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For two days in October, more than 20 executives of nonprofit groups in Harlem came together at Columbia Business School for a leadership training program. To Professor Ray Horton, who joined the faculty in 1970, the new Strengthening West Harlem Nonprofits program represents the ideal alignment of University expertise and his own longstanding commitment to serving the local community. For the past three years, he has been in charge of social enterprise programs in the business school’s executive education division, which he sees as an important platform for enhancing the leadership skills of those working in many forms of public service. “This is kind of a dream come true for me,” says Horton. “It bridges the gap between the practical business management skills that these nonprofit leaders already possess and the types of cutting-edge training in management principles that they would receive in a formal M.B.A. program.” The goal is to give these leaders new tools for effectively managing in the face of increasing demand for their services and decreasing budgets. The first group to go through the training, which was underwritten by a grant from the American Express Foundation, quickly saw benefits for their organizations and professional development. “By the end of the session I was really clear what my core values are, where I want to lead from and what the result is that I would like to produce,” said Shirley Faison, executive director of The National Black Theatre. Horton, the Frank R. Lautenberg Professor of Ethics and Corporate Governance, has had an interest in the impact of management decisions on governments and nonprofits dating back to his days at Harvard Law School and subsequent graduate work in political science at Columbia. His dissertation on the development of collective bargaining for New York City municipal employees in the late 1960s led to his appointment to a commission set up during the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. For 15 years, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, he ran the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group for city finances and services, all while continuing to teach at Columbia Business School. From his hands-on work in municipal government, Horton learned a key lesson—that civil servants can benefit from professional management training. That realization led, in turn, to the establishment of a series of programs at the business school in public and nonprofit management, which have evolved over the years in response to students’ growing interest in corporate social responsibility, international development and the nonprofit sector. In some ways Horton’s latest venture returns him to the passions that launched his academic career back in the ’60s. Q. How did you end up becoming a professor in a business school? The late ‘60s were a very difficult time for Columbia. The Business School was under assault from the students of the college. I think the Business School dean thought he needed somebody who was a nontraditional person, and I think as a lawyer and a political scientist I was viewed as a nontraditional person. Q. What was the Temporary Commission on City Finances, and what work did you do there? That was a commission that was set up during New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s to study how to get out of the city’s long-term fiscal problems. I had learned a lot about New York City finances and Mayor Abraham Beame asked me if I would take a leave of absence from the Business School, which I did for two years, and I produced 20-some big reports which were by and large ignored by the city. We were after fundamental reforms that were not really politically feasible. It was a typical example of the academic working on policy problems and coming up with solutions that were not politically viable. Q. In 1983 you started something at the Business School called the Public and Nonprofit Management Program. How did that start, and why did it become the Social Enterprise Program in 1998? One thing I learned when I was working on city finances in the 1970s was that at the core of the city’s problems was that it was horribly managed. I sat down with the dean and I said, “We ought to start a program in public management. We ought to have a set of courses because the city needs people like Columbia Business School graduates who are trained in public management.” And that eventually become the program in Public and Nonprofit Management. That was a small program, really a sweat equity program that I ran for about 15 years out of my office with a part-time assistant. But we had a nucleus of students interested in government and the nonprofit sector, and I was sort of the employment officer for those students. In the late ’90s we began to think we should be reaching out to more than the students who were interested in public and nonprofit management. We thought we ought to teach corporate social responsibility to the students who wanted to be business leaders, social entrepreneurship to the young people who wanted to go out and start up nonprofit organizations, and international development to all the students who wanted to make the emerging markets a better place. And so it morphed into the Social Enterprise Program. I ran that from 1998 until 2009. Then Dean [Glenn] Hubbard suggested I take over running the nonprofit programs in executive education. We started Programs in Social Enterprise, which comprise two open-enrollment programs and a series of custom programs in such places as Saudi Arabia and Ireland as well as local institutions like the New York City police and fire departments. The newest of these customized programs is based in West Harlem. Q. How do you define social enterprise? It’s the application of business or management skills to the solution of social and environmental problems. That can be done through government, a nonprofit or a for-profit. It’s how you use management or business training to do something other than make as much money as possible, i.e. to make the world a better place. Q. And this is something that’s really developed in the last 20 years or so? Yes. In the 1990s, at least at Columbia Business School, there was a noticeable