February 23, 2012 - Columbia News

COLLECTED HISTORY
Gumby’s African-American
Scrapbooks | 3
vol. 37, no. 07
lenfest awards
This Year’s Exceptional
Teachers | 4
HUMANITIES MEDAL
A Presidential Honor | 5
February 23, 2012
NEWS and ideas FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITY
CUMC Researchers
Trace Path of
Alzheimer’s Spread
JUSTICE
HONORed
By CUMC News
eileen barroso
R
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (LAW’59) returned to Columbia Law School on Feb. 10 for an all-day symposium marking the 40th anniversary
of her appointment as the first tenured woman on the school’s faculty. Story on page 6.
Journalism School’s Largest-Ever Gift to Encourage Media Innovation
By Record Staff
C
olumbia’s Graduate School of Journalism received its largest gift ever, from
former Cosmopolitan magazine editor
Helen Gurley Brown, to establish the David
and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media
Innovation.
The institute will be based in the journalism building on the Morningside campus and at Stanford University’s School of
Engineering. Columbia and Stanford will
each receive $12 million, with an addition-
“This gift from David
and Helen Gurley Brown
is truly transformative
for the school.”
al $6 million going to Columbia to build a
state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom in the
journalism building. The institute is named
in memory of Brown’s late husband, movie
producer David Brown, a 1936 graduate of
the J-school who got his undergraduate degree at Stanford.
“This gift from David and Helen Gurley Brown is truly transformative for the
school,” said Nicholas Lemann, the journalism school’s dean. “As we enter our centennial year, the Browns’ generosity will enable
us to explore new and exciting realms of
leadership in our field.” He added that the
school is “thrilled” to be able to collaborate
with Stanford Engineering.
The funding will endow a professorship
continued on page 8
Foreclosed: Architecture Center Reimagines Suburbia After Housing Crisis
By Fred A. Bernstein
T
he Temple Hoyne Buell Center for
the Study of American Architecture,
founded in 1982, has never shied away
from examining important social issues. So
after the housing bubble collapsed in 2007,
leading to millions of home foreclosures
across the U.S., the center’s director, Reinhold Martin, saw an opportunity to look at
how America’s housing stock could move
beyond the suburban, single-family home
that dominates the “American dream” but
presents real-life economic and environmental problems.
It seemed like the perfect topic to work
on with his Art History and Archaeology
colleague Barry Bergdoll, who became
chief curator of architecture and design at
the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and
was encouraging links between the University and the museum. His issues-based
architecture exhibitions at MoMA have
included Rising Currents, a 2009 show
featuring designers’ responses to changes
in sea level caused by global warming.
Together, Bergdoll and Martin transformed the Buell Center’s inquiry into Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,
which runs at MoMA through July 30. The
centerpiece of the show is a series of proposals for five American suburbs, created
over more than a year by architects chosen
by Martin and Bergdoll.
The show’s underpinning is The Buell
Hypothesis, a book written by Martin and
center colleagues Leah Meisterlin and
Anna Kenoff. In the Hypothesis, which is An architectural model for a proposal to redevelop an Oregon suburb
available on the center’s website, Socrates into a sustainable garden city.
continued on page 8
www.columbia.edu/news
ese archers at Columbia University Medical Center made international news this month with a
study showing that Alzheimer’s disease
appears to begin in one region of the
brain and then spread to connected areas, “jumping” from neuron to neuron
like an infection or cancer.
The findings, which point to new opportunities for studying Alzheimer’s and
testing potential therapies to halt the
progression of the mind-wasting disease,
were published Feb. 1 in the online journal PloS One by CUMC researchers including senior author Karen E. Duff, professor
of pathology at CUMC and the New York
State Psychiatric Institute, and study coauthor Scott A. Small, professor of neurology. Both are affiliated with Columbia’s
Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s
Disease and the Aging Brain.
Alzheimer’s disease, the most common
form of dementia, is characterized by hard
clumps, or plaques, of the protein fragment beta-amyloid outside nerve cells in
the brain and tangled strands of abnormal
tau proteins inside those neurons.
Postmortem studies of human brains
and neuroimaging studies have suggested that the disease begins in the entorhinal cortex, a region of the brain behind the ears which plays a key role in
“The best way to cure
Alzheimer’s may be to
identify and treat it when
it is just beginning.”
memory. As Alzheimer’s progresses, the
disease appears in anatomically linked
higher brain regions.
For decades, researchers have debated
whether Alzheimer’s disease starts independently in vulnerable brain regions at
different times or if it begins in one region
and then spreads to connected areas.
To investigate the problem further, the
CUMC researchers used genetically engineered mice with abnormal human tau
in the entorhinal cortex. The brains of
the mice were analyzed at different time
points over 22 months to map the spread
of the protein.
The researchers found that as the mice
aged, the abnormal tau spread along a
pathway from the entorhinal cortex to
the hippocampus—a key part of the brain
involved in long-term memory—to the
neocortex, which is involved in higher
functions such as language. “This pattern
very much follows the staging that we see
at the earliest stages of human Alzheimer’s
disease,” said Duff.
The researchers also found evidence
suggesting that the tau protein was moving from neuron to neuron across synapscontinued on page 4
The Record
2 February 23, 2012
The Record
MILESTONES
on c ampus
A leading hematologist, oncologist
and former president of Haverford
College, Stephen G. Emerson,
M.D., Ph.D., was named director
of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at New YorkPresbyterian Hospital/Columbia
University Medical Center. He will
also hold the Clyde ’56 and Helen Wu Professorship in
Immunology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic,
the Mikati Foundation Professor of
Biomedical Engineering, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest
professional distinctions awarded
to an engineer. Vunjak-Novakovic,
the first woman at the University to be elected to the
NAE, was cited for her work with bioreactors and modeling for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
eileen barroso
Professor Ronald A. Feldman,
the Ruth Harris Ottman Centennial Professor for the Advancement of Social Work Education
and dean emeritus of the School
of Social Work, was honored with
the 2012 Distinguished Career
Achievement Award by the Society for Social Work and
Research, which recognizes outstanding scholarship
and major contributions to the social work profession.
