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Politicians have been talking about the need for tax reform for decades and this year’s presidential campaign is no exception. Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump both say changes are needed, but it should come as no surprise that their proposals are very different.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, race has become a defining issue in this election year, and mobilizing the African American vote will be the key to winning the presidency, says Fred Harris, a professor of Political Science and director of the Center on African American Politics and Society.

Harris, whose scholarship has ranged widely over politics, race and religion, wrote the 2012 book The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Fall of Black Politics, and his commentaries have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. In October, he is organizing a conference, Black Power at 50, with Barnard Political Science Professor Kimberley Johnson on the scholarly legacy of Charles V. Hamilton, who joined Columbia in 1969 as one of the first African American faculty members. The conference will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, which Hamilton co-authored with the late civil rights activist Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael). “The book defined a generation and is still used in African American studies and political science courses on race and politics,” said Harris.

Q. How has the African American electorate reacted to the candidates?

A. The response has been moderate enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton and disdain for Donald Trump. Only 2 to 3 percent of African Americans report that they plan to vote for Trump, a historic low even for a Republican presidential candidate. While African American voters are behind Clinton, it is still uncertain whether she will receive the same level of voter turnout as Obama. In 2012, for the first time in recorded history, black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout. The group with the highest level of voter turnout was black women. If those levels are repeated, it will be because black voters are voting from a position of fear rather than highly enthusiastic support for Hillary Clinton.

Q. What has Black Lives Matter added to the political agenda?

A. Black Lives Matter has done more to put issues of institutional racism and criminal justice reform front and center than a two-term black Democrat in the White House, the 40-plus members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and traditional civil rights leaders and organizations, combined. I don’t think that the protest activism of Black Lives Matter will translate into votes, however. Black Lives Matter activists have already won by pushing an issue that was dormant in American politics.

Q. What is the state of race in the United States?

A. Racial tensions have increased during the Obama era, but this has less to do with Obama than with the latent racism that already existed. Economic anxiety, particularly felt among working-class whites, has produced a greater acceptance of racism and xenophobia. Racial progress in the United States has been a pattern of one step forward and two steps back. As the Obama era ends, we’re in a mode of two steps back. Progress, though it can last for years or even decades, eventually leads to racial backlash. It happened during the late 19th century after the progress that had been made during Reconstruction. And again after the legislative successes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the subsequent rise of law-and-order conservatism that challenged black progress in the courts and at the ballot box. Now it’s happening again.

Event

Black Power at 50: A Scholarly Conference, Oct. 20-21

In honor of Charles V. Hamilton and Dona Cooper Hamilton on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Black Power.

Q. What do you anticipate will be Obama's legacy?

A. By default it will be that he was the nation’s first president of African descent. His crowning domestic policy achievement will be Obamacare, which has reduced the number of uninsured Americans. His legacy on race relations will be mixed, if not a disappointment. Though he was blocked by the Republican-dominated Congress and faced the rise of anti-blackness, xenophobia and general hate against “the other”—meaning those who are not described as white—Obama failed to use the bully pulpit to push back on this assault. He seemed to be pushed into addressing many of these issues—particularly institutional racism and criminal justice reform—in the last quarter of his presidency.

Q. You also study religion. How are politics and religion entwined today?

A. The religious right does not hold as much power as they used to in elections. They have mostly lost the cultural wars on issues such as marriage equality, though in states like Indiana and North Carolina those battles still continue. They will have to “hold their noses” to vote for a Republican presidential candidate who is not particularly religious and whose Christian beliefs are not as fundamentalist as the Christian right. On another matter, Islam is being used as a political scare tactic by the right who continuously link terrorism to the Islamic faith.

—Interviewed by Gary Shapiro

Gregory Wawro specializes in explaining the intricacies of politics and government. As a professor of political science, he studies Congress, campaign finance, political economy and judicial politics. He has written an award-winning book on the use of the Senate filibuster and the effects of legislative rule changes.

As he looks at the 2016 election, he sees a number of unprecedented developments. This is a year when Republicans should have had a much easier time regaining the presidency, as it is rare for a party that holds the White House for two terms to keep it for a third.