shift in the interests and values of business school students. I characterize it by saying there were fewer Gordon Gekkos walking the halls and more people who defined what they wanted to get out of business school less in monetary terms and more in social terms. I think some of it came from the corporate scandals of the early 2000s where you had Tyco and Worldcom and Enron, whose executives were basically looting the corporate store. Business school students were really disgusted by that. It grew so fast at Columbia partly because of the changing environment of students and because we put together a good program. It’s a major program at the business school now. The average enrollments in the Social Enterprise courses are larger than any other specialty in the school, including finance. Q. Can you talk a little more about the program you established—Strengthening West Harlem Nonprofits— with the backing of the University’s Government and Community Affairs Office and American Express? There are 21 organizations represented in the program, a mixture of arts or cultural organizations and social service organizations. We had three half-day sessions on leadership, dealing with topics like how a leader uses his or her values in the exercise of leadership, manages conflict in an organization and successfully uses teams of people in organizations. It worked out very well. I’m a nut on evaluation. We got a 4.8 out of 5, which is very good. My hope is that it will not be a one-shot deal. My hope is that the University and other organizations will support it going forward. I’d like to run a different program for the original 21 organizations and over the course of three or four or five years really dig deeply into each organization. We could do sessions for senior leaders—not the executive directors but a couple of people just below them—and for young stars in their organizations, where the leaders of the organizations select a person they think has the potential to be a great leader. I could see a program directed to board chairs and executive directors. Over a five-year period we could have a real impact on the quality of management and leadership of these organizations. And one thing that’s sometimes not recognized is that nonprofits historically have played a really important role in Harlem. Q. Is it more important to have these social enterprise programs working now than when the economy is doing well? As a management professor for so long, I believe that good management is always important, in good times or bad. But it’s particularly important in hard times, and these are definitely hard times. Most of these nonprofits are working with stagnant or declining revenues. The financial crisis dipped into the philanthropic dollar and reduced support from foundations and from wealthy individuals. Public funding of organizations is down. So these groups have fewer financial resources and therefore usually fewer human resources because most of the money that nonprofits have goes into staff. And because unemployment has been so high for so long, you have increasing demand for their services. Q. You’ve taught modern political economy here at Columbia for about 15 years. How has the course changed over time? The simple answer is it’s gotten a lot better. It’s divided into three parts. The first part has to do with a review of the grand masters of modern political economy, at least my grand masters: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Milton Friedman. Because these people are seldom read anymore, there are a lot of misconceptions about what they really believed and wrote. And so I spend the first part of the course really exploding the myths about Smith’s theory, about Marx’s theory. I have the students read the original works. The second part is about the evolution of the American political economy in the post-World War II period. The third gets into international political economy and revolves around America’s place in the world and how it’s changing. None of these presidential candidates would admit it, but America has undergone a decline in the international structure of power and one key question is who’s going to replace America as the world’s number one power. Q. Since you teach modern political economy, what were some of your thoughts on the election? The particular dynamics of American politics make it very difficult for presidential candidates to address the problems we are facing in a very serious way. Neither Obama nor Romney could admit that the United States of America is at a crossroads where if it doesn’t get its act together pretty soon it’s going to be very clearly a declining power. Nobody likes to hear that. The idea of American exceptionalism runs very strong, even though when you look at the comparative data on a lot of different things America’s no longer all that exceptional. In many respects we’re not leaders anymore. How often during the campaign did anybody talk about inequality? I don’t think the word ever came up. How often did the candidates talk about social mobility? They talked about education but with no clarity about how to make our declining system of primary and secondary education better. They talked about our perilous public finances—I have to give them credit for that— although they didn’t speak with much specificity. But huge problems like inequality, social immobility, financial deficits and economic decline are issues that they really never addressed very seriously. —Interview by Eric Sharfstein —Video by Columbia News Video Team