Dress Blues For the Ball
The Second Annual Military Ball, hosted by the U.S. Military Veterans of Columbia University and the Student Veterans of America, was held Feb.
16 in Low Library. Col. Brian J. Reed, who has an Army fellowship at Teachers College and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point,
was the featured speaker. He and English Professor Marianne Giordani, whose courses have included “Poetics and the Warrior,” discussed the
intersection of military service and academic scholarship at Columbia. Reed also led a cake-cutting ceremony in which the oldest and youngest
veterans in attendance—Michael Taylor (GS‘12), 47, who started the ball last year, and Ben Robinson (GS‘14), 23, respectively—were served first.
Two hundred military service members, veterans and their guests attended. The U.S. Military Veterans of Columbia University, known as Milvets,
was formed by a group of students from General Studies in 2002. It is the largest organization of student veterans in the Ivy League.
From Asylum to Academic Acropolis
Vol. 37, No. 07, February 23, 2012
Published by the
Office of Communications and
Public Affairs
David M. Stone
Executive Vice President
for Communications
I’ve heard that Buell Hall was once part of
an insane asylum. Is that true and what
can you tell me of its history?
—Architectural Historian
Dear Architectural Historian,
What you’ve heard is true. Buell Hall
was just one of the many buildings on
the former farmland that once housed
the Bloomingdale Asylum, which covered the original boundaries of the
Morningside Heights campus, 114th to
The Record Staff:
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Managing Editor: Wilson Valentin
Staff Writer: Meghan Berry
Designer: Nicoletta Barolini
University Photographer: Eileen Barroso
Contact The Record:
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e: [email protected]
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For the latest on upcoming Columbia events,
performances, seminars and lectures, go to
calendar.columbia.edu
Varsity Crew team
in 1895, providing
access to the Harlem River before the
new uptown campus was fully operational. It was also the
site of one of the
first official academic
gatherings on the
Morningside campus in 1897—entrance exams in Greek. The second and
third floors were deemed too cramped for
classes and it has mostly been used as office space, and over the years has housed
the University’s bursar, registrar, Athletic
Association, Alumni Federation, Foreign
Student Center, and more.
The 11th annual Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences
will go to Dr. Michael Sheetz, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of cell biology. The prize recognizes
contributions that open new fields of research or advance novel concepts or applications in a biomedical
discipline.
Two Columbia professors, Vidya Dehejia, the Barbara
Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art,
and Arvind Panagariya, the Jagdish N. Bhagwati
Professor of Indian Political Economy, were awarded
the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government. The
annual award, one of the highest civilian honors in
India, confers special recognition for “distinguished
service of a high order” to the republic.
ASK ALMA’S OWL
1874 map; original boundaries of the Morningside Heights
campus sat within the footprint of the Bloomingdale Asylum.
120th streets from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue. New York Hospital first
began developing the rural plot in 1818
and operated the asylum there until
1892 when the trustees of Columbia College purchased the property.
Built in 1885, the 11,712 square foot
gabled brick building was originally called
Macy Villa. Architect Ralph Townsend designed it to resemble a private home so
wealthy male patients could live in comfortable residential quarters instead of the
institutional settings in other buildings. It
was the last building constructed at the
asylum and is the only one that survived
Columbia’s campus move from midtown,
which began in 1896.
Macy Villa was originally located on
116th Street just west of Amsterdam Avenue. In 1905 the building was lifted from
its basement, shorn of its wide verandas,
and moved to its present location just east
of Low Library to make way for Kent Hall.
In its long history on campus the building has gone by many names, including
College Hall, East Hall and Alumni House.
Its first Columbia use was as home to the
Timothy Donnelly, associate professor of writing,
received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book
The Cloud Corporation. The annual $100,000 award,
which is offered through the Claremont Graduate University, is one of the most prestigious prizes a contemporary poet can receive.
Today, Buell Hall is the oldest building on campus.
In May 1977 the Maison Francaise,
which still occupies the building today,
celebrated its move to the space with a
reception attended by the French ambassador. It was joined there in 1990 by the
Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study
of American Architecture.
While Buell Hall was obviously not
part of McKim, Mead and White’s celebrated architectural vision for the
University, it nonetheless remains in
productive use today and is the oldest
structure on campus.
—Wilson Valentin
Send your questions for Alma’s Owl to [email protected].
Online Exhibit Explores One Man’s Scrapbooks of African American Life
By Nick Obourn
L
.S. Alexander Gumby may be one of the most influential
historians of early 20th century African American life
in New York—even though he never wrote a traditional
volume of history.
Born in 1885, Gumby was a Harlem resident who, over the
course of his unusual life, compiled 161 large scrapbooks filled
with manuscripts, photographs, pamphlets, artwork, clippings
and ephemera. He titled his project, which covered 1850 to
1950, the History of the Negro in Scrapbook.
His remarkable collection has been part of Columbia’s Rare
Book and Manuscript Library since 1950, when Gumby personally delivered his collection to Butler Library. Examples from his
life’s work are available in an online exhibition on the Libraries’ website. The Unwritten History: Alexander Gumby’s African
America, curated by Ph.D. candidate in history Nicholas Osborne,
has digital reproductions of more than 60 pages from his scrap- A photograph of Alexander Gumby holding eyeglasses and a pipe, with a handbooks. “It’s a fantastic collection not just for what it contains written caption in the lower right that says, “In The Revella Hotel Gumby 1950.”
about American history but for what it says about how a black which helped subsidize his interest in the arts. His scrapbooks
man in the early to mid-20th century thought about history and were intended for posterity and were also displayed in his salon
how he curated material about African American history,” says on 131st Street and Fifth Avenue, where he hosted talks and
Eric Wakin, Lehman Curator for American
events throughout the height of the Harlem
History, curator of manuscripts and adjunct
Renaissance from 1925 until 1930, earning him
professor in the history department.
the nickname “the Great God Gumby.”