If Clinton wins, the coattails sweeping other Democrats into office might be based less on voter enthusiasm for her than voters wanting to refuse Trump the presidency, he says. “This year is different in so many ways.”

Q. It is unusual for a two-term president to be succeeded by another of the same party. Will that pattern hold in 2016?

A. If Trump had not evoked such a strong negative response from so much of the electorate, I believe that the standard fatigue that we see after a party controls the White House for two terms would be the driving result of the election. Republicans would have taken back the presidency with relative ease.

Q. Do either of the candidates have coattails that could be a factor in the current presidential election?

A. In the summer, polls suggested that Hillary Clinton would win such a sweeping victory that there would be significant gains for the Democrats in down-ballot races, leading to big gains for the party in Congress. For a variety of reasons, those polls were not reliable. Now that the race has tightened, it is not clear that there will be a significant coattail effect. If there is and Clinton wins, it will not be because she is an immensely popular figure who has swept fellow Democrats into office, which is what we usually think is the source of coattails. I think it will be because voters who tend to vote Democrat turned out in large numbers to reject Trump.

Q. Can the GOP keep control of the House and Senate?

A. Political geography favors them keeping the House. As for the Senate, Democrats have, thus far, underperformed in the races where they should have taken back seats without much difficulty. A lot depends on whether the election breaks strongly in favor of Trump or Clinton. If Trump performs about the same as recent GOP candidates, I see his party keeping the House and the Senate. If he does much worse, Democrats will likely win a majority in the Senate and it may be enough to swing the House for them, too. It is highly unlikely, though, that Democrats will get a working majority in the Senate, which these days means at least 60 seats.

Q. Do you see any respite from the legislative obstruction that has stymied Congressional action?

A. It is difficult to see, given that legislative obstruction has evolved over the past several decades as a result of the deepening polarization between the parties, how this could be easily turned around. The only short-term solution that I see is for one party to invoke the nuclear option on legislation—an end-run that changes the rules of the Senate to require a simple majority instead of 60 votes to pass a bill—something I now think is inevitable without a dramatic reversal in the trend of polarization and obstruction.

Q. What precedent is set when senators refuse to set hearings for the president’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland?

A. Going forward, it is unlikely that any president will be able to get a Supreme Court nominee confirmed in an election year if the Senate is controlled by the opposite party. Democrats will likely do the same thing if a similar situation occurs, given the tit-for-tat way these conflicts have played out recently. This will probably also extend to lower court nominees. There is usually a slowdown of confirmation of nominees in an election year, but I think it is likely we could see confirmation attempts come to a complete standstill in the future.

—Interviewed by Gary Shapiro

Sharyn O’Halloran, the George Blumenthal Professor of Political Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs, has been focusing on the role of money in politics this year, in particular the presidential elections. “This is going to be a very tight race, it’s going to be a race about money, where money matters, and the candidates are going to have to speak not only to unnatural parts of their different constituencies, but they’re going to have to pick up the moderates within the electorate.

O’Halloran, a political scientist and economist who writes extensively about issues of economic growth, international trade and finance, regulation, democratic transitions, and the political representation of minorities, is also senior vice dean and chief academic officer at the School of Professional Studies. She came to Columbia in 1993 with a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

Q. What are some of the unusual twists and turns you have seen this year?

A. In the primaries, the same lobbyists, the same groups that supported the Cruz candidacy also supported the Clinton candidacy. That says there was a lot of uncertainty over who was going to win either the Republican primary and who was going to win the general. Once Cruz fell out of the race, everyone moved over to Clinton. The money came from finance, different types of businesses, real estate, all some of the largest donors. This was something we hadn’t seen previously.

Q. How does this compare to previous years?

A. In previous years you would see Republicans getting most of their support from businesses. Democrats, even the moderate Democrats, could attract some business support, but you would never see businesses lining up and contributing to both sides of the ledger, almost equally and at the same time, especially not in the primary stage. Businesses are hedging their bets, and it suggests that they are looking for the moderate to win.

Q. Where is the betting right now?

A. It’s with Clinton, even though popular opinion looks so even, because of the way votes get aggregated through the Electoral College. This is a case where you have extreme votes, or preferences, that coalesce around a candidate. The Electoral College is a balance that gives states an equal weight in the vote, a means to aggregate those extremes and have a more moderate view come through.

