Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
NEWS aNd idEaS FOR THE COLUMBia COMMUNiTYvol. 33, no. 11 April 28, 2008
For Philip Roth, three quarters of a century goes by like the blink of an eye. “Seventy five, how sud-den,” he said as he celebrated his 75th birthday at Miller Theatre on april 11.
Hundreds of people showed up on campus to help him celebrate with a symposium about the renowned author, forming a line outside the Miller Theatre that snaked hundreds of feet up Broadway. When the 688-seat theater filled to capacity, scores were directed over to the law school to watch the panel on closed-circuit television, and occasionally catch glimpses of the guest of honor as he sat in the theater’s front row, listening intently, his hands clasped in front of him.
Roth’s “astonishing career redrew the map of ameri-can literature in the 20th century and continues to do so in the 21st,” said Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of america, as he opened the event. The Library of america is issuing the definitive edition of the author’s works.
The conference was the brainchild of Ross Posnock, professor of English, who read excerpts from Roth’s 1986 book The Counterlife and said that Roth’s voice was as “indelible as Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s.” Most
authors do their best work when they are younger and then fade away, he said, but not Roth, whose “creative renewal is unprecedented in the late 20th century.”
in the evening’s first panel, author Judith Thurman moderated a discussion with three novelists—Nathan Englander, Jonathan Lethem and Charles d’ambrosio–exploring Roth’s impact.
all three recalled digging their first Roth books out of their parents’ bookshelves as teenagers. For d’ambrosio and Englander, that book was Portnoy’s Complaint, the 1969 novel about a Jewish man discussing sexual desire and sexual frustration with his therapist, which rocketed Roth to fame. “it was shocking to me that my parents would have anything to do with anything that is inter-esting,” d’ambrosio recalled.
The panel moved on to discussing Roth’s mastery of the craft and what it is that makes his writing so power-ful. “There’s no distance in the voice,” Englander said. “You … feel like the books are written for you.”
Lethem, discussing Roth’s sentences, compared him to a painter with “absolute faith” in his materials. But he attributed the power of Roth’s novels in part to his will-
More than 400 Columbia Law School students packed the main au-ditorium of Jerome
Greene Hall april 17 to watch fi-nal arguments in this year’s Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competi-tion. Four Columbia Law School students, narrowed down from 55 starting in the fall, argued before a panel of four highly distinguished judges, including Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr.
after the hearing, the judges left the auditorium, not to make a deci-sion on the case, but to decide on a winner for “best oral advocacy.” Upon returning, they announced Christopher Hogan (’08) the win-ner, and spoke highly of the other student advocates.
The students argued Nafziger v. Kaergard, a mock Seventh Cir-cuit (illinois) appellate court case written by allison Wright (’08) that involved three low-income women who claimed they were denied quality health care as a result of a regulation issued by the illinois de-partment of Healthcare and Family Services (dHFS). The judges compli-mented the complexity of the case.
Hogan and Jordan Connors (’08) represented the plaintiffs, the three low-income women, and Mol-lie Kornreich (’09) and david Scherr (’09) represented the dHFS director.
No sooner did Kornreich start her prepared opening than Chief Justice Roberts interrupt-ed with a question. Unflustered, Kornreich quickly—but respect-fully—countered his query with a “No, your honor.” For the next 90 minutes, the judges peppered the students relentlessly, often giving them only seven or eight seconds to answer one question before sending the next zinging forth—
just as the justices of the Supreme Court routinely interrupt lawyers that come before them during oral arguments.
after the arguments concluded, Roberts praised the four students for holding up under the flurry of
1968Then and Now | 5-8
www.columbia.edu/news
in a heartbeatalternative to Pacemakers | 9
artifactsLaw School’s Treasures | 4
continued on page 12 continued on page 9
six fellows named byguggenheimBy Record Staff
Chief Justice Roberts at the law school
DaviD
Wen
tWoR
th
at 75, PhiliP Roth is Ready foR moReBy Adam Piore
literarylion Six Columbia University
professors—including two Pulitzer Prize winners—won Guggenheim Founda-
tion Fellowships in recognition of “stellar achievement and excep-tional promise for continued ac-complishment.”
The Columbia winners were Margo Jefferson, Sam Lipsyte, Sam-uel Moyn, Peter Ozsváth, alexan-der Stille and Jonathan Weiner. “i congratulate the six Columbia win-ners of Guggenheim fellowships,” said Provost alan Brinkley. “Their achievements remind us of the ex-traordinary distinction of our fac-ulty and of our long and continuing history of important scholarship.”
The new Guggenheim Fellows in the Columbia community are among 190 who were selected from a pool of more than 2,600 applicants. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, aiming to further the development of scholars, scientists and artists, provides fellowships for advanced professionals in natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts.
among the Columbia winners, Margo Jefferson is a creative writing professor and a cultural critic for The New York Times. at the Times, she has been a daily book reviewer, the Sunday theater critic and a Sunday Book Review columnist. in 1995 she received a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published in 2006. She is currently studying racial composi-tion and improvisation.
Sam Lipsyte is the director of undergraduate creative writing and author of the novel Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book for 2005 and winner of the Believer Book award. He is also the author of The Subject Steve and Venus Drive, named one of the 25 Best Books of 2000 by the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Lipsyte’s work is char-acterized by its verbal acumen and black humor.
History professor Samuel Moyn won the 2007 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Prize of the German Studies association for his book A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France. The prize is awarded every second year for the best book dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in its broadest context. His other book
Chief Justice Presides in moot CourtBy Todd Stone
continued on page 12
TheRecordApril 28, 20082
TheRecord welcomes your input for news items and staff profiles. You can submit
your suggestions to:
USPS 090-710 iSSn 0747-4504 vol. 33, no. 11, april 28, 2008
Published by the Office of Communications and
Public Affairs
TheRecord Staff:
Editor: Bridget O’BrianDesigner: Nicoletta Barolini
Senior Writer: Melanie A. FarmerUniversity Photographer: Eileen Barroso
Contact the Record: t: 212-854-2391 f: 212-678-4817
The Record is published twice a month during the academic year, except for holiday and vacation periods. Permission is given to use Record material in other media.
David M. Stoneexecutive vice President
for Communications
Correspondence/Subscriptionsanyone may subscribe to The Record for $27 per year. the amount is payable in advance to Columbia University, at the address below. allow 6 to 8 weeks for address changes.
Postmaster/Address ChangesPeriodicals postage paid at new York, n.Y. and additional mail-ing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Record, 535 W. 116th St., 402 Low Library, Mail Code 4321, new York, n.Y. 10027.
TheRecord welcomes your input for news items and staff profiles. You can submit
your suggestions to:
Dear Alma: What was the Cox report?—Child of the ’60s
dear ’60s Child,after the campus disturbances of
1968, some on the faculty believed there should be a report of the causes and events leading up to it. Michael i. Sovern, a law school professor who’d been ap-pointed head of the newly formed Ex-ecutive Committee of the Faculty, turned to an old friend, a Harvard law professor named archibald Cox, and asked him to form a fact-finding commission.
Cox, former solicitor general under President John F. Kennedy, had a repu-tation for honesty and independence (which was forever fixed in public mem-ory six years later, when President Rich-ard Nixon fired him as the first Watergate special prosecutor for insisting that Nix-on turn over secret tapes.)
The commission’s other members were also well known in their fields. They were Hylan G. Lewis, a sociology professor from Brooklyn College; Simon H. Rifkind, a former federal judge and
a partner in the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Goldberg, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; dana L. Farnsworth, Harvard’s director of health services and a psychiatrist who was considered a leading expert on stu-dent mental health; and anthony G. am-sterdam, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The commission held 21 days of hear-ings and heard from 79 witnesses, creat-ing a 3,790-page transcript. Columbia’s then-president, Grayson Kirk, declined to meet with the commission. Some student groups also boycotted the commission.
The commission’s findings, published in September 1968, were no whitewash; the report found plenty of blame for virtually all the parties involved in the campus disturbances, from the adminis-tration to the student leaders and even to the University chaplains. The report was published as a 222-page paperback book that bore the hefty title: Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968.
—Bridget O’BrianSend your questions for Alma’s Owl to [email protected].
on c ampus milestones
SCienCe RiSing
The Report Card
asK alma’s oWl
amid the noise of construction, some 150 Columbia faculty, students and administrators gathered recently to celebrate the now-visible rise of the new interdisciplinary Science Building (iSB). Built on the last developable spot on the main Morningside campus, the 14-story, 188,000-square-foot building will incorporate the latest technologies to create a flexible learning environment. it will increase needed research capacity on campus by 50,000 square feet and provide critical teaching and office space for the science and engineering departments. among numerous benefits, iSB will also help lure faculty who are specifically oriented toward interdisciplinary research, and promote collaborative side-by-side research among seemingly disparate fields.
eiLee
n Ba
RRoS
o
Alfred Ashford was named senior associate dean of the Harlem Hos-pital Center affiliation with Columbia University Medical Center. ashford, a professor of clinical medicine at the Columbia University College of Phy-sicians and Surgeons and director of medicine at the Harlem Hospital Cen-
ter, had been serving as interim senior associate dean of the affiliation since last year. in his new role, ash-ford will oversee clinical operations, academic and re-search programs, and administrative management for the affiliation. The Harlem Hospital Center has been one of the three main teaching institutions of the Col-lege of Physicians and Surgeons since 1962. all of its attending physicians have academic appointments on the Columbia faculty.