Gumby devoted 17 scrapbooks alone to
The salon was a frequent haunt for artists
various boxers, heavyweight champion Joe
and
activists such as Langston Hughes, CounFor a slideshow on Gumby’s
Louis the most prominent among them. The
tee Cullen, Josephine Baker and Gumby’s close
archive and related links, visit
volumes also include 18 slave documents,
friend, the writer and artist Richard Bruce
news.columbia.edu/gumby
and one scrapbook page shows an early
Nugent. Many of these guests left items for in19th century newspaper advertisement for a runaway slave clusion in the scrapbooks, but Gumby also sought out items,
from what had been George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. such as letters and autographs from Frederick Douglass, WilIn a wry touch, the ad was placed next to an early 20th century liam Lloyd Garrison, Booker T. Washington, George Washingpostcard from the same plantation.
ton Carver, W.E.B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey, among others.
Gumby’s own story is one of an eccentric and magnetic char- Gumby’s salon closed when his major financial benefactor
acter who curated his scrapbooks with care and attention. Born nearly lost everything at the start of the Great Depression.
in Maryland, he made his way to Harlem around 1904, working
Gumby took it upon himself to collect what might have been
in a variety of jobs, such as bellhop, butler and postal clerk, lost to history. “I consider my History of the Negro in Scrapbook
Felix Candela: 1910-2010
T
he Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery’s first exhibition of 2012, “Felix Candela: 1910-2010,” offers a comprehensive look at the career of the famed
Spanish-born architect. Candela is celebrated for his
feats of architectural engineering, which transformed
thin-shelled concrete into the visual poetry of soaring, sweeping roofs. For the exhibition, curators Juan
Ignacio del Cueto Ruiz-Funes and Angustias Freijo
brought together 21 scaled models, photographs,
a documentary film, and videos and animations of
Candela’s emblematic designs. A selection of origi-
Gumby devoted a scrapbook to Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing
world champion, seen here in an autographed publicity photograph from his
boxing years.
more than a hobby,” he wrote in How I Make My Scrapbooks, a
text in the library’s archives. “The collection could well be
called the ‘Unwritten History’ because several of the items
that go into the various epochs have only newspaper, magazines and unpublished letters that record them.”
John H. Coatsworth Appointed
University Provost
On exhibit
nal architectural drawings and renderings are from
the Drawings and Archives Collection at Columbia’s
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, which is
home to one of three repositories of archival materials related to Candela’s life and career, and includes
personal and professional correspondence, architectural drawings and photographs of his work. “Felix
Candela: 1910-2010” will be on display until March
31 and is free and open to the public. Hours of the
Wallach Gallery are Wednesdays through Saturdays,
from 1 to 5 p.m.
grants & gifts
WHO GAVE IT: Julie F. Cummings (SW’11) and her
mother, Marjorie S. Fisher
HOW MUCH: $550,000
WHO GOT IT: School of Social Work
WHAT FOR: The new Fisher-Cummings Washington
Fellows Program will support social policy, program
and administration students in policy internships
in the nation’s capital. The program embraces an
evidence-based approach to social policy analysis
and promotes collaboration across institutional and
political lines.
WHO GAVE IT: IKEA Foundation
HOW MUCH: $4.1 million
WHO GOT IT: Earth Institute
WHAT FOR: To support model districts in India—
regional pilot programs that seek to improve the
National Rural Health Mission’s service delivery and
efficiency, and maternal and child health outcomes.
WHO GAVE IT: JPB Foundation
HOW MUCH: $1 million
WHO GOT IT: College of Physicians & Surgeons
WHAT FOR: To support research by Dr. David Sulzer
of the Department of Neurology into the mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease pathogenesis.
WHO GAVE IT: Louis and Rachel Rudin Foundation
HOW MUCH: $160,000
WHO GOT IT: School of Nursing
WHAT FOR: The gift supports several different scholarship funds.
February 23, 2012 3
Palmira Chapel, Cuernavaca, México. Photograph by Armando Salas Portugal. Collection Freijo (Madrid-México)
By Record Staff
J
ohn H. Coatsworth, dean of the School
of International and Public Affairs, has
been appointed University provost after serving in the role on an interim basis
for the past seven months.
“The many deans, faculty members and
administrators who have worked with John
have found him to be an exemplary partner,” University President Lee C. Bollinger
said in his Feb. 17 announcement. “With
a combination of great intellectual insight
and personal grace, he has been able to
focus on the critical intersection between
academic excellence and the quality of life
for faculty, students and staff.”
The provost is the University’s chief
academic officer, overseeing both faculty
and programs. In his short time on the job,
Coatsworth established a standing tenure
committee, worked to cultivate a more diverse faculty and coordinated Columbia’s
proposal for a new state-of-the-art technology campus in New York City. As the permanent provost, Coatsworth will, among
other initiatives, work to expand the University’s capacity for research and interdisciplinary work among the sciences, he said.
“This is an opportunity to help make
Columbia greater than the sum of its parts
and an even better place to work, think and
study,” he said.
Coatsworth, a professor of international
and public affairs and of history, is a leading
scholar of Latin American economic and
international history at SIPA, where he has
served as dean since 2007.
He will be succeeded on an interim basis
by Robert C. Lieberman, SIPA’s vice dean for
academic affairs, whose research focuses
on American political development, race
and politics, and social welfare policy and
the welfare state.
Before joining Columbia, Coatsworth
was the Monroe Gutman Professor of
Latin American Affairs at Harvard University from 1992 to 2007, founding director
of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for
Latin American Studies, and chair of the
Harvard University Committee on Human
Rights Studies.
He taught at the University of Chicago
from 1969 to 1992 and has held visiting
professorships at universities in Mexico, Argentina and Spain.
Coatsworth is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
Council on Foreign Relations and the board
of directors of the Tinker Foundation, a
nonprofit organization that supports development in Latin America.
He is the former president of the American Historical Association and Latin American Studies Association and has served on
the editorial boards of the American Historical Review, the Journal of Economic
History, the Hispanic American Historical
Review and other social science journals
published in the U.S. and abroad.
