<p>Here is an opnion piece from the spec. It kinda makes you realize that Columbia is not PERFECT!!!!!</p>
<p>Here is the link if you do not want to read it here <a href="http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/12/03/41afebc31368e%5B/url%5D">http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/12/03/41afebc31368e</a></p>
<p>We Owe You Nothing, Columbia</p>
<p>Indian Poker</p>
<p>By Nick Rosenthal
December 03, 2004</p>
<p>I haven’t even left Columbia, and I’m already a disgruntled alumnus. The fact that we have yet to graduate has not prevented Columbia from asking us to contribute money to the school—via some Ponzi scheme known as the “Senior Fund”—on top of the $40,000 that many students are paying per year.</p>
<p>I would encourage all my fellow students not to give money to Columbia in the future, unless certain conditions are met. Until that time comes, my advice is for you to do something more useful with your money, like using it in place of the low-grade, one-ply toilet paper with which the school generously provides us. Or you could just burn it if the other option is too gross.</p>
<p>Condition #1: Replace student loans with grants and ensure that tuition cannot increase beyond the rate of inflation from year to year.</p>
<p>Thanks to our alma mater, many students (myself included) are already under a crushing amount of debt due to student loans. The notion of handing extra money to Columbia after receiving such a stingy financial aid package does not sound appealing at all, particularly not when there are bill collectors banging loudly on the door. If Columbia expects its graduates to be generous with donations, they should have been a little more generous with us when we were students.</p>
<p>Of course, even those who weren’t on financial aid will remember that we saw our tuition rise at a spectacular clip during our tenure at this school. It’s going to take at least another four years for most students to make back the amount they spent on their college educations here.</p>
<p>Condition #2: Stop it with the monkey-eyeball experiments, sickos.</p>
<p>Columbia isn’t exactly using the money it is given for humanitarian causes, either. A visit to <a href="http://www.columbiacruelty.com%5B/url%5D">www.columbiacruelty.com</a> offers information about how Columbia has been performing experiments on primates that involve intentionally causing strokes in the animals by removing their eyeballs and clamping a nerve in their brain. Other experiments involve forcing the monkeys to use tampons, which, admittedly, sounds kind of amusing.</p>
<p>Columbia also invests a good deal of its endowment in corporations that produce weapons, pollute the environment, and prevent unionization of their workers, like General Electric, United Technologies, and Wal-Mart.</p>
<p>On top of that, Columbia is home to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (also known as CASA, which gives it a kind of friendly Mexican flair). CASA produces Drug War propaganda such as “Non-Medical Marijuana: Rite of Passage or Russian Roulette?” By giving money to the school, we are supporting these programs, whether we like it or not.</p>
<p>Look, if I want to force a monkey to smoke cigarettes, dump chemicals into the Hudson, or make up lies about how bad pot is, I’ll do it on my own time. But I’m certainly not going to give Columbia the money to enable the University to do it.</p>
<p>Condition #3: Spend some of the five billion dollars you are sitting on before you start playing the poor card.</p>
<p>It’s really hard to sympathize with a group that comes to your doorstep asking for any spare cash when they already have over five billion dollars in the bank. I mean, it seems illogical to me that I should give money to the school just so it can sit in a bank account or be invested in some multinational corporation, instead of actually being used to educate people.</p>
<p>This is a matter of prioritization here; each individual has only a limited amount of money to give—do you want your charitable donation to go to a group that, say, helps homeless people or saves the rainforest, or do you want it to go to an institution that is already incredibly wealthy and to whom your donation is but a mere drop in an extremely large bucket?</p>
<p>You wouldn’t give $10,000 to your speed-freak cousin so he could buy a pick-up truck, so why would you write a check to Columbia? The accumulation of funds has got to stop at some point, because right now endowment size has just become a ridiculous ego-thing between the elite schools, which are all counting on their alumni to continue supplying them with the powdery cocaine which keeps their sense of identity intact. Personally, I believe that any money I make in the future should be put to better use than to prevent my alma mater from developing an irrational inferiority complex.</p>
<p>The entire college experience is just a financial scam. We go to college, where we pay outrageous sums of money to live in subpar housing and eat bad food and buy books written by our professors and often published by our university. Then, once we graduate, we are expected to continue giving money to the school because we “owe” whatever success we have to them.</p>
<p>This is a system that I want nothing more to do with unless the school is willing to clean up its act. Seriously, stop it with the monkeys, guys.</p>
<p>Nick Rosenthal is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. Indian Poker runs alternate Fridays.</p>