Morningside Hates
Columbia University was once my dream school and has since become my nightmare.
I was sixteen years old and had just read Making It by Norman Podhoretz, who passed away at age 95 last month. His memoir was about a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who went to Columbia and became a major intellectual figure. I was a young poet, raised on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom graduated from Columbia, and Kenneth Koch, who taught there. All my teenage heroes, from Herman Wouk to Richard Rodgers to Art Garfunkel, were Columbia grads. At sixteen, at a time when most of my peers were fixed on the next football game or the imminent senior prom, I knew exactly where I wanted to go to college.
There was only one problem: how would I ever get in?