Coatsworth was awarded a John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in
1986 and has been appointed a senior Fulbright lecturer three times. He earned his
B.A. in history from Wesleyan University
and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economic history
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Record
The Record
Lenfest Awards: 9 Faculty in Arts and Sciences Honored for Exceptional Teaching
By Record Staff
G
reat teachers engage, challenge, inspire
and empower their students. And they
draw inspiration from the teachers
who taught them. So say the nine winners of
this year’s Distinguished Columbia Faculty
Awards, who won for their teaching and mentoring skills.
The honor, established in 2005 by University trustee Gerry Lenfest (LAW’58, HON’09), is
given annually to recognize and reward faculty
members for attributes beyond their scholarship
and research. This year’s winners will receive a
stipend of $25,000 per year for three consecutive years, and will be honored at a dinner at the
Italian Academy on March 1.
They come from disciplines ranging from
chemistry to art history, but they are united in
their shared commitment to instruction, with
many crediting their own academic success to
a particularly inspiring mentor.
Daphna Shohamy, assistant professor of
psychology, recalls how she was “completely
hooked” as a freshman at Tel Aviv University after a few classes with a professor, Matti Mintz,
who taught a course similar to Columbia’s
“Mind, Brain and Behavior.” The professor had
a special gift for asking intriguing questions and
engaging the students,” she says. “It was an important experience that got me interested in
neuroscience research and started me down the
path that led to where I am today.” Which, as it
happens, is teaching “Mind, Brain and Behavior.”
Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor
of World Order Studies and chair of the History Department, had a similar experience with
John Campbell, his doctoral supervisor at Oxford. “He was a deeply humane and inspiring
man who believed in allowing his students to
find their own way,” says Mazower. “We spent
supervisions mostly talking about things other
than my dissertation, and I learned a lot from
him about treating one’s students as equals.”
The honorees also share a belief that their
jobs involve more than simply lecturing in their
areas of scholarship. For Robert Y. Shapiro,
professor of political science, “being a good
teacher means engaging students and giving
them knowledge and skills they can use beyond
the courses they take with me, and also the confidence and interest in using and developing
these skills further.”
That conviction is echoed by one of his political science colleagues, Fredrick C. Harris, who
also strives to help students think critically. “I am
not interested in directing students to a particular worldview, but I hope they find or strengthen
their own commitments,” says Harris, who directs the Center on African-American Politics
and Society. “They must defend perspectives
through understanding the texts before them.”
Still, they must be able to appreciate ideas
and experiences different from their own, a
capacity that Holger A. Klein, professor of
art history and archaeology, tries to nurture in
his students. “To have an opportunity to open
students’ eyes and minds to the world around
them, to help them to critically evaluate the past
and empower them to use their senses to uncover the beauty and meaning of works of art,
is for me one of the most rewarding aspects of
being a teacher,” he says.
For Emmanuelle Saada, associate professor in French and Romance philology, the qualities of a good teacher are best expressed by the
French philosopher Descartes’ idea of generosity—the recognition “in one’s self and in others
of the ability to understand the world and the
will to make it a better place.”
“‘Good sense is, of all things among men, the
most equally distributed’—the first lines of the
Discourse on Method are a powerful pedagogical manifesto,” says Saada. “Descartes was distilling the democratic potential of education—the
belief that everybody can do it. This belief was
formative to me during my own education and
I hope that I convey this sense of freedom and
empowerment to my students.”
Good teachers also hope to instill in their
students a desire to address unsolved problems. This may be especially true in the sciences,
where Laura J. Kaufman, associate professor
of chemistry, often finds herself focusing on
modern research.
“Certainly one of the big challenges is
keeping people interested—trying to make
sure that everyone understands that even
though we’ve got these textbooks that could
J
amal Joseph’s life has all the makings of
a great book. A Black Panther at only 15,
he was in jail at 16 and later served time
in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., where
he got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
After his release, he founded a theater group,
became a filmmaker and today is a Columbia
professor.
Yet he avoided writing an autobiography.
“When you’re living in your own skin, even
though people are telling you your life is really interesting, you kind of resist that,” he said.
“And the storyteller in me didn’t know quite
how to tell the story.”
Joseph, now 59, is the founder of Impact
Repertory Theatre, a Harlem performing arts
group for teenagers and young adults, and
does a lot of public speaking to youth groups.
Their curiosity about his early life helped him
overcome his writer’s block. The key, he realized, was to tell his story not from the perspective of an older man looking back, “but as
this wide-eyed 15-year-old kid trying to figure
out what life was about.”
The result is Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion & Reinvention, published Feb. 15 by Algonquin Books. Written for young adults, the
book chronicles Joseph’s formative years as a
Black Panther, concentrating primarily on the
period between the ages of 15 and 20, a time
he calls a “hyper life” because so much was
happening around him and to him.
“It was energizing, it was exhilarating, it
was frightening, it was all of those emotions
that can charge a young person in a positive
way,” Joseph says. “It was full of accomplishments and difficulties and more than most
people get in far more years.”
When writing, Joseph was mindful of the
literary efforts of fellow Black Panthers, some
of whom tried to write books for years. “They
would always get stuck because they felt a
duty to the politics, to what they know now …
and that stopped it from being a good read,”
Joseph says.
He hoped to write it in such a way that
young people would read it much as he had
read Manchild in the Promised Land, Down
These Mean Streets and The Autobiography
of Malcolm X—three coming-of-age stories
from the ’60s by black and Latino writers —
Psychology Professor Studies Science of Motivation
By Eric Sharfstein
F
The recipients of the annual Lenfest awards for exceptional teaching.
have been written 50 years ago, this is indeed
a live science,” she said.
To keep her students engaged, Kaufman
might work in a reference to the chemistry of
food, such as whether salt makes water boil
faster. Frances Negron-Muntaner, associate
professor of English and comparative literature,
also tries to make her instruction relevant in an
era when students might just as soon go on the
Web to find information as go to class.
