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The sharp flick of textbook pages, the smell of studied parchment and a litany of knowledge surrounded Liza Libes during her time at Columbia University, an experience she entered as a bright-eyed, liberal freshman, before leaving a conservative with a deep commitment to free speech.
“I was very upset with my suppression of speech. You know, I’m a writer. The biggest thing to me is the ability to be able to say what you think, to write what you think. And I wasn’t able to write exactly what I thought in my English classrooms,” Libes told Digital.
“I would get Cs when I would argue in favor of the patriarchy. And then when I argued that, you know, so-and-so was subverting gender norms, then I would get an A… It was just this kind of gradual accumulation,” she continued.
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Ivy league alumna Liza Libes exposes the curriculum and on-campus environment that left her feeling “socially ostracized” for the conservative values she developed while at Columbia University. (Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images; Liza Libes)
Libes detailed an experience she had during an English class involving an assignment about Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which her professor said the play centered on “queer desire.”
Libes, the founder of the Substack “Pens & Poison,” disagreed.
“I just wrote about the play, I didn’t touch on queer desire. She took off a couple points from my exam because I didn’t mention queer desire in the class for the midterm. So I thought that was a very bizarre thing for her to do,” she said.
“There [were] a couple other professors [that] I really disagreed with in terms of the way that they were teaching literature, the way they were kind of creating this Marxist ideology from a lot of literary works and kind of thrusting the Marxist teachings on so many great works of literature,” Libes continued.
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An image of the essay in which Liza Libes alleges an English professor took off points for not writing about “queer desire” in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (Liza Libes)
“I felt very stifled as a writer and I think that that was kind of my last straw,” Libes added.
“I wanted to be in a place where I could just… express my values, express my beliefs in writing and also in conversation… By the time I was a senior, I very much identified with the conservative movement,” she continued.
Libes received a master’s degree in English and comparative literature in 2020, after earning her bachelor’s degree in English literature in 2019.
When asked about the campus environment beyond the classroom, Libes described an underlying “expectation” to hold “certain viewpoints,” saying she knew she was going to be “socially ostracized in some way.”
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Liza Libes on campus during her days studying at Columbia University. (Liza Libes)
Libes grew up in what she called a “post-Soviet household,” speaking Russian with her immigrant parents and grandmother.
“One of the things that was very big in my household was just this idea of freedom, right, because my parents had come from the Soviet Union, there was a lot of oppression there,” she said.
“Obviously, we did not like socialism because socialism was one of the ways that a lot of this oppression was perpetrated. And I thought of myself always as a liberal because I stood for freedom. I was against oppression, I was, you know, pro-free speech — those to me were very liberal ideas, those were the ideas that I grew up with in my household,” Libes continued.
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Today, Liza Libes is a conservative influencer and founder of “Pens & Poison” where she shares her Ivy League experience, and how ideology is affecting literature and its interpretations across schools in America. (Nikolas Lanum/ Digital)
“When I got to Columbia, I very quickly realized that those ideas were no longer part of the left, that the left liked to suppress speech, the left liked to ostracize anyone who didn’t hold, you know, certain opinions or beliefs,” she added.
Libes encourages other young people to stand by what they believe.
“Don’t be afraid [of] expressing your beliefs and don’t let, kind of, peer pressure or other people sway you into believing one thing or another,” Libes said.
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Columbia University did not respond to Digital’s request for comment.
