The Formerly Incarcerated Person Who Turned Down Columbia’s Ph.D. Offer

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After 30 years in prison house, Ibrahim Rivera was headed to the Ivy League. Then he realized that because of Trump administration threats, the university could not guarantee his funding would survive.

By Ginia Bellafante

Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture and life of New York City.

Late in February, Ibrahim Rivera opened his email to receive the happy news that at 54, he had been accepted to the doctoral program in social work at Columbia University. The letter notifying him of his admission made a point of his “outstanding academic record, professional achievements and excellent potential for independent scholarship with high impact.” He was offered, in addition to full compensation for tuition, roughly $44,000 a year in stipends on top of whatever fellowships he might receive.

His accomplishments, though, could not insulate him from the blistering politics of the moment.

When he was 20 or 25, Mr. Rivera would have had trouble imagining a future in the academy. He grew up in the South Bronx in public housing, where going to prison was looked at as “a rite of passage,” he said recently. At a certain point, he dropped out of high school and moved to Florida, in part to escape the temptations of selling drugs, but eventually he was drawn back into the trade. Still a teenager, he killed a man in a drug deal gone wrong; he was convicted of murder, and at 19, he was sent to prison for the next 30 years. He left behind a 6-month old son whom he only saw sporadically over the years. That fractured bond informed his academic interests.

“I was born at Columbia Presbyterian,” he told me a few days before he was scheduled to speak on a panel about prison education. The conference, held earlier this week, took place at Penn State, where, over the course of serving his sentence, he completed a bachelor’s degree through a distance-learning program that required him to submit his work, banged out on a typewriter, through the mail.

“I grew up in the shadow of these two great New York institutions — Columbia and N.Y.U. — which don’t really seem as though they are for New Yorkers,” he said. Five years ago, after he was released from prison, he went to CUNY for a master’s degree in social work. Then he applied for doctoral programs. “When I got accepted to Columbia, I was ecstatic.”

A few weeks after he was admitted, Mr. Rivera met with the administrator of Columbia’s social work program on Zoom. “She looked tearful,’’ he told me. Given all the turmoil at Columbia she could not say with any certainty that there would be a place for him in September.

Mr. Rivera was going to Columbia to study the impact of incarceration on families. While he was in prison, his son struggled, landing in the shelter system, where he was introduced to drugs and developed an addiction. Mr. Rivera’s work was to be financed through a grant administered by the National Institutes of Health, known as the T32.

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