News Archive

The fifth annual Puppy Study Break is kicking off. Students are encouraged to take a break from their studies and play with puppies in John Jay. 

Over 27 days in 1913, 87,000 New Yorkers visited the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street and came face-to-face with modern art for the first time. “Everybody went and everybody talked about it,” wrote photographer and author Carl Van Vechten. “One may meet with ridicule, rage, helpless questioning and savage enthusiasm, but not with indifference,” opined the \"New York Evening Post.\" Former President Theodore Roosevelt (LAW 1882) reportedly stormed through the galleries proclaiming, “That’s not art!” The legendary show did nothing less than shatter American…

In their book This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains, David Stark, the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, and photographer Nancy Warner pair images of abandoned farms with the plain-spoken recollections of the people who still live in nearby communities.

Professor Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and director of Columbia's Institute for African Studies, discusses Nelson Mandela's life and lasting influence.

Understanding that past will help scientists like Ali, a PhD student at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, project what might happen in the future as the world warms up. This is no esoteric question for Los Angeles, whose nearly 4 million people depend in part on Mono Lake’s watershed for drinking water, green lawns, agriculture and industry.

When the writer Sholem Alecheim died in 1916, his funeral was one of the largest public gatherings ever seen in New York City. As many as 200,000 people lined the streets of the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens to watch his funeral cortege pass by. A memorial service was held in Carnegie Hall the next day, where Sholem Aleichem was lionized as “the Jewish Mark Twain.”

Tradition! Tradition! Alisa Solomon, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, has written a book about a musical that was so wildly successful, it became a tradition all its own. Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof examines far more than the 1964 Broadway juggernaut whose songs have been enjoyed by millions of Jews and non-Jews alike and has had countless productions mounted in every corner of the globe, from high school auditoriums to the Alhambra theater in Jaffa, Israel. Solomon shows how a musical set in a Jewish village in czarist Russia at the turn of…

As part of its 125th anniversary celebration, the college has mounted an exhibition, "Doing and Undergoing," which honors John Dewey by embodying his concept of learning through experience. 

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells.

Patricia Culligan, professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, is leading a team of 20 investigators who have just won a five-year $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how urban green infrastructure (GI) can mitigate the city's role in coastal zone pollution.

In one of his first public addresses since being elected mayor three weeks ago, Bill de Blasio came to Columbia to give the keynote address at the Earth Institute’s NYC Summit on Children, an all-day conference on the value of early childhood development programs and pre-kindergarten education.

In one of his first public addresses since being elected mayor three weeks ago, Bill de Blasio came to Columbia to give the keynote address at the Earth Institute’s NYC Summit on Children, an all-day conference on the value of early childhood development programs and pre-kindergarten education.

ALAN BRINKLEY, Allan Nevins Professor of American History, Whose John F. Kennedy Volume in the American Presidents Series Was Published Last Year

John F. Kennedy was a good president but not a great one, most scholars concur. A poll of historians in 1982 ranked him 13th out of the 36 presidents included in the survey. Thirteen such polls from 1982 to 2011 put him, on average, 12th. Richard Neustadt, the prominent presidential scholar, revered Kennedy during his lifetime and was revered by Kennedy in turn. Yet in the 1970s, he remarked: “He will be just a flicker, forever clouded by the record…

Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary year, announced today that Elizabeth Spayd has been named Editor in Chief and Publisher of the magazine and its website, cjr.org. Spayd has spent the last 25 years at the \"Washington Post,\" most recently as Managing Editor of the paper, where she helped supervise a newsroom of six hundred journalists in Washington and around the world, overseeing coverage of everything from political, foreign and financial news to investigative projects and features. Spayd’s previous job was Managing Editor of \"The Post’s\"…

Marianne Hirsch began her presidency of the Modern Language Assocation last January, just months before the release of a report to Congress by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences defending the value of a liberal arts education at a time of reduced humanities funding and waning student enrollments.