Alice Kessler-hArris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of american History, has been designated vice president and president-elect of the Organization of american Historians. Kessler-Harris, who is also a professor in the institute for Research on Women and Gender, spe-cializes in the history of american labor and the com-parative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender.
School of international and Public affairs lecturer hishAm Aidi has been named a 2008 Carnegie Schol-ar. Established in 1999, the program provides financial and intellectual support to writers, analysts and think-ers, and since 2005 has supported scholars whose work seeks to promote american understanding of islam and Muslim societies. aidi, one of 20 Carnegie Scholars this year, will receive a two-year grant of up to $100,000 in support of his original project, a book titled Identity, Inclusion and Muslim Youth, which will examine the cultural and political experiences of Mus-lim youth in america and Western Europe.
Andrew J. nAthAn, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science and department chairman of Political Science, was given this year’s Mark Van doren award for teach-ing. The award is given out to a teacher in Columbia College for outstanding leadership and teaching, after a rigorous selection process by the academic awards Committee. Nathan’s teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the com-parative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights.
dAwn h. delbAnco, adjunct assistant professor for art history and archaeology, has been appointed to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory council to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The council is a board of 26 distinguished private citizens appointed by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate. delbanco’s appointment was confirmed by the Senate on March 13. delbanco teaches both art Humanities and asian art Humanities and is a scholar of Chinese art, with a specialty in 17th-century Chinese painting.
williAm V. hArris, the William R. Shepherd Profes-sor of History, received a distinguished achievement award from the andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is given annually to those who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry. Harris will receive a three-year grant of $1.5 million, the largest the foun-dation gives to recipients of that award. His research covers a large swath of the ancient Greek and Roman periods, addressing such subjects as war and imperial-ism, literacy, and economic and psychological history.
The Heyman Center for the Humanities recognized Chair of Music Humanities professor wAlter frisch with the 15th annual Wm. Theodore de Bary award for distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum. Frisch is the music department’s H. Harold Gumm/Harry and albert von Tilzer professor.
CorreCtions
a new cancer breakthrough described on page one of The Record’s March 31 issue was the work of professors in the department of biological sciences and the department of chemistry, which are in the arts and Sciences division. The headline of the article incorrectly gave credit for the discovery to the Columbia University Medical Center.
TheRecord April 28, 2008 3
Will the U.S. solve the climate change crisis?
it’s the question of the moment, pondered every-
where from africa to Uzbekistan— and on March 27 and 28, in alfred
Lerner Hall, at the Earth institute’s fifth bi-annual State of the Planet Conference.
The conference featured scien-tists and other experts speaking on topics ranging from eradicat-ing poverty to environmental changes in the arctic. But one of the signal events was a debate addressing the proposition, “The U.S. will solve the climate change
problem.”Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, global cor-
respondent at The Economist magazine, which co-sponsored the conference,
moderated. arguing on the “pro” side were david Victor, professor of law and
director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable development at Stanford University, and venture
capitalist Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems inc., a maker of computer servers and data storage devices. arguing “con” were daniel Esty, a professor of law at Yale University and director of its Center for Environmental Law and Policy; and Michael Grubb, chief economist of the U.K. Carbon Trust and a prominent international researcher on economic, technology and policy aspects of climate change and related issues.
Victor went first, offering three declarations: that “the U.S. is on the cusp of serious efforts to control emissions at home, and those will have very important effects”; that the U.S., “through its efforts at home and through diplomacy, will leverage its effects around the world, including to the emerging markets”; and that “radical improvements in technology” will, at very low cost, “allow us to enjoy the benefits of using energy without the harmful effects of energy insecurity and especially climate insecurity.”
His teammate Khosla added that, “for all its great intent, Europe has been singularly useless at innovation.” america’s “entrepreneurial energy … will be the solution to our problems.”
Speaking for the other side, Esty recast the debate’s core issue to ask whether the U.S. alone will solve the problem of climate change. “The answer to that question is emphatically no,” he declared.
“No country can solve climate change on its own,” he argued. “if the U.S. were to act and others were not, we would slow but not stop the problem.” Moreover, he said, the U.S. is waiting for other countries to act against climate change as much as vice versa.
While “innovation across the United States is good, innovation effort across the world is better,” he said. Spurring such global innovation would require economic penalties levied internationally against those who contribute to the climate change problem, he added.
Grubb elaborated on these points, saying, “Viewed from across the pond, it looks like the rather less green and progressive parts of U.S. industry are still calling more of the shots, and that is certainly where the vast bulk of investment is still going.”
He pointed out the U.S. actions and policies that have defied the efforts by other nations to more satisfac-torily reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reverse climate change. “Of course, the U.S. can choose to stay outside the internation-al system,” he said. But “it cannot solve the problem that way.”
The debate concluded in the same manner as the conference as a whole—and, indeed, like the wider debate on climate change—without firm solutions.
ON EXHIBIT:ITAlIAN CRAFTSMANSHIP
Experts Talk about the Weather,debate U.S. Role in Solving CrisisBy Robert E. Calem
GLOBaL ELiTES RESHaPE THE PLaYiNG FiELd iN POWER POLiTiCSBy Robert E. Calem
The age of globalization is spawning a “superclass” of global elites who have amassed unprecedented wealth and power, and outgrown the national laws and regulations that traditionally kept
them in check.That argument is the basis for a new book by author
david Rothkopf (CC ’77) entitled “Superclass: the Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.” The topic provided for a lively discussion april 2 in Low Memorial Library with President Lee C. Bollinger and experts in international law, media and trade.
“There have always been elites,” Rothkopf argued during the panel discussion. But when, like the 19th century robber barons, they rose too high, “the govern-ment apparatus could write laws to contain them.” Today’s elites, in contrast, operate globally, where mechanisms to rein them in are weak “and built to reflect the power structure of 1946.”
This new superclass has emerged in a period of unprecedented and growing economic inequality—the combined net worth of the world’s richest 1,000 people is almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion, Rothkopf said.
But it is the topic of power that fascinates Rothkopf most (though power, he notes, often comes with money). To understand who has it and how they use it, Rothkopf compiled a list of the world’s 6,000 most influential people and took readers inside their rarefied sphere, such
as at the World Economic Forum in davos. He draws some conclusions about what they have in common and shows how they are shaping societies. Rothkopf has not published the list because it changes frequently, but said it includes CEOs, religious and political leaders, billion-aires, military potentates and even the heads of shadowy criminal organizations.
during the panel, Rothkopf cited examples to show how the playing field is changing, and just how divorced these elites are from those that govern the majority of the planet’s people. in many instances, he said, these people are more powerful than governments.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he pointed out, gave out $2 billion for health initiatives in 2007, more than the World Health Organization. “But the WHO is connected by mechanisms of government to the people, and the Gates fund is connected to people through the will of Bill Gates,” he noted.
The discussion panel was made up of five experts well qualified to discuss this newly emerging global elite and the implications. Moderated by alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, other participants were President Bollinger; Columbia sociologist Saskia Sassen; Merit E. Janow, who teaches international law at the School of international and Public affairs and is a former member of the World Trade Organization appellate Body; and Luis alberto Moreno, president of the inter- american development Bank and former Colombian ambassador to the U.S.
Janow said that the emerging playing field will require more international cooperation, and that international antitrust mechanisms are still emerging. “There’s tremendous tension within all societies, including the United States, in having confidence in delegating authority to outside entities,” she said.
Nor has education caught up with the trends. “Universities don’t change at the same speed as the outside world,” Bollinger said. “a lot of us need to develop new expertise and prepare students and do research that will provide interesting critiques of what’s happening. We have to catch up.”
the combined net worth of the world’s
richest 1,000 people is almost twice
that of the poorest 2.5 billion.
the italian academy for advanced Studies in america at Columbia University is presenting an exhibit on mosaic and
terrazzo workers in new York City. the show reveals a new chapter in the story of italian immigrants who flooded into america around 1900.
the gem-like decoration of many of new York’s most famous buildings came from the hands of skilled italians—as seen in the homes of the vanderbilts and goulds, and public buildings such as Christ Church on Park avenue, the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street, and the Metropolitan Life insurance Co. building on Madison avenue. gold leaf and jewel-toned glass masterpieces of mosaic were a hallmark of these italian immigrants, as were the sturdy floors of inlaid, polished marble.
in contrast to the traditional story of the italian immigrants—unskilled newcomers held back by the language barrier and racial prejudice—italian mosaic and terrazzo workers from northeastern italy were paid well for their highly specialized work. hoarding their professional secrets, these craftsmen built a powerful network and dominated the market across america.
the exhibition opened april 15 and has been extended to run through april 30. For more information go to: www.italianacademy.columbia.edu.
—By Record Staff
Image credit: Courtesy of Frederick Krieg Papers, Drawings and archives, Avery Architectural & Fine
Arts Library
TheRecordApril 28, 20084
Two Columbia graduate schools have aligned themselves with counterparts in Europe, offering students the ability to receive joint degrees that provide
an international perspective in journalism and history.
Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism announced a dual degree with Sciences Po in Paris that will offer students top-tier training from both an american and a European perspective, and encourage mastery of journalistic techniques, bilingual training, and the opportunity to develop a career with a unique international background.