“After nearly a decade of teaching, I have
come to believe that the teacher’s fundamental role is to free the student to learn by him
or herself,” said Negron-Muntaner, who is also
director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity
and Race. “I believe that each and every one of
the people that I interact with in the classroom
already knows things, things that I will never
know. And therefore they will learn the most
not from writing down what I say, but from being inspired to learn what they want.”
Jamal Joseph’s Path From Black
Panther to Professor
By Bridget O’Brian
research
when he was a teenager. “The prose of those
books was just so powerful and theatrical
and alive,” he says.
Joseph’s unmarried mother moved to New
York City from Cuba while pregnant with him.
He never met his father. He was raised in foster care until the age of 4 and after that by
Noonie Baltimore, the loving, Bible-reading
housekeeper of his foster parents, who adopted him. Joseph was a church-going honor
student until the 1968 assassination of the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., when he became
an angry young man and joined the Panthers.
“I got to the Panthers thinking that it was
going to be all about anger and violence and
revolution, and what it was really all about
continued on page 6
What emerges from listening to great teachers talk about their pedagogy is how much they
enjoy and profit from the experience.
“The most breathtaking part for me is when
students get excited about what they’re doing
or moved by what they’re reading or stunned by
how beautiful something is or floored by what
something they’re studying suggests about how
they might live,” says Cathy L. Popkin, the Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities and a professor of Slavic languages.
Although the Lenfest awards celebrate all
that teachers do right, Saada admits her own
style of teaching was formed in part in reaction
to her teachers in France, who “lectured constantly, never engaged in conversations with the
students and rarely praised them.”
“My students can perhaps be thankful that I
have learned from my American colleagues and
students on how to teach: They have been my
teachers,” she said.
Alzheimer’s
continued from page 1
es, the specialized connections that these
cells use to communicate with each other.
The findings of the study have important implications for therapy.
“If, as our data suggest, tau pathology
starts in the entorhinal cortex and emanates from there, the most effective approach may be to treat Alzheimer’s the
way we treat cancer—through early detection and treatment, before it has a chance
to spread,” said study co-author Small.
“The best way to cure Alzheimer’s may
be to identify and treat it when it is just
beginning, to halt progression. It is during this early stage that the disease will be
most amenable to treatment. That is the
exciting clinical promise down the road.”
Duff said treatments could conceivably
target tau during its extracellular phase,
as it moves from cell to cell. “If we can
find the mechanism by which tau spreads
from one cell to another, we could potentially stop it from jumping across the
synapses—perhaps using some type of
immunotherapy,” she said. “This would
prevent the disease from spreading to
other regions of the brain, which is associated with more severe dementia.”
Alzheimer’s, which destroys memory
and problem-solving skills, is irreversible
and incurable. An estimated 5 million
Americans suffer from the disease, which
typically affects those age 65 and older. As
the population ages, the number of people with Alzheimer’s is projected to rise to
as many as 16 million people by 2050.
Other CUMC researchers who contributed to the paper include Li Liu, Valerie Drouet,
Jessica W. Wu and Catherine Clelland.
orget carrots and sticks, the widely used
catch phrase suggesting people are motivated by the desire to seek pleasure
and avoid pain.
Social psychologist Tory Higgins believes
that formulation is simplistic at best.
“The essence of human motivation
is that we want to be effective. It’s what
makes us feel alive,” says Higgins, the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and
director of the Motivation Science Center
at Columbia Business School. “We are willing to give up sensory pleasure and take on
pain in order to be effective.”
According to Higgins, there are three different ways to be effective. First is achieving
a particular result, such as feeding yourself
when you’re hungry or winning a game. He calls this
value effectiveness.
The second is having
influence over what happens—what he calls control
effectiveness. “The adage,
‘It’s not whether you win or
lose, it’s how you play the
game,’ is exactly what control is all about,” he
says. If carrot and stick were the only model
for human motivation, he adds, no one would
participate in extreme sports, which have the
potential to cause great pain. In that situation,
participants want to control a situation that is
highly challenging and difficult to control.
Finally, there is truth effectiveness, which is
seeking what we believe to be legitimate, correct or genuine. “To be sure, what is true to
one person can be mere illusion or delusion to
another,” he notes. “But all of us are motivated
to know what is real. In disagreements around
the globe over politics and religion, humans
are motivated to risk pain and even death to
establish what they believe is true.”
Higgins, who earned his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1973 and has been on the faculty since 1989, has spent nearly 30 years
conducting research on motivation and has
written a new book on the topic.
In Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works (Oxford University Press), he
details his findings and conclusions, drawing
upon more than 1,000 experiments, including more than 250 he and his collaborators
conducted in his lab on the Morningside
campus and labs around the world.
For Higgins, the most profound insight
about motivation is how the three ways to be
effective—value, control and truth—interact.
By understanding how these ways of being effective work together, he believes we can better motivate ourselves and others.
Higgins has consulted with business leaders
on ways to apply motivation
science in the workforce.
In one such case, he determined that a video game
company needed different
incentives for employees in
product development than
for those working in quality
control.
Product development team members were
motivated best by a traditional bonus system
in which they were rewarded for achieving
innovations. Product quality team members—
whose job is to ensure reliability —were motivated best by a bonus system whereby they
would lose money already put aside for them
if they made mistakes.
Higgins, who started his career in cognitive
psychology, says he got interested in human
motivation after a period of depression. “I said
to myself, ‘I’m supposed to be a trained psychologist but I don’t understand why I’ve lost
my motivation to do things. And if I ever get
out of this, I’m going to try to understand it.’”
“Everyone is a
practitioner in the
science of motivation.”
And he did just that.
He posited that depression and anxiety
are two different motivational reactions to
life’s traumas and difficulties. One system was
concerned with gains and
accomplishments
and
produced sadness or depression, as well
as decreased
eagerness,
when confronting
the absence of positive outcomes; the other
was concerned with safety and stopping losses and caused worry or anxiety, as well as increased vigilance, when confronting the presence of negative outcomes. These insights led to new treatments that
distinguished between the two reactions. For
depression, it meant seeing oneself as moving
forward to some more ideal state; for anxiety,
it meant doing what was necessary to return
to a safe, satisfactory state.
