The College Fix

Columbia University – rife with racial tension?

Columbia University students – depressed beyond hope?

Seriously?! That’s how many students feel at the $64,000-a-year progressive Ivy League school set in the heart of the most diverse city in the nation?

Apparently so, if you are to believe the students who attended a fireside chat with University President Lee Bollinger on Tuesday.

A headline in the Columbia Spectator declares: “Bollinger: Administrators studying racial divide at Columbia.” The campus newspaper reports:

Gerardo Romo, CC ’14, brought up one of the more controversial topics of the night when he said that students of color at Columbia felt “a lack of support” in a “predominantly white environment.”

“At least, maybe, a fifth of my friends have had to take medical leaves because of depression,” Romo said.

Bollinger, visibly taken aback by the question, said the administration was addressing these issues.

“We don’t like hearing things like that, at all,” he said. “We really don’t want that to be the situation here.”

“We’re actually doing a kind of study to try to understand questions like this,” Bollinger said. “What you’re saying is very important for us to know. … I can say to you, categorically, that the motivation, the purpose, is certainly not to have statistics and so on,” in place of real change. …

After the fireside chat, students had the most to say about Romo’s question regarding racial tensions. Romo said he was not satisfied with Bollinger’s response to his question, and other students agreed.

“It’s definitely an atmosphere thing in part,” Javonni Judd, CC ’14, said of the issues she faces as an African-American student. “In part, it’s a matter of not knowing who to reach out to—and I don’t even mean if something is necessarily wrong.”

“The point about racial tensions was pretty accurate in my opinion—the question. The answer was not an answer at all,” Alex Nguyen, CC ’17, said.

Read more.

CLICK HERE to Like The College Fix on Facebook / TWITTER: @CollegeFix