Meanwhile, Columbia’s department of History and the London School of Economics will offer a dual master’s program in international and world history. Students who complete the program will earn graduate degrees from both institutions. The title of the program, “international and World History,” reflects a dual emphasis on the relationships between individual countries, and the historical movements—such as climate change, epidemic disease, trade and migration—that
have shaped the world as a whole. J-school students at Sciences Po will study
subjects such as international affairs, French and European history, economics and social dynamics, and a wide range of journalism courses. also, while enrolled at Sciences Po, they will be placed in internships with Paris-based news and media organizations. Sciences Po’s journalism school will oversee the placement of these internships. Students from Sciences Po who are admitted to Columbia will enroll in the master of science program that is the cornerstone program offered by the journalism school.
“The journalism profession is reinventing itself to adapt to technological changes along with the globalization of higher education,” said Bruno Patino, dean of the Sciences Po School of Journalism. “Taking the global dimension into account has become a neces-sity today in journalism.”
The two-year program in international and world history, which opens this fall, comes in response to a growing call by U.S. historians and academic organizations—including the
american Historical association—for more master’s degree programs in history for students who don’t plan to get doctorates. The program was built with a practical application: to give graduates a deep understanding of globalization so they might use it within professional fields such as government, business, journalism and the nonprofit sector.
“Our country has clearly suffered from a lack of historical knowledge,” said Matthew Connelly, Columbia associate professor of
history and director of the program. “This program is meant to educate historians for the 21st century, to be a boot camp for the newest fields of research.”
Students will study in New York and in Lon-don in successive years. They will be required to become fluent in a foreign language, corre-spond with government officials and notable policymakers, and conduct research at the United Nations archives, the British Library and the British National archives.
an imposing oak desk occupies Kent McKeever’s office in Columbia Law School’s Jerome Greene Hall. it is different from the standard-issue desks in other offices: This desk is far older, and has a
documented pedigree.When McKeever, director of the Columbia Law Library,
inherited the desk in 1994, it came with a letter dated from 1975. The note, written by arthur Schiller, a professor, traces the desk back to Edmund Munroe Smith, who first taught at the law school in 1882.
The desk is one of the few artifacts that remain of Columbia Law School’s early history, and if not for the interest of a few professors over the years, even this object could have ended up in a landfill.
McKeever has turned his office into a miniature archive of law school history, with old chairs, tables and barrister bookcases. “i like history and i don’t want it to be lost,” said McKeever. “i like saving these items because i view them as grace notes to what the school is doing.”
McKeever has also rescued smaller artifacts of the school’s first 150 years. He recently purchased a silver tray engraved with the signatures of the law school faculty from 1952. The tray had been given to Young B. Smith upon his retirement after 24 years as dean. McKeever has also purchased notebooks of former law school students, and recently secured copies of a law school exam from 1908.
The Columbia Law School itself has managed to hang on to several significant artifacts over its 150 years. a wood table
stands in the lobby of the Law Library, which was used by Harlan Fiske Stone when he was the law school’s dean, from 1910 to 1923. (He later became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.)
in addition, the Law Library stores the seven volumes of notebooks penned by Theodore Roosevelt when he was a student in 1881.
Old student notebooks are saved as a record of what was taught, and how the material was emphasized. The Law Library has saved the notebooks of a number of students from the late 1800s and early 1900s, including those of John armstrong Chaloner from 1883, which contain notes from lectures on real property law by Theodore W. dwight, the law school’s first warden, or dean.
Then there’s McKeever’s old oak desk. Exactly when Munroe Smith obtained it remains unknown, but it moved to Kent Hall, which the law school first occupied in 1910, after being housed for 13 years in Low Library. Eventually, Schiller inherited the desk and used it until the law school abandoned Kent Hall for Jerome Greene Hall in 1960.
“at that moment the fate of the desk was in doubt,” Schiller wrote. “dean [William C.] Warren was adamant … that all the desks in the new building should be uniform and modern.”
Warren relented, but another hurdle now loomed. “The oak desk was too large to pass through the door of the room which i had chosen,” Schiller wrote. So he had the desk taken apart and reassembled in his new office. He used it for another 14 years, until turning it over to Louis Lusky in 1974.
When Lusky retired in the early 1990s, Jim Hoover, the Law Library director, rescued it. He passed it on to McKeever in 1994, along with Schiller’s letter of desk pedigree.
and when McKeever one day retires? “Well, i’m sure there will be somebody for whom this echo of the law school’s past will resound,” he said.
Oak Desk Survives as a Valuable Relic Among Law School’s Treasure TroveBy James M. O’Neil
Double Dipping: lonDon, parisprograms offer Dual DegreesBy John H. Tucker and Clare Oh
Kent McKeever, director of the Law Library, poses behind the oak desk in his office. The desk has been passed down by generations of law school professors.
Phot
o CR
eDit:
CoUR
teSY
oF t
he Lo
nDon
SCho
oL o
F eCo
noMi
CSDa
viD W
entW
oRth
At left: Theodore Roosevelt’s student notebooks from his days at Columbia Law School in 1881. At right: A large table Harlan Fiske Stone used as a desk when he was dean of the law school in the early 1900s; it now stands in the Law Library lobby.
Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley, on left, and LSE director Sir Howard Davies sign partnership agreement in London.
DaviD
Wen
tWoR
th
DaviD W
entW
oRth
Columbia is a very different place today than it was in the spring of 1968, when hundreds of protesters
took over five University buildings and new York City police were ultimately called onto campus to oust the strikers in the glare of the national and international media spotlight.
Four decades later, the once nearly all-white, all-male college is the most socio-economically diverse in the ivy league, and is co-educational. Columbia now has the second-highest number of international students among all American universities. institutional changes growing out of the protests—the University Senate and student disciplinary code—have long since been accepted as part of university governance. Columbia no longer participates in classified defense research, a
major issue with faculty and student protesters alike in 1968. And a number of those who protested during that era—at Columbia and elsewhere—now serve on Columbia’s faculty and in senior roles of its administration.
The year 1968 was a time of student protests and urban riots across the U.S. and Western Europe, amid the assassinations of two of America’s most charismatic leaders, the crackdown of Czechoslovakia’s “prague Spring” by Soviet tanks, and violent clashes between the police and demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago. new Yorkers also witnessed the polarizing clash over local school control in ocean Hill-Brownsville.
Here on Morningside Heights, the Columbia of 1968 had relatively little interaction with its neighbors.
A legacy of Change By Record Staff
continued on page 8
Pictured above, upper right: crowds surrounding Low Library, courtesy of Columbia University Archiveslower left: WKCR broadcasting, courtesy of Columbia University Archives
April 28, 20086 TheRecord
columbia, then and now
Lewis Cole has vivid memories of 1968, when he was a student and member of the strike steering committee at Columbia. “We were awake all the
time. it was a world of meetings and action and very intense personal relationships. all of our energy went into it.”
at one point, Cole’s hero, herbert Marcuse, the philosopher who was then teaching in California, “came to the University and told us we were doing a terrible thing,” he says. “We felt betrayed.”
Unlike Marcuse, Cole didn’t think he was acting against the University. indeed, he believed then, as he does now, that he was acting in accordance with its values. “the teachers i had at Columbia—edward Said, angus Fletcher—were devoted to the idea that culture is a living issue, that the things that you read you bring into the practice of life.” in light of events in vietnam, “it seemed to me that there was no choice but to take a stand, given what i had learned here.”
one thing Cole didn’t do in the spring of 1968 was coursework. as a result, he was denied his degree—which is one reason he never imagined himself teaching at the University. (“it’s the cunning of history,” he says of his eventual return.) over the next two decades, Cole wrote four books and more than a dozen screenplays, and served as television critic of The Nation. in the mid-1970s, after a lawyer wrote to Columbia on his behalf, he received his undergraduate diploma. he began teaching at the film division (initially as an adjunct) in 1986, and served as chair from 1995 to 2000. During his administration, he says, “nobody went on strike. and there’s a reason: they were listened to.”
Which, he says, is the norm at Columbia these days. “the University has learned the lessons of 1968. the whole tenor of academic life has changed. there is a sense these days that
authority is not something that is granted, but authority is something you must earn.”But there are still problems, he says. “Columbia has become probably an even more
elite university, in terms of the amount it costs to come here, than it was back then,” Cole says. “We need to be asking, ‘how can this institution with such a rich intellectual history
be more available to more people, and more different kinds of people, in our society?’ ”
—By Fred A. Bernstein
on the wall of Michael i. Sovern’s office in the law school is a delicate work of art and calligraphy dating from 1969, bearing the thanks
and signatures of his fellow members of the executive Committee of the Faculty. “it was a fabulous group,” remarks Sovern, who was chairman of the committee, as he examines the 17 names on the document, many of them Columbia’s academic luminaries: Richard hofstader, Daniel Bell, Fred Friendly and Lionel trilling.
the mandate of the committee, created by the University faculty just after the 1968 campus strike, was to return Columbia to its feet. indeed, it wasn’t clear when the strike ended whether Columbia would even be able to open the following fall, Sovern recalls. Working over the summer and into 1969, the group helped to bring warring factions together and proposed a series of sweeping changes to rules and procedures that helped bring Columbia back from the brink of collapse.
Sovern was not involved in the campus strike, but his role after the crisis “was key to its resolution—absolutely key,” said allan Silver, a sociology professor who negotiated with students during the campus strike. in his book on the history of the University, Stand, Columbia, Barnard historian Robert a. McCaughey describes the executive committee as “the principal political force on campus” after the strike.
