News
Columbia’s Lee C. Bollinger was among the university presidents, deans, professors and policy makers who spoke at a Nov. 18 White House Summit on diversity and inclusion in postsecondary education.
The all-day meeting included conversations with students from around the country, including Karisma Price (CC’17) and Kiana David (BC’17), as well as a speech by the U.S. Secretary of Education, John B. King. The event was a call to continue successful efforts to create greater diversity among the student bodies and faculty at the nation’s colleges and universities.
The federal Department of Education simultaneously issued an 89-page report spelling out how campus diversity efforts have fared during President Barack Obama’s administration, and included suggestions for further progress. It included data showing where educational inequities persist and featured practices that show promise.
President Lee C. Bollinger meets with Columbia student Karisma Price and Barnard student Kiana Davis at the White House summit.
Related: A Final Push for Inclusivity, Inside Higher Ed, Nov 21, 2016
Among the leadership examples cited in the report were Columbia’s efforts “to expand college access to low-income, first-generation, and historically underrepresented students [and its investment of] $85 million to support the recruitment and retention of underrepresented faculty.” It also cited other endeavors, such as grants for new or ongoing research by junior faculty members who contribute to diversity goals.
At the White House summit, Bollinger spoke on the day’s first panel, “Building a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion.” It was moderated by Theodore Shaw (Law’79), now a professor at University of North Carolina Law School and director of its Center for Civil Rights. Shaw is a former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and was a Columbia Law School professor until 2014. He had previously worked with Bollinger on the Supreme Court cases involving the University of Michigan’s affirmative action programs.
Shaw said that he sees “some tough times coming” in federal support for efforts to build diversity on campus given the change in administrations. Other panelists included Lori Alveno McGill, who served as defense counsel for the University of Texas in the recent Fisher cases; Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor, who had worked with Bollinger at Michigan; Jose Cruz, the president of Lehman College; and Payton Head, a student government leader and activist from the University of Missouri.
Related: Affirmative Action Isn’t Just a Legal Issue. It’s Also a Historical One., The New York Times, June 24, 2016
Bollinger began the discussion by emphasizing the shortcomings of the line of federal court decisions—starting with the 1977 Bakke case, the first U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld affirmative action in education—that separated the educational rationale for diverse student bodies from the enduring impact of the nation’s racial history on today’s unequal society.
“In order to think intelligently about educational benefits of diversity, it only really makes sense to talk about the realities of race in America—and that includes discriminatory practices and systemic discrimination,” Bollinger told the Columbia Spectator after the summit. “It’s only by linking all of this together that you can really explain why it is what we’re doing, and I think there’s a way to do that consistent with the [Supreme Court] cases.”
Bollinger’s legal and public advocacy goes back to his defense of the University of Michigan affirmative action programs when he was president there, which resulted in the 2003 Supreme Court cases that upheld the rights of schools to use holistic admissions policies that take account of race. When another challenge to affirmative action came before the court for the second time last year in the Fisher v. University of Texas case, Bollinger continued his public advocacy—as well as joining an amicus brief by several peer universities—urging the court to uphold the University of Texas’s holistic admissions policy. Earlier this year, the court did exactly that.
Later in the day, Susan Sturm, a Columbia law professor and director of the Center for Instructional and Social Change, spoke on a panel on the use of data in demonstrating what institutional strategies can help shape a culture of inclusion.
The Columbia and Barnard students, Price and Davis, are both LEDA Diversity Scholars at the University, a program run by the non-profit Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. It supports first generation college students from low-income backgrounds with high GPAs and standardized test scores, and who demonstrate leadership and intellectual curiosity. They were among 10 LEDA scholars who were asked to participate so the summit could hear student perspectives. “It was good to hear how important it is to get students into college whose experience is similar to mine,” said Price.
Related: What Once Was Lost Must Now Be Found: Rediscovering an Affirmative Action Jurisprudence Informed by the Reality of Race in America, Harvard Law Review, Apr 12, 2016
The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World
By Derek Chollet
PublicAffairs
In an insider’s assessment of Barack Obama’s (CC’83) foreign policy legacy, Derek Chollet, adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia’s Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, argues that Obama has profoundly altered the course of American foreign policy for the better and positioned the United States to lead in the future. He combines a deep sense of history with new details and insight into how the Obama administration approached the most difficult global challenges. Chollet, who served at the White House, State Department and Pentagon during the Obama years, takes readers behind the scenes of: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of ISIS, a belligerent Russia and more.
Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
By Mike Massimino
Crown Archetype
Imagine looking back at Earth from space and seeing the precise line between day and night. Massimino has done just that, and in his memoir, Spaceman, he puts readers inside the spacesuit with him. A professor of professional practice in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, he grew up in a workingclass Long Island family dreaming of space and was rejected by NASA three times. In his memoir, Massimino takes readers through the surreal beauty of his first spacewalk, the tragedy of losing friends in the Columbia shuttle accident, and the development of his enduring love for the Hubble Telescope. Spaceman is a rare up close journey into a world where science meets the most thrilling adventure, revealing just what having “the right stuff” really means.
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
By Tim Wu
Knopf
In a book that The New Republic described as, “A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention,” Wu shows how in nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising, sponsored social media and other efforts to harvest our attention. Wu, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, coined the term “net neutrality.” He argues that this barrage is the result of more than a century’s growth in the industries that feed on human attention, offering free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu makes clear that attention merchants constantly find new means of getting inside our heads and are changing our very nature.
Return to Cold War
By Robert Legvold
Polity
The 2014 crisis in Ukraine sent a tottering U.S.-Russia relationship over a cliff—a dangerous descent into deep mistrust, severed ties and potential confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War. In an incisive new analysis, Soviet and Russian foreign policy expert Legvold, the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Soviet Foreign Policy, offers a detailed exploration of the new phase in this relationship. He traces the long and tortured path leading to this critical juncture and contends that the recent deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations deserves to be understood as a return to the Cold War with great and lasting consequences. He urges political leaders in both countries to adjust their approaches in order to make it “as short and shallow as possible.”
Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration
By Flores A. Forbes
Skyhorse Publishing
Flores Forbes, associate vice president for Strategic Policy and Program Implementation and a former leader of the Black Panther Party, has been free from prison for 25 years. That, he shows in his latest book, makes him part of a group of black men who are all but invisible in society, men who have served their time and not gone back to prison, despite a recidivism rate that hovers around 65 percent. In this collection of essays on incarceration, sentencing reform, judicial inequity, reentering society and increasing inequality for the formerly incarcerated, Forbes weaves his own research, wisdom and experience into a portrait of these invisible men, giving them a voice and face in society
Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians Are Paid
By Miriam J. Laugesen
Harvard University Press
Sudden Death: A Novel
By Alvaro Enrigue
Riverhead Books
In a novel that The New York Times called, “Splendid,” The New Yorker said is “rich with Latin and European history,” and The Wall Street Journal hailed as “Brilliantly original,” Enrigue, a lecturer in Spanish in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Culture, takes as his subject a 16th century tennis match between Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn. The crowd includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene and a generation of popes. The story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. Enrigue traces a grand adventure at the dawn of the modern era.
Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead
By Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman
The MIT Press
In the year 2014, Google fired a shot heard all the way to Detroit. Its driverless car had no steering wheel and no brakes. The message was clear: cars of the future will rearrange established industries and reshape cities, giving us new choices in where we live and how we work and play. Hod Lipson, professor of Mechanical Engineering, and his co-author Melba Kurman, offer readers insight into the risks and benefits of driverless cars. The technology is nearly ready, they show, but car companies and policy makers may not be. The authors make a compelling case for why government, industry and consumers need to work together to make their development our society’s next “Apollo moment.”
Along the walls of Oceanographer Canyon, fish dart in and out of colorful anemone gardens and sea creatures send up plumes of sand and mud as they burrow. Bill Ryan, an oceanographer at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, studied these scenes through the windows of a mini research submarine in 1978 as he became one of the few people to explore the seafloor canyons that President Barack Obama (CC’83) designated a national monument in September.
At Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Open House on Oct. 8 the motto of the day was, “Clean hands are not learning hands!” said seismologist Marc Spiegelman. The annual event is a day of free public lectures, demonstrations, hands-on workshops for kids and a chance for members of the community of all ages to learn directly from world-renowned researchers. The eruption seen here sent ping-pong balls flying to demonstrate the hurling power of volcanoes.
Although Desmond Patton went to school for social work, being a social worker was never on his agenda. “I didn’t have a lot of interest in direct practice work,” he said. “I wanted to do research.
