Thanks, that did help. For anyone finding this post in the future, the following code was actually the correct answer and worked for my case:
library(tidyverse)
df <- mtcars %>%
select(any_of(c("columns", "that", "maynot", "exist", "cyl", "gear"))
)
mtcars %>%
mutate(speed=ifelse(rowSums(df==4, na.rm = TRUE)>0, "fast", "slow"))