Yet Sovern’s involvement was almost accidental. the day after new York City police cleared out the occupied buildings and arrested hundreds of students, he and a colleague were lunching at the West end, discussing what should be done next. “We were a couple of smart-ass law professors sitting around,” he recalls. they discussed many ideas, including dropping charges against the students. “then we said, ‘Let’s go see the law school dean, see what he thinks.’ ”
the dean liked their ideas, but the administration did not. Later that afternoon, at a huge meeting of the faculty and administration, a motion was brought to censure the administration’s handling of the strike, and Columbia President grayson Kirk stepped aside from running the meeting as it was debated. that’s when the creation of the executive committee was proposed and quickly passed.
Few people were better suited to the job of chairman than Sovern. having become, in 1960 at age 28, the University’s youngest full professor in modern times, his credibility with the faculty and administration was high. he also had a thriving consulting practice in labor negotiation and conflict resolution; he’d mediated talks between the city and its police and firefighters’ unions.
at 88 years old, Wm. theodore De Bary still teaches east asian Languages and Cultures, nearly 20 years after he retired. his teaching load this semester—four courses—is twice that
of a non-retiree.De Bary has spent five decades on the Columbia faculty (the last two pro bono), but he
is still not sanguine about the events of 1968, from which, he says, “the University has never fully recovered.”
De Bary remembers the spring of 1968 as “terrorism on a small scale.” he recalls, “My office was ransacked during the occupation of Kent hall. Several professors were roughed up.” When his daughter, a Barnard student, came to see him in his office, crossing a picket line to do so, “she was subjected to harassment and abusive language,” he says.
the prolific east asian scholar was a reluctant participant in the events of 1968. he had published eight books, but not his own doctoral dissertation at that point. “i was determined to get back to my own work,” he says. “So i was desperately husbanding my time in april 1968.”
then a student urged him to attend a faculty meeting about the impending protests. “i said i was minding my own business,” De Bary recalls. “But he said, ‘You really ought to go and participate in that discussion.’ ”
hardly a conservative—he had been a member of the Young People’s Socialist League—De Bary found himself arguing for “a return to civil conduct on the campus, people dealing with each other through reason, not through threats, which were very much present in the so-called moratorium and strike.” For taking that view, he says, he was called a liberal fascist.
During the strike, De Bary continued teaching his classes. “i told my students, ‘i have a moral obligation to meet you at the scheduled time and i will be there,’ ” and so were the students. But he remained active in the movement to restore order to the University. he was elected the first chairman of the University Senate executive Committee, which, he said, was one of the good things that came out of 1968. he was the University’s provost from 1971 to 1978.
in the wake of 1968, he regrets the loss of many professors who, when they “found they had opportunities elsewhere, took them.” De Bary also had hoped to add second-level great books courses on asian cultures to the Core Curriculum, but that has never been fully implemented. as for his own dissertation, it was published in 1993, 40 years after he defended it.
—By Fred A. Bernstein
Lee C. BoLLingeR
MiChaeL i. SoveRn
then: incoming first-year law student, Columbia Law School
noW: president, Columbia University
then: professor, Columbia Law School
noW: president emeritus, Columbia University
LeWiS CoLe
then: Columbia student, member SDS
noW: professor of screenwriting, film division
W. theoDoRe De BaRY
then: professor
noW: professor emeritus
the spring uprising that rocked Columbia was over when Lee Bollinger arrived on Morningside heights for law school from eugene, oregon, in the summer of 1968, but he says the aftershocks were still
rumbling on and off campus. “there’s a tendency here to think of it as one major event, but there was just a continuous stream of
protests and discussions in those years,” Bollinger recalls. they “took place not only at Columbia, but down on Wall Street in new York City, Chicago, Washington D.C. and elsewhere here and abroad.”
as a university president and a First amendment scholar, Bollinger can catalog how deftly—or not—the administrations of other schools handled their own protests and free speech issues over the years. the Columbia lesson is very clear to him: “You just do not call in the police,” he says. “When emotions get very, very high, and the conflict seems unresolvable, there is a strong tendency to say ‘enough, we have the power to end this.’ that temptation is usually coupled with a lack of appreciation of what happens when you call in the police. ... the police operate by different norms than a university community.”
a university, by contrast, has a responsibility to the students entrusted to its care, educational and otherwise, he says, and “if you break that bond, in this case by calling in the police, the responses—the sense of injury and anger—soar through the roof.”
Bollinger recognizes that passions on what happened at Columbia run deep, 40 years later. Students “felt their lives were at stake, and, more importantly, their principles,” he says. at the same time, “there is a feeling still among very reasonable and very enlightened people that this particular protest had many people from outside the University controlling the situation, and the behavior had threatened the core values of the University,” he adds. “i think that’s part of the residue of the period, that there is still not complete reconciliation between those profoundly different perspectives.”
Bollinger himself participated in protests in those days, yet he worries that a nostalgia surrounding the 1960s includes “an implicit contrast” to today’s students. “there’s a view that people were really engaged in public issues then, and that they’re not today,” he says. “i think that’s extremely unfair. i think it’s an unhealthy view for one generation to leave for the next. and in my experience it’s untrue since i see students today as highly engaged citizens, whether it’s in local service or national politics.”
it is the job of a university to reflect on such events, Bollinger says. “i think it is very important to put it in a national and even a world context. Many universities and institutions and cities and countries experienced this and so it’s sort of figuring in the zeitgeist of the time. What’s important is for us not to be narcissistic about it.”
—By Bridget O’Briancontinued on page 8
April 28, 2008 7TheRecord
columbia, then and now
Stories about Columbia’s 1968 campus strike tend to focus solely on the students who participated. But it doesn’t take long in a conversation with allan Silver about those days to recognize just how
deeply the crisis affected professors, too.Forty years later, those days are still painful for Silver, a professor of sociology. he was on the
steering committee of a group calling itself the ad hoc Faculty Committee, which tried to find ways to end the standoff as it became clear that negotiations with the administration were going nowhere.
talking with student strike leaders face-to-face and with school officials, “we sought a settlement that would prevent violence by the police and between students,” he says. “We were concerned by the fragility of Columbia.” Some of his more conservative colleagues thought the group was coddling the students. “i think a number of them then, and still now, saw us as foolish and objectively as collaborators with the students, and not having a concern for the University,” he recalls. “that was utterly false.” at the same time, the strike leaders thought the settlement proposals didn’t go far enough.
and the administration brushed off an effort to end things by offering amnesty to the students. at one point, Silver drafted a proposal with the amnesty proposal in it, which he hoped could end the standoff. “i imagined what Charles de gaulle would do if he were president of Columbia, and drafted a statement the style and substance of which were in the style of de gaulle,” he recalls. he got Lionel trilling, the highly respected professor and literary critic, to bring the proposal to Columbia President grayson Kirk. “When Kirk looked at it, he said ‘it’s not my style.’ ” the strike lasted several days more.
“the students and the people running the University were on very different wavelengths,” he says. Before the strike, Silver recalls, “the college kids were treated with an incredible remoteness, not only with administration but from the senior faculty, who tended not to teach in the college.” he adds, “We were in touch with the undergrads, we knew what was going on. … the administration and senior faculty lost moral authority.”
Silver had been among those lobbying for change at Columbia for several years leading up to 1968. he and other faculty members were pushing the administration to stop furnishing class rankings to the local draft board; the lowest-ranked students lost their student deferments and became eligible for the draft. (Columbia was not the only university doing this at the time.) “it involved the invasion of the teacher-student relationship, turning teachers into agents of the state, influencing who would be conscripted,” he says.
“i had a schizophrenic life,” says Dorothy Urman Denburg, who was a Barnard sophomore in the spring of 1968, commuting from her parents’ house
in Brooklyn. “Between classes, i would stand outside the [occupied] buildings with other students to show support. and then i would go home to my parents, who were immigrants from eastern europe—holocaust survivors—who would marvel at students who thought they had the right to challenge the University administration.”
half of Barnard’s students supported the protest, Denburg estimates, and more than a few of them occupied buildings. “the issues were just as vivid on this side of the campus,” she says.
in addition to the major reasons behind the protest, such as the war, the sexual revolution was also a flashpoint at Barnard. one incident that stands out for Denburg was the case of Linda LeClair, a 20-year-old student who was disciplined for lying on a housing form in order to cohabit off campus with her boyfriend. the scandal was all over the media. “i remember being on the Long island Rail Road, and i was wearing a Barnard sweatshirt, and someone made a vulgar remark about Barnard women,” Denburg recalls.
Barnard’s nine-member Judicial Council took LeClair’s breach of school rules seriously and disciplined her, though it also proposed a revision of the housing rules. “the fact that the college actually followed up and had a hearing for that student, it was like a tinder box” at Barnard, says Denburg.
two years later, in 1970, Denburg was living on campus when a new series of anti-war protests erupted. however, she says, that time “everybody was of a mind, because the Kent State [shootings] had taken place, and the invasion of Cambodia had taken place, and the universal lottery pegged to people’s birthdays had taken place,” she says, referring to the draft in which date of birth determined likelihood of being called up. “everybody knew someone who had been affected.”
after finishing Barnard, Denburg received her M.a. in english from the graduate School of arts and Sciences, and took her first full-time job at Barnard in the admissions office in 1971. She became dean of the college in 1993.
as an administrator, she says, she is always cognizant of the lessons of 1968. “i believe in open and regular communication with students and in a shared governance structure,” she says. a dozen years ago, confronted with an actual student takeover of administrative offices, “i drew upon my memories of spring 1968,” she says. “i spoke to the students encamped in the offices until we reached an agreement; calling in the police was never an option.”