A New Yorker staff writer who also teaches and directs the Global Migration Project at the Columbi Graduate School of Journalism, Sarah Stillman has made a name for herself in the world of investigative journalism for richly empathetic stories that expose policies and institutions affecting society’s most vulnerable.
Spiritual enlightenment can arrive in the unlikeliest of places. For Josef Sorett, it came at an open mic night in a dark nightclub.
Dear Alma,
Is it true that a pair of Columbia graduates were featured in a Tony-nominated Broadway play?
—Curious Dentist
Dear Curious Dentist,
Yes, sort of. In 1991, The New York Times wrote a profile of a remarkable pair of sisters, two centenarian African American “maiden ladies.” Sarah (Sadie) Delany, 103 years old, and her younger sister Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, 100, living alone and sharp as tacks, recounted their life as two of 10 children born in North Carolina to a former slave who became the first African American bishop.
After they moved to New York City during World War I, both women earned advanced degrees at Columbia at a time when the University enrolled few students of color and fewer women. They became pioneering black professionals in the 1920s, witnessing the growth of New York’s African American community from the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance through the civil rights era and into the modern age, where they met figures such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne and Ethel Waters.
By the time the newspaper story about them was published, they were long retired and living together in Mount Vernon, N.Y. The interest in their lives sparked by that story led to a 1993 book, Having Our Say, which spent 105 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. In 1995, it was turned into a Tony-nominated Broadway play. A 1999 television movie starring Diahann Carroll and Ruby Dee won a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting.
Their lives were certainly worthy of the attention. Bessie Delany wanted to follow in the footsteps of her brother, who had graduated from New York University’s dental school in 1918, but the school didn’t admit women. The next year she applied to the Columbia School of Dental and Oral Surgery, becoming one of only 11 women, and the only African American woman, out of 170 students.
According to a recent book commemorating the school’s centennial by the school’s dean emeritus, Allan J. Formicola, Bessie Delany felt supported by the dean and most of of her teachers, but there was one professor who failed her. A white female student offered to submit the same work under her name, and sure enough, she passed. Delany graduated in 1923, only the second African American woman to receive a dental license from New York State, and set up her practice in Harlem.
Sadie Delany got a bachelor’s degree from Teacher’s College in 1920, and then her master’s five years later. “I was very happy at Columbia,” she said in her book. “Bessie had a much harder time there…I did not encounter as much prejudice.” After her graduation, Sadie Delany applied for her first teaching job by mail, and received her appointment the same way.
When she showed up for work on her first day, the school’s administrators were shocked to discover they had hired an African American woman. She became the first African American woman to teach home economics in a New York City public school.
The Delanys lived long enough to see how their lives inspired others. Bessie died in 1995 at age 104, outlived by Sadie, who died five years later at 109.
—By Gary Shapiro
Send your questions for Alma’s Owl to [email protected]
Like much of the cutting edge work at Columbia, Zosha Di Castri’s compositions are enriched by their multidisciplinary nature. Her approach to music will be on display when she is the focus of a composer portrait at Miller Theatre on December 1.
Di Castri, who at 31 is one of the youngest composers to be featured, describes herself as a composer, pianist and sound artist. She finds this honor, “Humbling and exciting. When writing music, your ideas stay in the abstract for so long. It is necessary to have concerts to hear your work fully realized, and find out whether it works or not.”
A cornerstone of Miller’s programming, these evening-length musical profiles explore the work of a single composer. Di Castri’s work that evening will include pianists, percussionists, a violist, and vocalists—alongside electronics—performing four pieces, including two premieres.
“Her music is captivating and multidimensional, and will be expertly performed by two ensembles [Yarn/Wire and Ekmeles] with whom she’s collaborated closely,” said Melissa Smey, executive director of Miller.
Di Castri, who joined the Music Department faculty in 2014 after earning her doctorate there, was recently named the Francis Goelet Assistant Professor of Music Composition. Her work extends beyond concert music, and includes projects with electronics, installations, video and dance.
“Imagine sound on a spectrum, moving fluidly between abstract soundscapes, gestural outbursts and referential echoes of music half-remembered,” she said. “I hope to trigger an engagement with the performers and audience, a heightened sense of awareness.”
A recent composition, Dear Life, highlights the hybrid, collaborative quality of her music. Commissioned by Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra and based on a short story by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro, the piece, which premiered in Ottawa in 2015, combines a symphony orchestra with a soprano, a recorded narrator, projections and photography to create an immersive multimedia experience.
