Crosses Return to Columbia Crown

Well I have actually been in the trustees room and neglected to notice the crown. However if I ever have the opportunity again I will be sure to take note. PS didn’t notice the missing crowns from the symbol either. I have scrutinized my business card but since the crown on it is so small it is hard to tell if they are crosses or not.

As an alumnus, I am delighted to see the return of the proper crown with cross. Although secular, Columbia has always been more or less Episcopalian. St George’s Chapel was Anglican, and across the street sits the huge and magnificent seat of the Bishop of New York, the Cathedral of St John the Divine.

Having once swanned around the Upper West Side with great friends who were also parishoners of St John the Divine as well as a grad students at Columbia, I am so pleased about this particular Restoration.

Harvard has not followed suit–originally “Veritas” was followed by “pro Christo et Ecclesiae”. One of our friends wryly remarked that, having got rid of Christ and His Church, when would they drop “Truth”?

The Columbia University Marching Band [CUMB] oft noted for their sarcasm always kept the crosses on their seal. In fact, when visiting my friend (a Columbia University student,) upon pointing out the change in the campus wide symbol, they were shocked. (CUMB members may be secularized, but they love tradition.) And incidentally, after Columbia had a terrible loosing streak in the 80s, the Marching Band started beginning [American] Football games with–don’t tell the ACLU–a prayer.

Dear Mr. Cusack:
First, I would like to congratulate you on the elegance of your writings and your breadth of subjects. I first was referred to your website because I am trying to write a book about La Salle Military Academy from which I graduated in 1953. It was unceremoniously closed and I thought it should be celebrated. You wrote an excellent piece about it in 2006 and I have a link to it on my “favorites.”
I grew up on the Lower East Side of New York in a cold water flat that was demolished by Robert Moses to build the Al Smith project. I was able to date the builldong to 1811 in a reverse directory at the new York Historical Societyin assembling a book, “Life on the Lower east Side (Princeton Arch Press 2006) co-authored with Rebecca Lepkoff, now 92, who contributed 170 vintage photographs of the neighborhood from the 1930s and 1940s. The connection here is with your delightful article on Governor’s Island which I visited many times with my Uncle Pete who worked there as a fireman during World War II. By the way, you might be interested in highlighting the plaque the DAR placed in 1889 on the Brookln Bridge stanchion commemorating the site where Washington lived after being inaugurated. It’s in disrepair and fenced off.

The third connection is with this article. Rowman and Littlefield just published my book “Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints and Sinners which looks at the portrayal of Christians in 200 films from 1905 through 2008. In it, I lamented the removal of the crosses from Columbia’s crest (i have my M.D.from there). I was glad to learn that they are back.
Is there somewhere that I can buy a compendium of your work rather than reading it off the web.
best,
Peter E. Dans

I’m not a Columbia alumnus but have always appreciated its Anglican heritage. In the late-nineteenth century New York Episcopalians were inspired by the vision of creating a “city on the hill” in Morningside Heights, dominated by three great church-related institutions — Columbia College, St. Luke’s Hospital, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine — and sering the spiritual, corporeal, and intellectual needs of all New Yorkers. The removal of the crosses from the Columbia crown was a denial of both history and the aspirations of the great churchmen who built the wonderful “city” we all enjoy.

Yikes, someone didn’t do his homework. Columbia University was founded in 1754. King’s College was resuscitated as Columbia University by the new state of New York and a board of trustees made up of King’s College alumni including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Columbia’s charter and King’s College’s charter are one and the same so the institutions are legally, historically, and colloquially the same entity. On a separate note, I stumbled across this page and have been reading some of Andrew Cusack’s articles. I find it very odd how this Andrew fellow thinks he has the pedigree to justify the snobby satire he produces (even if it is only satire). He neither attended an Ivy League school not Oxbridge. St. Andrew’s is basically a school where B students from the United States attend when they can’t get into a top institution. It would be on par with an NYU or a Wake Forest if it were operating in the U.S.

I shall have to start explaining to people that I went to the “Wake Forest of Scotland”.

(Actually, that sounds like a lovely place to go for an autumnal stroll.)

Veritas, you’re an idiot.
I know nothing of the estimable Andrew Cusack’s background (beyond what he himself tells all his readers) but it is in fact immaterial here. The great Peter Simple (Michael Wharton) was grammar school educated but got to the core of the English class system with every satiric glance in its direction he ever put to paper.

Your vision of NYU and Wake Forest College being somehow equivalent is laughable. NYU has no social standing while Wake Forest is one of the “Hidden Ivies”. A young relation of mine, from a family which has been in the New York Social Register for many decades, and who attended, like his father and grandfather before him, one of the most socially prestigious of the New England prep schools, is a student there now.

You seem not to understand that lofty social class and grade-grubbing are mutually exclusive. Relevant too is the fact that Yale, Harvard and Princeton are now the abode of the painfully politically correct and are therefore avoided by the more traditional and discriminating members of the old families.

But you wouldn’t know about that would you?