Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature, has been appointed to University Professor. Only 17 other faculty members hold the distinction—Columbia’s highest academic honor—that allows them to set their own instruction schedules and teach across schools and departments.

While academics often must push for their research to be publicized by news outlets, criticisms of mainstream media and the growth of informal social platforms have broadened the opportunities for academics to enter public discourse on current issues. University professors have accumulated upwards of 3 million followers on platforms such as Twitter—where their controversial ideas garner political attention and even become virally distributed.

Media sources swarmed when a Columbia School of Social Work adjunct lecturer seemed to confirm on video that presidential candidate Joe Biden is a sexual predator. The video was retweeted by a Trump aide, and both left-wing and right-wing media sites began to claim the content for their disparate political goals.

Messages between members of the Columbia chapter of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, nicknamed Fiji, have circulated over the past week, implicating several students in racist comments targeting a Black woman photographed in The Denver Post after being tear-gassed by police. One fraternity member’s concerns were dismissed when he expressed disgust with a joke that compared the tear gas—a toxin linked to chronic respiratory diseases and miscarriages that has been used as a weapon against protests—to semen.

The educational institutions eligible for multimillion-dollar coronavirus federal aid include public universities with high rates of low-income students, struggling community colleges, and, controversially, Ivy League universities with multibillion-dollar endowments.

During a days-long occupation of what would eventually become the Malcolm X Lounge in April 1970, students from the Afro-American Society demanded that Columbia create an official space for Black students on campus. Their demands reflected the momentum from the 1968 protests, during which students occupied Hamilton Hall in protest of the University’s plans to build a segregated gym in Morningside Park.

Columbia has temporarily provided 10 paid workdays, on top of the city-wide 40 hours of sick paid leave, for emergencies that may arise due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

This semester, there have been three reports of swastikas being painted on the 16th floor of East Campus. This is the same floor on which Chinese students’ name tags were burned in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.