Senate-plenary

Content Warning: This episode of The Ear discusses sexual violence and rape.

Senators raised concerns surrounding a lack of available campus housing for graduate students and faculty in light of an expanding student body, specifically citing barriers posed by salary requirements for international students, at Friday’s senate plenary.

Like many on Columbia’s campus last Friday morning, Violet Krejcie was working hard at learning something new. Her current area of study? High fives.

Close to 400 undergraduate students were registered to vote and requested absentee ballots for midterm elections this year, following the University Senate’s decision to pass a resolution to promote civic engagement and voter registration on campus.

In an eventful and historic plenary, the University Senate passed a resolution to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day to be celebrated on the second Monday of October every year, while later issuing a special election for the chair of the Executive Committee—nullifying a previous appointment for the first time in Senate history—on Friday afternoon.

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.

In a contentious start to the semester, student and faculty representatives questioned the senate’s ability to accurately represent its constituents’ voices at the first plenary last Friday, citing inconsistently-enforced senate policies, distant communication with University administrators, and the exclusion of non-tenured faculty amid tense conversations around childcare policy and resources for postdoctoral workers.

The Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate, in conjunction with the Columbia Alumni Association, announced the creation of the Student Leadership Advisory Council, a University-wide organizational unit intended to enhance student-alumni relations, in an email on Thursday afternoon.

In the final plenary meeting of the year, University senators summarized committee progress, passed a resolution in honor of Provost John Coatsworth’s upcoming departure, and questioned the reputation and academic quality of the School of Professional Studies—a school that, amid its rapid expansion in enrollment, now accounts for nearly 50 percent of all the graduate degrees awarded by Columbia.

At Columbia, it’s cool to be “urban;” it’s cool to spend time downtown and have friends who go to NYU. This, however, is where the Columbia experience of the “greatest city in the world” usually ends. Most students are willing to travel 45 minutes downtown to eat the same dinner at different restaurants, but never 40 minutes to Queens because of its designation as an “outer borough”—and, implicitly, because of its over-representation of people of color. These same students claim the title of “New Yorker” without befriending the few students here who are actually natives of the Bronx or Brooklyn and have managed to make it to this university’s (taken) land as students. These students, along with other students who are from equally disadvantaged communities in other parts of the country, are either completely ignored or hyper-exposed—and often ruthlessly tokenized on Columbia’s campus. This tokenization is deceptive and subtle.