Ovarian Cancer Patients Have Lower Mortality Rates at High-Volume Hospitals Women who have surgery for ovarian cancer have better outcomes if they are treated at high-volume hospitals, according to researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. The improved survival rate is not dependent on a lower rate of complications following surgery, but on the treatment of complications. Patients with a complication after surgery at a low-volume hospital are nearly 50 percent more likely to die as a result of the complication than patients seen at highvolume hospitals, according to the study. “It is widely documented that surgical volume has an important effect on outcomes following surgery,” said Dr. Jason D. Wright, a gynecologic oncologist at NYP/Columbia and the lead author of the study published online this month in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. What the current study shows is the importance of improving the care of patients with complications from surgery. “We also believe in the importance of adhering to quality guidelines and best practices, which may overcome these volume-based disparities,” said Dr. Dawn Hershman, associate professor of medicine and epidemiology, another of the study’s authors. The research team reviewed data from more than 36,000 women aged 18 to 90 who underwent removal of one or both ovaries at 1,166 hospitals from 1998 to 2009. Scientists Engineer Mouse to Develop Better Vaccines Against Typhoid Fever Columbia University Medical Center researchers have created a genetically engineered mouse that may lead to the development of more effective vaccines against typhoid fever. Typhoid is caused by the bacterium Salmonella typhi, which is spread through contaminated drinking water or food. While rare in the United States, it causes 200,000 deaths a year in the developing world. The disease is treated by antibiotics, and currently there are two vaccines with efficacy rates ranging from 50 to 80 percent. Since mice are resistant to the bacteria, it has been difficult to develop new vaccines. In the current experiment, Dr. Sankar Ghosh, chair of microbiology and immunology at CUMC, and colleagues sought to create an animal model for studying the disease. First they identified an immune cell receptor that they had reason to believe granted the mice immunity to the bacteria. Then they created a strain of mice that lacked the receptor. When the “knockout” mice were infected, they developed typhoidlike symptoms. Next the researchers demonstrated that the micey developed typhoidlike symptoms. Next the researchers demonstrated that the mice could be successfully immunized against S. typhi with a heat-killed vaccine. “Vaccines are the most practical solution for preventing typhoid in the Third World,” said Ghosh. “Unfortunately, existing typhoid vaccines are only modestly effective, leaving millions of people vulnerable to infection. With our new mouse model, we have a powerful tool for investigating the disease and devising better vaccine strategies.” The research was published last month in the online edition of \"Cell.\" New Research Sheds Light on Childhood Neuromuscular Disease A study by scientists at the Motor Neuron Center at Columbia University Medical Center suggests that spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a genetic neuromuscular disease in infants and children, results primarily from problems in the motor circuits that coordinate muscle movement. Previously, researchers thought that motor neurons or muscle cells were responsible. In a second study, researchers at the Motor Neuron Center identified the molecular pathway in SMA that leads to problems with motor function. Findings from the studies could lead to therapies for the debilitating and often fatal neuromuscular disease. “To our knowledge, this is the first clear demonstration that defects in the function of a neuronal circuit are the cause of a neurological disease,” Dr. Brian McCabe, assistant professor of pathology and cell biology, said about the first study. Both studies were published online Oct. 11 in the journal \"Cell.\" SMA is a hereditary neuromuscular disease characterized by muscle atrophy and weakness. There is no treatment for SMA, which is estimated to affect as many as 10,000 to 25,000 children and adults in the United States and is the leading genetic cause of death in infants. Based on the findings of McCabe and his colleagues, the SMA Clinical Research Center at CUMC launched a clinical trial last July of a potassium channel blocker called dalfampridine for the treatment of patients with SMA. The drug is currently marketed under the brand name Ampyra for multiple sclerosis. “This drug is unlikely to be a cure for SMA, but we hope it will benefit patient symptoms,” McCabe said. Mailman School Study Finds Strong Ethnic Neighborhoods Can Boost Health of Seniors A new study from the Mailman School of Public Health suggests that African-American and Mexican-American seniors are less likely to have cancer or heart disease if they live in an ethnically homogeneous community. Contrary to earlier studies, the researchers found that “living in the barrio or ethnically dense communities isn’t always bad for your health,” said Kimberly Alvarez, a Ph.D. candidate at Mailman who conducted the study with Becca Levy, associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health. The researchers used survey data from 2,367 Mexican-Americans and 2,790 African-Americans over age 65 living in communities with high percentages of residents of the same ethnic background. Among African-Americans, those living in a county with an ethnic density of 50 percent or more were 46 percent less likely to report doctor-diagnosed heart disease and 77 percent less likely to report cancer than those who lived in a community with an ethnic density of less than 25 percent. Mexican-Americans living in a county with an ethnic density of 50 percent or more were 33 percent and 62 percent less likely to report heart disease and cancer, respectively, than those who lived in a community with an ethnic density of less than 25 percent. Cultural factors such as respect for elders and close-knit families could help explain the phenomenon. “These networks may facilitate better health behaviors and, in turn, better health outcomes,” Alvarez said. The study was published online last month in the \"American Journal of Public Health.\"