In 2000, Higgins won a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, which said the
research underpinning his new book “represents a fundamental breakthrough in psychological theorizing … and suggests a number of
exciting avenues for future research.” In 2004,
he won Columbia’s Presidential Award for
Outstanding Teaching.
“Everyone is a practitioner in the science of motivation,” says Higgins. “But that
knowledge is applied rather than scientific.
As psychologists and others learn more
about motivation science, that knowledge
needs to be shared with business, government and schools. By learning about how
motivation really works, we can make motivation work for us.”
new book Ponders Ethical Issues of Genetic Testing
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
A
patient who tested positive for the gene that leads to Huntington’s
disease wrestled with a host of questions. Should she have children
with her husband, knowing that each baby has a 50-50 chance of
inheriting the mutation that causes the degenerative neurological illness?
Should she have an abortion if prenatal testing showed the fetus had the
mutation, or should she not have biological children at all?
Another patient with breast cancer who just learned that she has
a genetic mutation associated with the disease asked psychiatrist  and
bioethicist Robert Klitzman, “Am I my genes?”
Klitzman, professor of clinical psychiatry at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons and the Mailman School of Public Health, wasn’t sure
how to answer these or any of the myriad questions that come up when
people learn they have a marker for inherited disease. And that led him
to write his new book, Am I My Genes? Confronting Fate and Family Secrets in the Age of Genetic Testing, published by Oxford University Press.
With a new genome decoder hitting the market that will allow
people to have their entire genetic makeup analyzed quickly and relatively cheaply, the challenges for patients and
their doctors will get only more complex.
“We are going to be barraged by information,” says Klitzman, who also directs the
master’s program in bioethics at Columbia’s
School of Continuing Education. “There are
many social, familial, ethical and legal questions the information brings up. How should
we understand it? How should it affect our
choices about who we marry, whether we
screen embryos, how we see ourselves?”
Klitzman specializes in the intersection
of medical theory and practice. His last
book, When Doctors Become Patients, was
influenced by his personal experiences after his sister was killed in the attacks on the
World Trade Center.
In Am I My Genes? he interviews 64 patients grappling with one of three diseases, each of which has biomarkers for which they can be tested.
With breast cancer, the
BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations
are responsible for between 5 and 10 percent of breast and ovarian cancers. While having the mutation dramatically increases the likelihood a
woman will have cancer, not everyone with it will develop the disease.
Huntington’s disease often begins with psychiatric or movementrelated symptoms when patients are in their 30s or 40s before it progresses to dementia. There is no effective treatment.
And alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency is a disorder that can cause
lung and liver disease. Although good treatment exists for it, many
patients are misdiagnosed and told they have a more common pulmonary disease.
“Genetic information forces people to embark on journeys for which
they are often unprepared. A lot of people are not used to thinking
about this,” Klitzman says.
The diseases generate different sets of questions, and patients respond differently based on their cultural, religious and family perspective, as well as life experiences. Looming large in the debate about
genetic testing is the question of screening embryos for sex or possibly, in the future, other genetic markers correlated with desirable
traits such as intelligence and athletic ability. They also can involve
complicated privacy issues.
“Science is now giving us all this information,” Klitzman says. “Genetics can offer
tremendous good, potentially. On the other
hand, it can be misused.”
Major health care facilities are now engaged in biobanking—taking a sample of
each patient’s genetic material and storing
it. What would happen if law enforcement
wanted to use material stored in a biobank to
find a suspected criminal?
“Do we like biobanking because it will help the police find out who a
rapist is? What if they decide they’re going to look at a mutation associated with being a rebel—will they use it in court? Markers may soon be
identified that are associated with violence or impulsivity. Should that
information be shared with a judge and a jury?”
Klitzman says the medical community, ethicists and government
have not seriously grappled with the answers to these questions, but
they should.
“I am interested in mapping out this brave new world that we are
now entering so that we can be prepared to deal with it,” he says.“It
turns out that genetics are much more complex than we thought. Genetics is both a lens into ourselves and a mirror back. It would be great
to say, ‘Let’s not deal with it.’ But it’s here, and it’s here to stay.”
“Genetic information forces
people to embark on journeys for
which they are often unprepared.”
February 23, 2012 5
Andrew Delbanco
Receives National
Humanities Medal
By Record Staff
W
hen Time declared in 2001 that Andrew Delbanco was “America’s best
social critic,” the magazine approvingly noted that the American studies professor is “a man who looks back for a living, who
reads and rereads, even in middle age … stuff
most of us leave behind after 11th grade.”
A prolific author of books and essays on
topics ranging from American literary and religious history to higher education, Delbanco
has racked up an impressive number of honors, including the 2006 Great Teacher Award
from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He is
a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Courtesy of the National Endowment for the Humanities
4 February 23, 2012
Professor Delbanco with President Obama at the award ceremony,
held at the White House on Feb. 13.
Sciences, trustee of the Library of America and
vice president of the PEN American Center. On Feb. 13, Delbanco was invited to the
White House to receive what may be his most
prestigious honor yet—the National Humanities Medal. The award, which was presented
by President Barack Obama (CC’83), cited
Delbanco’s “insight into the American character, past and present” and praised him for
revealing how classic works by American
writers continue to shape contemporary lives.
Delbanco’s most recent book, College:
What It Was, Is, and Should Be, is a collection
of essays in which he argues that a traditional
liberal arts education is more important than
ever and that educators must try to “turn out
citizens who believe they owe something to
someone other than themselves.”
“America promises that our lives
are not predestined, that we have
the capacity to reinvent ourselves.”
“A general education affords students the
opportunity to achieve some perspective on
themselves, their culture and society, so that
they aren’t living in a perpetual present but
have a feeling for what has led to the state of
the world today,” he has said.
Much of Delbanco’s work has been based
on the idea that authors of the past, like Herman Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson, can
offer Americans insight on how to live their
lives. His books include Required Reading:
Why Our American Classics Matter Now; The
Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost
the Sense of Evil; The Real American Dream:
A Meditation on Hope; and Melville: His
World and Work.
