The Candidates at Columbia

5:20 p.m. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic nominee for Vice President was spotted in a black sports utility vehicle turning onto 114th Street.

After making a joint appearance at Ground Zero, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama will speak about service in Alfred Lerner Hall this evening. The much-anticipated joint event will draw the world’s spotlight to Columbia’s campus yet again.

Senator John McCain, connected to Columbia as the father of alumna Meghan McCain, CC ‘07, is returning to Morningside Heights as a presidential nominee. He will speak about service back-to-back with his political rival. Both campaigns have issued a joint statement pledging to keep Sept. 11, 2008 nonpartisan, and their student constituents have said they would follow suit.

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took the Columbia stage last year, the campus went on lockdown as the sidewalks of Broadway filled with New Yorkers eager to voice their opinion on the guest and the University’s invitation. But this fall’s high-profile event hasn’t stirred a comparable uproar.

For a young organization, community-service coalition ServiceNation is already making big waves.

Student councils, club governing boards, and student political groups scrambled to organize Columbia University Serves 2008, a nonpartisan, service-oriented event on Low Plaza before the ServiceNation Summit.

Forty-eight years ago, a senator three weeks away from a tight presidential election arrived on a college campus in the middle of the night.

As a civil rights adviser to President John F. Kennedy, former Senator Harris Wofford (D-Penn.) helped co-found the Peace Corps with political activist Sargent Shriver, but he won’t take all the credit.

Barack Obama, CC '83, returns to campus today for the first time since kicking off his presidential bid. Many Columbians cheer the fact that if the Senator wins in November, he will be the first Columbia College alumnus in the Oval Office. But Obama has kept noticeably silent about his experience at Columbia, offering only scant recollections in his autobiography and subsequent interviews.

Students trickled into Lerner Hall’s East Ramp Lounge throughout Tuesday afternoon, Columbia University ID cards in hand, to claim the coveted blue slips of paper that several referred to as “golden tickets.”