University Senate Discusses Endowment, Resolutions

“Fantastic—we love agnosticism,” joked University President Lee Bollinger.

And so went the February plenary meeting of the University Senate, which took place Friday among an irregularly large crowd of senators who turned out for the two votes which required a three-fifths majority present to pass.

104 Jerome Greene Hall was nearly filled by the senators who turned out for the meeting, and the three-fifths majority held despite senators trickling out as the discussion dragged on. Even Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin made it to the meeting—his first this year. The meeting began, as it has for the past few months, with discussion of the endowment.

“If you are prone to feeling alarmed for the prospects for the future, it is very easy to become alarmed,” Bollinger said, but reassured the group of students, faculty, and staff at the meeting, “If we just significantly tighten ourselves for a period of time, we’ll be fine.”

While the President assured the room that, as of December, fundraising was actually ahead compared to the previous year, professor and Senator Michael Adler mentioned the recent news that Columbia had two accounts involved in the Bernard Madoff scandal. Bollinger nonetheless insisted that it did not really affect the University. “That does not in any way concern the financial health of the institution,” he said.

One area that the financial crisis did affect was the progress on the projects in Manhattanville, which has slowed substantially. University Provost Alan Brinkley also spoke about the project in his meeting with the Student Affairs Caucus preceding the plenary.

“Nothing in Manhattanville or anywhere else is going to go forward unless we have the money in hand to build it,” Brinkley said. Currently, the only building with significant funding already in place is the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Science building.

The University is also making a case to include money for Manhattanville in the federal stimulus package currently making its way through Congress. It is possible that the University could profit considerably from this bill.

Among other issues discussed at the meeting was the status of the resolution on limiting the amount of standing committee chairmanships to two per person. After several months of being tabled due to the lack of a three-fifths majority attendance, the resolution passed without incident.

The more contentious vote was the resolution to create a title of “research professor” for researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The track is similar to current professorships where there are three ranks—associate, assistant, and full research professorships. There is no tenure rank.

The resolution comes in response to Lamont’s worry that its research program is not competitive enough with similar institutions, which is causing many research officers to seek positions elsewhere. “They are being wooed away by other institutions,” said Graham Purdy, Lamont-Doherty’s director. “I need more tools in my toolbox in order to keep these world-class people.”

The resolution passed after ten minutes of lively discussion over the title of “research professor” versus “Lamont research professor,” during which one microphone was shared by senators seated in the front—including Bollinger—due to technological difficulties. Several senators worried that omitting the word “Lamont” from the title did not make it sufficiently clear that these research professorships only apply to Lamont researchers.

Both Brinkley and Purdy declared themselves “agnostic” on the issue, sending chuckles through the room, and the resolution passed with a “friendly amendment” changing the title to include the word “Lamont.”