Late in February, Ibrahim Rivera opened his email to receive the happy news that at 54, he had been accepted to the doctoral program in social work at Columbia University. The letter notifying him of his admission made a point of his “outstanding academic record, professional achievements and excellent potential for independent scholarship with high impact.” He was offered, in addition to full compensation for tuition, roughly $44,000 a year in stipends on top of whatever fellowships he might receive.
His accomplishments, though, could not insulate him from the blistering politics of the moment.
When he was 20 or 25, Mr. Rivera would have had trouble imagining a future in the academy. He grew up in the South Bronx in public housing, where going to prison was looked at as “a rite of passage,” he said recently. At a certain point, he dropped out of high school and moved to Florida, in part to escape the temptations of selling drugs, but eventually he was drawn back into the trade. Still a teenager, he killed a man in a drug deal gone wrong; he was convicted of murder, and at 19, he was sent to prison for the next 30 years. He left behind a 6-month old son whom he only saw sporadically over the years. That fractured bond informed his academic interests.
“I was born at Columbia Presbyterian,” he told me a few days before he was scheduled to speak on a panel about prison education. The conference, held earlier this week, took place at Penn State, where, over the course of serving his sentence, he completed a bachelor’s degree through a distance-learning program that required him to submit his work, banged out on a typewriter, through the mail.
“I grew up in the shadow of these two great New York institutions — Columbia and N.Y.U. — which don’t really seem as though they are for New Yorkers,” he said. Five years ago, after he was released from prison, he went to CUNY for a master’s degree in social work. Then he applied for doctoral programs. “When I got accepted to Columbia, I was ecstatic.”
A few weeks after he was admitted, Mr. Rivera met with the administrator of Columbia’s social work program on Zoom. “She looked tearful,’’ he told me. Given all the turmoil at Columbia she could not say with any certainty that there would be a place for him in September.
Mr. Rivera was going to Columbia to study the impact of incarceration on families. While he was in prison, his son struggled, landing in the shelter system, where he was introduced to drugs and developed an addiction. Mr. Rivera’s work was to be financed through a grant administered by the National Institutes of Health, known as the T32.
But that grant was part of the $400 million the federal government threatened to pull from Columbia if it did not take a more forceful position against perceived antisemitism, and was now jeopardized. Even if the university acceded to the government’s demands — which it soon did to so much controversy — it was still quite possible that the T32 money would not materialize.
This sequence of events represented the second time that changes in federal policy directly affected Mr. Rivera’s education. The Omnibus Crime bill of 1994, sponsored by Joe Biden and signed into law by Bill Clinton, eliminated Pell grants for prisoners. They were reinstated a few years ago — long after Mr. Rivera finished his degree, which he paid for with help from his parents. At $130 a credit, it took him 10 years to finish.
A few days after his conversation with the Columbia administrator, he sent her a note thanking her for her honesty. He told her that even though it broke his heart to step away from Columbia, he would be enrolling at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, which has an endowment one-seventh the size of Columbia’s and which nonetheless still has a more reliable funding stream. The precarity at Columbia troubled him, and so, too, did the fact that the university’s response to the government had been, in his view, “capitulating.” He worried that at Columbia he would be more vulnerable to targeting over his background, his political advocacy — he has campaigned for various criminal justice reforms in Albany — or the fact that he was Muslim.
Like Columbia, Rutgers appears on a list of 60 colleges and universities that the Department of Education has cited for punishment should they fail to enforce the protections that the government has insisted on for Jewish students. But Rutgers has taken a more resistant posture. A week ago, the university senate proposed creating a “Mutual Defense Compact,” a shared financial and legal agreement among 18 universities with the purpose of standing up to the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. Earlier, the university’s faculty union filed a lawsuit in federal court to try to stop federal immigration officials from detaining or deporting foreign students and teachers over pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Since the 1990s, the endowments of universities like Columbia have tripled and quadrupled as they have more or less served the same number of students while admitting an ever tinier percentage of applicants. (Last year, Columbia College accepted fewer than 4 percent; Barnard, its affiliate undergraduate women’s college, accepted 9 percent.)
The paradox of a populist attack on elite universities is that it will almost inevitably make them more rarefied — less welcoming of nontraditional students like Mr. Rivera. In turn these institutions may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the search for talent, especially if the compromises they forge to ward off the desecrations of the Trump administration cause potential applicants to reconsider.
At Rutgers, Mr. Rivera will join a cohort of six doctoral students who were selected from a pool of 75 applicants. “He just continually rose to the top — of the review process, of the interview process,” Cassandra Simmel, the director of Rutgers’s Ph.D. program in social work, told me. “People were really excited about him.”
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. More about Ginia Bellafante
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