Elizabeth: It’s Columbia, it’s one of the best institutions out there. How did you feel sitting there in the classroom, your schedule, meeting other students? Was it a little fish in a big pond type of moment?
Kris: Yeah so I remember exactly what I was wearing on my first day of class. I had gone shopping and bought a bunch of stuff that I felt like “okay this is what people wear in college”, like a stuffy sweater basically. So I go to my first class naturally like a vet, early, like 15 minutes early, and I’m in the room by myself and then some other eager student comes in and goes “Hi, professor.” And I was like “fuck”. Like, I guess I’m not a kid anymore.
Elizabeth: That’s funny
Kris: Yea. So, you know, I think I went through the same thing that a lot of students went through, which is imposter syndrome. Yeah, like wondering like, “How the fuck did I get here” Like, I don’t belong here I’m looking to my left and to my right, like, I’ve got you know, a retired Kpop singer. You know, I’ve got a Disney Princess. You know someone who was a professional dancer, all this amazing shit and I’m just like, I’m just some fucking army washout. Like what the fuck am I doing here? So, Columbia was super fucking overwhelming. But I had come there for one thing. And that was for the student veterans club. So, in my first semester there I run for the position of treasurer, which is the worst fucking position ever. I should not have done that. But I won, so again, I’ve got a new group of friends. It’s this new veterans organization, you know a bunch of vets had similar experiences. For example, if not overseas, like what led us into military service in the post 911 era. And balancing classes and that role was really fucking tough.
So every year the Columbia mill (millennials) vets throw a ball which costs at minimum like $80,000. And as far as GS (Columbia’s General Studies School) goes, it’s like the most anticipated social event at the school of the year. So that requires a level of fundraising that I just had zero ability or background for. So, you know, I’m basically like trying to get alumni to write checks for $10,000 at a time, not an easy thing to do when I also have to write this paper on Plato. [laughs]
So then, the student veterans club got really fucking dramatic. It’s during the 2016 primary process and it’s just when Donald Trump is just starting to become a political animal and I think forces that we didn’t really see coming, where starting to bubble to the surface, like the alt right, white nationalism and stuff.
Columbia is a really progressive community, right?
We need like, you know, we’re caricatured as like being a safe space and all this shit. Well, I didn’t realize it, but there was a small but extremely local population of these like, hardcore, right wing troll mill vets who we’re like into all this shit like Reddit and 4chan. Yeah, so I didn’t know about any of this shit. Like I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on, but we had you know a bunch of guys who were just like constantly just attacking me and the other members of the Board of Columbia Mill (Millenium) vets.
Most of it was directed at our president, this guy, Brian Jones, who I had at that point been best friends with, just constantly receiving personal attacks and just all sorts of shit. Hindsight 2020 I get what was going on. There were like actual fucking Nazis in Colombia. But you know, I was naive for that.
So then over the winter break between my first fall and second spring semester, one of these trolls starts spreading around a video of me from my anti war days. And that was something that I wrote about when I applied to Columbia, about my anti-war experience. You know, I’ve been open and discussing this anti war stuff with everybody. But the level of vitriol and the obsessive behavior of these guys was like, it was like cyber stalking, cyber bullying, like all sorts of shit that I didn’t think that adults experienced. But I was getting hundreds of notifications on Facebook every day, like these guys just coming after me. Just doing everything that they could to ruin my reputation. You know, lo and behold, I find out later on what triggered this was that I took a photo with Hillary Clinton at some point and these guys got pissed off because they’re these like Donald Trump acolytes or something.
So I ended up taking a few semesters off because it all came to be to much.
Elizabeth: Where was the administration in all this?
Kris: They were there hiding behind the First Amendment saying like, “Hey, you know, the president of the university is a First Amendment scholar. We’re all about free speech,” blah, blah, blah, and they just fucking left me out to dry.
Elizabeth: Yeah, but there’s a big difference between freedom of speech and harassment,
Kris: Yeah, yeah. And absolutely. The problem is I, you know, was living off of student loans and didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer to help me in this situation.
Elizabeth: Were you in contact with the veterans transition and services department here at Columbia?
Kris: That didn’t really exist at the time. So I’m dealing with like the academic advisors, the deans, and I had greatly overestimated their willingness to step into what were things like personal attacks, and stuff that was like way out of line. So I left the school and basically washed my hands off Colombia was like fuck this. I never want to go back to that. That was fucking terrible and I went you know kind of from feeling like “oh man I got accepted to Hogwarts” to “ you know this place is fucking garbage”. They look at me and they see dollar signs and don’t give a shit about me as a person.
You know, I had felt a lot of resentment, feeling pretty betrayed, because It wasn’t just that the administration wasn’t paying attention. It was that the administration was literally on Facebook watching this all happen. Like watching the cyberbullying live. And one of the deans, one of the most senior deans was like messaging me as a friend saying “hey, I’m here for you” but like, not doing anything about it. So I was, I was fucking pissed. So I started to hate the school. And really regret coming there. And because I was no longer in school, I couldn’t take out student loans. So in one semester I went from being like a pretty successful student at Columbia University to a homeless veteran. Like overnight. [end]
