 29 considered themselves politically engaged, up from just 24% in 2009. Why, then, is College Walk so quiet? Is the politically engaged, radically bent version of Columbia dead in the water? Have Columbia’s radicals been absorbed by the institutions of neoliberalism? … Left-leaning political organizations at Columbia fit into two broad genres, each characterized by their proximity to institutional politics. In one camp are direct action –based organizations like Student Worker Solidarity and Housing Equity Project. While the days of radical flyering on Low Steps are largely behind us, these groups fill the void once dominated by the International Socialist Organization and Students for a Democratic Society. A flurry of direct action and mutual aid organizations, including Mobilized African Diaspora and Students Helping Students, surged in membership and support during the 2020 uprisings and the subsequent remote academic year, but are effectively dormant today. In the other category are the longstanding groups which tend to work within established political structures and institutions: the Columbia University College Democrats, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Columbia Political Union. These groups intend to be big tents; Roosevelt and CPU both identify as “nonpartisan,” and CU Dems describes itself as “a
THE BLUE AND WHITE