—By Fred A. Bernstein
DoRothY DenBURg
then: Barnard junior
noW: dean, Barnard College
aLLan SiLveR
then: sociology professor
noW: sociology professor
DaviD DinKinS
then: Harlem resident, former state assemblyman
noW: Columbia professor, former NYC mayor
Jamal Joseph, a son of harlem and a teenaged member of the Black Panther Party, spent many days in the spring of 1968 on Columbia’s campus, protesting the vietnam War and the University’s
administration.“i remember standing in front of Low Library on College Walk, right in front of the statue of alma
Mater,” he says. “i was shouting: ‘Brothers and sisters, if Columbia University won’t relate to the needs of the community, if they won’t denounce the war in vietnam as a war of exploitation, if they won’t talk about the slumlords and police brutality in harlem, if they won’t be relevant, then you’ve got to do more than take this place over—you’ve got to burn the damn place down!’ ”
the damn place is now, of course, where Joseph is a full professor and chairman of the film division at the School of the arts. and he’s the first to note the differences between the Columbia he protested against 40 years ago and the Columbia where he now teaches. “My references, being a young Panther and avid reader and admirer of the writings of Malcolm X, was as Columbia as a plantation big house,” he says. it was a place where, if he and his friends came to campus, they were stopped by white police officers and asked why they were there. “We’d be chased off,” he recalls.
So when the Columbia demonstrations began and student leaders reached out to other groups such as the Black Panthers, “it was the first time i felt welcome on the Columbia campus,” he says. Before then, “there was nothing going on, culturally or educationally, that would make a skinny black kid from harlem feel welcome.”
in the years since then, Joseph has led a life far more colorful than the average college professor, including five and a half years in a federal penitentiary in connection with a 1981 armored car robbery; although he was acquitted of participating in the robbery, he was convicted of helping to hide a man who took part. he founded his first theater company while in prison, earned two degrees there and later co-founded iMPaCt Repertory theatre in harlem. he joined Columbia’s School of the arts as an adjunct professor a decade ago, then as a full-time professor.
“the atmosphere at School of the arts and the film division felt very ’60s—there were educators and students who cared about making work that was important, stories about
people from diverse backgrounds, who were passionate about their work. and students wanted to volunteer at iMPaCt,” he recalls. “i remember thinking, ‘Wow, this feels like what we talked about’ ” in 1968. the Columbia that once turned a cold shoulder to him was a vastly different place. “i was embraced by students and faculty. Columbia now welcomed people who resisted, who disagreed, who thought outside the box.” Columbia’s gates were now open, something he couldn’t have imagined in 1968.
—By Bridget O’Brian
JaMaL JoSePh
then: Harlem resident, Black Panther member
noW: professor, School of the Arts
L ike many public officials in 1968, David Dinkins was in the thick of opposition to the proposed Columbia gym in Morningside Park.as a harlem resident and a former state assemblyman, “i came to the demonstrations on campus,”
he recalls—and there were “more than a few” demonstrations. indeed, first proposed in 1958, the gym by the mid-1960s was being challenged by a number of community groups. in his 1965 mayoral campaign, John v. Lindsay issued a white paper suggesting the plan should be re-evaluated. the parks commissioner Lindsay appointed after he won also opposed it.
as time went on, more officials challenged the gym, including the Manhattan borough president, a state senator, and then-assemblyman Charles Rangel. and when it emerged that, because of the park’s vertical topography, there would be two gym entrances—one at the upper level of the park, for Columbia faculty and students, and another below, facing harlem, for local residents—hostility for the plan burst into the open. “i opposed the gym as they had planned it, as many in the community did; it was not a unique posture,” Dinkins says.
Many Columbia faculty also were against it, but while halting the gym was one of the strikers’ demands, “there is little evidence that the gymnasium was an important campus issue before the april disturbances,” according to the Cox Commission report about the campus strike. after the strike, construction was put on hold and, in 1969, the University’s trustees abandoned the project.
Fast forward to a new millennium. Columbia has forged a myriad of ties to its uptown neighbors, says the former mayor, from its affiliation with harlem hospital to a mobile dental center that travels around the community, to multiple partnerships with the harlem Children’s Zone and the engineering school’s work with local schools and nonprofits on technology training and support. Dinkins likes to point out that Columbia faculty played a key role in helping his administration shape the proposals for the Upper Manhattan empowerment Zone while he was mayor.
So when it came to Manhattanville, an area he had hoped to revitalize while in City hall, he says the University worked hard on crafting its plan, actively seeking the support of the surrounding area’s
continued on page 8 continued on page 8
TheRecordApril 28, 20088
Scholars interested in delving deeper into the 1968 Columbia experience should visit the Columbia University Oral History Research Office on the sixth floor of Butler Library, with its treasure trove of transcribed
interviews, many of which were conducted on the University campus between May and September 1968, when memories were still fresh and many wounds still raw.
The Columbia Crisis of 1968 project, begun under the direction of Louis M. Starr, includes testimonials from student activists, junior and senior faculty, administrators and parents, along with the boldfaced names of the time, including Columbia President Grayson Kirk, Columbia Vice President david B. Truman and literary critic and author Lionel Trilling.
“it’s the history of a movement, but within an institution,” said Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Oral History Research Office, the world’s oldest and largest university-based oral history project open to the public. “Oral histories record what worked and what didn’t work, the dreams, and the failed imagination.”
Ronald Grele, director of the Oral History Research Office from 1982 to 1999 agreed that oral histories add unique,
eyewitness accounts to our understanding of history: “The document you get after the fact is more abstracted; people try to give a general pattern, by necessity taking an aerial view. What gets lost is the individual story. Oral histories provide a different perspective—of the participant, not the observer.”
Founded in 1948 by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian allan Nevins, the oral history collection now contains nearly 8,000 taped memoirs, and nearly one million pages of transcript. Over 2,000 scholars a year consult the collection, including several prominent historians and biographers who have used research from the Oral History Collections for their work: doris Kearns Goodwin, for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II; Cary Reich for The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958; and Robert Caro for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
The Oral History Research Office follows strict protocols that allow interviewees control over the public consumption of their interviews, sometimes resulting in restrictions for pub-lication, or even public access. dean Henry S. Coleman’s inter-view stipulated that it would remain closed until the death of Grayson Kirk (he passed away in 1997). However, many of the interviews once marked “Permission Required by interviewee” are now open to researchers, according to Clark.
Beginning in the fall, the Oral History Research Office will be sponsoring a Master of arts degree in oral history, in collaboration with the institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia. This will be the first oral history masters degree offered in the nation. The deadline for application is May 1. Visit www.iserp.columbia.edu/education/ohma.html.
oral histories speak Volumes on ’68 events
By Stacy Parker Aab
Students exiting Hamilton Hall during strike.
A protest against Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on Columbia campus.
Soverncontinued from page 6
Dinkinscontinued from page 7
Silvercontinued from page 7
1968continued from page 5
the committee, which ultimately included a representative from the faculty of each school at the University, set up headquarters at Faculty house. then it got to work. “there were meetings galore,” Sovern says, with professors, the administration, trustees and students—some lasting as long as 10 hours.
in the wake of the strike, the committee proposed the creation of the University Senate, to give voice to the concerns of students and faculty. it persuaded the trustees that students arrested at the end of the strike should not be criminally prosecuted. it promulgated a University-wide code of conduct, which didn’t exist before, as each school’s dean had the final word on discipline, and the notion of due process for students was unheard of. Rules governing protests at the University were put in place before classes resumed in September.
the committee took stands on other issues, too. it appointed a fact-finding commission to look into the causes of the strike. and when Kirk resigned as president in august and the trustees made international affairs Dean andrew Cordier acting president, Sovern’s executive committee opposed the appointment. “happily, they ignored our advice,” Sovern said.
as for Sovern, the strike changed his life, too, as he discovered a talent for administration that took him away from his planned career path of teaching. Coming out of a 10-hour committee meeting one evening, a colleague moaned, “Wasn’t that awful?” Sovern replied, “i enjoyed it.” he became law school dean in 1970, then provost in 1979 and Columbia’s president in 1980, a job he held until 1993.
in 1988, shortly after the 20th anniversary of the campus strike, The New York Times ran a cover story in its magazine section titled “Columbia Recovered.”
—By Bridget O’Brian
today, the University’s many schools, centers and mission-driven groups have created a vast collection of local partnerships linking students, faculty and staff with community organizations, public schools, cultural institutions and health-care providers in harlem and Washington heights.
in contrast to the proposed Columbia gymnasium in Morningside Park that became such a flashpoint for widespread opposition, the University has worked for nearly five years through informal outreach and the official new York City land-use process to win approval from the City Council for its proposed long-term expansion in the old industrial area in Manhattanville.
new York and Columbia itself very nearly went bankrupt in the years after 1968, as jobs and people left the city in an increasingly global economy. But both the city and Columbia ultimately survived the lean times and, over the past two decades, the same global marketplace has remade new York into one of the world’s most desirable cities, which now must manage the challenges of growth instead of decline. the University once again thrives as an international center of great teaching, research and scholarship. Yet it remains a place of active involvement in public issues—with an enduring enthusiasm among its students and faculty for engaging in the controversial intellectual and political questions of our time.
in this special section, current Columbia faculty members and administrators who were here in 1968 provide their perspectives on the impact of events four decades ago.
local groups and officials. Ultimately, Columbia garnered endorsements for the project from the current mayor, borough president and local council members, as well as Rangel, now the district’s congressman and one of the most powerful members of Congress given his chairmanship of the house Ways and Means Committee. the needed rezoning was approved by the City Council last December by a vote of 35 to 5.
