'Why Aren't They Studying?'
The Columbia Protestors Are Blinded By The Privilege Of Being An Ivy League Student
I was in college when the Iraq War broke out.
In the winter of 2003, I was a sophomore at Hofstra University on Long Island, about 20 miles east of Columbia University where this week’s pro-Palestine protests took place. I found myself so called to try to stop what felt like a runaway freight train into Iraq that everything I had to do – go to class, see a movie, even DJ a jazz show at my college radio station – seemed frivolous and insulting. I joined a group of other anti-war activists on campus to plan a “strike” as the war grew increasingly closer to happening. We would all walk out of class and refuse to go back to class or operate normally until the war stopped.
Many were open to it, but the war was relatively popular and many students called me "anti-American” and "a terrorist lover.” None of that really bothered me, but there was one person who really got into my head. I stopped a fellow student, a black kid who told me he grew up in public housing project in Upper Manhattan. I asked him to join the strike and he declined. He stared directly into the eyes and said “No, I have a paper due and midterms to study for.”
I tried explaining why stopping this war was far more important and he cut me off.
“No one is going to listen to us,” he said. “The war will happen or won’t regardless of what we say. My mom worked three jobs to pay for my SAT courses to get me here, I owe it to her to get my ass to the library instead."
I didn’t really think about what he said at the time. Yesterday, when someone asked on social media why the suspended students at Columbia weren’t studying, and I saw a few Columbia students who were involved in the protest explain that it was disrupting their ability to get to class, it reminded me of that moment over 20 years ago.
It also reminded me that the Spring 2003 semester, when I spent much of my time out protesting the Iraq War, was also the semester I got a 2.3 GPA. I barely attended class and ended up on academic probation and having to change my major from Broadcast Journalism to Political Science because the School of Communication essentially suspended me for bad academic performance.
Was it worth it? At the time, I thought so, but looking back now? No way. The war happened anyway, lasted almost a decade, and my bad academic performance stood in the way of my going to graduate school and almost certainly negatively impacted my long-term career prospects. The kid who told me he’d rather be in the library had it right. The only reason I felt it was worth it back then was because it made me feel good to protest the war. It was about self-satisfaction and a need for attention, and it came at a price. Nothing was achieved except my own 20-year-old ego was stroked, and maybe I pissed off my Republican grandmother in the process.
"Why aren't these people studying?"
The Columbia students who staged this protest this week aren’t in class and they aren’t studying because they are largely privileged rich kids who have never done a hard day's work in their lives and are at Columbia with the intention of never having to.
The problem with Ivy Leagues and other “elite” higher education institutions is they end up admitting students who had always expected to go there and don't appreciate the privilege of being there. This disincentivizes them from the type of hard academic work and dedication that would take priority over pointless virtue signaling.
The students who worked their asses off to get to schools like Columbia and wake up every day thankful and in amazement that they made it there are busy working toward their degree and career advancement, not pitching tents on the quad and carrying around signs for Instagram likes.
This is also why *actual* working class voters in the country not only don't see themselves as allies of progressives, but openly disdain them. Right now there are millions of working class people who would've given a limb to go to Columbia and they are watching these students blow their chance over Gaza. The protests might have some support if it was about, say, labor rights or increasing support for childcare or schools or hospitals in rural areas, but they aren’t. These students are blowing up a $65,000 a year education for a war no American is fighting over 5,000 miles away in a country where a significant portion of the population hates us.
It's a slap in the face of every working class high school student from whom Columbia was never an option for him or her no matter how hard they worked. It’s a slap in the face of every teenager who wasn’t given a chance because those who were legacies and whose families can afford the extra tutoring, big endowment checks and time for extracurricular activists got a leg up, and they are now making spectacles of themselves in front of a global audience. It’s a slap in the face of the students who would put in the work and the time and the dedication to improve their education and career prospects, and save the theatrics for more pressing and immediate issues and not for what TikTok tells them is the latest cause you must give your whole self to or be labeled a bad person forever.
The problem is the people who donate money to these schools are often the parents of the kids protesting.
I am quite sympathetic to the points made in this post. I was in student government at a fancy college, looked on mid 80s protests at that time with some practical detachment - what is expected of student government at this time, etc - and was not a true believer but still participated.
I still think the key question - which I still ask and is still open - is what is the value of protests/disruptions/stopping traffic/other? I am naturally not very sympathetic to those kinds of actions, but something prevents me from totally dismissing them as meaningless.
It’s easy to dismiss the irresponsibility of the actors and their privilege and all that, but I do think positive outcomes result from protests. It’s just that it’s a messy, random, non-productive process that occasionally - sometimes accidentally - has a positive impact, I think.
It’s always going to be hit or miss - mostly miss. But probably better to have it than not.