Morningside Hates

Columbia University was once my dream school and has since become my nightmare.

By Michael Oren

I was sixteen years old and had just read Making It by Norman Podhoretz, who passed away at age 95 last month. His memoir was about a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who went to Columbia and became a major intellectual figure. I was a young poet, raised on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom graduated from Columbia, and Kenneth Koch, who taught there. All my teenage heroes, from Herman Wouk to Richard Rodgers to Art Garfunkel, were Columbia grads. At sixteen, at a time when most of my peers were fixed on the next football game or the imminent senior prom, I knew exactly where I wanted to go to college.

There was only one problem: how would I ever get in?

Precocious, pipe-smoking, convinced I was destined for literary fame, I was also a mediocre student, dismal at math and abysmal at standardized tests. Dyslexic before anyone really knew what that meant, I couldn’t accurately fill out the answer slots on the SATs, and so scored lower than someone who’d merely signed his name. And yet, Columbia was my dream, and I’d be damned before forfeiting it.

My strategy was to take a bus each week from my Northern New Jersey town to the Upper West Side of Manhattan and then to Morningside Heights. There, I simply wandered the red brick paths through college dorms with their stately names—John Jay, Livingston, Hartley—and gawked at the majestic libraries, Butler and Low. The statue of Alma Mater could have made me a pagan.

Eventually, I’d get up the guts to march into Hamilton Hall, home to Columbia’s admissions office. There, I’d buttonhole some poor officer and show him the poems I’d published and then tell him about the short film I’d made that won first place in the PBS Young Filmmaker Festival. I’d swear that the SAT scores were a fluke and my GPA a sign of progress.

I told them I absolutely had to get accepted to Columbia. The college would someday be proud.

I was lucky. The university had scarcely recovered from the anti-war riots of 1968 and 1970, and from the twice-occupation of Hamilton Hall and the president’s office. Mark Rudd was nationally notorious. Many parents, including mine, didn’t want to send their kids to such a seditious place. Applications dwindled and admission standards plummeted, but not so low as to ensure my entrance.

But those weekly junkets proved persuasive. The admissions office made the mistake—don’t all college freshmen feel that way?—of admitting me. And Columbia exceeded my fantasies.

The college was still all-male then, with women consigned to Barnard across Broadway, and studying there was like learning in a secular yeshiva. The classes were tiny—smoking and drinking were permitted—and the curriculum core. For two years, every undergrad read the classics, gained an appreciation of music and art, and a deep understanding of the Declaration of Independence. A rival with the University of Chicago as America’s most rigorous university, this was no party school. I worked, not proverbially, my butt off.

But outside studying, campus life was a thrill. I wrote and produced plays, gave poetry readings, edited the yearbook and served as a news editor at Columbia TV and WKCR, Columbia’s storied radio station. I belonged, however improbably, to a fraternity specializing in jazz and literature. There were disappointments, of course, even heartache. There were the professors who assured me I’d never make it as a writer, the varsity crew I rowed on, which failed to win a single race. Still, the four years I spent there—a young man’s idea of a long time—will remain with me always as a time of ineffable stimulation, self-discovery, and magic.

I’d go on to get an MA at Columbia, in international affairs at what is now known as SIPA, and then on for another MA and Ph.D. in Middle East Studies at Princeton. Weirdly, perhaps, the teen poet had decided not to study English literature and the hopeless dyslexic had become an aspiring scholar. Columbia could do that for you. But so could Israel.

True, I’d always wanted to be a writer but, with at least equal determination, I longed to be an Israeli. In high school, I joined Jewish and Zionist youth movements, worked all year shoveling snow and cutting lawns to save enough money to travel to Israel each summer and work on a kibbutz for free. At eighteen, my big decision was not whether to attend Columbia, but whether to put off college altogether for four years and enlist in the IDF. In the end, I opted for college—Columbia, I feared, could change its mind—and only later became a Lone Soldier.

As vibrant as my artistic and athletic life was on campus, my Zionist activities were more fulfilling still. I met classmates who went on to make aliyah and serve the state as ambassadors, prominent journalists, editors, and security officials. It was not an easy time to be an Israel supporter. The country was still reeling from the Yom Kippur War while a pistol-packing Yasser Arafat received a standing ovation in the UN General Assembly. Terrorist attacks—Lod, Ma’alot, Kiryat Shmona—became almost commonplace. And yet, the campus was free of any trace of anti-Zionism. My Israel-bound friends and I studied Arabic and Middle East history alongside Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians, without any discord, with professors who never once brought politics into the classroom.

All that changed in the following decades. The student rebels of the late Sixties and early Seventies who had remained on campus joined the faculty and instilled their radical ideas into generations of undergraduates. Edward Said, the university’s leading English literary critic with whom I often shared a Hamilton Hall elevator, published Orientalism, an incalculably influential book which portrayed Israel as the illegitimate offspring of Western imperialism. Massive funding from Qatar and other Middle Eastern states supportive of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood further fortified this hatred. In the minds of myriad students, Israel became a white settler state, racist and rootless and slated for destruction.