“i think [Columbia President] Lee Bollinger, in particular, is very much aware of and sensitive to the importance of engaging with the local community,” says Dinkins, a professor at the School of international and Public affairs since leaving City hall a dozen years ago. “the actions taken back in 1968, in many ways, informed what we do better now.”
—By Record Staff
at the same time, he was not opposed to military recruitment on campus, one of the signal issues among student protesters. as chair of the committee on outside recruiting, he “could not find a principle prohibiting recruitment by the military while permitting others to recruit,” he says.
the Columbia of today “is a better place—a far, far better place. But i wouldn’t necessarily attribute it to campus strikes,” Silver says. “Whatever good emerged from the ’68 crisis was not intended by the small SDS cadre who had in mind the goal of using the University as an arena in which to radicalize students, without regard for the consequences for the University.”
—By Bridget O’Brian
TheRecord April 28, 2008 9
after years of intense study, medical researchers have turned a corner in the work to repair a faulty heartbeat, making
significant progress toward the goal of releasing patients from the burden of implanted artificial pacemakers.
The findings, from the laboratories of drs. Michael Rosen and Richard Robinson at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and drs. ira Cohen and Peter Brink at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, have shown it is possible to reprogram heart cells to provide the steady electrical impulses needed by the heart to pump blood throughout the body.
dr. Rosen, the Gustavus a. Pfeiffer Professor of Pharmacology and professor of pediatrics at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, says, “We know it works. We can generate the pacemaker function biologically. it’s now time to fine-tune the technique to ensure the heartbeat is sustained in a regular rhythm.”
The innovative approach involves installing functioning pacemaker cell genes into human mesenchymal stem cells. These provide a platform to carry the signal to heart cells not originally functioning in the beat-making role. The newly recruited pacemaker cell unit then initiates the electrical message, telling other heart muscle cells to contract.
Six-week animal trials have shown that the new genetic therapy enlists an animal’s heart cells, turning them into biological pacemakers. Now the team will move to the next phase, extending their tests of the treatment to a one-year animal study. if that phase proves the treatment is safe
and effective over the long-term, the team will be ready for the first round of hu- man trials.
dr. Rosen says the team is looking at two ways of delivering the genetic payload to heart cells. in one, they have found success using adult mesenchymal stem cells engineered to carry the pacemaker signal to heart cells. The other promising delivery mechanism uses viruses to insert
functional pacemaker genes into heart cells directly. Both treatments are directly injected into a target area of the heart.
“We record a rhythm in the heart that originates at the site of cell injection,” says dr. Cohen, Leading Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Stony Brook and adjunct professor of pharmacology at Columbia. “We injected the engineered stem cells into
the heart in vivo and they were capable of driving the heartbeat.”
The body’s natural pacemaker is comprised of a group of cells in the heart’s right atrium, called the sinoatrial node. in some individuals, because of disease in either the sinoatrial node or in the atrioventricular node (the site through which the impulse must conduct to reach the heart’s ventricles) the heartbeat fails to reach the ventricles. as a result, the blood-pumping function of the heart is severely compromised.
artificial electronic pacemakers came into general use in the 1960s. Over time, the devices have grown smaller and their batteries last longer, but even these much-improved devices represent palliative rather than curative care. Currently, more than 280,000 human patients worldwide whose hearts do not beat properly have been implanted with an artificial electronic pacemaker, and as the baby boom generation ages it is likely to create an increase in demand for heart help.
The researchers’ vision is that a biological pacemaker would resolve several problems inherent to implants. doctors hope it will alleviate the need for repeated surgeries for battery and hardware replacement, and decrease the possibility of inflammation and infection.
“This technology is like the dVd replacing the VHS tape,” dr. Cohen says. “it is a market-changing technology as it has the potential to replace the core technology of a $3 billion-a-year industry. The real advantage though is that it will ultimately be a better experience for patients.”
in a heartbeat, Cell genes Couldtake the Place of PacemakersBy Mike Keller
research
Guggenheimcontinued from page 1
is Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (2005), which was given the Morris d. Forkosch Prize for the best book of the year in intellectual history.
Math professor Peter Ozsváth in 2007 won the ameri-can Mathematical Society Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry. Granted every three years, the Veblen Prize is one of the field’s highest honors for work in geometry or topology, the study of the intrinsic properties of spaces.
alexander Stille, the San Paolo Professor of international Journalism, is the author of The Sack of Rome: How a Beau-tiful European Country With a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi, and several other books. He has contributed to The New York Times, New Yorker magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and other publications.
Journalism professor Jonathan Weiner is the author of sev-eral books based on his biology observations. His book The Beak of the Finch, which follows biologists studying the evo-lution of finches on the Galapagos islands, was the winner of both the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science. Weiner has written for New Yorker magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and many other newspapers and magazines.
The Guggenheim foundation was established in 1925 by United States Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a me-morial to a son who died in 1922. amid a time of decreased funding for individuals in the arts, humanities and sciences, the Guggenheim program has been able to increase both the number of awards and the average amount of its grants, thanks to generous donations. The awards for this year’s 190 recipients totaled $8.2 million. Four of the Guggenheim winners, clockwise from the top: Peter Ozsváth, Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Weiner and Samuel Moyn. The other two recipients are Margo Jefferson and Alexander Stille.
eiLee
n Ba
RRoS
o
Two Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric institute researchers, J. John Mann and Ezra Susser, were selected for the
prestigious distinguished investigator award, a highly competitive grant program for investigators of brain and psychiatric disorders.
Mann and Susser are among 11 scientists this year receiving the award, which was created by the National alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and depres-sion (NaRSad), a charity dedicated to mental health research. The award aims to support highly significant research by established scientists who are on the cusp of a breakthrough, or who are poised to test an innovative new idea that has the potential to make a significant advance in a given area of research.
NaRSad will provide each researcher with a one-year grant of $100,000 to advance psychiatric research in their areas of specialty: Mann in the field of major depression and Susser in schizophrenia.
Mann, the Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in psychiatry and radiology) and chief of molecular imaging at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and the New York State Psychiatric institute, plans to test a hypothesis regarding the mechanism of action of ketamine, an anesthetic drug that has been noted to have an extremely rapid antidepressant effect. The research holds promise for development of new treatments for major depressive disorder, a condition affecting more than 14 million americans each year.
Susser, the anna Cheskis Gelman and Murray Charles Gelman Professor and chair of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and professor of psychiatry at P&S and the New York State Psychiat-ric institute, will examine whether genetic mutations not inherited from one’s parents can help explain the association between prenatal famine and schizo- phrenia. Over the past decade, work by his group and others has established that early prenatal exposure to famine increases risk of schizophrenia, but the bio-logical basis for this is unknown.
tWo Win aWaRD FoR BRain WoRKBy Record Staff
TheRecordApril 28, 200810
aside from approving two degree programs, the University Senate was all
talk on april 11, with reports that zoomed in on various University operations. The scheduled guest, Trustee Chairman William Campbell, had to cancel his visit on short notice.
anne Sullivan, executive vice president for finance, offered an update—requested at the last plenary by Sen. daniel Savin (Researchers)—on backlogs in accounts payable and purchasing operations that had beset University offices through the winter. She said an unexpected change in software requirements had obliged her office to implement a new system during the busy month of October, with a series of setbacks that lengthened processing times for vendors’ invoices from 12 to 20 business days. Hard work had brought wait times back near previous levels, she said, and will in time lower them further.
in response, Savin noted other problems, calling on administrators to adopt the federal government’s simpler policy on per diem travel reimbursements, to negotiate better discounts from vendors, and to process major purchases more efficiently. He stressed the urgency of such improvements for Columbia’s research enterprise. Sullivan agreed to report again in September.
The Libraries Committee offered a complex picture of the Hammer Medical Center library, illustrating how it has traveled a separate path from the Morningside libraries over the past few years. Chairman Samuel Silverstein (Ten., CUMC) said its acquisitions budget is rising only 2 percent a year, compared with 8 percent on Morningside, and its librarians’ salaries are lagging. Silverstein identified a problem of “overgrazing the commons”—extensive use of the Columbia University Medical Center library by Presbyterian Hospital personnel, without budgetary support from the hospital. He said Sen. Lisa Hogarty, chief operating officer at CUMC, was raising this issue in “balance of trade” talks with Presbyterian. She had also announced plans to restore administrative bonds between the Morningside and CUMC libraries.
Sen. Patrick Callahan (Stu., PH) noted trade-offs in renovations now under way in the Hammer library, which has moved 300,000 volumes of a pre-eminent collection off site and given up 700 library seats to provide a new student center for the uptown campus, with new classrooms and configurations of study space to suit small groups. Callahan appreciated recent decisions to provide new, better-maintained printers in the library, as well as additional evening shuttle buses between campuses. Hogarty mentioned plans to add attractive new study space in several uptown campus locations by 2010.
