Lonely lions

While our former dean hosted “Tea with Dean Moody-Adams,” she lamented that one of the biggest challenges Columbia faces relative to other schools is the apathy of its alumni. In her opinion, the alumni’s apathy is due to the lack of support undergraduates felt and feel during their time here. To paraphrase our outgoing dean: alumni like their universities, but they love their colleges.

This was not apparent until I visited another university. While walking around campus, I noticed that the students were happy: they were walking (not running) to class, they had smiles on their faces, and a couple of them came up to me and introduced themselves saying that they hadn’t seen me before. Maybe I am exaggerating, but it was odd.

After I came back to Columbia, I realized that I was all too used to the “Columbian indifference”: people on their smartphones (I’m certainly guilty as charged) and third lattes of the day, with smiles reserved for networking. Jaded? Possibly. Though we rank fourth in the country in terms of the best colleges, it came as no surprise to me that good ol’ Alma Mater wasn’t even ranked in the Daily Beast’s list of the happiest colleges in America. Columbia needs to focus on the cohesiveness of its undergraduate body with the faculty, administration, and University as a whole at this turning point in its history.

I transferred to Columbia from schools that were polar opposites on the happiness scale: one was a school-spirit-y prep school where students went to pep rallies even if they weren’t interested in sports, and on the jaded end was school in Maryland that, in my experience, oozed negativity to the point that transferring was the only option I had for maintaining my sanity. Columbia was somewhere in the middle ­­—it has proud individual students but rarely a unified community. To me, Columbia and its students were a pragmatic sort: people were never “happy” but were “satisfied.”

I was told that: “When you come to Columbia, you’ll find a lot of things to complain about.” The (perceived) student and administration divide, the chance of food poisoning while eating at John Jay, the fact that the undergraduate class is split into four, the fact that stress is something to be proud of, the fact that our most famous alumnus refuses to acknowledge our existence, and the fact that we are one of the “forgotten Ivies” (read: not HYP) and have a chip on our shoulders as a result, are just a few examples.

On an individual level, work and stress and all its derivatives are supposed to toughen up the average Columbian with the logic that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: John Jay food will toughen your stomach, Socrates said (I think) that work is done best when it produces a result rather than reputation, and our boy in the White House isn’t doing too hot right now. We may not do so well in terms of happiness, but the same Daily Beast ranked us number one in terms of stress.

A large part of this culture has to do with being in a city—specifically New York City. Its not a coincidence that in the top 25 happiest schools, none of them are in big urban environments. It seems as if happiness is tied to community and that’s where Columbia stumbles.

Perhaps Columbia is a victim of its own success–a rigorous academic environment may serve as a jungle to each of the student-lions of Columbia. But remember, though the Lion may be fierce, noble, and brave, it is constantly in competition with the other animals to stay at the top.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in Economics. He is a multimedia associate for the Eye.