Member-only story
To the Halls That Raised Me
A story of awakening, a letter of gratitude
I don’t think much about college anymore. It’s all passed into a kind of smudge I relegate to the deep past, along with all the other relics I cringe away from now: Hot Topic, MySpace, high school hipster irony. To say that I didn’t much enjoy college would be an understatement; I was downright suicidal. But I made it through, skipped the graduation ceremony and walked onwards into the rest of my life, never to touch Barnard or Columbia blue again.
But I keep seeing pictures of my campus in the news: the sturdy columns of Butler Library, etched with the names of famous dead thinkers the Western canon has deemed the most important ones, and I feel an unexpected swell of gratitude. There, in that stately concrete, is the palpable image of The Institution, and through those doors have passed thousands of people who’ve made it their lives’ work to tear the stagnant Institution down.
I joke that Columbia students can only go one of two ways: 90% will go on to work for Goldman Sachs; 10% will end up crazy radicals. And looking back at the eleven years since I left the school behind, I find I must give Columbia credit. Without those sons of Knickerbocker and Bold Beautiful Barnard women, I don’t know if I would’ve ended up in that 10%.
