Columbia Suffers in Hustling Gotham Setting; Pushes Towards Cosmopolitan Student Body

When you climb out of the IRT subway at the Morningside Heights station, you are flanked on one side by the noisy, dirty Amsterdam area of New York, and on the other by Columbia University, a polyglot jumble of tall buildings and patches of grass, watching indifferently over the bustling metropolitan scene.

Unlike Princeton which is the heart of a small town, unlike Harvard which lies in the middle of a big city yet manages to preserve a definite detachment from it, certainly unlike Cornell and Dartmouth which are tucked away in the semi-wilderness, Columbia can never escape its environment. The world is too much with it.

The Columbia College catalogue calls Morningside Heights "a center of culture and learning, which although in the city, is not part of its rushing life." Unfortunately, this is not completely true. The campus is a crowded one, cluttered with too-tall buildings and temporary shacks that have never been torn down, and interspersed with only occasional splotches of foliage.

Although Columbia is surrounded by a quiet residential neighborhood, the dirt and hustle of Gotham are but a few blocks removed. But, big as it is, New York has never managed to swallow little Columbia, which has only 2,200 men in the College (and over 25,000 in the University).

A New York City location poses certain problems for administrators and students alike. The biggest of these is that of the commuter. Over half of Columbia's students are from New York City; about 800 of these are "carpetbaggers"--men who commute from homes in the metropolitan area. Most of them face subway rides of from one to three hours daily--consuming time that could otherwise be turned to extra curricular or social life.

The 60-odd percent living on campus have a choice of three dormitories--Hartley, Livingston, and John Jay--which house a total of 1,600 men and whose physical appearance more closely resembles a modern apartment-house project than an Ivy League dormitory. As high as ten stories, the Halls are combined residences and student activities center: the fourth floor of John Jay is home of the undergraduate publication. With more than 500 students living in a single hall, the Dean's Office is presented with an almost insoluble parietal rules problem. But the Columbia administration has found the simplest solution--one which makes for a rather dull existence, but a solution nonetheless--women are absolutely forbidden to enter men's dormitories. it would, indeed, require a veritable army of proctors to keep checks on such massive residences.

Columbia extends its "paternalism" into broader field. The college controls the daily newspaper--the "Spectator"--and other extra-curricular organizations. There is, however, a reasonably fair trade: in return for office space and financial assistance from the College, these groups must adhere to a ruling that "the University reserves the right to pass upon the acceptability of the policies and programs of an organization with which the University's name shall be publicly associated."

This ruling, though, is not nearly so severe at is sounds. The Dean's Office will hesitate and consider for a long, long while before it steps in and enforces it. In matters involving the newspaper (which, incidentally is a frequent and rather vigorous opponent of University policy), the administration will exercise a great deal of caution. It realizes that suppression of an editorial policy of the Spectator, no matter how unreasonable the policy may be, would produce "righteously indignant" cry of censorship.

One of the last applications of the ruling came in 1950. A student referendum had demanded that all anti-Negro and anti-Jewish discriminatory clause be removed from the constitutions of Columbia's 16 fraternities. The Dean's Office warned that if any such clause remained in a constitution by 1956, the guilty fraternity would forfeit its right to use the Columbia name, and, incidentally, Columbia facilities. Thus far, only two of the 16 fraternities (whose total enrollment is 640, or over 25 percent of the college), have failed to comply with the 1950 ruling.

Even selection of courses, for the first two years, at any rate, follows the same paternalistic pattern. Here, however, the administration's watchful guidance can be considered a definite boon.

All students registered in Columbia College must study two years of Contemporary Civilization and two years of Humanities. "CC" is conducted on a joint basis with members from the departments of anthropology, economics, government, history, philosophy, and sociology. Professor Justis Buchler, head of the Contemporary Civilization department, refuses to define the course, claiming that it "defies description in a few words; I have written 30,000 words attempting to describe it."

The catalogue, on the other hand, tells students in a mere 18 words that the first year of the course studies major political, economic, and philosophic influences that, have shaped the character of Western civilization, while the second deals with basic problems in contemporary society.

Columbia's Contemporary Civilization course, conceived in 1919, is parent of the modern American craze for "General Education." The "Great Books" and "integrated study" courses have their roots in this 33-year old experiment.

Columbia's admissions office is at present trying to solve a problem of unbalanced geographical distribution. The college does not have nearly so cosmopolitan a student body as most of its Ivy colleagues. While it is not attempting to duplicate the intensive selling and recruiting programs adopted by most of the Ivy League, Columbia would like to do something about its overly-large proportion--90 percent--of students from the "North Atlantic Area." Of this number, some 80 percent are from New York State, the remainder from New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Figures on the distribution of the present freshman class indicate that the administration has already begun correcting the situation. There was a five percent drop in the number admitted from New York City--the figure is now down to 45 percent. The Greater New York area, however, still sends Columbia fourfifths of its students.

Associate Director of Admissions Bernard P. Ireland says that the college seeks to admit an entering class of three equal groups; a third from New York City, a third from the rest of the metropolitan area, and a third from the rest of the nation. This ideal figure will mean a 15 percent decline in entrants from the city and surrounding areas.

Scholarship funds at Columbia are rather limited, for the College has been in a fairly poor financial position for some years. Slightly over 7 percent of the students--a far cry from the 25-30 percent ratio at Harvard. Yale, and Princeton--are receiving scholarship funds. Of the $136,000 awarded this year, the bulk of the scholarship money comes from the Ford Foundation, while Nationals and Pulitzers provide other funds.

Lack of adequate scholarship funds, combined with Columbia's high basic costs, gives the Bureau of Student Placement a tremendous volume of business. Tuition last year took a jump up to $790, while room, beard, and miscellancous items cost an estimated $1100.

The Bureau figures that at least 65 percent of the students at Columbia College are partially selfsupporting. More than one-fourth of the College is registered with the Bureau, whose registrants college and university piled up a half-a-million dollars in on-campus jobs, such as "board jobs," last year. Total estimated earnings for students during paritime work amounted to two million dollars.

Lacking Ivy atmosphere. Columbia tries, in a minor sort of way, to overcome the physical deficit with "tradition." Thus members of the freshman class are required to wear light blue beauies, until the freshman-sophomore rush. In this latter event the freshmen attempt to fight through sophomores who are defending a greased pole, and capture a dummy perched stop the pole.

Only once did the sophomore class born in defeat in this event. The class of '61 was the first and, to date, the last to rescue the dummy; Spectator reports that is was a class consisting mainly of World War 11 yeterans.

Another tradition involves the kidnapping of class leaders, which at times can have five consequences. Take last year for example, when two freshmen were whisked off to Alexandria, Virginia.

Columbia has a sort of counterpart to Radcliffe in Barnard College. Unlike Radcliffe, however, it maintains a separate faculty and a pretty thorough independence from its big brother. Barnard was named in honor of Columbia President Frederick A. P. Barnard, who, until his death in 1889, unsuccessfuly attempted to introduce coeducation or "joint instruction."

When in 1900, Barnard College was opened, it was declared the undergraduate college for women of Columbia University.

Columbia has consistently maintained a reputation for academic excellence. Unfortunately, it is set in big New York, whose noise and squalor are only partially compensated for by cultural wealth. But even if Columbia misses the Ivy atmosphere, it certainly is not lacking the Ivy intelelct