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, reviewing another recent piece by Di Castri, Patina for solo violin, in The New York Times last June, noted that “Patina wove contemporary preoccupations— with microtonal shadings and the relation of music to noise—in a score tense with wild fluctuations in temperament.”
Di Castri grew up “on the prairie” in a small community in Alberta in western Canada. She started playing piano at age three and, as she grew older, learned how to play other instruments, including flute, oboe and percussion. During her last year of high school, she was introduced to composition when she had the opportunity to write a piece of music for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
After double majoring in composition and piano performance at McGill University in Montreal, Di Castri lived in Paris for two years where she studied political philosophy and spectral music, exploring the properties of sound and the psychology of musical perception.
When Di Castri arrived at Columbia as a graduate student in 2008, she took many classes at the University’s renowned Computer Music Center and was especially influenced by a sound sculpture course that was, she said, “a huge revelation.” It was very hands-on, teaching her to solder and build objects out of metal and wood. It is also where she started thinking about how sculpture might play into her music.
Phonobellow, which was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and premiered in 2015, can be traced back to the sound sculpture course. The hour-long piece, co-written with David Adamcyk, blends violin, bassoon, saxophone, piano, percussion, electronics and a performative installation—a 20-foot long, eight-foot tall kinetic sculpture that looks like a cross between an old-fashioned camera bellows and an accordion. Throughout the piece, the musicians manipulate the sculpture; in effect, playing it as a percussion instrument, and eventually an organ.
Recent orchestral compositions by Di Castri have been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, Tokyo Symphony and Toronto Symphony Orchestra, among other musical groups. In September, she was awarded a commission by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress to write a piece for ICE with percussionist and conductor Steven Schick.
This semester, Di Castri is teaching undergraduate composition and Techniques of 20th Century Music. In the spring, she will teach Masterpieces of Western Music, and a new graduate seminar that she is designing, Composing for Dance.
“The Columbia music majors and graduate students are extremely intelligent, very motivated and curious, critical thinkers,” said Di Castri. “I’m always surprised and inspired by the work they’re doing. I see my teaching as a collaborative dialogue, an opportunity to bring forward materials that will lead to an interesting conversation and hopefully help everybody with their work.”
—By Eve Glasberg
Election Day wasn’t just about the presidency. The election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in the Senate likely means a conservative majority will dominate the U.S. Supreme Court for decades.
“He could have two or three appointments to the Court in the next four years,” said Jeffrey Lax, a professor of political science who specializes in judicial politics, the U.S. Supreme Court in particular. He notes that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (LAW’59) is 83 and Anthony Kennedy is 80. “Four years is a long time,” said Lax.
A conservative Supreme Court, working with a Republican Congress, will have a lasting impact on America, said Lax, noting a number of potential, sweeping changes. The Affordable Care Act, upheld by the Court in 2012, likely will be repealed and the Court’s 2015 ruling in favor of same-sex marriage could be overturned, returning the issue to the states. A decision in 2013 that effectively gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act will have an impact on future elections if conservative justices reject individual cases claiming voter suppression.
Lax thinks the deepest core of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision upholding a woman’s right to have an abortion, is safe, at least as long as no one else leaves the Court. But he added, “A lot of it has been carved away over the years. Even now, Roe has been deeply wounded in practical effect.” The Court also recently agreed to hear a case involving transgender rights, which likely won’t be heard until there is a ninth justice. Extension of such rights seems unlikely, said Lax.
Most likely, Trump’s first action regarding the Court will be to nominate someone to fill the seat that has been vacant since the February death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the fifth member of what was a conservative majority. “This could be something he uses to play nice with the Republican establishment or he could use it to poke at the establishment,” said Lax. “I don’t know what to expect.”
The list of potential nominees Trump released during the campaign included conservative judges and Senators—even one who didn’t endorse him—but didn’t list any of the expected names.
Merrick Garland, whose nomination last spring by President Barack Obama (CC’83) was blocked by a Republican majority in the Senate, now is expected to remain a justice in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Partisanship drives Senate votes on Supreme Court nominees in two ways, Lax said. Republicans tend to vote for a Republican president’s nominees while Democrats vote against them and vice versa, but Senators also view public opinion through a partisan lens— really listening only to the opinions of constituents from their own party.
