In His Own Words: Gorsuch’s Lively Writings at Columbia

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-.html

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WASHINGTON — Decades before he began writing legal opinions, Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was a student columnist at Columbia University. And he had no shortage of opinions.

His topics ranged broadly, from life on campus to the Iran-contra affair. His conservatism was a constant. And he had a lively writing style that persists to this day.

He and his collaborators seemed to sense that their writings would survive the years. “We ought not forget,” they wrote in an unsigned 1987 editorial for The Federalist Paper, which Judge Gorsuch helped start, “there is something vital and useful in the curious, if imperfect youth — something that shall not be stifled.”

Here is a selection of that youthful curiosity.

While mounting an ultimately unsuccessful bid for a seat on the university Senate as a freshman in 1986, Judge Gorsuch was asked by The Columbia Daily Spectator for his views on hot-button issues, including the question of whether the Marines should be allowed to recruit on campus.

The Spectator commissioned a series of columns on the lessons that should be learned from the Iran-contra affair. Judge Gorsuch, whose mother had served in the Reagan administration, saw a need for a more decisive American foreign policy.

In a February 1987 column, he took the university to task for what he called its failure to promote diversity (“that cherished buzzword”) of thought.

In March 1987, Judge Gorsuch argued against making Columbia’s fraternity system coed as the university more fully integrated women. Writing with his friend Michael Behringer in The Federalist Paper, Judge Gorsuch, a member of Phi Gamma Delta, once more cited freedom of association.

In 1988, Columbia was embroiled in debates about its fraternities, new university rules governing protests, and a student council election. Judge Gorsuch, never a fan of student protesters, derided “progressives” in a Spectator op-ed column as being anything but progressive as they claimed “a monopoly on righteousness.”