April 16, 2007 - Columbia News - Columbia University

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4APRIL 16, 2007TheRecordSCHOLARS GIVEKLUGE A BIGTHANK YOUBy Record StaffDenise De Las Nueces (CC’03) was packing for a tripto Central America when she got a call telling herthat John Kluge had pledged $400 million toColumbia. Would she, a Kluge Scholar herself, bewilling to speak at the ceremony announcing the gift?She put away her suitcase and rescheduled her flight.“Nothing could keep me from standing here,” she said at theceremony honoring Kluge. De Las Nueces grew up inWashington Heights, in a family where no one had gone tocollege and few entered the professions. When she wasaccepted at Columbia, she was “relieved and honored andblessed. Not only had Columbia accepted me, but granted mea scholarship,” she said. “Finally, my dream became a reality.Somewhere, someone believed in my goal to succeed.” She isnow a student at Harvard Medical School.Ronald Townes (CC’08) also spoke at the ceremony, thankingKluge for giving him access to educational opportunitiesthat he knew, as a student of Detroit’s public schools and alsoof a prep school, are not available to everyone. He hopes toteach in a New York City public school after he graduates.In the audience was another Kluge Scholar, Adrianne Clark(CC’08). Clark, of Fairfax, VA, didn’t know she was the recipientof Kluge’s generosity until she opened up her financial aidpackage before she started her freshman year and found she’dreceived the scholarship that paid for all four years of tuition.“We should go and shake his hand,” she told her roommate,another Kluge Scholar, when she learned about Kluge’s gift andthe ceremony honoring him for it. “He just paid for us to go toschool!” As the applause subsided after the ceremony, Clarkswam up through the crowd to see Kluge, and did just that.Gift of a Lifetimecontinued from page 1zon. And he does not want us to be complacent with” the gift.Bloomberg lauded Kluge for “his strong belief that theAmerican Dream belongs to everybody” and hailed him forleading by example. “You are really a model for all of us.”And Rangel said, “What can I say about a man who investsin the minds of young people? I can’t think of anything moreimportant.” He added, “I hope this is contagious, and not justin the private sector.”Columbia isn’t the only recipient of Kluge’s generosity. In2000, he gave the Library of Congress $60 million for the JohnW. Kluge Center for Outreach and Scholarship in such areasas American law and governance. A year later, he donated his$45 million, 7,378-acre Virginia estate to the University ofVirginia to use for meetings, studio and performing arts, andsummer/visiting programs.Kluge’s gift to Columbia comes just seven months after theUniversity kicked off the Columbia Campaign, a $4 billionfundraising effort that emphasizes boosting the endowment forfinancial aid across all schools and campuses. With this commitment,Columbia reaches $2.2 billion, 55 percent of its goal.Virtually every school in the University has financial aid asMayor Michael Bloomberg, U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, Lee Bollinger and John Kluge.one of its top campaign priorities. As the campaign waslaunched last September, the University announced that itwould be eliminating the debt burden on undergraduate studentswhose families earn under $50,000, replacing grantswith loans for those first entering Columbia College thisSeptember. Historically, Columbia has attracted a much higherpercentage of low-income students than its peers institutions.Kluge himself was one of those students in the 1930s. Bornin Germany, he was eight when he came to the United Statesand settled with his family in Detroit. At the Low Library ceremony,Kluge recalled arriving in New York in 1933 and walkingtoward the gates on 116th Street wearing ill-fitting clothesand carrying his Hammond typewriter.