Dear Alumni,
I want to wish you a happy New Year and share with you some news and observations from my first semester in Hamilton Hall. During the past five months, I have met with dozens of you at meetings, dinners and in my office, and received countless emails from around the world. Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Even more, thank you for all that you do each day to help strengthen the College and enhance the undergraduate experience here.

In December, we admitted early decision applicants for the Class of 2016 from the best early decision applicant pool we have ever had. Our admitted students hail from 39 states and 20 countries around the world. They have a tremendous diversity of backgrounds, and like our current and former students, are creative, talented and intellectually fearless. They are truly representative of all that makes Columbia College students so remarkable.

We think our success in early decision is due, in no small part, to our full-need financial aid program. Because of our policies, students who need financial aid can apply only to Columbia and commit to entering the College if admitted, confident that we will meet their full demonstrated financial need. We thank you for your support in helping us admit these future Columbians. We know that each of these gifted students will bring a unique voice to the spirited discussions in our classrooms and around campus and contribute to and benefit from the undergraduate experience in the College.

Our current students are also thriving, through internships, fellowships and in research labs, and in winning competitive scholarships and awards. Alex Frouman ’12 has been awarded a Marshall Scholarship, which he will use to study economics at the graduate level in the United Kingdom. Richard Sun ’13 was awarded one of Ireland’s prestigious Undergraduate Awards, which encourage excellence at an undergraduate level, for his paper on “Triple Bottom Line Analysis of Sustainable Urban Development.” In October, he flew to Dublin and received an award medal from Ireland’s president, Mary McAleese. Our early decision class makes me confident that Columbia College students will continue to receive such prestigious honors.

We are working on expanding student internship and fellowship opportunities. This summer, we will kick off a new alumni-sponsored student internship program, which will provide College students with access to new, high-quality internships. These internships represent a gift of experience to present College students from former College students. We have exceeded our internship goal for the program’s first year, and, with your help, hope to increase the number of internships in future years. We are also delighted to have the Columbia College Women mentoring program, through which alumnae provide support and guidance to women students by giving job advice and career help. We currently have 180 seniors matched one-on-one with alumnae mentors, and an additional 150 juniors matched in groups. We are committed to increasing mentoring, which draws on one of the most important assets the College has — its alumni — for the benefit of current students, and we encourage you to join this effort.

I will be in touch in the coming months with additional news and details. In the meantime, please continue to contact me at columbiacollege@columbia.edu with your ideas and feedback.

Roar, Lions, Roar,

James J. Valentini
Dean of Columbia College
Vice President for Undergraduate Education (Interim)

Huzzah, Jeff! Photo via gocolumbialions.com

CC’10 Salutatorian and baller fencer Jeff Spear has been named the Academic All-American of the year by ESPN.

B&W alum Marc Tracy talks to B-Baller Bruce Robbins about the sacredness (and Jewishness!) of Ulysses. More for Joyce-devotees and regular people: Tablet is hosting a Bloomsday celebration next Wednesday.

Six CU alumni and faculty pwned The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40″ fiction writers worth watching list. (Click for Q&A’s with authors) That’s about 25% 30% of the whole list.

See Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg talk about nuclear proliferation! Tonight, 1501 IAB, 6PM. Facebook event here.

PSA! Click your way to a good conscience: the Nourishing Kitchen in East Harlem, a longtime friend of Columbia’s, is eligible to win a $25,000 grant. The Kitchen “works to alleviate the strong correlation between poor nutritional health and low-income status through health hot meals, produce distribution, community nutrition classes, and yoga classes.” All you have to do is vote to secure $25,000 for the program. Do it do it, kids.

Greta is no stranger to fame, though, having previously appeared in the Times in 2007, and–more importantly–dispensing senior wisdom back in the day on Bwog.

“By the time Lipsky got to the camp last week, its caretakers already knew of his connection from other young staffers already there. Within hours of his arrival, the information began to flow…A guide found a letter from a prisoner, telling of a camp cook in the later years of Buchenwald who used to line his clothing with potatoes and sneak them to the hungriest… Later, someone from the camp’s foundation came to him with his grandfather’s check-in slip, on which the young cook had signed his name — in a manner bearing a striking resemblance to the way Lipsky writes his own signature.”

