Columbia becomes a status vector almost by force of gravity, regardless of individual intentions: I wasn’t one of the undergraduates making tens of thousands of dollars working in finance each summer, but I did successfully wheedle my way into the once-fascinating lower rungs of the city’s cultural journalism scene (RIP L Magazine, Impose, and New York Press) and had a habit of venturing deep into Bushwick on weeknights. At the time I thought this made me cool, but it really made me a product of Morningside Heights, where everyone harbors dreams of trading up.
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The university has little psychic or spiritual significance beyond itself. It has no Skull and Bones-type secret societies, no final clubs, no recent history of high-profile athletic success. Nobody has time for that crap in New York. Career and student services in general were notably thin 15 years ago, as if the institution wanted you to leave the neighborhood and make your own way as quickly as you possibly could, or else decamp for some other environment you could actually handle. The greatest fictional Columbian of the 21st century, Meadow Soprano, got stuck with a mentally ill roommate, dated an unbearably pretentious film student, and quickly moved off-campus, proof that the show’s producers knew a little something about life there. The greatest non-Alexander Hamilton, real-life alumnus in the school’s history, Barack Obama, almost never talks about the place.
On the other hand, it is very hard to hide the existence of an Ivy League institution in New York City, however quickly its students and alumni move on from it. It’s even harder to acquire and then raze 17 acres of Manhattan, especially when it’s part of an impoverished, historically Black and Hispanic neighborhood where several of the incumbent landowners don’t want to sell to you. Bollinger’s masterpiece as Columbia president, clinched in the years after the Ahmadinejad fiasco, was the construction of a second campus in the Manhattanville section of west Harlem, a dour enclave of Renzo Piano-designed monstrosities built through hardball negotiating tactics and the threat of eminent domain. The estimated price tag for the eventually 6.8 million-square-foot campus was $6.5 billion as of 2019, much of it raised on Bollinger’s watch. Purchase of the land started in 2004, early in Bollinger’s reign. In 1968, the construction of a gym in Morningside Park was enough to set off riots on campus.