Columbia may be facing budget cuts, wage freezes, and losses on its investments. But, then again, we’ve got Obama.
Facing a blistering recession, the University has sought to keep a fine balance between cost-cutting and maintaining quality. The surrounding neighborhood too has suffered from slowing retail business, slashed school and transportation budgets, and rising rents—but the danger to Columbia has been the health of its endowment. Meanwhile, the presidential race that captivated the country put the campus back in the spotlight, as Barack Obama, CC ’83, became not only the first biracial person to win the office, but also the first Columbia College alumnus to do so. On Sept. 11, 2008 the campus played host to the ServiceNation forum, featuring then-presidential candidates Obama and John McCain. A another debate—on whether or not Columbia should invite the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps back to campus—also drew the nation’s attention.
And yet, despite all the headlines, much of this last year has been dedicated to internal matters. The appointment of new deans and a new provost, changes to student enrollment, and Debora Spar’s first year as president of Barnard College have dominated this year’s news, along with Columbia’s perennial financial battle.
“Every year has its own character,” University President Lee Bollinger said in a May interview. “What has seemed to me called for this year has been a very much internal focus.”
Over the past four years, Columbia’s character has changed greatly. Very few of this year’s graduates had not already met on Facebook by the time classes began, as they entered armed with laptops, many of which were set to the campus gossip site Bwog. The athletic teams have consistently brought in more trophies. Even the dining hall has improved. A little.
Making headlines
This year’s graduates were introduced to controversy at Columbia late in 2005. Two students scrawled racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic graffiti on the door of a dormitory suite, setting off a criminal prosecution. While the charges against the students were dropped as part of a plead bargain, the event sparked the formation of Stop Hate on Columbia’s Campus, an ad-hoc coalition of students who sought to protest intolerance at the University. These events served as the groundwork for the Community Principles Initiative, a University-directed drive to create a set of common standards across campus. CPI has somewhat fizzled out as of late, but not before an official document containing said principles was made public.
For a time, Columbia became one of conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly’s favorite punching bags: After a small group of Columbia students rushed the stage where Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist was speaking and unfurled a banner stating that “No one is illegal,” fight broke out on the stage and a national controversy ensued.
Last year began with a bang when the University invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus as part of the annual World Leaders Forum. For a week, the campus rocked with debate, protest, and planning. International media outlets, disgruntled alumni, and protesters from across the Northeast maintained a constant presence outside of the main University gates from the moment of the invitation until after the speech. At a meeting with Bollinger the day after the announcement, student leaders defended the University’s invitation while opposing the head of state’s views on homosexuality, human rights, and the state of Israel. Students organized a massive forum on campus, which was restricted to Columbia University ID holders on the day of the speech, while administrators set up huge television monitors on South Lawn.
During the speech, Bollinger delivered a blistering introduction, condemning Ahmadinejad’s positions on Israel and human rights, saying that Ahmadinejad exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” and stating that his views of the Holocaust showed him to be “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” In a question-and-answer period following a wandering speech about the intersection of faith and science, Ahmadinejad denied that the nation was pursuing the development of nuclear weapons and defended his desire to conduct research into the Holocaust while generally evading questions about the treatment of women in Iran, the nation’s support of terrorism, and whether he desired the destruction of the state of Israel. In a moment that was widely replayed on TV after the event, Ahmadinejad also denied the existence of homosexuality in Iran, saying, “We do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.”
At about the same time, a string of bias incidents rocked the community. In September, homophobic and Islamophobic graffiti was found in an International Affairs Building bathroom. Two weeks later, a noose was found on the door of Teachers College professor Madonna Constantine, who is African American. In the following month, anti-Semitic graffiti was found in a Lewisohn Hall bathroom and a swastika was found on the door of a TC professor known for her research on the Holocaust.
Partly cued by those events, as well as in protest to the University’s Manhattanville expansion plan, a small group of students staged a hunger strike in November demanding a withdrawal of the expansion plan, curricular changes, and increased support for minority communities on campus. The strike provoked strong reactions on all sides, with students divided between those supporting the strike, those supporting the strikers’ goals while condemning their form of protest, and those opposing both the strike and its aims. After 10 days, the strikers ended their protest following the announcement that Columbia would revamp the Major Cultures requirement of its Core Curriculum and provide greater support for campus minority groups.
