WOKE BILL COMES DUE: Columbia Agonistes.

Words scarcely express what relief it was to finally escape Columbia University to turn whistleblower early last year. For the previous eleven years, across a range of prestigious schools, I was a reporter and PR flack charged with making people look good whether they deserved it or not, and oftentimes they didn’t. No doubt I promoted a bunch of dazzlingly impressive minds, but I also helped cover up for a lot of sloppy and misleading scholarship and no small amount of outright prejudice.

Today I stand especially relieved to have jumped ship ahead of Columbia’s calamitous past academic year, by far the most tumultuous and consequential in the university’s history since the notorious riots of 1968. It’s been “an even bigger sh1t show than Mattress Girl,” as I quipped on Twitter. Blow by blow, humiliation by humiliation, my heart has gone out to all of my former colleagues in the impossible position of trying to preserve Columbia’s reputation when it so manifestly deserves most of the embarrassing headlines and withering criticism.

Get woke, go broke.