Our inquiry into “fixing Columbia” began by examining the challenges facing us—a necessary process. While it’s easy to harp on problems, it’s much harder to creatively generate solutions from whole cloth. Yet solutions are crucial to our quest.

Here’s this week’s column in a nutshell: we need a vision. Our objective now must be to develop it—by no means an easy project—and then to act on it. In this task, Columbia’s administration, and especially President Bollinger and Dean Quigley, must take the reins.

There are two Columbias, I claim, separated in time. Historical dates are always hard to pin down precisely, so we might as well just declare that the transition point is today, Feb. 25, 2008. Old Columbia was an institution marked by bureaucratic malaise, too-frequent resource mis-allocation, and an emphasis on the showy and trendy rather than on lasting added value. Lerner Hall perfectly exemplifies Old Columbia: it’s a shiny eye-catching building that’s virtually unusable as a student center, wastes much space (in a city where space is at a premium) with its atrium, and due to administrative gridlock contains an entire floor being put only to ad hoc unofficial uses at present. That, in a nutshell, is Old Columbia.

New Columbia, following the Lerner metaphor, buildings where form follows function and where the needs of their users take precedence. It works wholeheartedly for administrative cooperation with an eye to the greater good of the institution and its inhabitants. It treats students as ends in themselves. And it formulates a clear vision for itself, a manifest destiny that guides it toward greatness.

Where is New Columbia? It’s here, nascent, latent in the student body and administration. Our task is to create it, to engage in the innovative thinking and action that will enable us to realize it. There are two major psychological components to innovation: first, the freedom and willingness to entertain new ideas, even when they initially may seem ludicrous, and second, the analytical horsepower to pull said ideas apart, turn them around and inside-out, and see whether or not they work.

Here’s an attempt at the former. Columbia is the paramount institution both globally and nationally for the interconnected innovation and thinking that will characterize the 21st century. Columbia’s future hinges on its effectively creating an intellectual environment here that fosters research and innovation, and on its taking an effective national and international role so as to contribute meaningfully to the goings-on of our time. “Interdisciplinarity” seems to be the buzzword in academia today, and much of the most creative research is taking place at the intersection of multiple fields: economics and psychology, for example, or political science and evolutionary biology. Columbia is the key place for this interdisciplinarity to bear fruit.

What’s that you say? That’s incorrect? No, I say again, it’s here, nascent, growing, slowly being realized. Columbia has used its position in New York well by instituting the World Leaders Forum and inviting various international dignitaries to campus—this is an example of one good idea that has taken root. The objective of expanding our research facilities (the particular ethics of the Manhattanville plans aside) is another. Columbia also must seek to manage its endowment effectively and to cultivate its alumni base.

Do I sound like President Bollinger? Good, because he’s right on track. He and his administration in many ways have done an excellent job of envisioning where Columbia ought to be in decades’ time. There is, however, one major respect in which they could improve substantially.

Let me explain via analogy. If you think of institutions as cellular organisms and the people in them as the complex molecules driving their functioning, then a clear parallel arises. Just as the random molecular motion generated by heat provides the energy to make cellular machinery function, so a promulgated vision provides the motivating “heat” for institutions. In plainer terms, people don’t work effectively unless purpose motivates them. Unlike in biological cells, in human-built hierarchical organizations motivation and vision must be generated afresh from their leaders. My question as a student is, what good is it if Columbia is a “global university”? How does this benefit me? Why should I ally and identify myself with Columbia?

I spoke of innovative thinking above. Part of what enables this innovative thinking to flourish is the creation of regulations and procedures which lets students form clubs and organizations that foster their own interests, as well as an attitude toward students which encourages them to think creatively. That attitude has to start at the top—President Bollinger and Dean Quigley, I’m looking at you. Saying that our future is so helps us rally ‘round the flag. Well, let us say: it’s so. Give us some heat and verve. Connect with the students who are here on your watch. Sell us on your vision. Because the truth is, if you can present it compellingly, we’ll fall all over ourselves to get behind it. And we have the skills, the mental horsepower, and the social capacity to make it happen. Don’t ignore your students, Bollinger and Quigley—join forces with them.

It can be hard to enable too much when financial resources are lacking, though. A discussion of endowments, the practical underpinning of all our endeavors, coming next time.

Mark Holden is a Columbia College junior majoring in political science and philosophy. If It Ain’t Broke runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com