Ever wonder why there was a sleeper cell of pro-Hamas Columbia students ready to bang drums, pitch tents and smash windows after the attacks of October 7? Because the university consciously stacked its classes full of activists.
Elite colleges have long combed their enormous pool of applicants for social justice warriors passionate about community activism.
That admissions strategy backfired spectacularly when kids decided to turn their ire on the university itself in the name of the Palestinians. The result has been reputational damage and crippling federal budget cuts.
“Columbia essentially did this to themselves,” college admissions expert Christopher Rim told The Post. “Students involved in a lot of social justice-type activism were really sought after in the past at Columbia.”
A preference for lefty activists is evident even in the Ivy League school’s application essay questions.
One essay prompt asks students to discuss a “perspective, viewpoint or lived experience” that has “shaped the way [they] would learn from and contribute to Columbia’s diverse and collaborative community.”
Another question probes prospective students’ “ability to navigate through adversity” and asks them to “describe a barrier or obstacle [they] have faced.”
That’s a little rich, considering that 36% of Columbia students come from families in the top 10% of income earners, 62% come from the top 20% — and just 5% hail from the bottom 20%.
“That being one of five questions for students to pick from is pretty telling,” said Rim, founder and CEO of Command Education. “I don’t think a lot of students can really answer this if they’re wealthy and went to a private school. A lot of them don’t have real adversity.”
Columbia’s most on-the-nose case study is encampment firebrand Khymani James, who led melodramatic press conferences on behalf of the school’s pro-Palestinian tent city last spring.
James, who uses he/she/they pronouns, was suspended after a video emerged of him saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” during a disciplinary hearing with university officials. But his hateful rhetoric hardly came out of the blue.
Already an outspoken activist on the Boston School Committee as a high schooler, James told the committee, “I, too, hate white people.” As a teen, James was profiled by several local news outlets for his activism, perpetually wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt for photoshoots.
“From my experience, Columbia cherry-picked students who were really, really, really into social justice activism,” Rim said. “They thought they would add value to the community, but actually it totally backfired.”
This isn’t limited to Columbia. Who can forget when Stanford admitted a student whose essay consisted of the phrase #BlackLivesMatter written 100 times over?
Having gone to the Lawrenceville School, a prep school and Ivy League factory in New Jersey, I saw how high schoolers were transformed into “community activists.”
In celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day during my freshman year, the school hauled us in for mandatory workshops. We could choose from topics like “Bruce Lee and Asian Masculinities,” “Everyday Sexism,” “Unpacking White Privilege” and a session on black liberation theology called “The Black Jesus.”
Students — who were paying $80,000 in tuition — could also take part in a “Poverty Simulation.”
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the school ensured we all had access to buses to attend protests in Washington, DC. No such transport was provided for Trump rallies.
Many Columbia students come from similar private schools that inculcate the same message: Become a social justice activist ASAP to make yourself stand out. The cause du jour just happens to be the Palestinians.
As Avi Friedman, a Columbia professor who stepped down over antisemitism, told The Post of last spring’s protests: “If you looked at the signs around the encampment, there were more things there that were anti-America — anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, the West is bad, everybody’s racist — than there were about Israel and Gaza.”
He recalled asking a student at the encampment why she was there.