“I passed this building and I was filled with awe, and aweeven today, because this institution made me a better person,”he said. “I was a country bumpkin when I got here. People sayI haven’t changed that much.”Some might dispute that self-characterization. While a studenthere, Kluge developed a penchant for playing poker, somuch so that he was threatened with expulsion if he didn’t buckledown and tend to his studies. Kluge managed to graduate in1937 with honors in economics—and $7,000 in poker winnings,equivalent to $100,000 today. He has spent a lifetime since puttinghis educational and financial savvy to good use.EILEEN BARROSOLargest Private Gifts to U.S. UniversitiesCalifornia Institute of Technology:$600 million, from Gordon and Betty Moore and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; 2001EILEEN BARROSOJohn Kluge meets two Kluge scholars, Denise De Las Nueces (CC’03)and Ronald Townes (CC’08)Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering:$460 million from the F.W. Olin Foundation, to establish the college; 1997Columbia University:$400 million John W. Kluge; 2007Stanford University:$400 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; 2001Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:$360 million from an anonymous donor; 2001SOURCE: THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, APRIL 12, 2007.Senate Hears Trustee Campbell, Discusses NIH Funding DownturnBy Tom MathewsonTrustee chairman William Campbell made hissecond visit to the University Senate on March30, for a lively review of the state of theUniversity. He discussed trustee reorganizationduring his two years as chair, community relations overManhattanville, the university-wide Columbia AlumniAssociation, and his relationship with President Lee Bollinger,who sat beside him. The two men responded jointly to senators’comments and questions, touching on endowment managementand persistent gender inequities (Campbell said trusteeswill hear from outgoing diversity provost Jean Howard in June).Campbell’s presence at the Senate meeting helped pushattendance over the three-fifths threshold needed to amendSenate by-laws, and the Senate voted in favor of a twicedeferredmeasure to lengthen the interval between Senate reapportionmentsurveys from two to five years. But the supermajoritywas not enough to push through a package of resolutionsto create a new committee on information technology, withcorresponding adjustments to other committees’ mandates.The Senate voted to postpone the initiative.Professor Christia Mercer (Ten, A&S/H), co-chair of theCommission on the Status of Women, reported on progress inchildcare provisions for Columbia families, including a 30 percentincrease in the number of places for small children at affiliatedcenters. A new program will also provide up to 100 hoursof emergency “backup” care (at a subsidized $4 hourly rate) forfaculty, officers and Ph.D. students.Student caucus chair Chris Riano (GS 2007) presented areport on administrative oversight of student groups. TheStudent Governing Board, which had supervised political andreligious groups, is now under the authority of ColumbiaCollege and SEAS deans, who also oversee the primarily undergraduateActivities Board at Columbia. The report expressedqualified support for the change, as well as dissatisfaction thatauthority for networks of student groups from so many schoolsresides in only two undergraduate divisions.Finally, Faculty Affairs co-chair Robert Pollack (Ten, A&S/NS)highlighted consequences for Columbia scientists of lowerfunding rates for grant applications from the National Institutesof Health, which are down 10 to 20 percent. He called on theUniversity to help address this predicament, possibly by usingindirect costs that funding agencies provide to the University tosupport grants as bridge funding for struggling researchers.Calling it an academic freedom issue, Pollack called on the universityto “share the risk of a non-funded year.” Bollingerendorsed the idea of an ad hoc committee.Without debate the Senate approved a new dual degree linkingSIPA and the National University of Singapore, a new M.S. inpatient-oriented research, the new Irving Institute for Clinicaland Translational Research, and yet another ad hoc committeeonthe persistent shortage of student study space.Anyone with a CUID is welcome at the session’s last plenaryon May 4. Most Senate documents are available at www.columbia.edu/cu/senate.This column is editorially independent of The Record. Formore information, go to www.columbia.edu/cu/senate.
