Columbia might screw up a lot in its planning and decision making, but it does not seem to be doing anything wrong by picking Manhattanville as a place to expand.

Also: Columbia is not a business! Columbia is a non-profit institution. Just because it is a ‘private’ school doesn’t mean that it is a for-profit institution. When Columbia tries to raise money, it does so in order to use that money to fund academic research and to support students. There aren’t shareholders who will make millions of dollars if our endowment doubles in the next 10 years.

It seems to me that unless some evidence can be provided that making these changes will lower the number of bias incidents, these issues should be treated as distinct.

I understand that some people find it very distressing when people of their ethnicity or faith are subject to a bias incident/hate crime in their university. I think I might feel the some way if placed in a similar situation. I also understand that when people feel very distressed by something like this, they often have a desire to take action and try to prevent these events happening in the future. However, it only makes sense to ‘take action’ if what you’re doing will have some impact in preventing bias incidents in the future. Yet no evidence has been provided that the actions that the concerned people are taking will have an impact on preventing bias incidents. To draw a familiar analogy, lots of people felt that after 9-11, the US had to take action in order to prevent terrorist attacks. Many people justified the Iraq War on the grounds that invading Iraq would help to prevent terrorism. (This was not the only justification people gave for going to war, but it was a commonly discussed justification). Yet evidence was not provided that invading Iraq would prevent events like 9-11 happening in the future.

The fact is that the people calling a eurocentric core the root cause, or at least a reinforcement of latent racism are nuts. Then again so are the people who are so adamantly upset by those calls. Guess what, you ARE mind-blowingly ignorant and closed-minded. You’re perfectly happy ignoring the fact that the world as it is today was largely shaped by the actions of european imperial powers imposing their wills across the globe. But hey, that’s the past right, why can’t we just forget about it and move on?

This was pointed out earlier in another post somewhere- the Upper west side has voted to restrict building heights because people got pissed off about the luxury condo towers built on 100th street and broadway. Do they realize that people willing to pay higher rents will be moving into the neighborhood anyway? And that by restricting developement, it’s actually going to increase the rate at which rents increase because now the housing stock is locked in at a low fixed number of units? Good job.

Even bringing the expansion into the issue of racsim on campus makes no sense.

I’m glad the only people who take these “teach-ins” seriously are themselves.

this is about a huge INSTITUTION (almost a corperation) steamrolling through a neighborhood of people. columbia has had so many under the table dealings with the mayor and the governer, and it’s this “old boys,” heavy-handed approach that is isolating the people in the neighborhood.