Lax said his research has shown that Republican Senators are far more likely to listen to their more conservative constituents than to the average voter in their state. “I don’t expect Republicans in Congress to be a meaningful check on Trump, even if their constituents as a whole want it,” said Lax.
There also are a number of vacancies on lower federal courts that Trump will be able to fill. After a rule change in 2013, those nominees can be confirmed by a majority vote. Supreme Court nominees still require breaking any filibuster with 60 votes. Although Democrats will have 48 votes in the new Senate, it will be hard for them to block Trump nominees, said Lax.
“If they try to filibuster a nominee, Republicans will end the filibuster and just require a majority vote,” he said. But replacing Scalia with another conservative doesn’t mean the Court will act exactly as it did before.
“You’ll get someone whose thoughts about legal rules will interact in complicated ways with the other justices’ thoughts,” said Lax. “It’s not like you’re replacing Scalia with a clone.”
—By Georgette Jasen
Alice Kessler-Harris, a scholar of women’s and labor history, has witnessed a number of firsts in her career. She came of age as a historian in the late 1960s as the field of women’s history was being created. At the time, there were virtually no women studying with her in graduate school, and she had only one woman for a professor. Even her dissertation on labor organizing had no women in it “because few historians thought about women as appropriate or interesting subjects,” she says.
That began to change dramatically within a few years. “It was enormously scintillating to be in the middle of real debates about real things,” recalls Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Women’s history linked the past with the politics we were living ...At the same time, of course, we were also changing the institutions in which we lived.”
Now, as another barrier breaks, Kessler-Harris discusses how she views the election of Hillary Clinton as America’s first female president.
Q. Where do you put this milestone in historical context?
A. In the last 40 years, there has been what you can only call a revolution in terms of the roles women play in the world, and the expectations of women in the workforce and the economy and the family. We’ve moved from what used to be called a male breadwinner family to the two-income family. Before the 1960s there were only one or two women in Congress at any one time; they often replaced husbands who died while in office. Since then there’s been a dramatic expansion of women in politics, although in Congress women still make up only about 20 percent of the seats.
Q. How many of these changes were inevitable versus a function of a changing economy?
A. Nothing, I believe, was inevitable. Changes in the economy and in family life have drawn women from largely poorly paid, secondary jobs to economically independent and self-supporting lives. Their political imaginations have changed accordingly, and women, as the current election shows, now fully recognize the need for political representation. There’s an irony in the fact that, when Hillary's husband was running for president in 1992, she was attacked for not wanting to stay home and bake cookies. Now look where she is.
Q. Does this reset gender roles in any significant way?
A. In much the same way people have begun to acknowledge race as a crucial factor in our identities and our political stances, they now think about men’s and women’s roles in family and community as politically important. Issues of equal pay, paid parental leave, childcare and sexual harassment can no longer be avoided, making gender an important electoral variable. Just as words like equality and democracy have taken on different meanings in light of movements for racial justice, so they introduce new energy into women’s struggles for fuller places in American society. Partly because she began her career by focusing on issues of race and poverty as they affected children, Hillary Clinton bridged gender and race, helping to reset gender roles from her initial entry into politics.
Q. Some still view feminism as a threat, how can that be addressed?
A. If by feminism, we mean the search for human equality, then it will continue to threaten different people in different ways. But the goal of fair and equal treatment can’t be abandoned just because it threatens those with privilege. Issues of reproductive rights, child care, equal pay, work and motherhood affect almost everyone at some stage of their lives. But because resolving them challenges traditional notions of family life, they produce tremendous conflict. A feminist politics has to reconcile the new tensions of women’s working lives with the caring tasks to which women have routinely been assigned. But that won’t be an easy task.
Q. So she’s been elected—now what?
A. A Hillary Clinton presidency will put issues of equality at the forefront of discussion: Black Lives Matter, the $15 minimum wage, trade union representation, and inequality will all become part of the agenda. That’s not to say that she will succeed, but assuming she doesn’t turn out to be a Margaret Thatcher, she should be able to change the level of the discussion around domestic issues. At the same time, Republicans are already threatening to do to her what they did to Obama and refuse to pass any legislation, or to consider a Supreme Court nomination. The very issues that we feminists, we women, are delighted that Hillary has brought to the forefront of her campaign are the issues that will be very difficult to move forward on once she takes office. At least Hillary, helped by [Vermont Senator Bernie] Sanders and [Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth] Warren, gives us a platform from which to move forward.
