For the first time in 36 years, Columbia will be offering a major in linguistics starting spring 2020 following a notice of approval by the New York State Department of Education sent late Tuesday night. The major will require 34 total points, including two required courses, a senior thesis, and one intermediate-level course in a foreign language.

Barnard’s Student Government Association announced the results of its fall elections Tuesday afternoon.

Barnard and Columbia released their Annual Security and Fire Safety Reports on Tuesday. The reports, mandated by the Clery Act, a federal law that demands disclosure of public safety information, compile statistics on reported instances of crime and fire safety across the University campuses and surrounding areas over the past three calendar years.

Columbia’s Earth Institute has begun collaborations with global investment management firm AllianceBernstein to create a new environmentally conscious curriculum for portfolio managers. AllianceBernstein will also be serving as lead sponsor to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s annual open house on Oct. 5.

The University intends to continue bargaining in good faith with the Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW, despite newly proposed regulations by the National Labor Relations Board that would threaten the federal teaching and research assistants’ right to organize, Interim Provost Ira Katznelson announced in an email on Monday.

Around 300 Columbia and Barnard students marched in a climate strike with thousands of other young activists—including Swedish teen Greta Thunberg—in New York on Friday as part of a global movement to protest climate change. Strike organizers estimated a turnout of 250,000 protesters in New York while the Mayor’s Office estimated 60,000. Organizers also estimated there were 4 million strikers from over 150 countries worldwide.

Columbia will establish two new task forces in the coming year to address climate change and how the University can serve humanity on a larger scale, University President Lee Bollinger announced in an email Thursday afternoon.

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.

With union elections approaching at the end of the month, the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers are faced with a pressing debate: Barnard undergraduate teaching assistants—many of whom teach courses within Columbia departments—still cannot participate in or vote on union decisions.