Days-on-Campus

I would not really consider myself a “walker.” For years, people have been recommending that I pick up a habit of mindless ventures around the city. New York is absolutely the place for this, and it could be cathartic.

In order to inspire lasting change and shape the fundamental culture and climate of departments, a cohort of faculty and administrators have convened to tackle pervasive issues of harrassment and discrimination within Arts and Sciences, introducing bystander training workshops and revising hiring and promotion policies to enforce ideas of diversity and inclusion to create a “culture of respect” within academia.

Columbia is really weird. For four years, we live in an alternate universe where we assign the highest value to things that become meaningless when we leave (@James Ritchie, great opening for a graduation speech). I could spend the rest of this column ruminating on “the bubble” and the real-world applicability of higher education, but this isn’t a CC class where no one’s done the reading. No, I want to praise the Columbia bubble for what I think is its greatest gift: campus-wide inside jokes.

As the largest expansion Columbia has seen in half a century, the Manhattanville campus is poised to create hundreds of square feet of space for academic inquiry, events, and student recreation. But in the face of the ever-growing opportunities to provide input on groundbreaking developments, the University Senate’s Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee—the only body charged with bringing student, faculty, and staff perspectives to the forefront of Columbia’s mission to shape its campus—has struggled to execute its mission.

I’m from Inwood, which is a 20 minute commute from campus on the 1 train. When I decided to come to Barnard, commuting seemed to make the most sense. If I’m from New York City and live relatively close, why would I dorm? However, I didn’t realize how foreign commuting would seem to my peers and what it would mean to a commute to a mainly residential school.

Columbia’s endowment reported a 3.8 percent return on investment for the 2018-2019 fiscal year, according to a statement released by the University on Tuesday. The endowment currently stands at $10.95 billion.

There is no denying that the Columbia University has/operates a historically significant campus. Established in the 18th century as King’s College, it is the oldest university in New York. The University then moved to its current location over 100 years ago. Given this rich history, it makes sense that our campus would be littered with interesting spots and dotted with stories. How much do you know about the campus you walk through each day? Here’s six spooky sites.

October signifies different things to different people. The arrival of fall can mean the onset of midterms or the smell of pumpkin spice; the end of summer or the beginning of the festive winter season. Whatever it may mean to you, check out Spectrum’s list of Columbia students you’ve seen around campus this month, and see if you identify with any of them!

That students have an overall positive relationship with their peers and professors, need to get more adequate sleep, and face financial burdens in paying for basic necessities are among the many findings from the Report on the 2018 Columbia Student Well-Being Survey released Thursday afternoon.

United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth Jayathma Wickramanayake spoke about the power of young communities to inspire change through connectivity in what she described as a rapidly changing and chaotic political climate on Tuesday as part of the Columbia University World Leaders Forum.