Relly Robinson, BC ’25, is a Barnard College senior majoring in English.

I have been working for Michelle Margolis at the Jewish Studies department of Columbia Libraries for over two years. In that time I have worked on countless different projects that make up a small part of our libraries’ vast collections of Jewish artifacts, such as the Varian Fry collection and the Fort Ontario files. While everything I’ve worked on has been deeply interesting, nothing has fascinated me quite as much as when I got to help archive the Seth Low Scop.

In order for this project to make any sense, a bit of background information is necessary. Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College and since then it has always had, in some quantity, Jewish students enrolled. By the early 20th century, Columbia was notorious for its outsized Jewish and immigrant population as compared with other Ivy League schools. In 1928, in an effort to curb this number of “undesirables,” a solution was formed in the founding of Seth Low Junior College, named for the former Columbia University president.

Seth Low was a Columbia outpost in Brooklyn that offered a two year pre-professional program of study. The entrance requirements were the same as Columbia, yet no degree was offered at the end of the course of study – and the educational experience was decidedly unglamorous. The student body was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Students at Seth Low knew they were in exile, as many of them had initially applied to Columbia but ended up sequestered in Brooklyn, and decided to poke fun at their situation. Many Ivies are known for their overzealous commitment to student journalism that often takes the form of daily newspapers, and Columbia is no different. Columbia’s daily newspaper is known as the Spectator–or “Spec,”–and so Seth Low would have its “Scop.”

My task in helping to digitize the Seth Low Scop was to comb through the microfilms of the newspaper. The junior college was disbanded in 1936, so there is a limited–but fascinating–collection of student journalism from the time. I didn’t have time to go through every article as my task was to report the quantity of issues we had not to record the contents of the paper, but some things on the page really jumped out at me. There were Friday night dances at John Jay, course schedules for upcoming semesters (the offerings were upsettingly dry), and notices about anti war demonstrations. Without fail, every issue had at least one–but usually more–ads for cigarettes. My favorite ad was one for men’s leisure robes. There was even a writeup of a debate held against the then-women’s college, Vassar, about whether or not men were smarter than women.

I have always been fascinated with the history of Columbia/Barnard and have taken wonderful classes that emphasize this history. By no fault of their own, professors have neglected this aspect of our school’s history because in the aftermath of the second world war, no one wanted to admit that Columbia had once sequestered its Jewish students to an outpost in a different borough. The University Archives has a guide to more resources about Seth Low Jr. College, but there is still quite a lot more to discover! While ignoring the history of Seth Low might make Columbia’s history more palatable, with the digitization of this newspaper the archive can now more fully and truthfully represent Columbia’s complicated  history.

The Seth Low Scop is in the process of being uploaded to the Internet Archive; the first few issues can be found here, and later issues will be accessible via the same link.