Butler, Low, Lerner, Hamilton, John Jay: Columbia's five most prominent buildings are all named after Republicans and their historical predecessors, the Federalists. While few would dare make a connection between the American right wing and Columbia, their histories are intertwined. Consider that Columbia has educated such illustrious conservatives as Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Pat Buchanan, and a bevy of scholars, senators, governors, and congressmen. Only 58 years ago, a Republican five-star general proudly assumed his role as University president. Yet today ROTC is banned from campus and veterans are harassed. Times have indeed changed.
Our notorious yet well-deserved moniker as a bastion of radicalism overshadows this grand and admittedly unexpected tradition. Since a generation of draft dodgers became academics (their one legal recourse), their influence has long since restyled the status quo. The conservative voice, that which transcends mere political affiliations, has been suppressed and undermined. An institution fraught with contradictions, fashionable progressivism, and political correctness runs in direct opposition to the founding principles so beautifully carved on Butler's facade: Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian belief, and classical thought.
So long as students, faculty, and administrators increasingly reject conservative scholarship as mere partisanship, they deny the value of the metaphysical and epistemological considerations that underlie conservative thought. Rare is the Core professor who correctly (and publicly) attributes canonical authors Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Smith, Hamilton, Jay, and Mill as the collective foundation of the modern conservative movement. Without fail, it is Burke-and Burke alone-who is presented as the be-all and end-all of conservatism. Inexorably, when presented as such, the movement as a whole appears scant and detached.
Actually, I must apologize for the inclusion of Hamilton and Jay. In recent years, the Federalist Papers, coauthored by these great Columbia alumni, have been downgraded or entirely removed from the Columbia canon. In their place, texts such as "Radicallesbians" and "Black Feminist Statement" now dominate a formerly traditional and classics-based curriculum. Whereas the majority of Columbians will graduate with the ability to distinguish the three waves of feminism, few can properly identify both the origins and principles of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism that, when combined, are adopted, practiced, and promulgated by a vast number of Americans. Hayek, Lewis, Mises, Vogelin, Rand, Kirk, and Eliot are apparently less representative of American civilization than neo-Marxist feminists.
And, so, I speak to the great number of my young peers who will soon find themselves in a crisis of conscience. Like all Columbians of the past 30 years, two paths will appear before you: either you go the way of the majority or struggle to maintain some degree of autonomy. Your progressive peers do not face such concerns. They enter Columbia and find only immediate affirmation by way of professors with prestigious awards and titles repeating that same litany of opinions. Because they have degrees, of course, they must be right! Progressives, like a great number of moderates, accept this disingenuous and flawed logic and take a noticeable step left.
For that minority who retain their values, college becomes a struggle-a legitimate intellectual challenge and not mere regurgitation. At times you will sense, in the words of Rand, that it is an "assault on your mind." Rand goes on to say, "What [you] feel towards the school will range from mistrust to resentment-intertwined with a sense of exhaustion and excruciating boredom." Extreme? Possibly, but withhold comments until you have listened to a professor, in all seriousness, call the 1990s a "conspiracy" by "the rich" to disenfranchise the poor with material goods, or refer to America as an imperialist "Homeland Security State." It is the conservative, with every fundamental tenet of his beliefs challenged and successfully defended, who leaves campus truly prepared for the real world.
Undoubtedly, it will often feel as if you alone are part of this struggle. But, rest assured, there are others. They include Columbians of generations past and some of your peers today. They are the silent majority who respect the institution for what it stands for, and not, as some would have it, for an empty name and a blank canvas to be remade with each passing movement and educational experiment.
There is little I may offer by way of immediate solutions, however vocal and outspoken I might be. When I find myself questioning my own will, I turn to those forgotten Columbians and take solace. It was Whittaker Chambers, our very own Communist-turned-conservative, who taught his young family to take only the path of trials, to preserve their character and spirit at any cost. "If I have led you aright," he wrote, "I will have brought you to Golgotha-the place of skulls. For when you understand what you see, you will no longer be children."