For John Reddick, Harlem isn’t just a visual feast, it’s music to his ears. The architectural historian, who leads walking tours of the Upper Manhattan neighborhood, has been researching the cultural connections between early 20th century music written by African Americans and Jews who lived in Harlem.
Reddick also is a Columbia Community Scholar, one of 18 northern Manhattan residents selected by the University to pursue research projects and develop their skills at Columbia. They audit courses, have library privileges and meet one-on-one with scholars in their fields.
The program, which is jointly administered by the Office of Government and Community Affairs and the School of Professional Studies, began in 2012. Reddick is now in his third year, and on Nov. 4 he will give the first Columbia Community Scholars Lecture at Faculty House at 6:30 p.m.
James Reese Europe's 1916 string octet. Photo courtesy of the Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.
His topic is the many links between early 20th-century African American and Jewish music cultures in Harlem. He will discuss composers like James Reese Europe, a black bandleader who straddled the ragtime and jazz eras, whose orchestra was one of the first to give a jazz concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912; and H.T. Burleigh, a classically trained composer and singer who arranged and wrote hundreds of spirituals (In the 1920s, Burleigh also was a baritone soloist for the choir at New York’s Temple Emanu-El.)
Such artists influenced the next generation of musicians to grow up in Harlem, including George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. “If you read their biographies, they were going to these local theaters on West 125th Street,” said Reddick. The ragtime music there was the hip-hop music of the day.” He added, “Columbia is on the shores of this great history.”
The transfer of identity and ideas was a two-way street. As a young vaudevillian, Sophie Tucker was forced to wear blackface until she refused, and audiences were shocked to find she was white and Jewish. Many of this Jewish singer’s songs were written by black composers, including her signature song for over 60 years Some of These Days, written by Shelton Brooks, a fellow vaudevillian. In 1934, Gershwin adapted a story of black cultural life to create the opera Porgy and Bess.
Reddick says that Eastern European Jewish immigrants’ sense as outsiders has parallels in the black community. “What better two groups are there to help create the American songbook?” said Reddick. “Psychologically, we all have something about ourselves that makes us feel like an outsider, so outsiders writing from that experience in the end touched everybody.”
That’s not a feeling Reddick experienced growing up in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. “I was in a very integrated area and always feel blessed that this was my experience,” said Reddick. “I had this comfort factor with others.”
He received an architecture degree at Ohio State University and went to Yale for his master’s, becoming a teaching assistant to Vincent Scully, an art history professor at Yale who influenced dozens of students who became well known architects. “He told us to look at the cultural life, not just the physical buildings.”
Which is what Reddick does in his walking tours of Harlem where he discusses cross-cultural influences and connects musical and theatrical history to the architectural landscape. The tour recently included an exhibition of sheet music at the restaurant Settepani on Lenox Avenue.
“They were the album covers of their time,” he said. It included sheet music from the 369th Infantry Jazz Band, led by Europe. As the band for the “Harlem Hellfighters,” one of the first regiments in which African American men could fight for the Allies in World War I, they fought on behalf of the French. Its musicians played in concerts all over France, introducing jazz to military and civilian audiences.
After moving to Harlem in 1980, Reddick became a consultant for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit community and economic development agency and has since worked on several public space projects in Harlem, including the creation of Frederick Douglass Circle on the northwest corner of Central Park and the installation of a bronze memorial to author Ralph Ellison at 150th Street and Riverside Park, across from where the writer lived.
More recently, Reddick has been working with the Apollo Theater, giving talks and leading tours of the historic venue.
He recently gave a tour for the creative team behind the Marvel Comics series on Netflix Luke Cage, which is set in Harlem and features a black superhero. “I wanted to give them a flavor of the architecture and character of the neighborhood, including how people live, recreate and work there,” he said. “There is an intimacy of the community that I sought to show them.”
—By Gary Shapiro
Columbia Community Scholar John Reddick gives a lecture on contributions by African American composers to pop culture, including soundtracks for movies like Meet Me in St. Louis.
With the presidential election just two weeks away, the latest polls suggest that Hillary Clinton will win, some saying her chances are better than 90 percent. But individual poll results vary widely and some still give Trump a chance of turning things around.
Why the discrepancies? “Polling is not an exact science,” said Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science and founding director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia. “You have to be careful.”
