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From the Mammon Issue (May 2000):
Nostalgia for a Time That Never Was A Feditor looks back on life Jacqueline Hidalgo As the present chapter of my life approaches its close, I am beset by memories from my life. I remember high school, the four years before this, in flashes of warm and cold, and I wonder how I will look back on my Columbia education. The first year out of high school I only remembered the good times, good friends, and good classes I had. Then slowly my delusional memories began to unwind and I remembered that I had been somewhat happy to graduate, that it had not been easy being a minority scholarship student at a small mid-western private school, that I certainly had never felt truly happy or comfortable there. However, dissatisfaction is the mode of life for most Columbia students, and it is not unusual that college colored my memories of high school angst. Columbia taught me how to think critically about everything and I turn that skill around on my education here, both inside and outside the classroom. I think about "enlargement and enhancement," the biggest load of bullshit known to man. Okay, possibly not the biggest. But how can I forget the times I sat on the heater during my modern poetry class or my physical anthropology class, not to mention to the devastation encountered when I learned of the false promise of personalized attention? And ethnic studies. A school that promises such a high quality education, one that is supposed to help us think critically and truly understand the world around us, has great difficulty ensuring the survival of these programs. It seems odd that students who actually want to learn about the world around them have to fight for the programs to teach them. And of course, the lack of tenured gender studies professors within various departments on this campus is at once frightening and pathetic. At times, Columbia seems less interested in teaching us how to understand the world around us than how to propagate an old-white boys' version of academia. As one professor once said, the core is designed to make us post-Protestant males. Is this what I will remember? I just filled out the senior survey, and overall, I was happy with my education at Columbia. Dissatisfaction apparently also leads to the description of my Columbia education as "generally satisfying." Unfortunately for the class gift committee who just sent me a second letter asking for money, I do not have any real interest in donating to Columbia at the moment. The primary motivator is fear that my meager amount of money would not go towards anything good. Someday, when I am older and the bad memories of college have started to slip away, will I actually donate money to the college? I consider doing so for my high school now when I don't really have any money to give.
Maybe I will remember both good and bad things. I have spent these four years trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance I suffer from. I will miss Columbia. While I am not generally pleased with the students at Columbia, I will miss them, the conversations, and the arguments. From post-college friends, I know that the people at Columbia are a rare breed. Generally, I enjoyed my classes and I still believe the Core was amazing overall. However, my exit will be bittersweet. Perhaps this school that has molded me these four years taught me too well; I learned how to think critically here and I turned it around on this institution. However, I still believe that the desire to wrestle with the world around me is an important one.
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