Karen Xia

We are thrilled to introduce Spectator’s 145th managing board. They have demonstrated their tenacity and unwavering commitment to staff, and we are excited to see them cultivate a stronger community, innovate, and explore new avenues across our content and products. We can’t wait to see where this board takes Spectator, and know it will be an amazing year.

Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute filed a lawsuit challenging new regulations that require U.S. visa applicants to register their social media handles with the State Department Thursday afternoon.

Josh Berenzweig, a member of the Columbia College class of 2020, has died, administrators announced in an email Wednesday morning.

At a record-breaking Alexander Hamilton Dinner held in Low Library on Thursday, award recipient George Yancopoulos, CC ’80, GSAS ’86, PS ’87, promised in his acceptance speech to commit $10 million to found a “beginner’s mind initiative institute” at Columbia.

Former CIA employee and intelligence contractor Edward Snowden spoke on the relationship between mass surveillance, a global Internet, and eroding democratic rights in lieu of systematic protections at an event hosted by Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute on Tuesday evening.

During “Race, Caste, and American Pragmatism,” the first event in the second annual Ambedkar Lectures, a panel of faculty from various universities discussed the rigidity of the American social structure and how racial oppression in the United States reflects a social caste system.

Larry Jackson, a former assistant provost at The New School, has been appointed associate dean of academic affairs, Core Curriculum, and undergraduate programs. Starting this year, the position—formerly known as the associate dean of academic affairs and director of the Core Curriculum—will increasingly focus on questions of how the Core is integrated into general academic life.

U.N. human rights investigator Agnès Callamard denounced the slow progession toward justice for Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on a panel at the Journalism School on Friday, criticizing a lack of response from both the United Nations and other international forces just days before the first anniversary of the dissident’s murder in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consolate.

After years of fighting for union recognition, Columbia graduate students found themselves at the forefront of a landmark case when in 2016, a 3-1 decision by the National Labor Relations Board overturned a decades-long precedent in favor of allowing graduate students to unionize at Columbia and other private universities across the nation—.

With a growing student body and a stagnant classroom inventory, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been increasingly compelled to look elsewhere for classroom spaces—including event spaces in Lerner, the Kraft Center, and buildings more than a mile from Morningside Campus. Without a clear solution, the growing pressure has led faculty, students, and administrators to question whether Columbia must eventually abandon its historically centralized campus for one that sprawls across Morningside Heights and, more and more, into West Harlem.