THE IVY EXILE: Columbia’s Sweet Surrender. “Before the protests of the past few years, I still would’ve placed Columbia somewhat ahead of the rest of the Ivy League in terms of positive name recognition and perception of prestige, but now the brass at Low Library has to face the reality of free-fall where, Ivy League or not, Columbia has likely dropped well out of the top ten, and may now sit somewhat behind other institutions that it had never been forced to quite consider peers: Tufts, Duke, Hopkins, Chicago, Northwestern, and (egads!) maybe even some of the flagship state schools. . . . While I do have some significant qualms about some of the Trump administration’s assault on elite higher education (I hated to see funding disrupted for the incredible scientific research conducted by brilliant scholars I used to cover at Columbia Engineering, for instance), Columbia eminently deserves a reckoning, good and hard. The appalling antisemitism so inescapable over the past few years is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the fashionable prejudices Columbia went out of its way to promote and inculcate over the past fifteen to twenty years. So I was disappointed to see Columbia wriggle out of substantive accountability with a pittance of a fine of merely $221 million, pocket change for an institution with a near-$15 billion endowment.”

But: “Columbia’s drastic decline in social status at last became a sort of advantage: the university has become too marginal to matter as much as it once did. Humbling Harvard is the real prize, and slapping Columbia around but a minor sideshow. … Can Columbia lick its wounds and work back to its former renown? I doubt it. One 1968 was bad enough, and the antics of the past few years have perhaps permanently persuaded much of the country that Columbia is but a middling Oberlin on the Hudson. . . . I expect it will always remain the Ivy with an asterisk, the place that managed to self-abuse itself from near the top of the Ivy League heap to its rock bottom. Low Library has made its bed, a lousy and flea-bitten one, and it will be gratifying to see Columbia have to sleep in it.”