Old Hippies Get What They Sowed For

When I was a student at Columbia College, my friends and I did a lot of stupid things.

Columbia has a round disk of stone and brass in the center of the Morningside campus. It’s just the right height to sit on. For some reason, I have always remembered it as having decorative panels featuring zodiac signs, but Wikipedia says they actually depict phases of the day. People call it the sundial, but it doesn’t indicate the time. It’s flat on top, so there is nothing on it to cast a shadow.

When I was at Columbia, the kids used to have a fake Satanic sacrifice on the sundial every year. I think they did it at midnight. They would find a girl who pretended to be a virgin, and a guy would dress as the devil and pretend to sacrifice her while she lay on the sundial. I would love to tell you more about a couple of the actors who participated in this, but I suppose it wouldn’t be a good idea, since they are real people.

I wasn’t part of the sacrifice crew, but I did show up, probably drunk, to watch.

We also watched pornographic movies the university helped sponsor. There was a building called Ferris Booth, and it had a big area that could be filled with tables. Musical acts could perform there. One year, some organization showed Bel Ami and Behind the Green Door there, and I was in attendance. Definitely drunk.

It’s hard to believe, but there was once so little porn, people actually recognized the names of movies.

I got arrested once for grabbing a bookdrop in front of Butler Library, pulling it over on its face, and dragging it some distance. Drunk. I was wearing a pair of fake glasses, and I had been to a Heineken promotion. I had a giant plastic promotional bottle cap stuck to one lens as I tried to sweet-talk the campus cops and convince them I was a responsible person who didn’t need to accompany them to their offices.

My friends and I set off a lot of fireworks at Columbia. We released live crabs in an elevator. We saved two turtles from a Chinatown wet market and put them in the university’s decorative fountains.

I took a vertebrate anatomy course. I was given a dead cat. The building I lived in had an elevator with a panel that was missing one button. There was just a hole. I took the cat’s severed tail and stuck it in the hole so it looked like the the rest of the cat had been sucked through it.

We did plenty of stupid things, but we never took over a building for the purpose of slandering Israel and threatening and assaulting Jewish students, and we never took any university employees and made them our hostages. It appears the current crop of students has done these things. They took over Hamilton Hall, a classroom building.

Hamilton was the site of a lot of useless classes in subjects such as literature and history. Even back then, you could learn all you wanted about literature and history by going to a library, and now, you can learn using free materials on the web. You can even watch lectures, which are just as effective as lectures attended in person. You don’t really need to pay $10,000 to read and understand 10 novels.

If memory serves, there were also some classes which had more reason to exist. Language classes, for example. Still, you can go to Berlitz and pay a lot less than $10,000 for a class. You can use a phone app for nearly nothing.

Overall, Hamilton was a place where people went to waste their parents’s money and prepare for careers as fungible white-collar workers in cubicles. Either that, or they could become academics and help future parents waste their money.

Now they are wasting their parents’s money (and your money, thanks to Biden’s loan schemes) trying to destroy the only refuge the world’s Jews have and contributing to the destruction of the Jews themselves.

A sexually convoluted former student named Khymani James appears to be one of the leaders of the revolt. James was expelled recently for calling for the murders of people who supported Israel.

When I wrote about James earlier, I expressed dismay that Columbia had not reigned him in, but now I see that it has. My question: why?

When I was at Columbia, it was not long after the famous Columbia riots. I think these took place in ’68 and ’72, but I am not going to bother to look it up. Students rioted because of the Vietnam War or something. Maybe they were mad because their parents made them eat vegetables. Like Marlon Brando said in The Wild One, “What do you got?”

Rebels often preexist their causes.

Faculty members who had participated in the riots were admired. They were proud of it. Students looked up to rioters. There was a sense that we had missed out, and were somehow inferior to the rioters, because we hadn’t been there.

I think this atmosphere of willful, infantile stupidity contributed to what’s happening at Columbia now. I think the kids who are abusing Jews and damaging property are excited because now they, too, have rioter status.

Columbia is a lawless place. It encourages civil disobedience, which is nothing but lawlessness. It’s crime. You’re supposed to use the First Amendment and the voting booth to manipulate society. You’re not supposed to commit crimes. Blocking traffic, throwing paint on people in fur coats, and taking hostages are cheating.

People who do civil disobedience are election deniers. They want to deprive people who vote against them of their constitutionally-provided power.

I’m sure the administration loves lawlessness. I don’t think a person who didn’t love it could get hired in Columbia’s culture. So how come they expelled bro Khymani? Why are they now suspending other students?

My guess: it’s all about the do-re-mi.

Columbia’s student body has been heavily Jewish for decades, and it’s not an “antisemitic trope” to say there are a lot of very wealthy Jews. It’s a fact. It’s also not a trope to say Jews are big philanthropists. Many Jews have left Columbia, done well for themselves, and (mysteriously, to me) gone on to make multimillion-dollar donations. Now some of them have turned off the tap.

If billionaire Muslims were Columbia donors, and they were threatening to cut off the cash if Columbia bothered the brats, would Khymani still be a trespasser instead of a student? I wonder. Columbia has tolerated all sorts of hateful speech, including threats, for years. Hateful speech is not new there. What’s new is responding to it with disciplinary measures.

I’m not impressed by Columbia’s sudden decision to do what they should have done long ago. I think they’re just whoring out. In America, this is what college administrations do. They admit stupid rich kids whose parents donate. They rename old buildings named after great men for anyone who will write a check. I think Columbia is just changing course because, while it was fun to pretend to be warriors, things looked different when they started hearing metaphorical bullets whizzing by their ears. It’s always fun to be a social justice warrior when it requires no guts whatsoever, and it actually enhances your income and prestige, as any famous actor could tell you. When there is a cost, only the sincere remain standing, and they are few in number.

I don’t know if oppressed black trans Khymani will be arrested for what appear to be crimes like trespassing, battery, false imprisonment, and vandalism, as privileged white me was arrested for the very serious crime of knocking over a book drop, but I’m pretty certain that if he or she is, there will be no bail and no trial. This is Manhattan, where you can be fined half a billion dollars for negotiating with a bank, but you can literally shoplift and be arrested 5 times in the same day if you hustle.

I can’t believe I chose to go to Columbia. What was I thinking? I wish I could go visit my high school senior self and punch him in the face.