As a private institution, the legal power of the trustees over Columbia University is nearly absolute. In practice, this power is sometimes mitigated by tradition and public opinion. At least twice before in the last 100 years, students and faculty at Columbia have voiced their concerns...

1917:

"I have been driven to the conclusion that the University is really under the control of a small and active group of Trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. Their conduct betrays a profound misconception of the true function of a university in the advancement of learning."
    -- Charles A. Beard, upon his resignation from Columbia in October, 1917, in protest over the dismissal of two colleagues, Professors Cattell and Dana, for having publicly opposed the entry of the U.S. into World War I.
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"University trustees are generally men of affairs, and as men of affairs they naturally tend to hold the same attitude towards the university that they do to the other institutions -- the churches and railroads and corporations -- they may direct.... That they tend so often to act as if they were a mere board of directors of a private corporation gives rise to the endless suspicion that they consult their own interests and the interests of the donors of the vested wealth they represent.... Nor has democracy been achieved by the cautious admission, in recent years, of alumni trustees, as in the case of Columbia, or, as in the case of Harvard and Yale, by the substitution of alumni for the former state officials. Self-perpetuating boards will always propagate their own kind, and even if alumni trustees were ever inclined to be anything but docile, their minority representation would always be ineffective for democracy.
    -- Randolph Bourne, "Those Columbia Trustees,"
    New Republic, October 20, 1917.

1968:

"What other means were there, then, to cut through the illegitimate basis of power than to seize the university? And this seizure of property cut through to the raw nerve of the university. Even this might have been mediated but for the liberated documents in Grayson Kirk's office which exposed the truth! Here were the secrets! Here was what really went on. The documents undercut all the needs for secrecy justified in the name of national interest. What it was all about was the scramble for money, the fight for markets to make money; what it was all about was manipulation of markets and stock rigging and money plays on the way to power. That the whole defense establishment in all of its manifestations was tied in with corporate interests, tied in with real estate speculation, tied together by contacts, and that the whole process of market escalation was furthered by a series of men on the make who made the decisions that they clothed in the patriotic rhetoric of national security and sanctification of the cold and hot war fight to free the enslaved world. All this was covered by a sanctified university facade which, to the financial detriment of students and faculty, permitted high level robbing to go on without let or hinderance.

"The meaning of this seizure of property and the codes of behavior in property protection and accumulation was perceived all too clearly by the administration, especially the crude hard liners who know their operations were the shadiest; realizing they had the most to lose most immediately, the rhetoric gave way to a club. A struggle for survival was mounted by the students and the community as the administration was aided by the overwhelming and ponderous control of almost all the media; history was rewritten as it happened. And, as we have pointed out, it was no coincidence that trustees included Sulzberger of the Times and Paley of CBS."

    -- North American Congress on Latin America, Who Rules Columbia? -- Original 1968 Strike Edition (New York: NACLA, 1970), p. 34. (Five pages of this 40-page publication are available online under its section title, "Columbia and the U.S. Intelligence Community.")
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"By its final days the revolt enjoyed both wide and deep support among the students and junior faculty and in lesser degree among the senior professors. The grievances of the rebels were felt equally by a still larger number, probably a majority, of the students. The trauma of the violence that followed police intervention intensified emotions but support for the demonstrators rested upon broad discontent and widespread sympathy for their position. The record contains ample proof of this conclusion."
    -- The Cox Commission Report, Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968. (New York, Vintage Books, 1968), p. 190.

A search in NameBase for "Columbia University" provides citations and offers clues for further research. Clicking on a title produces an annotation that describes the source, and another click generates a name index of that source. You can also use the social network diagram to get a list of other names mentioned on the same pages that CU is mentioned. But this is as far as NameBase can take you by searching for CU. If something looks promising, you have to find the source in the library and read the listed page numbers, in order to find out why CU was mentioned.


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
pages cited this search: 21

Show a social network diagram for this name


Although most of these references relate to our interest in the power behind CU, they are primarily of historical interest. No doubt there are many articles or books about CU that also cover the historical record, but which are not indexed in NameBase. That's because NameBase is somewhat partial to obscure items that tend to be neglected by mainstream sources. The truth is probably out there, but our experience is that you'll need a shovel to find it.

For example, Carroll Quigley mentions in passing that J.P. Morgan and Company had considerable power at Columbia during the first half of the century. Archibald Cox did a decent liberal analysis of the demonstrations at Columbia in 1968, but according to Who Rules Columbia?, the ground rules for the Commission required that they ignore all the documents liberated from Grayson Kirk's office. The Lies Of Our Times article is about another real estate grab by CU, and how New York City's newspapers defer to CU's spin because of the power and connections of the CU administration.

The book by Kathryn Olmsted mentions that the CU trustees were upset by the Pulitzer advisory board in the mid-1970s, because this board had recently shown interest in journalistic independence and investigative reporting. After the trustees publicly rebuked the board, the prize was awarded to journalists who covered relatively noncontroversial issues. In his book, Lawrence Soley suggests that CU's interest in biospherics may be related to the $20 million that Edward P. Bass, the moneybags behind Biosphere 2, gave to Yale University in 1990 for a dubious "Institute for Biospheric Studies." Soley also tells how Columbia's journalism school put a PR man on its faculty in exchange for a $1.8 million donation.

All of this is valuable background; now we have a sense of what CU might be about. At least we know what to look for. But we still haven't used NameBase to drill down into the available data to answer our original question, "Who's behind Columbia University?" We want a snapshot for year 2000, not anecdotes from the 1900s...

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