Some Columbia alumni can’t handle all this winning
When the Columbia Lions football team snapped its infamous 44-game losing streak on Oct. 8, 1988, Michael Rosenthal was among thousands in the stands who stood and cheered, “We won!”
Puzzled, Rosenthal, the associate dean, then turned to a friend and asked, “What’s the protocol?”
Almost 30 years later, as the school is forging its best football season in recent memory, going 6-0 after the weekend’s 22-17 win over Dartmouth, some Columbians are still grappling with how to celebrate gridiron success. Indeed, a few see no cause for celebration at all.
“Columbia football? They still have that?” said writer Vince Passaro, Columbia College class of 1979.
“I haven’t been keeping up with this,” he added. “Not in the least. It’s all brand new to me and I already resent it.”
For decades, Columbia football has been a running punch line. The university has not won an Ivy League championship since 1961, when it shared the laurels with Harvard. After going 6-3 in 1971, the Lions did not have another winning season for 23 years. More recently, they lost 24 straight games before beating Wagner in 2015.
Under Al Bagnoli, who was hired that year as head coach, this season is shaping up to be quite different, even extraordinary. The Lions have not started 6-0 since 1996, and their victory against Dartmouth ensured their first winning season since that year. Currently, they are first in the Ivy League. More than 13,000 spectators witnessed the team’s 34-31 overtime victory at homecoming against the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 14 — the biggest turnout since 2003.
Some who wave the blue and white are euphoric. “This is utterly exciting,” said Beth Chung, a middle school teacher in Falls Church, Va., and a Columbia College graduate of 1988. “It was deeply disturbing to me when we couldn’t win a game for five years.”
And yet, precisely because they are so used to losing, others can’t — or won’t — accept the situation.
“When my husband told me that Columbia had beaten Penn, I said, ‘That’s bad news,’ ” said Chung’s classmate Jill Levey, a New Jersey fundraising consultant. “When I went to Columbia, we prided ourselves on being anti-football and pro-intellectual. Can’t we retain our pride in being anti-athletic intellectual nerds?”
A number of Columbia alumni are perversely proud of dismal football results, believing they reflect academic superiority. Others speak of building character through adversity. Either way, certain graduates are uneasy.
“Very pleasantly unsettling” is how the financial journalist Samantha Rowan, who graduated from Barnard, the women’s college associated with Columbia, in 1996, described her feelings. Happy though she is for the team, years of disappointment have led her to expect the worst.
“You want to look, but you’re almost afraid that your heart is going to get broken on every play,” said Rowan, president of the Columbia University Band Alumni Association. “I’ve seen any number of games where things went wrong.”
The Columbia band is notoriously irreverent in addressing this kind of disappointment. In 2011, the athletic department briefly barred the group from performing after it altered the fight song “Roar, Lion, Roar” to include such lyrics as “We always lose lose lose / By a lot and sometimes by a little.”
William Oliver, Class of 1964, understands such skepticism. “There are now whole generations of alumni who don’t have memories of a positive period,” he said.
Oliver, who held major positions in several Columbia administrative offices over more than 25 years, suggested that any jadedness is less a function of campus culture than that of the five boroughs.
“I think it’s more of a New York thing — a cynical, don’t-accept-the-easy-but-enjoy-the-underdog thing. A sort of toughness and refusal to be taken in. It’s more of a city experience, and Columbia has always been part of that, and football has been an emblem of that.”
For the moment, alumni dollars aren’t reflecting any such jaundice. On Oct. 18, the annual Columbia Giving Day yielded over $3.1 million in pledges for athletics, compared with $2.7 million in 2016, according to Lauren Dwyer, the university’s senior associate director of athletics development. Last year, about $260,000 was earmarked for football; this year the total so far is $302,000, Dwyer said.
In general, current students are more enthusiastic than battle-hardened alumni. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve found my heroes,” wrote Joseph Siegel, a sophomore, recently in the
Columbia Daily Spectator. “The titanic athletes in their helmets and pads, the wide expanse of the stadium, the goal posts and lights scraping into the sky; for all this, I see no substitute.”
Some alumni are simply coming to grips with their own changing perceptions.
“The pure joy of Columbia football is that we’re not supposed to be good,” said Sahil Godiwala, Columbia College Class of 1999. A New York-based lawyer, he vividly remembers the coverage on the student-run radio station WKCR-FM.
“I got hooked on the broadcasts,” Godiwala recalled. “The announcers lost all semblance of professionalism and talked about the games as if they were a comedy show. They conveyed the surrealness of the situation. If we had a win, it was because some freak accident happened. We would get a fumble on the goal line or something like that.”
Now, he said, he is “thrilled” that the Lions are winning. “I have absolutely no reservation.”
“My feelings as an alumnus are very different from when I was a student,” said Stephen Holtje, Columbia College Class of 1983. When he was in the university’s marching band, he said, “Being a rabid sports fan was not really hip. I remember taking great delight in Columbia’s perfection of the forward fumble.”
Today, Holtje is manager of the record label ESP-Disk and has a different slant. “I no longer need to be hip and ironic,” he said. “When they’re losing, it means nothing and I don’t notice. But when they win, it’s like this amazing blessing out of nowhere.”
Holtje dismissed any notions that Columbia’s current football prowess might overshadow the university’s emphasis on academics. “It’s sufficiently obvious that we will not be Ohio State,” he said, “so we don’t have to worry — even if we have an undefeated season.”
But Passaro, among others, is not satisfied. For him, today’s Lions symbolize a cheerful, rahrah Columbia that he derides as “Princeton on the Hudson.” To his mind, the authentic Columbia is the scrappy institution of higher learning he attended in the 1970s — when New York was bankrupt, the Baker Field stadium was rotting and the Lions were reassuringly predictable bums.
“Whatever this miraculous thing is that you’re telling me about, I don’t understand it and I don’t like it,” Passaro said. “My Columbia was a happily bohemian place and I wish it were still.”