With colleagues, he recently studied 4,221 polls to compare poll results to the actual outcome in 608 federal, state and local elections since 1998. They found that the actual margin of error once the votes were counted was between 6 and 7 percent, about twice the estimated margin reported with poll results.
Here he answers questions about the polling in the current election campaign.
Q. Why is polling not an exact science?
A. Different polls use different methods and survey people on different days. They reach different people. The non-response rate is estimated at more than 90 percent. Poll takers try their best to get a random sample, but if they don’t, they adjust for differences between the sample and the population at large. Those adjustments are based on assumptions. When a candidate is losing, his or her supporters are less likely to respond to a poll. That doesn’t mean they are less likely to vote. I think that if the election were held today, Donald Trump would do better than what the polls are showing.
Q. Is there a chance Trump can win?
A. A one-in-ten chance seems like a reasonable number. For presidential elections, one in ten takes us back 40 years. In that period we have had just one election when there were big changes just before the election: In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the presidency after losing in the polls for months. Based on what has happened before, things don’t change much in the last three weeks. By now most people have decided who they’re going to vote for. But you can’t be sure.
Q. Will the third-party candidates make a difference?
A. Although the third-party candidates this year are doing better than many in the past, they are still far behind the Republicans and the Democrats. Once it’s a two-candidate race, you don’t want to waste your vote. It’s hard to break the threshold of getting people to vote for you if you don’t have a chance. The federal system, with the electoral college, makes it hard for third-party candidates to succeed.
Q. Should the polls still be getting so much attention?
A. You shouldn’t bother paying attention to individual polls. The aggregators such as pollster.com are more accurate. Many polls are done for commercial purposes in partnership with a survey organization, with questions about the election added to questions about such things as what kind of toilet paper you use. Horse-race polls are a loss leader, a way to get your poll in the news. This is not to say that these polls are no good, it just gives some insight as to why there are so many polls out there.
Q. What’s your outlook for this election?
A. This is not a bad year for the Democrats; the economy is doing okay and the president is fairly popular. There has been a narrative that after two terms of a Democratic president, it is time for the Republicans to take over, that the party in the White House usually changes after two consecutive terms. I don’t see that strongly supported in the data. In 1988, Reagan was succeeded by George H.W. Bush. In 2000 [after Bill Clinton’s two terms], as we know, Al Gore won the popular vote. At the start of this campaign I would have given the Democratic candidate 52 percent of the vote, others said about 49 percent. That’s not too far from where we are now. All that is without reference to the particularities of this year’s candidates and their campaigns.
—By Georgette Jasen
Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD)
“This is an exciting opportunity to expand the possibilities for deeper and broader racial justice interventions, while addressing the need to restore black leadership to the forefront of the movement,” said Denise Perry, co-founder and executive director of BOLD. “This program will provide leaders the chance to think beyond our American context and connect across geographies and disciplines.”
Center for Community Change
“The history and ongoing reality of structural racism is the great challenge facing our country,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. “We’re proud and excited to be part of this bold effort to build a better, more inclusive future and invest in leaders who can imagine and create that future.”
Nelson Mandela Foundation
“The legacies of colonialism and apartheid continue to burden South Africa,” said Sello Hatang, CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. “Race remains a fundamental fault line threatening realization of Nelson Mandela’s dream of a truly free society. In this context we are honored to partner with US-based organizations in a program premised on the need to challenge anti-black racism in all its forms both locally and globally.”
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, “This moment in our country demonstrates the need for an intentional investment in the leadership of young activists, leaders and visionaries who are committed to the hard work of tackling racism. I could not be more encouraged than I am by the decision of The Atlantic Philanthropies to undertake this bold initiative and to seed into our collective future by supporting the development of a dedicated corps of racial justice leaders who will be equipped to confront the complex and global dimensions of racism.”
Haas Institute
“The entire world is going through profound shifts, much of it centered around identity, around who belongs,” said john a. powell, director of the Haas Institute. “Within the US, our transformation and development as a society cannot be understood without understanding racism, and specifically anti-black racism, which affects all people in our society, albeit in different and unequal ways. In effort to address race and racialized outcomes in this country and abroad, strong leadership will be essential. The Haas Institute is incredibly honored to help launch the Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and to bring to bear our established history and diversity of research and scholarship to this effort.”
How many courses require students to read Freud, discuss the Gospel of St. Matthew, and then watch episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?