Columbia: Anatomy of Anarchy

Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 1, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Columbia: Anatomy of Anarchy

Malcolm A. Kline, July 1, 2010

For most of the past half century, Columbia University has provided endless fodder for news outlets such as ours. Indeed, as Accuracy in Academia discovered, the campus left has veto power over not just the curriculum but extracurricular activities as well.

Actually, left-wing student groups have been active at the crown of the Ivy League for about the past century. What changed is the attitude of the administration there: from indulgence to surrender.

From the turn of the last century to the end of World War II, Columbia practiced peaceful coexistence with the Left but did not hesitate to step in to keep the peace. During that time, Nicholas Murray Butler presided over the Morningside Heights campus with a not always invisible hand.

“The aging President of Columbia refused to concede that the ‘right to be heard’ included the right to chant under his window, ‘Castrate Butler! Castrate Butler!’,” the late Ralph deToledano (Class of ’38) remembered in his autobiographical Lament for a Generation. Later a conservative columnist, deToledano was himself very much a man of the Left at the time.

“A small episode, but pertinent in the context since it has lodged in my memory, also had its effect,” deToledano wrote in Lament. “Lionel Trilling was liked as a teacher and respected as a critic,” deToledano wrote in describing a fixture on the Columbia faculty in his undergraduate years.

“But he took no nonsense from the Communists, was known to associate with an occasional anti-Communist, and did not hail Stalin as a latter day prophet....

[Blado]

Nuke it from orbit.

It’s the only way to be sure.