TheRecord APRIL 16, 2007 5NEW ON THE SHELVESCompiled by Dan RiveroTen Booksto Add toYourLibraryColumbia faculty write everything from New York Times best-sellers to collegetextbooks. In between classes, research and leisure, professors from everydepartment at the University somehow find the time to write novels, politicalprofiles, and scientific anthologies. Take, for example, PonisserilSomasundaran of the engineering school. Within the last year, this professor of earthand environmental science wrote or edited four books, from a handbook on cleaningand decontamination of surfaces to an encyclopedia on physical chemistry.While not everybody can claim that impressive total, the rest of the faculty is prolificin its own right, recently publishing a range of prose that is consistently diverse andscholarly. On March 30, law professor Robert Ferguson published The Trial in AmericanLife, inspired by his seminar of the same name. Jean Howard, Vice Provost for DiversityInitiatives and the William B. Ransford Professor of English, published Theater of a City:The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 in December. These two are just a sample ofbooks new on the shelves. Here, The Record highlights 10 of the most recent works fromprofessors in fields ranging from international relations to the arts and sciences.Self-Knowledge andResentmentBY AKEEL BILGRAMI(HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS)Through four questions, philosophyprofessor Akeel Bilgrami argues thatself-knowledge of our intentionalstates is special among all theknowledge we have because it is notan epistemological notion in thestandard sense of that term, butinstead is a fallout of the radicallynormative nature of thought andagency.Conversations with GayatriChakravorty SpivakBY GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK(SEAGULL BOOKS)Newly appointed University ProfessorGayatri Chakravorty Spivak is immortalizedthrough a collection of interviewsthat capture her playful,provocative and intellectual thoughtson feminism, Marxism and post-colonialismin more intimate ways thanher theoretical essays.Iran: A People InterruptedBY HAMID DABASHI (NEW PRESS)In this lucid historical narrative,Iranian studies professor HamidDabashi fills a crucial gap in ourunderstanding of the nation that hasemerged as the United States’ primeantagonist. Reflecting on the last200 years of history, Dabashi discusses,among many events, theIslamic revolution in 1979, The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, The SalmanRushdie Affair of 1989, the electionof Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asPresident and the current showdownwith the United States and Europe.A History of ModernLebanonBY FAWWAZ TRABOULSI(UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS)Starting with the formation ofOttoman Lebanon in the 16th century,visiting professor FawwazTraboulsi covers the growth of Beirutas a capital for trade and culturethrough the 19th century. The mainpart of the book concentrates onLebanon’s development in the 20thcentury and the conflicts that led upto the major wars in the 1970s and1980s.Democracy and LegalChangeBY MELISSA SCHWARTZBERG(CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS)Associate Professor of political scienceMelissa Schwartzberg arguesthat modifying law is a fundamentaland attractive democratic activity.Against those who would defend theuse of “entrenchment clauses” to protectkey constitutional provisions fromrevision, Schwartzberg seeks todemonstrate historically the strategicand even unjust purposes unamendablelaws have typically served, and tohighlight the regrettable consequencesthat entrenchment may havefor democracies today.Theater of a City: ThePlaces of London Comedy,1598-1642BY JEAN E. HOWARD(UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS)Jean Howard, Shakespearean scholarand vice provost for diversity initiatives,draws from a wide range offamiliar and little-studied plays fromfour decades of a defining era oftheater history to show how thestage imaginatively shaped andresponded to the changing face ofearly modern London.Conversations on Russia:Reform from Yeltsin toPutinBY PADMA DESAI(OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS)In conversations with important figureslike Boris Yeltsin, George Soros,Anatoly Chubais, and Yegor Gaidar,economics professor Padma Desaiconsiders questions such as why theSoviet Union fell apart underGorbachev, what went wrong witheconomic reforms after Gorbachev,whether the privatization of Russianassets could have been manageddifferently, and what the prospectsare for the Russian economy in thenear future.The Good Life in theScientific Revolution:Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz,and the Cultivation ofVirtueBY MATTHEW JONES(UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS)Amid the unrest, dislocation, anduncertainty of seventeenth-centuryEurope, readers seeking consolationand assurance turned to philosophicaland scientific books that offeredways of conquering fears and trainingthe mind. Here, history professorMatthew Jones presents a triptychshowing how three key early modernscientists envisioned their new workas useful for cultivating virtue andfor pursuing a good life.American Vistas: Volume 2:1877 to the PresentEDITED BY LEONARD DINNERSTEINAND KENNETH JACKSON(OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS)Offering up-to-date coverage ofAmerica’s social, political and diplomaticpast, this anthology of articlesby nationally renowned scholarsintroduces students to the excitementof American history. Withseven new selections, the secondvolume is co-edited by history professorKenneth Jackson and hasbeen substantially revised to examinesuch topics as law and order inthe American West, the role ofwomen in the armed forces,American anti-Semitism, and therise of suburban culture centeredaround the mall.The Trial in American LifeBY ROBERT FERGUSON(UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS)In a bravura performance thatranges from Aaron Burr to O.J.Simpson, law professor RobertFerguson traces both the legal implicationsand the cultural ripples ofprominent American legal battles.He brings together courtroom transcripts,newspaper accounts, andthe work of such writers as Emerson,Thoreau, William Dean Howells, andE. L. Doctorow to show what happenswhen courtrooms are forced tocope with unresolved communalanxieties and make legal decisionsthat change how America thinksabout itself.
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