Yay?

Hooray?

For some time, Columbia has been buying up chunks of land north of its Morningside Heights campus, around 125th St. & Broadway. The plan is to create a satellite campus abutting the Hudson River, within walking distance of the main campus.

Only problem? This is Manhattan; there are already buildings there. Columbia has been fighting an increasingly ugly eminent domain battle in the courts over the past months. They've tried to claim that the land is "blighted," and thus fair game for acquisition. The people who live and work there have disagreed, and quite vocally.

According to the New York Times article above, Columbia just won its appeal and is going to be able to give the boot to the few remaining tenants in the neighborhood. Those include a couple gas stations and a few self-storage buildings. No big deal, right? As a Columbia student, I should be totally jazzed.

Well, I kind of feel like I'm the kid in the class who got the highest score, but noticed later on that my test's grader added up the points wrong and I should have gotten a lower score.

In other words, I feel kind of guilty!

Every week, I take the 1-train uptown to Columbia-Presbyterian, where I volunteer in the surgery department videotaping surgeries. For a brief handful of blocks, the 1-train emerges from underground and passes by this "blighted" swath of land. This is what I see from the subway car window:


In case you can't read it, the sign on the building says, "STOP COLUMBIA! We won't be pushed out!"

This is a University with some serious town-gown relationship problems. I'm all for the expansion of academia. I'm even for the use of eminent domain in some situations. Especially after the Atlantic Yards project sailed through the courts last year, it seemed more than reasonable that an institution of higher learning should certainly win an eminent domain battle if a basketball franchise could.

But what we've ended up with is a mess. The community isn't happy with the University, and with good cause. New Yorkers are being forced to abandon their fair share of the American Dream. At the end of the day, Columbia may get a whole lot of cheap real estate out of this. But they lose something, too. The tension that already exists between the largely sheltered, privileged Columbia students who breeze into the neighborhood for a brief four years and the hardened New Yorkers who have been in the neighborhood their whole lives will only be exacerbated.

It's a long-term problem that won't go away once the shiny new buildings are erected. I'll take that high score on the test because it'll help my GPA right now. But once I'm forced to recall that material on the MCAT in a year, I'll wish I had done the right thing from the beginning.