Robert Paul Wolff is an old and wise philosopher who taught at Columbia until 1971. He’s sort of back this year, commuting 500 miles from North Carolina every Tuesday to teach SOCI GU4600, Mystifications of Social Reality. Staff Writer Andrew Wang went to office hours to get smarter.

If Ethics is fiction, it therefore follows that all of CC is.

Do you remember 1968? Robert Paul Wolff remembers.

Back then, the Core Curriculum was younger than Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia cost $1900 to attend—$100 less than Harvard—and Buy/Sell was a farmer’s market.

More people did the reading back then, and Robert Paul Wolff was one of them. A professor of philosophy at Columbia, his life had been arguably more interesting prior to his hiring. Wolff began at Harvard at age 16, and by age 20, as a freshly-minted graduate in mathematics, he found himself in the fabled English manor of Bertrand Russell for tea. Russell had wanted information from the logic wunderkind from Harvard. Things went south, however, when Wolff replied, “Actually, I’ve been reading Kant’s Ethics lately,” to which Russell snapped back, “So you enjoy reading fiction, do you?” Office hours were do or die, and our dear Mr. Wolff did not do.

But of course, we all remember 1968.

Fifty years ago, revolutionary student protests at Columbia rocked the university and the world. Columbia’s affiliations with weapons research think tanks led to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Black students led protests against the school’s discriminatory practice of constructing a segregated gym (“Gym Crow”) in Morningside Park.

While many students on campus today commemorate the revolutionary fervor of 1968, Wolff argues that appearance does not a reality make.

“Here is the joke. Everybody in 1968 thought the world was coming to an end at Columbia—people were really traumatized. Students were destroying the university.”

Indeed, the Columbia administration of 1968 seemed to have taken this view. After all, they did call the police on students. Wolff, however, does not end the story there:

“The very next year, it turned out that the university was in terrible shape, and it had nothing to do with the students. As it turns out, the board of trustees—a bunch of New York City bureaucrats—had been badly mismanaging the endowment. It took the university about 20 years to get back into financial shape.”

Wolff’s account of the post-1968 Columbia also counters the popular story that Columbia suffered because Manhattan did. As that one goes, New York was run by the mafia, and it wasn’t until Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the streets that Columbia could reemerge as a great university.

But this, according to Wolff, is incorrect.

“Columbia’s finances were the real crisis. The ‘uprising’ was just a flash in the pan. The real problem was that the university was going broke because the trustees were mishandling the endowment.”

Perhaps this story has a lesson: that, like the student protesters of 1968, our graduate workers are not the harbingers of Columbia’s apocalypse. Maybe they do not take to the streets to take to the streets, but to negotiate for love and understanding (in the form of contracts). Maybe the future of Columbia rests not on the do or die, but the everyday. Like Bertrand Russel would say of Kant, poor spending and finger-pointing is fiction.

But I had another question on my mind this time.

“Was the extra $100 for Harvard worth it?”

“Yes.”

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