Student Veterans

His revenge, he decided, would be to get good grades, and that meant holding back his desire to challenge the offending professors in class. As he put it, “That’s not a goal which is accomplished by getting a ‘C’ in Peace and Conflict Studies or something like that where you know you’re going to go to a class where the professor is going to saying all this stuff and at one point you’re not gonna be able to take it anymore and you’re just gonna be, like, ‘You’re totally full of shit. You don’t know what you’re talking about—you’ve been at a university for the last 35 years. You’ve never done anything in your life but talk about other people doing things.’ And the professor’s going to be like, ‘Oh, well, obviously we have some sort of Republican agent here, and so I’m gonna really stick it to him.’”

Whether this was true or not, or not, cautioned Robinson, was not the point. “A military vet coming straight out of a conflict zone is going to feel really odd anywhere in society. It’s not just on college campuses, it’s anywhere.”

After a bruising eight months at Berkeley, Stalcup transferred into the School of General Studies at Columbia University in the fall of 2005. The program—one of Columbia’s three undergraduate schools—had a long history of accommodating veterans. Founded in 1947, the school was designed specifically to absorb returning GI’s who didn’t fit Columbia’s traditional undergraduate mold. On the famously liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan, Stalcup found the veteran community he had been craving. After a year, he became president of Columbia’s 90-member-strong veterans club, the MilVets. It’s been a fun, but far from perfect, match.

“The main difference between me and the administration,” explained Stalcup, “is that they want Columbia to appear more veteran-friendly, and I actually want it to be that way.”

A nagging bone of contention has been the International Socialist Organization. From time to time, they set up shop in the center of campus and pass out copies of The Socialist Worker, which argues against American imperialism abroad. In one well-publicized incident, Matt Sanchez, a Marine Reservist and frequent Fox News guest, complained to Columbia’s administration that members of the group had harassed him at a military recruiting event in fall 2005 and told him that the military “uses minorities as cannon fodder,” and then followed with, “You’re too stupid to understand that you’re being exploited by the military.” A year and a half later, in January 2007, he appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” and re-hashed the same charges, complaining that the administration had turned a deaf ear to him. ISO members have denied his claims, calling the whole situation a case of organized public slander. According to a Columbia spokesman, the university has taken his complaint seriously and responded “by following the established disciplinary processes.” The university can’t discuss the details because of federal privacy laws.

Problems from outside the classroom have snuck into the lecture halls too. As Stalcup explained, “I still spend a lot of time being really careful about what classes I take and what professors I take classes with. Is this professor going to be somebody who’s going to find out I’m in the military and ride me for the rest of the semester so that he can prove his own worldview to himself?” But even he acknowledges that it’s not all black and white. Last semester he had a Shi’ism professor who had made it onto several online “uber-liberal, anti-military watch lists,” but turned out to be a very respectful, down-to-earth guy. At the end of the day, Stalcup admits that for all its faults, he loves Columbia. “It’s a great school,” he said.