At the last fireside chat of the semester for graduate students, University President Lee Bollinger addressed concerns about connectivity on campus.
“How are you feeling about life?” Bollinger asked as students enjoyed food in his Morningside residence Thursday evening.
One Journalism School student said that she feels like she is on her “own little planet” most of the time, noting that she didn’t even know about the Tree Lighting Ceremony held on Tuesday night.
Bollinger replied with a personal anecdote. He said he had been, like most graduate students, so involved with his schoolwork that he could miss what was going on around him. “I burrowed myself into free speech and press,” he said, admitting that “for years, I never read newspapers … I didn’t think it was possible to learn about one field and also read newspapers.”
Still, he added that “Great universities will find structures for students to interact,” and noted that “we are not as integrated as other universities.”
After one student mentioned the lack of a “scholarly community at Columbia,” Bollinger embarked on a discussion about scholarly life.
“Scholarly life is lonesome … you spend a lot of time in your own mind,” he said, adding, “People in your positions are expected to say new things in your fields,” when you shouldn’t be expected to say new things until you’ve been in your field a number of years. This is an “isolating activity” which “leads to a desire for community,” he added.
Bollinger not only spoke on academia, but also talked about the real world.
Money became another theme of the night, from jokes about the financial collapse to questions about the lack of loans for international students.
Last year, Citibank decided to stop giving international student loans, and Bollinger discussed the fact that Columbia cannot support these students.
“We do not have the financial aid resources to support international students like we do domestic students,” he explained.
Bollinger noted that Columbia is competing against other institutions with more financial resources. “Best thing for Columbia is for the market to collapse so that we can all start from scratch,” he joked, referring to the large difference between Columbia’s $5.7 billion endowment and Harvard’s, which is $26 billion.
He added that even though some universities are loaning money to international students, “we aren’t sure they can or will sustain it.”
A student asked whether Bollinger perceives universities as national or international institutions. He replied that one “could make a powerful argument that it [Columbia] is a domestic institution to serve domestic purposes,” since the University is held accountable to state and national laws. But he said he hopes universities will come to foster a “sense of international citizenship.”
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