“America promises that our lives are not
predestined, that we have the capacity to reinvent ourselves,” Delbanco has said. “We are
not doing as well as we should in keeping that
promise for all our citizens, but I believe it is
still an animating principle of our culture, an
aspiration we should strive to keep alive.”
After the ceremony, Delbanco, the Mendelson Family Chair in the Center for American Studies, joined the president and first
lady Michelle Obama at a reception along
with other winners of the National Humanities Medal and National Medal of Arts.
Among those honored in the arts was actor
and director Al Pacino.
The National Humanities Medals were
previously known as the Charles Frankel
Prize in honor of the American philosopher,
Columbia alumnus and longtime University
professor.
The Record
Ginsburg Speaks at Symposium Marking 40th
Anniversary of Her Law School Appointment
By Record Staff
S
upreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (LAW’59) returned to Columbia for a symposium honoring her trailblazing career as a legal scholar and continued to make news in
a speech suggesting that the high court may have moved too fast
when it legalized the right to abortion in the historic 1973 case
Roe v. Wade.
Ginsburg said her predecessors could have delayed ruling on the
case until more states had liberalized abortion laws, or it could have
struck down the law without finding a constitutional right to privacy. It was that finding which invalidated abortion bans nationwide.
“It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far too
fast,” she said. “Things might have turned out differently if the court
had been more restrained,” Ginsburg said. At the time, 21 states allowed the procedure on request or under limited circumstances.
The Feb. 10 symposium, organized by the Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, marked the 40th anniversary
of Ginsburg joining the Columbia law faculty in 1972 as the first
tenured female professor. She was welcomed by law school dean
David Schizer, who said she “exemplifies the values and aspirations of our school.”
Ginsburg notes there are now three women on
the bench. “My new colleagues are no shrinking
violets ... it looks like women are there to stay.”
During her eight years on the Columbia faculty, Ginsburg
taught courses on sexual discrimination and the law, fought for
women’s rights on campus, helped found the ACLU’s Women’s
Rights Project, and argued six gender equality cases before the
Supreme Court, winning all but one.
Ginsburg was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington in 1980 and sworn in as the second female justice on the
Supreme Court in 1993. Her key decisions have included the majority opinion in the 1996 decision striking down the male-only
admissions policy at Virginia Military Institute and her vehement
dissent in Bush v. Gore.
During an informal conversation between Ginsburg and two of
her former clerks, Professors Gillian E. Metzger and Abbe R. Gluck,
Ginsburg described the difference between writing a majority
opinion and a dissent—the first may require persuading a col-
Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg teaching a class in her first year at the law school.
league to join while in the second, “you can let out all the stops.”
Ginsburg also recalled the triumph she felt writing the VMI
decision. “In a sign of the changing times, it was the U.S. that brought
the case,” she said. “We were no longer the opponent, but the
proponent.”
Born in Brooklyn, Ginsburg received her B.A. from Cornell and
was admitted to Columbia Law School in 1958 after completing
two years at Harvard Law School. She has spoken about the difficulty she had finding a job when she graduated, even though
she was a top student and Law Review editor. “A Jew, a woman,
and a mother, that was a bit much. Three strikes put me out of the
game,” she once recalled.
Eventually, she clerked for a federal judge (fellow Columbia Law
School alumnus Edmund L. Palmieri ’29), worked on an international law project with the late law school professor Hans Smit
and then landed a job on the Rutgers faculty. In 1972, Dean Michael Sovern ’55 offered her a faculty position.
During a question-and-answer session, Ginsburg noted approvingly that there are now three women on the bench. “My new
colleagues are no shrinking violets,” she said. “(Sonia) Sotomayor
is giving (Antonin) Scalia a run for who asks the most questions.
And with (Elena) Kagan on one end and Sotomayor on the other,
it looks like women are there to stay.”
Ginsburg has two children: Jane, Columbia’s Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, and James, a
music producer in Chicago. Asked to give advice to young women
starting law careers, she said the hard thing is finding a balance
between work and family life. “That’s changing, but not swiftly,”
Ginsburg said. “It takes people who care.”
The Record
Jamal Joseph
Anne Born
YEARS AT COLUMBIA: 11
WHAT SHE DOES: Born manages the budget, hiring and payroll, takes care of room and equipment needs, acts as the liaison between her department and other administrative offices, and
generally looks after the Sociology Department,
including more than 70 undergraduate majors
and 66 master’s and Ph.D. students. “Sometimes
it feels just like tap dancing all day, sometimes it’s
more like plate juggling and tap dancing!” she
said. On Feb. 14 she made time to take her staff to
Faculty House for a Valentine’s Day lunch “and let
them know that Sociology loves them.”
BEST PART OF THE JOB: Born is particularly fond
of the 29 other academic department administrators around the university. “We’re a very close
group,” she explained. “We go through training
in new systems together. Typically, new systems
don’t work. We compare notes routinely on how
to get things to work.”
ROAD TO COLUMBIA: Born, who holds an M.A. in
art history from the University of Chicago, began
working at Columbia in 2001 as the executive
assistant to the vice president for investments.
In 2002, she joined the School of International
and Public Affairs as the academic department
administrator and assumed the same role in sociology in 2005.
Before joining the university, the Michigan
native was a professional opera singer for 18
years. She sang mostly in New York, was an apprentice with the Des Moines Metro Opera, and
has also performed in Belgium, England and Italy.
Since having her children, she sings primarily in
church. Born has also worked as a professional
organizer and personal assistant.
MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT: Professor Joseph
E. Stiglitz had just won the Nobel Prize in economics when Born began working at SIPA. He
FACULTY Q&A
continued from page 4
Timothy
M. Frye
was service, the breakfast program and the free
health clinic,” he said. “In fact, you held a pancake
spatula and a diaper much more [than a gun] in
the Black Panther Party.”
Nonetheless, Joseph participated in the student
takeover of Columbia in 1968 and later became
a spokesman for the party in New York City. At
age 16, he was among 21 Panthers arrested and
charged with conspiracy to blow up department stores, a police station, railroad tracks and
the Bronx Botanical Garden. Unable to raise the
$100,000 bail, he spent a year on Riker’s Island
before his case was severed from those of his codefendants because of his age. They were later
acquitted.