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today issued the following statement to the University community: \"Today, after serving for more than eight years as Columbia’s Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas B. Dirks is announcing that he is stepping down to prepare to become the tenth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. This, of course, is a major role in American higher education, especially at this moment, and while we will miss Nick deeply and are extremely grateful for all he has done for Columbia, we also take great pride in his appointment. \"Nick came to the Morningside campus in 1997 to chair and rebuild the University’s illustrious department of Anthropology. As the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and History, he admirably preserved the distinguished legacy of Boas through his own scholarship on British colonialism, the history of imperialism, and cultural theory. Columbia students honored Professor Dirks with the 2002 Lionel Trilling Award for his book, \"Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.\" Among his many honors, Nick has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and MacArthur Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he is a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. \"Nick served as Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences during a pivotal period of Columbia’s history. With responsibility for six of Columbia’s schools, 29 departments, and 27 institutes and centers, Nick was centrally important to sustaining and improving our academic excellence, building and expanding interdisciplinary programs, improving our capacity to be a diverse community, expanding our sources of revenue, and all the while being a friend of us all. \"In the next few weeks, I will announce a search committee to identify the next Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences, a process which should be completed by the end of the academic year. In the interim, I am asking the Provost, John Coatsworth, to take up the responsibilities of that office, working closely with the relevant administrators and especially the Policy and Planning Committee of the Arts and Sciences. \"On behalf of the University, I am happy to thank and congratulate Nick Dirks for his many lasting contributions to Columbia and to wish him the very best on those he will soon make as the Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.\"

Researchers at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have been explaining to the media and public how weather systems converged to make Sandy so powerful, and how the rising sea levels caused by climate change have sharply increased the destructive potential from such storms on the New York region. At the Mailman School of Public Health, faculty members with expertise in disaster response and in post-traumatic stress disorder provided context and commentary to the news media, and discussed the environmental risks and ethical issues that cropped up in the storm's aftermath. In the aftermath of Sandy, students from Columbia’s School of Nursing Entry to Practice program (ETP) joined with Team Rubicon—a nonprofit that sends military veterans and medical professionals into crisis situations—to help victims in the Rockaways, bringing medical supplies, mops, bleach, baby food and formula, garbage bags, carbon monoxide detectors, face masks and gloves, and cleaning basements and garages, shoveling sand away from houses and cars, and ripping up molded floor tiles. It wasn't only Columbia faculty working to explain the storm's impact. At Columbia Journalism School, student reporters and photographers hit the streets to chronicle the city's preparations before the storm and, later, its aftermath. Their work can be seen at The Columbia Journalist. In addition, The New York World, the online news site that operates from the school and covers the city, sent out its own reporters to cover the destruction in the Rockaways in Queens and in flooded Coney Island. On the Morningside campus Monday, dozens of faculty, staff and students volunteered for an emergency blood drive held in Low Library's rotunda. Despite a long line, the volunteers sat patiently waiting to do their part. They are among a number of Columbians who are pitching in to provide aid to the storm-wracked region. Fraternities have been collecting water and canned goods for distribution, and the Student Council at the School of General Studies organized a housing effort to connect students without a place to stay. These efforts can be found at Help With Hurricane Recovery, for Columbians and non-Columbians alike.

This article originally appeared in our October 2010 issue and has been revised and updated for the 2012 presidential election. As Mitt Romney and President Obama crisscross the nation this campaign season, some voters are receiving VIP treatment. The country’s electoral college system almost guarantees that voters in swing states, like Ohio and Florida, get more candidate attention, both on campaign stops and on the airwaves, than in states that lean decidedly Democratic or Republican. In fact, according to Professor Brett Gordon, just one third of the US population was exposed to more than 90 percent of campaign advertising in the 2000 and 2004 elections. The role of the Electoral College in shaping national elections has been under particular scrutiny since 2000. Only three times in U.S. history has the electoral vote trumped the popular vote in a presidential election, but the uniquely contentious results in 2000 rekindled the debate about whether to abolish the winner-take-all electoral college in favor of a direct national vote. Since then, a handful of states have passed legislation pledging their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote and several others have considered following suit. Perhaps the greatest criticism of the Electoral College is the way it influences candidates’ campaign strategies, creating battleground states that attract a disproportionate amount of attention from candidates in terms of advertising dollars, fundraising, and candidate appearances relative to the number of popular votes those states represent. While Gordon estimates that $3 to $5 billion will be spent on advertising in the 2012 election, those dollars aren’t spent evenly. California, New York and Texas — large states with huge numbers of electoral votes — barely register in presidential campaigns. These blockbuster-sized states are viewed as noncompetitive because the margins of victory for the dominant party in each are so big that campaigns view their election results as predetermined. And although geographically indiscriminate social media is playing a more prominent role than ever in elections, Gordon says political campaigns still focus the majority of their media budgets on TV ads. Consider the 2008 presidential