Q. How are the markets responding?

A. You’re not seeing the stock market responding to this election, even though there’s been so much concern around a Trump presidency, and in some cases a Clinton presidency. The reason, especially with regard to a Trump presidency, is that it looks like the Democrats might gain seats in both the House and the Senate, so a Trump presidency could be faced with a divided government. So Trump’s ability to pursue some of the more extreme policies that he has proposed would be limited. It’s called checks and balances.

Q. What are you looking at in the remaining weeks before Election Day?

A. It’s time for the candidates to start putting their agendas out there in a very concrete way that captures the 25 percent of voters who are uncommitted. This time the white male is the swing voter. Clinton and Trump will have to speak very clearly to their concerns, which have been their inability to gain from this global economic system, their inability to maintain a standard of living, their inability to make sure that there are paths and different types of opportunities going forward. They care about education, they care about different types of civil liberties, but not in the same way women do. That’s going to be an interesting challenge for both candidates.

—Interviewed by Bridget O'Brian

The last seven years have seen a slew of state laws enacted that require voters to have government-issued identification to combat in-person voter fraud.  That, in turn, has set up a series of challenges to those laws, many of which have been scaled back or overturned by federal courts. Richard Briffault, the Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation at Columbia Law School, discusses the laws and the challenges to them—and their effect on this year’s presidential election.

Q. What role will voter ID laws have in this election?

A. They probably won’t play a big role in 2016, in part because of the status of several lawsuits on the issue. The strictest, enacted in North Carolina, was struck down by a federal appeals court in June; the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked four-to-four on whether to hear the state’s appeal. Federal courts in Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas have also narrowed or thrown out some of the restrictions in those states’ voter ID laws.

Q. What did the appeals court find objectionable about the North Carolina law?

A. The state’s 2013 law required not just that voters have a photo ID, but it reduced early registration and ended same-day voter registration and preregistration. The court found that the North Carolina legislature did that with discriminatory intent, citing “smoking gun” evidence that showed lawmakers requested data on voting practices by race. They also noted that lawmakers started working on the voter ID bill one day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act requirement that certain states—including North Carolina—pre-clear any voting changes with the U.S. Justice Department.

Q. What is the current status of voter ID laws?

A. The Supreme Court has upheld the authority of states to require that voters present government-issued photo identification in order to vote. But there is an emerging consensus that there should be exceptions for those who don't have or can’t easily obtain one. Not everybody has a driver’s license, and some don’t keep a copy of their birth certificates; getting one often requires time and money. So the big issue is what kind of accommodations should be made for people in these situations. Separately, the U.S. Supreme Court split 4-4 on whether to hear North Carolina's appeal to reinstate its voter ID law, which means the state cannot enforce that particular law, but its legislature can re-enact it with different provisions. Other states could introduce similar laws in the future.

Q. Where is the line between what a legislature can and cannot do about voting access in their states?

A. States can adopt restrictions, like voter ID or shortening the period for early voting, that can affect access if the burden on access is not severe, and if the state has a reasonable justification. Of course, whether the burden is severe and whether the justification is reasonable in light of the burden will often be hotly contested, And certainly a state cannot act with a racially invidious purpose or if a court finds the restriction disproportionately affects racial minorities.

Q. Are voter ID laws necessary?

A. The usual argument for voter ID laws is that they help prevent in-person voter fraud, that is, someone showing up at a polling place and falsely claiming to be someone who is registered there. All studies, by academics, the media, and law enforcement agencies, have concluded that in-person voter fraud is almost nonexistent. There are election-related frauds, but in-person voter fraud, which is the only problem that voter ID addresses, is an extremely tiny problem.

—Interviewed by Bridget O'Brian

Columbia University produced a return of -0.9 percent on its endowment portfolio for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016. This reflects the normal one-quarter lag in private equity and real asset valuations.

The total value of the Columbia’s endowment as of June 30 was $9 billion. The University’s trailing 5- and 10-year returns are 7.4 percent and 8.1 percent, respectively. For long-term returns, Columbia remains a leader in its peer group.