Just as contentious has been the issue of Columbia’s responsibility to academic freedom. First, Bollinger’s aggressive introduction of Ahmadinejad drew ire among a group of faculty members, who circulated a petition expressing their ongoing displeasure with Bollinger’s handling of Middle East affairs. A second issue emerged over the state of scholarly research in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences met in April to discuss the formation of an advisory committee that would use Columbia resources to tackle problems of travel facing Palestinians who wish to come to American colleges. The meeting was the culmination of letters and petitions in which they called on Bollinger to take a public stance, especially after he criticized the United Kingdom’s professors’ union for boycotting Israeli academic institutions in June 2007. But Bollinger declined to take sides on the debate this time around.
Growth, cuts, and expansion
While Columbia has had its eyes on the world at large, perhaps its most important undertakings have occurred right here in Upper Manhattan. Bollinger’s plan to create a new 17-acre campus a half mile north of the main gates on Broadway—the most important single expansion of space for Columbia in a century—has taken shape as the senior class has worked its way through the University.
The new campus would primarily serve to increase the University’s science facilities and to move some of the graduate schools—including the School of the Arts, School of International and Public Affairs, and Columbia Business School—off of the Morningside campus, paving the way for its use as a predominantly undergraduate space. Additionally, the new campus will include a new magnet school for high-achieving students from the local community, open green space, and ground-level shops.
While the University contends that the expansion will benefit Manhattanville and West Harlem and has received the support of the majority of elected officials representing the area, Columbia has faced stiff opposition from some local leaders and members of the area’s community board who say that the plan will change the character of the neighborhood and push out many area residents, both directly and through gentrification.
With the city’s approval process more than a year gone now, the expansion has moved into final stages of planning. On Dec. 18, the Empire State Development Corporation approved the use of eminent domain in the University’s 17-acre expansion site, eliminating the last procedural obstacle to construction.
Eminent domain is the process by which the state can seize private property for the public good, and Columbia’s Manhattanville project drew criticism for receiving this civic designation. Eminent domain law requires the University to pay the current owners market value for the properties. There are only two remaining local property holdouts who have refused to sell their land to Columbia.
Also under the umbrella of growth and expansion, Columbia revealed large changes to its financial aid policies over the last four years.
Three years ago, the University announced that it would switch loans to grants for students whose families make less than $50,000 annually. Then, following sweeping announcements by schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, Columbia revealed an additional slate of reforms the next year. The policies included the elimination of tuition, room, and board payments for families making less than $60,000 annually, as well as a decrease in loan and tuition burden for families making up to $180,000. The School of General Studies has seen an increase in its financial aid budget, but the size of GS packages falls well behind those of CC and SEAS.
A year after Spar stepped in as Barnard’s new president, more new faces emerged as Columbia began hiring new top administrators. This year, Michele Moody-Adams was appointed dean of Columbia College and Feniosky Peña-Mora was appointed dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Just last week Columbia announced Stanford psychologist Claude Steele will serve as provost, taking Alan Brinkley’s place after six years in the position.
Meanwhile, Columbia has had to undergo an across-the-board restructuring of its finances in response to the nation’s economic meltdown, which contributed to a 22-percent decline in Columbia’s endowment. At the beginning of the academic year, University administrators were hopeful that Columbia’s investment portfolio, which was then valued at $7.15 billion, would experience only negligible, or at least reparable, losses. But as time went on, reality eventually set in.
In late January, Bollinger sent a Columbia-wide e-mail reporting that the University had suffered a 15-percent decline in its portfolio over the six-month period that ended on Dec. 31. “Let there be no doubt, we still have to face hard choices in the months ahead,” Bollinger wrote. “Hopefully, by accepting and planning for this new reality, we will be in a position to move forward in strength.”
The University relies on endowment funds for only 13 percent of its operating budget—the remainder primarily come from government grants, patient revenue, tuition, private gifts, and contracts—so a decreased endowment affects Columbia less than it would affect institutions that rely more heavily on their endowment for their operating budgets.
“While hardly good news,” Bollinger wrote in his May e-mail, “my sense is that this constitutes strong relative performance both compared to benchmark averages in the financial markets and university endowments nationally. It also helps in this context that we are less dependent on our endowment than almost all of our peer universities.”
Bollinger announced each “budget unit” of the University—including schools, centers, and offices—should plan for an 8-percent decrease in the amount of funds that they would receive in the next fiscal year from the endowment funds. While Bollinger did not announce any further budget cuts in his e-mail this month, he did suggest that the 8-percent reductions would be only a “first step” in the process of “absorbing these endowment declines.”
In March, Kevin Shollenberger, dean of student affairs and associate vice president for undergraduate life, informed the student body about the addition of 50 students to the incoming Columbia College class of 2013. This enrollment increase is expected to result in an approximately $1 million revenue boost after renovations are paid for. Another of the University’s money-saving initiatives includes a 10-percent decrease in the number of doctoral students.