Our modus operandi is to make a snarky comment here, but in this case, just read the whole thing (photo by Chris Usher of the Times).

- Image via The Associated Press

A commenter alerted Bwog earlier tonight to the plight of UN official and CC and SIPA graduate John Solecki, who is being held hostage in Pakistan. Solecki, the head of U.N.’s refugee office in Quetta, Pakistan, was captured on February 2nd. On Monday, his captors said Solecki would be killed if their demands (which include the release of Pakistani political prisoners) are not met in four days. Solecki’s father, Ralph, is a professor emeritus at Columbia. While at Columbia as both an undergraduate and as a SIPA grad student, Solecki studied under Richard Bulliet, who wrote a touching column about him when he was first kidnapped.

In a ray of hope, an Iranian website quotes the Pakistani Interior Minister as saying that Pakistani security forces have discovered where Solecki is being held, and he will soon be released. Regardless, Bwog hopes for his safe return, and our thoughts are with his family.

UPDATE: Mukasey left the hospital around noon Friday with a “clean bill of health.” Doctors ruled out a stroke or cardiac problems as the cause.

Just five short years until the 6th and 7th graders at Columbia’s Secondary School can get a taste of the big kid Core 

The headline “Stale Castlevania Goes Eclectic in Order of Ecclesia” exists, heralds in a new video game

Columbia wins a football game

Alas, some grinches remind us that there’s still no money, and, worse still, no paper

This month, Hollander is arguing that when nightclubs offer all the ladies reduced-price drinks, they are discriminating. He then went on to conclude that since nightclubs get their liquor licences from the state, it’s not only the clubs but New York that is discriminating against him, Roy Den Hollander, and all of his kind.

The lawsuit was dismissed and Hollander called the judge a “feminist.” The end.

• President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia remains closely allied to the United States despite continual pressure from Russia.
• Tim Horrigan CC ’69 is running for New Hampshire State representative. For more background on him, check out his Netscap-era website.
• The Buffalo News profiles Dan Foote CC ’85, who is currently on diplomatic mission to Iraq.
• Future alum/current 2010er Raphael Graybill was in Denver this past week as the youngest member of Montana’s delegation.

The website provides an opportunity for parents to ship their children in boxes to Illinois so that they might be kissed by a certain other Columbia grad. Except it doesn’t actually, which is why the slideshow of Obama-supporting babies features no baby-in-box pictures, to remind us it’s only a joke and that babies can’t even vote. 

One newsanchor in the CNN video also cautions us not to send an actual infant but “if you do, be sure to use bubble wrap.” At which point she suffocates a doll with bubble wrap and sticks it in a carboard box. Mazel Tov Kareem!

The New York Times

Tow is hoping that his $5 million will aid J-Schoolers in figuring out how to save the dying newspaper business by attaining Internet-savvy. (Hint: stop printing newspapers on paper.) Tow also explains that he was annoyed at Harvard and its fancy “Internet institute” because it was much better than Columbia at teaching grad students how to publish things online.

Tow also donated $3 million to the CUNY J-School to create the Tow Center for Journalistic Innovation, which will focus on research and development. Funds at Columbia will be centered around training J-Schoolers in “digital media.” What exactly can 5 million buy these days? Accoring to J-School dean Nicholas B. Lemann: “two professors in new media” and “a curriculum that may include data-driven reporting and software design for news organizations.”

According to Editor & Publisher, CUNY will have to match the donation through fund raising in order to receive it.  Columbia will have to do the same, but it will have to double Tow’s donation and fund raise $10 million.

 

This gal’s a CU grad — just like many of you! (Go Lions!) She majored in Anthropology. And also like many of you, she loves to just gab away on the telephone, except her telephone conversations are infinitely more lucrative and sexy (?) than yours:

“Men call me for an infinity of reasons. Of course, they call to masturbate. I call it ‘Executive Stress Relief.’ It’s not sex; it’s a cocktail of testosterone, fueled by addiction to pornography, loneliness, and the need to hear a woman’s voice.”

