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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.
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.
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…
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…
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.”
…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…
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…
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,…
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,”…
How many courses require students to read Freud, discuss the Gospel of St. Matthew, and then watch episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Marking the achievement of the first major step in Columbia University’s most transformational building project, leaders of the University today dedicated the new Manhattanville campus, now taking shape along Broadway immediately above West 125th Street.
Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger was joined by distinguished faculty, University deans, and students in welcoming civic and community leaders and internationally renowned architect Renzo Piano of Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which designed the campus master plan with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Piano also designed the first buildings…
The Atlantic Philanthropies and Columbia University today announced the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, a 10-year, $60 million program for courageous and creative leaders dedicated to dismantling anti-black racism in the United States and South Africa, two nations with deep and enduring legacies of racial exclusion and violence. The program – conceived, designed and led in partnership with renowned champions of racial equity – will enable visionary activists, authors and artists, among others, to enhance their understanding of anti-black racism and strengthen their strategic capacity, individual…
David Keefe, senior assistant dean for Veteran's Initiatives at the School of General Studies, recently led a hands-on workshop transforming military uniforms into handmade paper. The event was co-organized by Deborah Paredez, associate professor of writing at the School of the Arts, and co-presented by Combat Paper NJ, a traveling workshop that helps veterans to publicly share their experiences through artmaking.