I was at columbia u in the 70’s and 80’s. My view of columbia was that its student body was mostly wasp until 1900 or so. then the student body became increasingly diverse but the wasp culture remained dominant until about the 1960’s when the culture there became liberal jewish. (but jews were never dominant in numbers—just culture.)I have not been there in a couple decades but my guess is that because of the increasing anti semitism there —the dominant culture at columbia u has become something else like woke which just mashes down everybody.
My understanding of Berkeley was that it was/is the columbia u on the west coast.
How would you characterize the cultural changes at berkeley during the 20th century. does columbia’s history match berkeley or would you say something else happened.
In the 1980’s Berkely made an bit of a comeback to serious academic pursuits due to the Silicone Valley boom. The radicals were marginalized a bit by the students who just wanted to get a great education and make a ton of money in the Tech Boom.
Columbia had no such dynamics and just kept drifting Left, if that were possible.
The thing that shocked me was the rapid rise of Islamic radicalism, probably due to Yasser Arafat PLO partisans getting into the school. Same thing happened at McGill up in Canada except worse. This was like mid 1990s and it was the first time I became aware that Islamic radicals were becoming a thing in the US.
Strangely, seemed the were closely aligned with non practicing, atheistic Jews in the Radical Left community.