Manhattanville: The Three-Step Plan - The Way

Columbia Spectator
Opinion

Manhattanville: The Three-Step Plan
The Way
By Tao Tan

October 26, 2005

Call me a cynic, but I see three phases in Columbia�s operations in Manhattanville: buy, bulldoze, and bring in. �Buy� was three summers ago, when Columbia first announced its land purchases and plans to expand into Manhattanville. �Bulldoze� started last spring, when Columbia�s request for the Empire State Development Corporation to consider eminent domain proceedings began. If we learned anything from that, it�s that �buy� and �bulldoze� don�t really work all the time.

�Buy� put Columbia in the uncomfortable position of dealing with six businesses that simply refused to sell. �Bulldoze,� to put it lightly, wasn�t received too well. Last May, Columbia visibly dipped its toe into the third phase for the first time by creating a $900,000 endowed position at Harlem Legal Services to protect and provide tenant advocacy services for low-income residents.

The results were fascinating. Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, the outspoken chairman of Community Board 9, was all smiles that day, commenting that �[Columbia] did this out of their own generosity, and that�s all there is to it.� This was the same man who had threatened �some kind of reaction, and it will not be pretty� in response to news of eminent domain proceedings the month before. What a sudden change of heart.

Why does the community resent Columbia anyway? It�s not because it�s one of New York�s oldest, wealthiest, and most acclaimed institutions, birthplace of the atomic bomb, home of 71 Nobel Prizes, and alma mater to John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and, of course, Spider-Man. The real reason anyone would resent Columbia is not because it is accomplished, but because it is exclusive, both in granting access and in setting priorities.

There is value to exclusivity, and Columbia�s first priority remains ensuring that its 24,000 students receive the first-rate education they paid and worked for, but there is a way to bring in the community without compromising anything.

Andrew Carnegie put it best when he talked about the American ideal of teaching a man how to fish rather than just giving him a fish. The truth is that nobody wants a handout. The $900,000 legal endowment is a drop in the bucket. The ends for which it was used, however, gave a positive impression of Columbia in a way that a $900,000 higher buyout offer or a $900,000 donation to a Harlem group never could. Money can come from anywhere, but this specific grant gave the community access to something far more valuable than Columbia�s financial capital: its intellectual capital.

I believe that the community�s ultimate desire is that Columbia abandons what are seen as token gestures, such as a few grants here and there, and the mobilization of the undergraduate student body for, gee, one day of community service. They want Columbia to stop pushing its short-term financial capital and start sharing its intellectual capital for their benefit in the long term.

Therefore, one of the first buildings built in Manhattanville�s Phase I should be a community education center. The center should do two things: it should combine all of Columbia�s institutional and student-driven outreach and service programs under one roof, and it should offer an informal environment.

The first would make apparent that Columbia�s myriad of existing efforts, such as the Double Discovery Center, the �Let�s Get Ready� SAT tutoring program, and Community Impact, currently individually spread out, are hardly token if centralized. The second is just as important. Enrolling in a formal course of study at General Studies or even at Continuing Education requires a tremendous commitment of time, effort, and money, and Columbia shouldn�t even try to open its formal academic programs to all. But it can set up computer classes, job training seminars, and make its course material, in the model of MIT�s OpenCourseWorks, freely available. In the evenings, star faculty might be persuaded to offer general-interest public lectures. That was how Frontiers of Science more or less began.

The center can also offer public computer labs and provide a new home for the decaying and inadequate George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library. Since the whole purpose is to make Columbia less draconian and bureaucratic and more accessible and user-friendly, this center should focus on accommodating �walk-ins� and de-emphasize registration and paperwork.

Manhattanville must remain a strictly academic campus. There is value in a close-knit academic community, and we are not, after all, NYU. But an academic home need not be an academic castle. Tens of millions of dollars in buyout offers earned Columbia distrust and resentment, but a financial drop in the bucket and a real commitment of intellectual capital earned praise from the University�s fiercest detractors. There�s a lesson to be learned in this: buyouts and bulldozing can win land, but it�s bringing in instead of shutting out that wins hearts and minds.