Student caucus co-chairs andrea Hauge (Bus.) and John Johnson (Law) presented a substantial report they had co-authored on implications of last fall’s bias incidents. it evaluated Columbia’s inter- nal communications about the incidents, respons-es by Columbia College and School of Engineering and applied Science deans of students, and continuing efforts to strengthen curricular and faculty diversity. The assessments were broadly positive, calling for more publicity about successful practices in place, and for minor improvements.
The action items, approved without discussion, were for two degree programs: an M.a./d.d.S. joining Teachers College and the College of dental Medicine, and an M.a. in Regional Studies—Latinamerica and the Caribbean.
The last plenary for this year is May 9 at 1:15 p.m. anyone with a CUid is welcome.
The above was submitted by Tom Mathewson, manager of the University Senate. His column is editorially independent of The Record. For more information about the Senate, go to www.columbia.edu/cu/senate.
Senate heaRS RePoRtS on BaCKLogS anD otheR oPeRationSBy Tom Mathewson
ZaDie reveals Her Craft, one sentenCe at a timeBy Stacy Parker Aab
COluMBIA IS NEARly PICTuRE PERFECTIN RuNuP TO STuDENT ACADEMy AwARDSBy Record Staff
Zadie Smith isn’t quite comfortable talking about what she does. But that didn’t stop the acclaimed novelist from
giving an open and insightful lecture on the process of writing to a packed audience in Havemeyer Hall on March 24.
While writers are often called upon to divulge the secrets to their writing success, Smith admitted to having “dithered” on creating the lecture, for she found talking about craft akin to taking one’s “private language” and having to “gussy it up” for scholarly consumption—an anxiety revealed in the lecture’s title: On Feeling Fraudulent. despite her caveats, Smith spoke at generous length about her personal process to a rapt audience that included MFa students in the Writing program.
author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling White Teeth, an epic novel chronicling the mixed-race, multicultural lives of three British families, Smith spoke as part of the Creative Writing Lectures series, sponsored by the Writing division of the School of the arts.
Born in North London in 1975, Smith garnered attention at the age of 21 for securing an impressive, six-figure book deal for White Teeth while still studying
English literature at Cambridge University. Published two years later, White Teeth went on to receive several awards, including the Whitbread First Novel award, and sold over a million copies worldwide. Her third novel, On Beauty, won the Orange Prize and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
in her talk, Smith divided novelists into two camps: the “micro-managers” and the “macro-planners.” after placing herself firmly with the former, she revealed herself to be a writer who not only composes, but tells stories one sentence at a time, rather than one who plans out the arcs of her charact-
ers before drafting the story. She often doesn’t know how her story will come out until it is actually finished.
Liberal and candid with her insights, Smith
identified one bit of advice as the most important: simply “stepping away from the vehicle.” Unless a writer must publish quickly, he or she should put the manuscript away, for years if possible, to give enough time and distance to return to the piece with fresh eyes. Smith conceded, however, that she had yet to follow this advice herself.
Smith also spoke to the importance of reading while writing—a touchy subject for some young writers, anxious that their work
will be easily influenced by stronger, more formidable authors. Smith rejected these fears, saying that the exposure to great work nurtures the creative process—especially when a writer gets stuck. “When you read a good book, you find a way out of your hole,” said Smith. Reiterating the importance of reading good works, Smith advised the crowd of writers: “You’re limited by the things you read. Try to cast the net as wide as possible.”
“Her talk wasn’t a lecture on craft, it was a deeply personal account of what she goes through when she writes a book,” said MFa candidate Ted Hodgkinson, who introduced Smith before her lecture. “Her honesty, rather than any one thing she said, was the true message of the evening.”
one tip for writers: simply “stepping away from
the vehicle”
A scene from one of the nominees: PAL/SECAM, directed by Dmitry Povolotsky. The Assasstant, directed by Scott Burkhardt, is also among the entries.
Perhaps the School of the arts should consider renaming itself Columbia Pictures, at least until the Student
academy awards are given out in June.Students from the school’s film division have virtually
swept the narrative film category of the Student academy awards in the eastern Regional Finals, with seven out of eight nominated films. Columbia students also garnered two out of four nominations in the documentary film category. the eastern Region finalists will compete for the national prize, to be awarded in Los angeles in June.
“the Student academy awards is the most significant competition for student films in the country,” said Jamal Joseph, chair of the School of the arts film division. “For Columbia to have seven out of eight films nominated to represent the eastern Region this year truly speaks to the tremendous talent here at the School of the arts, both students and faculty.”
the student academy awards is a national competition conducted by the academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences, the group that sponsors the oscars. each year more than 500 college and university film students from throughout the United States compete for awards and cash grants in four categories: animation, documentary, narrative and alternative.
Columbia filmmakers have won gold medals at the Student academy awards for narrative film in seven out of the past 11 years. “that’s a stunning testimony to the
strength of the film division’s programs,” Joseph added. Several of the narrative films can be viewed as part of the Columbia University Film Festival, which runs april 28 through May 9.
Past (non-Columbia) winners of the Student academy awards include Spike Lee, Bob Saget and oscar winners John Lasseter and Robert Zemeckis.
Here is a list of all the nominees in both narrative and documentary film competitions:
Narrative:The Assasstant—Scott Burkhardt, Columbia Bricks, Beds & Sheep’s Heads—imelda o’Reilly, Columbia Maine Story—nina Chernik, Columbia Man—Myna Joseph, Columbia Mr. A—Joe Murphy, Columbia PAL/SECAM—Dmitry Povolotsky, Columbia Picture Day—nick Paley, nYU Wianbu: Comfort Woman—James Bang, Columbia
Documentary:Life Sentence—Lisa gray, nYU Recruiter—adam Salky, Columbia Tijuana, Nada Mas—Yolanda Pividal, City College of new YorkUnattached—J.J. adler, Columbia
TheRecord April 28, 2008 11
Faculty Q&a
toddgitlin
Jim lindnercolumbia people
Interviewed by Bridget O’Brian
Todd Gitlin never set out to be the Boswell of the 1960s, but his own experience, his expertise in politics and communication—as well as the continuous anniversaries of that decade—keep dragging him back
to the subject.as a leader of the Students for a democratic Society in
the mid 1960s, he helped organize the first major national demonstration against the Vietnam War, was active in anti-war causes and became something of an activist intellectual in the underground press. “i was a writer and a kibitzer,” he says. But as the ’60s wore on and the protest movement’s methods turned darker, Gitlin grew critical. “The revolutionary direction that became apparent in 1968 and 1969 did not please me; i was appalled and opposed to it,” he says. “The vanguards of the movement had other fish to fry, which were rotten fish but there they were.”
Turning to graduate school at Berkeley, he had planned to write his dissertation on the history of the idea of scarcity (“the topic’s still available,” he says) when his adviser suggested he follow up on a freelance article he wrote in the New Left magazine Leviathan in 1969, entitled “Fourteen Notes on Television and the Movement.” He joined Berkeley’s faculty in
1978 and in addition to various academic posts has been an oft-quoted expert on politics, mass culture and communication.
Gitlin has written a dozen books, the most recent of which is The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats and the Recovery of American Ideals. Fewer than half of his books are about the 1960s, but the topic still seems to shadow him. This spring, he began teaching an american Studies seminar titled, simply, “The ’60s.”
“The movement was 10 years of my life, from 17 to 27, and it turned out to have historical significance,” he said. “My personal interest happened to overlap with matters of moment. i roll with those punches.”
Q. Columbia wasn’t the only campus with sit-ins and student unrest. Why has it become such a flashpoint?
A. The uprising at Columbia falls at a moment when the summer of confrontations reaches a boil. in the
fall of 1967, there is a major escalation of tactics in the student movement [on several campuses] … The SdS then declares that the slogan of the moment has become “From Protest to Resistance.” So the call for confrontation has
POsitiOn:
professor of Journalism and Sociology and Chair, ph.D. program in Communications
Length Of serviCe:
6 years
histOry:
Freelance journalist, part -time university lecturer, 1968-1977
professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, and
Director, Mass Communication program, 1978-1994 professor of culture, journalism and society,
new York University, 1995-2002
gone out. Then there’s the national political scene: the Tet offensive; [Eugene] McCarthy’s campaign, which shakes the democratic Party; Robert Kennedy’s candidacy and Lyndon Johnson’s abdication, followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King and this great eruption of rage in the black communities. Then comes Columbia.
if you’re looking for a symbol, and people are always look-ing for that, then Columbia is the transparently available, easily mobilized symbol for the ratcheting up of the confrontation of the apocalyptic forces of the time. it’s the first large-scale building occupation, and of course being in New York means it’s a starburst in a hall of mirrors. So Columbia is immediately seized upon by everybody—by the right and by the left—as the spark for the next stage.
For Tom Hayden, it’s the first of many “Columbias” that are going to come; it’s going to be a crucial moment in the growing resistance. For others it’s the turn toward the revolu-tion that a number of people involved in the Columbia action will then enroll in. For [New York Times associate managing editor] abe Rosenthal, it’s the beginning of the end of civili-zation. and for the Nixonian right and the George Wallace right, who are feeling each other out at this point, it’s yet more proof that it’s time to bring down the fist.