See? Plus, there’s hope for those of you questioning the worth of your English/Anthro/Philosophy/Comp. Lit. degree:

“I make twice the money I made in the corporate world. I work from home, the money transfers into my bank account daily. I’m Scheherezade: If I don’t tell stories that fascinate the Pasha, he will kill me in the morning.”

Ha! Hear that econ. majors? Twice the money and 100% more phone sex.

Bwog daily editor Mariela Quintana takes you inside yet another ’68 retrospective, this time a reading featuring Columbia writers who were there when the protests happened.

Of the four events I’ve attended that commemorate the 1968 protests, not one has started on time. From all the socializing and incessant chattering that precedes each lecture, it’s clear that these aging activists are desperate for a chance to catch up, reminisce and revive the waning spirit of ’68.  To an outside observer, the commemoration too often loses sight of its historical and social mission and instead tends towards an intimate, if not insular, college reunion–the likes of which these anti-establishment hexagenarians wouldn’t deign to attend.

But last night’s reading, entitled “Voices of 1968,” offered this jaded Gen-Yer insight into what the protestors felt at the time of the event and what they feel now.  The reading was most penetrating when authors exposed their struggles, their effort to pick themselves up out the wake of the protests, grow up and move on. As the poets and authors made clear, moving on proved difficult because it required accepting their moment in history had ended.

Although their subject matter had the potential to transcend the moment and touch a more contemporary audience, many of the works were too invested in the specifics of the experience. There was an obvious stigma against extrapolating the 1968 protests to universal themes and many authors and audience members even disdained paralleling it with the war in Iraq. Taking a surprisingly conservative approach to the interpretation of their movement, the reading all too often came off as an self-indulgent opportunity for the writers to get on a soap box and for their college buddies to hoot and holler in support.

In an honest and steady voice, Paul Spike (CC ’69) read from an essay that methodically, almost painfully so, detailed his ignorance as a white student hoping to relate to the oppression of black students. I could comprehend the meaning and significance of his words, but they were so specific to his experience that I was unable to access the emotion behind them. Nonetheless, the older members of the audience recognized his plea for forgiveness and answered it with a thunder of heartfelt applause.

Reading from her novel Pearl, Mary Gordon, BC ’71 and current English professor, succeeded where other authors fell short. Her writing conveyed her observations and experiences of the 1968 protests with a fine balance of honesty and self-deprecating humor. Like many others, Gordon touched on how her “experience [was] inflected by race, gender, class and religion,” but she quickly went on to express how she and her friends were highly sensitive to critical changes that were occurring in history and in their adolescences. Probing into a sense of confusion familiar to all students, Gordon spoke of how being in college means growing up “so easily and so quickly you become a person you would not have recognized.”   

When he read, Paul Auster CC ’70 did not narrate his specific experience of the ’68 protests. Like Gordon, he voiced an affecting account of growing up in a time of turmoil and of grappling with who he was and who he wanted to be. Auster began with a brief commentary about his Op-Ed in the Times earlier this week. “Crazy,” he explained, is “short hand for numerous feelings–frustration, militant refusal of American policy. All that cannot be expressed in an eight hundred word op-ed–all that can be achieved is a small poem.”  Returning to his undergraduate days, Auster went on to speak of a hoax essay competition headed by the Columbia Review asking its applicants to describe failure. “Why the compulsion to write about failure–the fear, the sarcasm, the mocking derision of failure?” Auster asked. Suggesting the dwindling legacy of the 1968 protests and the anxieties of Columbia’s current student body, Auster ended with an ominous quote from an influential poet of his youth: “I write for those on whom the black ox has trod.”

Reed dropped out of school and was on the lam for more than a year before she was arrested on Saturday on charges of fraud and identity theft. Henson—who has been missing for nearly eight years—is still missing.

While at Columbia, Reed is believed to have nabbed $100 grand of financial aid. CU administration has admitted that she was enrolled up until last year, but did not provide any details.

Did you know Brooke Henson/Esther Reed or know any details of her time at Columbia? Let us know, email bwog@columbia.edu