Already, at the beginning of this century, Columbia students such as Bari Weiss and David Feith were protesting the university’s pro-Palestinian bias, and even produced a documentary about it, Columbia Unbecoming. It focused on the Middle East Studies department and professors such as Joseph Massad who openly praised terror. The situation had hardly improved ten years later, when my son was an undergraduate. Jewish students generally, and pro-Israel students in particular, felt increasingly unwelcome and unsafe.

Then came October 7. The establishment of massive campus encampments, the chants of “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” the administration’s abject failure to enforce its own rules and protect Jewish students leading to Columbia’s rabbi advising them to avoid campus entirely—all were shocking but hardly surprising. Columbia had long been building up to this moment, its students prepped and organized for action. Though the local chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine would later be accused of—and sued for—knowing about the Hamas onslaught in advance, Columbia was fully primed to erupt into an anti-Zionist and antisemitic frenzy.

The images, for me, were devastating. Every photo of the encampments included a view of the John Jay Hall balcony from which I once watched snow silently coating South Lawn. Alongside a red-paint splattered Alma Mater was the bench where I waited—forlornly—for my first college love and the Low Library steps where I ate egg salad sandwiches and read Nietzsche. There was the sundial that served as a meeting place for friends and crew buddies hideously transformed into an epicenter of Jew-hatred and Hamilton Hall, formerly home to a scintillating world of ideas, occupied by masked, murderous thugs. While seeking to deny Israel any future, the protesters had stolen and sullied my past.

A few months into the war, I visited the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life to meet pro-Israel stalwarts. It was like entering a war room. The students looked stressed, embittered at their university’s failure to stand up for them, and shorn of a single favorable word about Columbia. When asked if they’d made a mistake by coming there, most answered unreservedly “yes.” And yet, they were to a person unbroken and determined to continue the fight. They and the pro-Israel activists I met—Eden Yadegar, Elisha Baker, and others—reminded me of the young IDF paratroopers I had recently briefed before they once again slogged into Gaza. These students, too, were soldiers, I thought, defending our people and state.

More actively, I joined my freshman roommate and former CBS news executive, David Friend, and a group of Jewish alumni in writing articles and interviewing about the travesties occurring on Morningside Heights. Special opprobrium was reserved for President Minouche Shafik and her refusal to apply Columbia’s own laws regarding campus protests. Minouche, following the fall of her counterparts at Harvard and Penn, would soon resign, but the university still seethed with pro-Hamas agitation. Not until last year, after President Trump’s crackdown on antisemitism at Columbia, and after the radical demonstrators tired of Palestine and turned to the next cause célèbre—immigration—did the campus appear to stabilize.

Within the classroom, though, little if anything changed. Explaining the recent mass protests by Iranians against the Ayatollahs’ regime, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, blamed the “nefarious” Mossad seeking to “distract attention from the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the continued theft of Palestinian territories on the West Bank.” Not surprisingly, not a single student stood up on South Lawn to protest the massacre of thousands of innocent Iranians by their own government.

Still, the questions remain: Is it too late? Is Columbia redeemable? Just this week, the university appointed a new president—its fourth in three years—Jennifer Mnookin. Jewish, the daughter of a Harvard law professor who has written about liberal Jewish issues, Mnookin formerly served as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin where she ordered the dispersing of anti-Israel encampments by police. “This is an inherent risk in an open encampment on our campus in the middle of our city,” she said. “We have seen these situations occurring elsewhere, including…at Columbia.” While upholding the protestors’ First Amendment rights, Mnookin opposed its abuse by radicals. “How would we respond if a neo-Nazi group…made similar use of campus land?” Will Columbia’s new president bring the same concern for Jewish student safety and sensibility, and opposition to anti-Zionist agitation, to Morningside Heights?

Many Jewish parents have asked me whether they should send their children to a school which, for all its prestige and academic reputation, will refrain from protecting them from prejudice. I usually assure them that their kids will no doubt receive a fine Columbia education but that, in the course of getting it, they may well have to fight. The alternative is to enroll them in some no less excellent school in Florida or Texas. Their campuses, far from New York’s clamor and grime, are sunlit, salubrious, and Jew-friendly.

Inside me, though, I’m unwilling to let go. The memories are too vivid, the gratitude still deep. For me, Columbia will always be the place where I learned not only why we must read the timeless books but how to engage them in discourse. I learned about excellence, about scholarship, and about friendship. From atop Morningside Heights, I glimpsed the world as it could have been back then, and which I—like that starry-eyed undergrad of the past—persist in believing still might become.