“This was a year when most leading endowments had negative or only very modest returns,” said University President Lee C. Bollinger. “For us the key point is that over the past dozen years, our steady investment performance has helped Columbia compete academically with other great universities that have far larger endowments, and ensure that the university has been well positioned to withstand economic downturns over this turbulent period.”

Columbia oceanographer and paleoclimatologist Peter B. de Menocal, was appointed Dean of Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He was also named as Thomas Alva Edison/Con Edison Professor, a newly established chair funded by Con Edison.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today announced that Peter Holland has been named chief executive officer of Columbia University Investment Management Company (IMC). Mr. Holland, who has been IMC’s chief investment officer since 2003, will succeed Narv Narvekar, the outgoing CEO of IMC, who was today named president and chief executive officer of Harvard Management Company. Holland will transition to his new role effective October 3, 2016.

“We are extremely fortunate that Peter Holland will continue and further expand his leadership that has been essential to the University’s financial strength for more than a decade,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger. “Peter is a key architect of our Investment Management Company’s very strong long-term performance, more than doubling the size of our endowment since 2003 and, equally important, ensuring that the university has been well positioned to withstand economic downturns over this turbulent period.”

Prior to joining Columbia, Holland was with J.P. Morgan for fifteen years, in the U.S. Equities Derivatives Group from 1993 through 2003, serving as co-head of group from 1998 until joining Columbia. Before joining the Derivatives Group, he worked in the Private Placement Group and in Investment Banking (Financial Services Group). Holland graduated from Dartmouth College in 1987.

“We appreciate Narv’s exceptional service and his hiring by Harvard is a powerful affirmation of the strategy, structure and people assembled at Columbia’s IMC,” said Jonathan Schiller, Chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees. “First among these has been Peter Holland as our chief investment officer for the past dozen years. Peter’s contributions to the IMC and Columbia's investment performance have been tremendous. He has played a key role in developing both a risk-based investment approach and our investment manager selection process, which have made our endowment management a consistent strong performer. As Trustees, we share President Bollinger’s confidence in Peter’s continued leadership.”

Columbia Investment Management Company (IMC) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University responsible for managing the University’s endowment.

In the 2016 election candidates rarely agree on anything—except their opposition to free trade. But economists find that repealing trade is unlikely to restore the manufacturing jobs that have been lost. Learn more and watch video of Amit Khandelwal, director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School, discussing international trade.

In an effort to encourage Hispanics to hit the polls in November, HBO Latino filmed a one-hour special Habla y Vota on the impact of voting in the Latino community. The special includes a segment on Frances Negrón-Muntaner, professor of English and Comparative Literature, who studies a variety of issues affecting Latinos. Filmed in English with Spanish subtitles, it will air across HBO’s channels through Election Day.

Emily Ramshaw, the editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, a digital news organization, has been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced today.

“The narrative of slavery is a real reminder to America of how much enslaved labor is woven into the fabric of the nation. The mission of the museum is to make African American history understood as American history,” says Architecture Professor Mabel Wilson, whose new book is the official Smithsonian Institution history of its 19th museum, which opens on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall on Sept. 24.

Kellie Jones, associate professor of Art History and Archaeology, and Sarah Stillman, director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia Journalism School, are among those named 2016 Fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In a discovery that could have profound implications for future energy policy, Columbia scientists have demonstrated it is possible to manufacture solar cells that are far more efficient than existing silicon energy cells by using a new kind of material, a development that could help reduce fossil fuel consumption.

The team, led by Xiaoyang Zhu, a professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, focused its efforts on a new class of solar cell ingredients known as Hybrid Organic Inorganic Perovskites (HOIPs). Their results, reported in the prestigious journal Science, also explain why these new materials are so much more efficient than traditional solar cells—solving a mystery that will likely prompt scientists and engineers to begin inventing new solar materials with similar properties in the years ahead.

“The need for renewable energy has motivated extensive research into solar cell technologies that are economically competitive with burning fossil fuel,” Zhu says. “Among the materials being explored for next generation solar cells, HOIPs have emerged a superstar. Until now no one has been able to explain why they work so well, and how much better we might make them. We now know it’s possible to make HOIP-based solar cells even more efficient than anyone thought possible.”