Q. Some people seem to feel nostalgic for that time. Is that warranted?
A. How could somebody feel a golden haze of nostalgia for a year of horrendous war, of piercing
assassinations, mass violence that annihilated parts of cities which still haven’t been rebuilt, the breakdown of the 30-plus-year liberal coalition and the beginning of Republican ascendancy? How somebody could celebrate and feel misty about the whole of that year strikes me as astoundingly ignorant.
The ’60s were very complicated. as i tell my students, they took 10 years to happen. an immensity of things took place then, and many of them had emancipation potentiality, some of which was realized. To live through it was, in many ways, agonizing. To think it was all a moment of all unadulterated nobility? No.
Q. What do the students in your course, “The ’60s,” seem most interested in?
A. There are only 16 students; there was a lot of demand for the course. They all have different angles. One
student is interested in the history of the dance Theatre of Harlem. another in american foreign policy, specifically the missile crisis. Somebody else is interested in the media coverage of the Chicago convention demonstrations, another in the escalation of violence. There are people really interested in music and art. The revisiting of the ’60s is as variegated as the ’60s themselves.
eiLee
n Ba
RRoS
o
DaRR
en Ro
SaRio
wHO HE IS: assistant Vice President for Human Resources information Services yEARS AT COluMBIA: 23 wHAT HE DOES: “i read and write e-mail, and i sit in meetings,” he quips. “it’s the dilbert thing, the curse of modern times.” as a manager of human resources data and systems development, he also oversees the team that designs functional changes to the management system that Human Resources operates. He is constantly “developing strategies to improve the way we do business.”A GOOD DAy ON THE JOB: When he is able to help his co-workers address smaller issues, but also work on a larger project. “Seeing in a day that we’ve moved closer to a place where things are done efficiently and quickly, and done well,” leaves him with a sense of fulfillment.THE ROAD TO COluMBIA: He arrived as a freshman in august 1979. “it was my first time on campus,” he recalls. “[Columbia] was my dream school.” He studied computer science for three years, then left and took various jobs, including work as a computer programmer and, later, as a carpenter. “That was a lot of fun,” he says, “but i kind of had the sense that i should finish my degree.” He returned to simultaneously work here while he studied, before starting at Human Resources in 1990. He has lived in the Morningside Heights area all this time.
MOST MEMORABlE EXPERIENCE: “arriving [freshman year] with my steamer trunk and typewriter in hand has to be up there.” So is his 1996 graduation ceremony from the School of General Studies. although he’d been to other graduations and even been a marshal, “to be sitting on the different side of things was tremendously memorable.” in his professional life, one important event sticks out: the day HR implemented a new, long-awaited software system after working on it for five years. “i think people around the University still remember” that day, he says. BEST PART OF THE JOB: “The things that i can do make it possible for those who educate—or those who provide clinical care, or those who research—to do that better or more easily,” he says. He finds joy in engaging members of the University community about his office’s projects. “i have within me a teacher, and i like to teach,” he reflects.IN HIS SPARE TIME: He is “endlessly renovating” his house, enjoying it as a counterpoint to his office job. Carpentry “can be intellectual and challenging; it can make you think,” he says, “but your product is just so very real.” in addition, he has a four-year-old son. “Playing with Max is really the coolest thing,” he says.
—by Ariel Bibby
TheRecord April 28, 2008 12
scrapbooK
What are you looKing at?hint: You may need a divine light to show you the way to this statuette. Send answers to [email protected]. First to e-mail the right answer wins a Record mug.
ANSWER TO LAST CHALLENGE: The symbol of the Fu Foundation—School of Engineering and Applied Science. The symbol is etched on the pavement near the school.
Winner: David M Rubinstein, radiation safety office.
Moot Courtcontinued from page 1
Philip Rothcontinued from page 1
PaRe
Sh g
anDh
i/ in
Dia a
BRoa
D
SLav
a neP
oMnY
aShC
hYMi
Chae
L DaM
eS
John coatsworth (center), acting dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), congratulates Global Leadership Award recipients arnold a. saltzman (CC’36) and lan yang (SIPA’96). Saltzman, a distinguished industrialist and diplomat, and Yang, a leading force in China’s media business, were recognized for their distinguished service at SIPA’s annual awards gala held at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan on April 14.
ingness to engage with difficult issues, while “refusing to be self-exiling.”
“He is the necessary american writer who refused to leave the room,” Lethem said. “He’s the writer who was always going to live in the world i was in.”
distinguished scholars comprised the second panel, all of whom had been asked to select one of Roth’s books to discuss.
Hermione Lee, chair of English Literature at Oxford University, singled out The Ghost Writer (1979), a novel about the young writer Nathan Zuckerman’s first en-counter with the fictional author E.i. Lonoff.
“i have a special admiration for the perfectly crafted and formed,” she said, comparing the book with short works by Turgenev, Tolstoy and James. “Every tiny detail of phrasing has its right place in this book.”
But the highlight for many was the brief remarks from the author himself, who ascended to the stage amid thunderous applause.
“Time runs at a terrifying speed,” he said, commenting on reaching 75. “it seems as though it was just 1943, the war was on, and i was 10.”
Roth recalled writing his first story that year: Storm Off Hatteras. Then he recalled the play he co-wrote and performed with classmates upon graduating from public elementary school. Titled Let Freedom Reign, it plotted “tolerance,” played by a classmate, against “prejudice,” played by Roth. at the end of the play, tolerance wins the day, and prejudice skulks away, exiting stage left.
“it’s not such a stretch to say that 12-year-old gave birth to the man of today,” he said. “That was the beginning, the start of the trail that leads up to today. Let’s do this again in 25 years. it will be here before we know it.”
grants & g iF tswho GAVe it: an anonymous donorhow mUch: $25 millionwho Got it: arts and ScienceswhAt for: Physical plant and financial aidhow will it be Used: $20 million will support construction of the new interdisciplinary Science Building, while $5 million will benefit financial aid at the College.
who GAVe it: Victor H. Mendelson (CC’89)how mUch: $1.5 millionwho Got it: arts and ScienceswhAt for: american Studieshow will it be Used: To support an endowment for the directorship of the american Studies program, currently held by andrew delbanco. The position will be known as the Mendelson Family Professorship.
who GAVe it: EMC Corp.how mUch: $750,000who Got it: Columbia Business SchoolwhAt for: information and Technology Grouphow will it be Used: This in-kind donation of a full Storage area Network (SaN) will allow the school’s information and Technology Group to overhaul and modernize its current storage environment, enhance research and benefit students with increased e-mail storage, quotas, document-sharing and RSS capabilities. This gift was made possible by Joe Tucci (BUS’84), chairman, president and CEO of EMC Corp. who is also a member of the business school’s Board of Overseers.
who GAVe it: Glaser Progress Foundationhow mUch: $1.5 millionwho Got it: Earth institutewhAt for: access Projecthow will it be Used: The access Project, directed by Josh Ruxin, assistant clinical professor of public health at the Mailman School of Public Health, provides management support and technical assistance to strengthen health systems in africa, with a current focus in Rwanda.
who GAVe it: Gracious Glory Buddhism Foundationhow mUch: $70,000who Got it: Columbia LibrarieswhAt for: C.V. Starr East asian Libraryhow will it be Used: $20,000 will be used to purchase a set of Chinese Buddhist periodicals from the Republican era, with the remainder going to set up an endowment for the acquisition and conservation of Chinese Buddhism library materials.
padma Desai and husband Jagdish bhagwati were honored by India Abroad magazine with Lifetime Achievement Awards, presented by sir salman rushdie (at left), at a ceremony March 28 at Manhattan’s Gotham Hall. Bhagwati, University Professor at Columbia and a leading free-trade economist, and Desai, the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems at Columbia, are credited with helping create a blueprint for India’s modernization through their book, India: Planning for Industrialization, published in 1970.
pointed judicial queries. “You may have thought we were being a little rude in stepping over each other’s questions; let me assure you that is exactly how it looks in the real world,” Roberts said. “Because, quite often, the judges are debating among themselves, really, and just using the lawyers as a backboard.”
Roberts said that as a lawyer, he often wondered whether oral arguments really played much of a role in the decision-making process of the Supreme Court. Now he knows it matters very much. “When we’re in conference we talk a great deal about the points brought out in the argument,” he said.
in addition to Roberts, the moot court panel included the Hon. Michael W. McConnell, United States Court of appeals for the Tenth Circuit; the Hon. diana Gribbon Motz, United States Court of appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and the Hon. diane P. Wood, United States Court of appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Judge Motz said the give-and-take between the judges and students was “better than any we have in the Court of appeals.” Judge Wood said she liked the way the students answered their questions with a clear yes or no and then followed up with an explanation. if lawyers respond with vague answers or explanations before stating clearly yes or no, “the judge will assume they don’t have a good answer,” she said.
after the conclusion of the hearing and the final remarks, the judges took photos with student advocates and spoke briefly with them privately.
“This is incredible,” said Hogan, this year’s win- ner. “i went to this last year [as an observer] with Justice Samuel alito presiding, which was fascinating, and i said to myself then, ‘My goal is to make it to this stage next year.’ ”
cathy nepomnyashchy (center), director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, led a faculty delegation to Turkmenistan to meet with education officials in March. She was accompanied by Kimberly marten (left), chair of the department of political science at Barnard College and alex cooley (right), associate professor of political science, also of Barnard College. olga nepomnyashchy also accompanied her mother to Turkmenistan.