campaign. More than $600 million was spent on television ads in the 2008 race, according to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, a research initiative documenting U.S. presidential and congressional campaign advertising between 1998 and 2008. The Obama campaign advertised very little in New York, probably on the calculation that John McCain was unlikely to advertise much because he was unlikely to win in the heavily Democratic state. Likewise, common wisdom suggests that the McCain campaign passed over advertising in Texas, where it anticipated that the Obama campaign would not invest much in ad efforts — because the Democrat would most likely lose in the Republican stronghold. But both candidates showered swing state Ohio with advertising, partially because each campaign sought to influence Ohio’s outcome and believed the other would do the same. In the 2000 race, it was battleground state Florida that brought these criticisms most sharply into relief, prompting the most recent calls for electoral college reform. “A lot of people — safe to say mostly Democrats — think back to Gore and Bush in 2000,” Gordon says, “and conclude that if we’d had a direct national vote instead of using the electoral college, Gore would have won. “But that may not be true,” Gordon contends. “If you change the way the system works, then you change the way candidates campaign.” After all, it would be political suicide if candidates didn’t also shift their campaign strategies and instead continued to ignore large markets like Los Angeles, New York City or Houston. “Even though the larger stronghold states lean strongly one way or the other, there may be people in the middle whose votes could be swayed. These areas would become much more competitive in attracting candidates’ attention.” Gordon, working with Wesley Hartmann of Stanford University, created an econometric model of the electoral system and combined it with advertising data from 2000 to 2004 from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. The model combines game theory with methods from economics, marketing, and political science to predict how changes in the electoral system would prompt changes in campaign ad spending and how those changes would in turn affect voter decisions and election outcomes. (Listen to Gordon discuss the context and design of the model in this podcast.) The results suggest that, without the electoral college, advertising would indeed shift away from battleground states and proportionally toward the large states where candidates, at present, tend to do little advertising. Interestingly, a direct national vote might make for more expensive elections — preliminary results show total spending on advertising going up. (How advertising directly affects voters is still hotly debated among political scientists — Gordon says his own research suggests that advertising in presidential elections leads to both turnout and persuasion effects.) Gordon and Hartmann also ran their model as if there had been no advertising in the 2000 presidential election (with the electoral college in place). While the scenario itself is a bit unrealistic, researchers run such counterfactuals as checks on the soundness of their underlying methods and math. If results seem too far out — say, either candidate winning by 400 electoral votes — that’s a sign the model or methods are probably flawed. In this alternate reality, Gore picked up Florida and New Hampshire for a total of 29 electoral votes, while Oregon shifted to Bush for a total 22 votes, putting the outcome at 288 to 249, in Gore’s favor. “These states all had thin margins of victory in the actual election,” Gordon says, “so it’s not surprising to see them switch. But without the model, we wouldn’t have known whether eliminating advertising would have tilted a given state one way or another.” And in 2012, the Electoral College isn’t the only influence on campaign advertising — political action committees (PACs) are also major players. Although PACs have existed for decades, in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that PACs that did not make contributions to candidates, parties, or other PACs could accept unlimited contributions from individual donors, unions, and corporations, and the “super PAC” was born. Their creation has already had an enormous impact on the 2012 presidential race, with super PACs spending more than the candidates’ campaigns during the Republican primary. “The super PACs are contributing to these inequities between battleground and non-battleground states and will keep increasing the gap,” Gordon said. “But we are particularly interested in the electoral college first because of the vocal criticism that it disenfranchises voters in non-battleground states and deprives them of attention from candidates, who might position their own policies to appeal to voters in battleground states rather than more broadly,” he says. “For these voters, the Electoral College seems unfair.” PACs are among the topics Gordon plans to study using the model, mainly to evaluate the different ways candidates could choose to allocate limited resources to the most effective markets. “With every election that’s very close in this regard, such as in 2000, it creates renewed discussion and highlights some of the problems with the electoral college that could be minimized under a direct popular vote. “Should we encourage a system where as many people are involved in the process as possible? How do we value spreading out an election?” Gordon asks. “These are real policy questions, and our work can make predictions about the likely changes that would happen under a new system and inform policy discussion.”

As a matter of longstanding University policy, Columbia University is closed for Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 6. There are no classes Nov. 5 or Nov. 6. All administrative offices are closed on Nov. 6. The University will reopen and all classes will resume on Wednesday, Nov. 7. Prospective voters who visit Who’s on the Ballot (whosontheballot.org) and submit their address will be provided with their polling place, who is running for office at every level of government and links to candidates’ campaign websites and social media pages. Make your voice heard. Vote.