Xiaoyang Zhu

Solar cells are what turn sunlight into electricity. Also known as photovoltaic cells, these semiconductors are most frequently made from thin layers of silicon that transmit energy across its structure, turning it into DC current.

Silicon panels, which currently dominate the market for solar panels, must have a purity of 99.999 percent and are notoriously fragile and expensive to manufacture. Even a microscopic defect—such as misplaced, missing or extra ions—in this crystalline structure can exert a powerful pull on the charges the cells generate when they absorb sunlight, dissipating those charges before they can be transformed into electrical current.

In 2009, Japanese scientists demonstrated it was possible to build solar cells out of HOIPs, and that these cells could harvest energy from sunlight even when the crystals had a significant number of defects. Because they don’t need to be pristine, HOIPs can be produced on a large scale and at low cost. The Columbia team has been investigating HOIPs since 2014. Their findings could help boost the use of solar power, a priority in the age of global warming. 

Over the last seven years, scientists have managed to increase the efficiency with which HOIPs can convert solar energy into electricity, to 22 percent from 4 percent. By contrast, it took researchers more than six decades to create silicon cells and bring them to their current level, and even now silicon cells can convert no more than about 25 percent of the sun’s energy into electrical current.

This discovery, Zhu said, meant that “scientists have only just begun to tap the potential of HOIPs to convert the sun’s energy into electricity.”

Theorists long ago demonstrated that the maximum efficiency silicon solar cells might ever reach— the percentage of energy in sunlight that might be converted to electricity we can use—is roughly 33 percent. It takes hundreds of nanoseconds for energized electrons to move from the part of a solar cell that infuses them with the sun’s energy, to the part of the cell that harvests the energy and converts it into electricity that can ultimately be fed into a power grid. During this migration across the solar cell, the energized electrons quickly dissipate their excess energy. But those calculations assume a specific rate of energy loss. The Columbia team discovered that the rate of energy loss is slowed down by over three-orders of magnitude in HOIPs – making it possible for the harvesting of excess electronic energy to increase the efficiency of solar cells.

Related: Columbia Scientists Unlock Big Perovskite Solar Cell Mystery, Clean Technica, Sept 22, 2016

“We’re talking about potentially doubling the efficiency of solar cells,” says Prakriti P. Joshi, a Ph.D. student in Zhu’s lab who is a coauthor on the paper. “That’s really exciting because it opens up a big, big field in engineering.” Adds Zhu, “This shows we can push the efficiencies of solar cells much higher than many people thought possible.”

After demonstrating this, the team then turned to the next question: what is it about the molecular structure of HOIPs that gives them their unique properties? How do electrons avoid defects? They discovered that the same mechanism that slows down the cooling of electron energy also protects the electrons from bumping into defects. This “protection” makes the HOIPs turn a blind eye to the ubiquitous defects in a material developed from room-temperature and solution processing, thus allowing an imperfect material to behave like a perfect semiconductor.

HOIPs contain lead, and are also water soluble, meaning the solar cells could begin to dissolve and leach lead into the environment around them if not carefully protected from the elements. 

With the explanation of the mysterious mechanisms that give HOIPs their remarkable efficiencies, Zhu knew, material scientists would likely be able to mimic them with more environmentally-friendly materials.

“Now we can go back and design materials which are environmentally benign and really solve this problem everybody is worried about,” Zhu says. “This principle will allow people to start to design new materials for solar energy.”

The research team was spearheaded by Haiming Zhu and Kiyoshi Miyata, two postdoctoral fellows at Columbia. Other members include graduate students Jue Wang, Prakriti P. Joshi, Kristopher W. Williams and postdoc Daniel Niesner, all of Columbia; Yongping Fu and Song Jin, collaborators from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; and the team was led by Columbia Chemistry Prof. Xiaoyang Zhu. This research received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

School of the Arts Dean Carol Becker’s research interests range from feminist theory and American cultural history to the education of artists and social responsibility. Her many books include The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change, The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility and Thinking in Place: Art, Action and Cultural Production. In her most recent work, Losing Helen, the cultural critic turns to one of the most personal subjects, coping with the death of her mother.