If he could go back in time, Neil Gorsuch would probably not have quoted Henry Kissinger in his Columbia yearbook. Or at least not choose this quote: “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

President Trump’s nomination of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court brings me back to my life in Morningside Heights more than 25 years ago. I had a eureka moment late yesterday afternoon when I realized that Neil Gorsuch was THAT Neil Gorsuch – the Neil Gorsuch I knew from college.

Neil and I only overlapped one year at Columbia and by the time I had arrived as a freshman, he had created a major presence on campus, serving as a loud conservative voice in a sea of Upper West Side liberalism. Neil was the co-founder of The Federalist Paper, Columbia’s answer to the Dartmouth Review, a conservative college publication that received national attention.

A member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity (known as Fiji) and the son of Reagan’s EPA administrator, Neil sounds like he’d be a close cousin to one of the stuffed-shirt villains in “Animal House.” But that’s very far from the truth. He was well-liked by almost everyone, far more of an Alex Keaton than a Doug Niedermeyer.

Looking back last night at some of the columns he wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator, I was struck by the fact that Neil largely avoided much of the snark embraced by many of those inspired by the Dartmouth Review. A column defending Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra Affair is nuanced in which he still takes to task the White House’s "contradictory policy-making."

Above all, Neil was a conservative diamond in Columbia’s liberal rough. Other prominent Democrats who graduated during Neil’s era included Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito as well as the Working Families Party Bill Lipton and pro-choice activist Andrea Miller.

A quick scan of Facebook shows that many of Neil’s Columbia classmates have nice things to say about Neil even though they usually don’t agree with him. (One bitterly remembered him hijacking conversations in their freshman floor lounge.)

As for his alarming quote of Kissinger, I take it as a joke. Or at least I hope it was.

And for the record, I don’t regret quoting James Joyce when I graduated: "History…is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake."