NICOLE CATÁ (Westchester, New York)
BEN THEODORE (Westchester, New York)
Nicole couldn’t help but notice that news about politics and the Ivy League have resurfaced on our humble blog, and she felt it necessary to point out that her future alma mater has its fair share of bizarre minutia. While we here at BOTO usually sing rigorous, albeit quirky, praises of Columbia - think rugby-clad musicians spouting witticisms and bellowing the school fight song in football fields across the Ivy League - we have also been taught to question the status quo to the point of near paranoia. Couple this insatiable curiosity with the perspective of a more objective voice (that of a Haverford College student) and you have a partnership ready to tackle the hairy underbelly of world domination. With this in mind, we present the following riddle: what do Barack Obama, Frank Lautenberg, David Paterson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hans Blix, Pat Buchanan, Alan Greenspan, and Mikhail Saakashvili have in common?
Find out after the jump:
These politicians are players in Ben and Nicole’s Columbia alumni-driven conspiracy theory. Think about it: as Ben noted on browsing Wikipedia’s list of noteworthy former Columbia attendees, one could recount the entirety of American history and only mention Columbia alums. It seems that the individuals listed in the riddle have collectively turned their attention to the future of politics and formed a coalition of actors in, or orchestrators of, the current state of society.
- As Chairman of the Fed for twenty years, Alan Greenspan had arguably more control over the state of the U.S. economy than any other individual on earth. Since 2001, he has actually been criticized for policies that led to a housing bubble and the current subprime crisis. And let’s not even begin to discuss how much of an impact the writings of Milton Friedman (PhD in 1946) have had on our leaders in the last few decades.
- Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), quite possibly our next President, has utilized his youthful idealism and command of rhetoric to assemble a massive army of devoted, political foot soldiers. With more influence than perhaps our current President (so much for Yale conspiracy theories - we’ll save Skull & Bones for another time), Obama is in prime position to extend Columbia’s influence across American policies both foreign and domestic. If only we could get him to acknowledge that he attended the school…
- Columbia has also achieved a near-stranglehold on the New York State Governor’s Mansion. After George Pataki (class of 1970 from Columbia Law School) served for eight years, New York’s mob-rule/democracy chose to elect Eliot Spitzer (alumnus of Princeton and Harvard). The powerful assembly of the New York City Ivy League school, however, had other plans. After having carefully planted David Paterson ‘77 as Spitzer’s Lieutenant, a prostitution scandal took down the Governor, and Paterson rose to the highest office in the state.
- With just one of the nine robes on the Supreme Court filled by a former student at Columbia, a less keen observer might think that the school’s reach stops with only two branches of government. However, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was rated the 20th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes Magazine in 2007. Perhaps more importantly, her Senate confirmation hearings set a precedent that nominees were not obligated to answer questions on certain issues if they chose not to. This ultimately led to the confirmations of Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts. Plus, she has her own famous Family Guy joke.
But why stop on our shores? Columbia’s powers also extend across the world. Whether it’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, it seems that former Columbians have made their mark on the modern diplomatic identity of the United States.- This focus is no more fitting this week given the media attention paid to Georgia ($10 if you could find it on a map before two weeks ago; $20 if you work in the White House and could find it on a map). With virtually all of the Western world siding with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in his accusation of unprovoked Russian aggression, it’s important to point out that Saakashvili is himself a recipient of an LLM from Columbia Law in 1994. EDITOR’S NOTE (8/16): Mr. Saakashvili is also apparently a discerning aficionado of certain Morningside Heights cafés.
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3 comments so far...
It occurs to me that PrezBo looks comically short in that picture.
Columbia ftw.
I know Kerouac didn’t graduate persay but still very much a product never the less! Obama did NYPIRG at Columbia!
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