I enrolled in Columbia University’s undergraduate school for nontraditional students, the School of General Studies, in 2017 as a 33-year-old progressive Democrat. By the time I graduated in May 2020, my entire worldview had been upended.
What I witnessed on campus was not education but indoctrination — a sweeping cultural revolution fueled by anti-Americanism, antisemitism and revolutionary zealotry.
It’s easy to write off the footage we see online — masked protesters storming libraries, chanting for an intifada and vandalizing campus property — as fringe behavior. But to me, someone who lived inside Columbia’s ecosystem for years, it’s not shocking at all.
These are not isolated eruptions. They’re the product of an ideology deeply embedded in the university’s intellectual and administrative infrastructure.
And now that same ideology is being packaged into a mayoral campaign.
Its champion is Zohran Mamdani. If he wins, New York City will become an extension