Columbia University appears in three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as the institution where a named individual worked or studied rather than as a subject in its own right. The excerpts do not describe the university’s history, governance, or curriculum; they place people there and follow the ideas outward.
William Cary and the Cady, Roberts memorandum
In the 2009 episode on insider trading, Don Boudreaux told Bob Zadek that insider trading was not illegal in the United States until about 1961, and that Congress had never made it illegal. Zadek interjected “Texas Gulf Sulphur?” and Boudreaux turned to what he called the Cady, Roberts memorandum, issued by William Cary, whom John Kennedy appointed to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cary, Boudreaux said, was a Columbia University professor of law, and it was his view that insider trading is bad. Legalize Insider Trading (2009)
Boudreaux placed Cary’s view against the legislative record of the 1930s. During the debates over the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act in 1933 and 1934, there were proposals to make insider trading illegal, and even the Congress under Franklin Roosevelt did not adopt them. What the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 did contain was Clause 10b, directed against securities fraud — a distinction Zadek underscored by repeating the word “fraud.” Boudreaux described Cary’s theory as using that Section 10b, a broad prohibition of securities fraud, and getting it interpreted as a prohibition on insider trading. In Boudreaux’s account, Congress never said insider trading is illegal and was not the agency that came up with the prohibition; it was a bureaucrat at the SEC creating a new product. He added that Congress could have overturned the result and did not, and that the courts have largely accepted it. Legalize Insider Trading (2009)
The episode’s treatment of Columbia is confined to Cary’s affiliation. The excerpt does not say when Cary taught there, what he taught, or how his academic work related to his SEC position beyond Boudreaux’s statement that he was a Columbia University professor of law.
The Uganda crop project
In the 2020 episode with Matt Warner, president of the Atlas Network, Columbia appears on the other side of a development failure. Warner described what he called the “outsider’s dilemma”: how do we know that our ideas are the answer for someone else? In the arena of foreign aid, he said, there is a laundry list of projects that have not only failed but have made things worse. His example was Uganda, where $300,000 was spent to give a local village of 7,000 farmers the money to switch from banana crops to corn crops. Researchers from Columbia University, Warner said, told the village it would get a much better yield with corn. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020)
Warner did not call the researchers arrogant; he said they were probably very well-intentioned. The village switched, and the yield did increase by quite a bit. But economies are not simple: there was no one to sell the extra crop to and nowhere to store it, and it attracted a huge infestation of rats. The village not only had the new problem of rats but no longer had its old crop of bananas, which it understood how to make the most of. Warner offered this as one of many examples where good intentions are not enough to solve problems. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020)
The excerpt gives no further detail about the Columbia researchers — not their department, the terms of the project, or how the $300,000 was administered. Columbia figures here as the source of the advice, and the lesson Warner drew concerns the limits of outside expertise generally rather than the university in particular.
The Frankfurt School in America
The 2022 episode with Jonathan Butcher, on Critical Race Theory, gives Columbia its most consequential role in the excerpts. Butcher traced the lineage back to Germany in the 1920s, where a group of Marxists were frustrated that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in Russia while the German working class had not overthrown the system as these Marxists thought it should. They held what they called their first Marxist Work Week, a gathering of Marxist academics and writers, and created the Frankfurt School, an institute at the University of Frankfurt, to discuss the future of Marxism and flesh out what became known as Critical Theory. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
Among the original Critical theorists Butcher named were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who, he said, wanted to connect Marxism to culture. They added Freudian ideas of relativism and the idea that there is no objective truth, and they were suspicious of the Enlightenment and of the rule of law. Then, in Butcher’s words, “here’s the kicker”: they were chased out of Germany in 1937 by the Nazis and landed at Columbia University, the Teachers College no less, in 1937. There, Butcher said, Horkheimer and Adorno attracted several others, including Herbert Marcuse, and disseminated and developed their ideas of Critical Theory in American higher education. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
From that foothold, Butcher said, the ideas bled over into law schools, which were easy to pick up on the notion of systems of oppression and an ongoing conflict between economic classes that he said the theorists attributed at least in part to American law. He contrasted the Critical Legal theorists’ view that law is not neutral but meant to establish and maintain power with the founders’ view that law was there to protect rights and that the Constitution built in limitations on government. The Critical Race theorists — Butcher named Delgado, Bell, Crenshaw and Harris, many of them law professors — took the Critical Legal Theory idea and added race to the equation, which he described as making it more radical. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
Earlier in the same episode, Butcher had said that the original Critical Race theorists do not believe a bill or set of laws can rectify what they see as systemic racism, which is why they argued with the Critical Legal theorists and developed their ideas outside that framework. He cited Derrick Bell, whom he called the godfather of Critical Race Theory and a Harvard law professor, and Bell’s book Faces at the Bottom of the Well, whose subtitle he said points at the permanence of racism. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
Across episodes
The three episodes do not argue a common question about Columbia; they put the university in three unrelated roles. In 2009 it is the academic post of an SEC chairman whose theory became insider-trading enforcement; in 2020 it is the source of researchers’ advice to a Ugandan village; in 2022 it is the American landing place of the Frankfurt School in 1937 and the conduit for Critical Theory into American higher education and law schools. The excerpts show no development in how the show treats the university, and no speaker in one episode refers to the Columbia material in another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Columbia’s founding, location, administration, student body, or academic programs beyond the affiliations named. They do not say what became of the Uganda project after the rat infestation, nor how the Cady, Roberts memorandum was received at the time. They do not describe the Frankfurt School’s years at Columbia beyond the 1937 arrival and the dissemination of Critical Theory, and they break off before the speakers finish several of the surrounding discussions.