Fall 2014

For me, choosing a college to attend was an easy decision. 

During my junior year, I was one of a handful of students from my Brooklyn high school to attend the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s annual spring convention. Each year since 1925, when Columbia’s undergrads depart for Spring Break, high school newspaper, magazine and yearbook editors have gathered on campus for several days of seminars and a taste of college life.

That taste was all I needed. One of my mother’s all-time favorite stories was how I came home after the first day of the convention, sat down at our kitchen table for dinner and announced in no uncertain terms: “That is where I am going to college.”

It wasn’t what I had learned at the seminars, or whether I learned anything at all. It was the total experience that made my decision easy. I remember climbing the subway steps after a long ride, walking through the Broadway gates and approaching the Sundial, then having that experience that comes when you see the core of the Columbia campus for the first time and realize that there can indeed be an oasis in the midst of the cacophony of the city.

Even then I thought I knew New York. After all, I was born and raised here. I’d been to both Mets — the art museum on Fifth Avenue and the opera palace on Broadway that was knocked down in the ’60s to make way for yet another office building. I’d attended Broadway shows, swum off Coney Island, wandered the streets of the Village, ridden the Staten Island Ferry. As a young sports fan, I’d often taken the subway from our apartment in the southern part of Brooklyn to Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Shea Stadium in Queens. I was a New Yorker.

Yet I had no idea that in a neighborhood I later learned was Morningside Heights, some 15 minutes north of Times Square on the Broadway local, was this amazing rectangle that is so vividly described by the experts in our cover story.

I don’t remember what I learned at the CSPA convention seminars. What I do remember is that they were held in these magnificent red-brick buildings, and that the instructors encouraged us to speak up, share our experiences and learn from one another as much as from the teachers. What a novel idea!

The light bulb went on: I could get an Ivy League education with teachers and students from amazing backgrounds only a short subway ride away from all the things in New York that I loved (not to mention home, if/when needed). Location, location, location …

One advantage of Columbia’s being in New York City is the plethora of internships, but these were not as commonplace then as they are now. I was fortunate, however, to stumble into a part-time job that furthered my interest in journalism, and specifically sports writing, and location played a key role. I became the campus sports correspondent for The New York Times, calling in scores and writing stories about Columbia sports events that the Times wanted to include but could not spare a staff member to cover. I’d also write a feature about Columbia teams or athletes for the early edition of the Sunday paper that served as a placeholder until Saturday night’s games were concluded. So each week, I’d peck out a story on my typewriter and take it with me on the subway to the sports department at the Times, then located on West 43rd Street.

Remember, this was the 1960s, when newspapers were a big deal — and the Times was the biggest deal in newspapers. Here I was, this college kid, handing in a story each week and seeing it appear in the Sunday Times (sans byline, as that was reserved for staffers, but my story nonetheless). This experience, along with my Columbia degree and two-year tenure as sports editor of Spectator, helped me get my first full-time job, with the sports department of the Associated Press at its New York City headquarters in Rockefeller Center — built on land that was owned at the time by none other than Columbia University.

Location, indeed.

There’s a marvelous old book of essays by Columbians about Columbia and their experiences, University on the Heights, edited by Wesley Furst, who worked in public relations for the University in the 1960s. Herman Wouk ’34, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Caine Mutiny, contributed a chapter titled “A Doubled Magic” in which he described the core rectangle of Columbia’s campus as “a peaceful oasis — I had almost said a hallowed oasis — of the life of the mind, defiantly independent of the surrounding marketplace racket of Manhattan.”

Wouk goes on to write, “There is a quiet here, and space, and charm, and pleasant green vistas — in the realm of lasting things. Here in this concourse of red-and-gray buildings, Kant is no mere name, Marx no mere bogey, Shakespeare no mere idol to be nodded to and otherwise ignored; and the nucleus of the atom is no mere vague nightmare. At Columbia these things are life itself.

“I do not want to overstate the case. When raccoon coats were the fashion, there were raccoon coats at Columbia; and whatever the current collegiate foolishness may be, there is plenty of it on the Van Am Quadrangle, you may be sure. The wonderful thing about Columbia is that there is also the life of the mind at its highest current mark for those who want it — and that so many students do want it.”

Wouk, who turned 99 in May, concludes his essay as follows:

“The best things of the moment were outside the rectangle of Columbia; the best things of all human history and thought were inside the rectangle. If only you had the sense, you could spend four years in an unforgettably exciting and improving alternation between two realms of magic. I did. That doubled magic is lasting me a lifetime. All my writings, such as they are, trace back in one sense or another to my four years at Columbia.”