Heritage Night Honors Alums

Although the roughly 100 attendees at Friday night’s Black Alumni Council Heritage Award Reception were diverse in age, pride in both school and legacy gave them common ground to celebrate their peers and the announcement of the first chaired faculty position of African-American studies at Columbia.

Held in Low Library, the annual event served as a keystone in February’s month-long observation of Black History Month, which has been celebrated on campus as Black Heritage Month.

“Tonight,” BAC President Kwamena Aidoo, CC ’03, said as he introduced a program that honored several prominent alumni for their impact on Columbia life, “we get to look into and explore our own connection to black history.”

The 2008 Heritage Award was given to the recently deceased Rick Johnson, CC ’71, who mentored many Columbia students and established an undergraduate scholarship fund in 1987. His brother Ted Johnson, CC ’81, accepted the award on his behalf.

The event was also peppered with news of milestones—Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley noted that the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found, for the first time, that Columbia had the highest national percentage of black students in its first-year class, and Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks announced the creation of Columbia’s first chaired faculty position in African-American studies to a standing ovation.

The endowed chair will be called the M. Moran Weston BAC Professorship, after the University’s first black trustee, who received a Columbia B.A. in 1930 and a Columbia Ph.D. in 1934. “He came here at 16 and he never really left,” his son Greg Weston, Law ’82, said.

Dirks said that the position may be filled as soon as next semester, although assistant professor of sociology Carla Shedd said she found that prospect unlikely. “Because the population of senior African-American studies professors is so small,” she explained, “Columbia will be competing with the Harvards and the Yales and the Penns.”

But not everyone was satisfied by the announcement. “I think a chair is all well and good, but a chair without a house is useless,” Ernst Perodin, CC ’70, said, noting that many of Columbia’s peer institutions already include full African-American studies departments.

Perodin and several classmates were recognized for their participation in the 1968 student protests, and most said that they felt more in alliance with current student activists, including last semester’s hunger strikers, than with administrative efforts.

The shadow of last semester’s turbulence, especially the string of bias incidents and the protests that followed them, was present not only at the reception but throughout the month. The impact began with a theme chosen by the campus Black Heritage Month Committee—“With love, we rise: Celebrating growth everyday within our community.”
“We chose to frame the month this way in response to some of the events of last semester,” BHM Committee Co-Chair Kirsten Grumney wrote in an e-mail. “We wanted to acknowledge these trying events, but we more wanted to emphasize the power and resilience possessed by both our institutions—Columbia University and Barnard College.”

With a focus on coalition-building, the month has included events hosted by groups ranging from Kappa Alpha Psi to the Society of Black Engineers. It will conclude with a fashion show called “Flair”—the focus, of which, Flair Co-Chair Nicole Beach, CC ’10, explained, will be on the “mosaic of different influences black culture has had around the world.”

She said she was excited to see the show open on Friday. “I think it’s personally important to me because it’s really important to celebrate where we come from, where we are now, and what’s changed.”

mary.kohlmann@columbiaspectator.com