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08/01/2007: "Local impoverished protest top-ranked University"

Cramped by its urban surroundings, Columbia University is seeking to expand into Harlem against a backdrop of protests from residents who say the Ivy League school's ambitious project would destroy their working-class, minority neighborhood.

Opponents say the university is being insensitive to the history of the community, and that its project would displace poor, minority families who have long struggled to earn a living there.

The project echoes another expansion dispute in 1968, when riots erupted over Columbia's plans to build a gymnasium in a public park. The university's proposal to build separate entrances for students and the public struck some in that racially charged era as discriminatory, and the gym was never built.

[ No program to make the poor unpoor has ever succeeded. On the other hand, many of our best and brightest go through Columbia and do good things for us all. So here, people want to sacrifice our best and brightest for people who are going to always be poor, and can do it just about anywhere. It's an inverted principle, and it's not sanity. ]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070801/ap_on_re_us/columbia_vs_harlem;_ylt=college_kids_on_drugs