Once out of prison, Joseph stayed active in the
Panthers but eventually went underground, making ends meet with odd jobs that included teaching karate and driving a cab. He married, began
acting and participated “in the struggle,” as he
puts it, by helping movement people get false papers or find places to stay.
Position:
Marshall D. Shulman Professor of
Post-Soviet Foreign Policy
Director, The Harriman Institute
Director, Center for the Study of Institutions and
Development, Higher Economics School, Moscow
Joined Faculty:
2006
History:
Associate Editor, Post-Soviet Affairs 2010 to present
Member, Council on Foreign Relations, 2010 to present
For a video interview with Jamal Joseph, visit
news.columbia.edu/panther
In 1981 he was convicted for harboring a fugitive, someone who had taken part in the robbery
of a Brink’s armored car in Rockland County. Sentenced to 12 years in prison, he served 5½ years,
during which he earned degrees from Kansas
State University and began writing and acting in
the prison theater company, skills he would put
to good use when he founded Impact Theater in
1997. That, in turn, led to his being hired as an
adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of the Arts,
where he is now a full professor of professional
practice.
Joseph is well aware of the irony inherent in
him being part of an institution where he once led
protests. “Sometimes I walk across campus and I
just get giddy,” he says. “And I think the lesson
there is that anything in life is possible.”
columbia people
WHO SHE IS: Academic Department Administrator,
Sociology
February 23, 2012 7
eileen barroso
6 February 23, 2012
submitted paperwork to Born to be reimbursed
for his incidental expenses in Norway, where he
accepted the honor. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is so
cool!’” Born laughed.
She also fondly recalls the department’s
move two years ago from Fayerweather on campus to its current home in Knox Hall on 122nd
Street between Broadway and Claremont, where
she enjoys views of Riverside Park and Grant’s
Tomb from her office window. Every April 27,
on the anniversary of Grant’s birth, the National
Park Service holds daylong ceremonies to honor
the man who is said to have saved the Union. Park employees fire canons, shoot muskets and
wear Civil War uniforms. Born closes the office so she and her staff can attend the festivities. “We never knew this was going on until we
moved to Knox and now it’s an annual event for
us,” she said.
IN HER SPARE TIME: Born, 60, checks Twitter first
thing every morning and admits to being a “news
junkie.” She keeps a personal blog, though much
of her time online is spent researching her family’s history. She traced her mother’s family to a
small town in Northern Ireland, which she visited in December. “My great-great-grandfather,
James Read, was a newspaper publisher and
the postmaster of Larne, just north of Belfast
in Northern Ireland right on the Irish Sea,” she
explained.
She is the proud mother of four children:
Graceanna, 25, a civil engineer; Mary Dorothy
(CC ’10), 23, a flamenco dancer in Madrid; and
Lucy, 19, and Charlie 21, both students at Hunter
College.
Born, who lives in the South Bronx, is also
devoted to furthering her education. At Columbia, she’s taken courses on Gothic cathedrals,
Paris in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, 18th
century French painting, Italian architecture and
Spanish.
—By Meghan Berry
Department of Political Science,
Ohio State University 1997-2005
Interviewed by Tanya Domi
I
n the late 1980s, Timothy Frye, a recent Middlebury College
graduate with a B.A. in Russian language and literature, went
for the first time to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
where Mikhail Gorbachev had just come to power. “It was just
such an exotic and fascinating place,” he says. “And if you’re a
curious individual, you begin to ask questions: Why is this country the way it is? Why is the political system the way it is?”
Frye (SIPA’92, GSAS’97) was lucky enough to be in Russia
again in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet empire. “Just to see the creation of states and markets and
parties, of elections being held for the first time, the possibilities for research were overwhelming,” he said. “It was like reading the Federalist Papers in the U.S. and being able to interview
Madison, Jay, Hamilton and say, ‘Why are you doing this and
not that?’”
Now, as the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet
Foreign Policy and director of Columbia’s Harriman Institute,
the oldest academic institution devoted to the study of the
former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Frye is
once again riveted by the state of the Russian political scene.
With national elections scheduled for March 4, few doubt that
Vladimir Putin will return to power as Russia’s president. But
with mass demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the
country is “as politicized as I’ve seen Russian society since the
early 1990s,” he said. “Many well-educated Russians who were
not particularly interested in politics really made a special point
to talk with me about what was going on.”
Q.
There have been a series of demonstrations across
Russia leading up to the election [on March 4], the
largest since the 1990s. Vladimir Putin’s approval rating has
dropped into the 40s from his historical high of 80, and yet
he’s still expected to be easily reelected. Why?
A.
During Putin’s tenure in office, both as president and
as prime minister, the Russian economy has done very
well. Economic growth prior to the crisis of 2008 was in the 6
to 7 percent range a year and the size of the economy doubled
between 1998 and 2008. Also he has an image of being a moderate nationalist who stands up for Russian interests on the
global stage. That said, he’s likely to win the election primarily
because the field is limited to people who are approved by the
Kremlin. They’re not going to approve any candidate who’s a
real threat.
Q.
A.
Has the economic growth in Russia benefited everyone?
Or some much more than others?
Inequality in Russia is roughly on par with that of the
U.S. What’s different is that the number of billionaires
in Russia is extraordinarily high for the size of its economy, so
there’s lots of inequality, particularly at the very high end, because of the natural resource wealth in minerals, oil and gas. But
under Putin the poverty rate has gone down substantially, and
this massive growth in the economy has lifted almost all boats.
Q.
A.
So what are the rallies and demonstrations about?
The main rallying cry of the opposition is anti-corruption. To the extent that great wealth is perceived as being ill-gotten, this touches a deep chord in Russian society and
throughout the post-Communist world. So it’s not so much the
wealth as the way it was obtained. Russia is far too well educated to be as corrupt and as undemocratic as it is. One structural
argument that political scientists make is that countries with
high levels of education tend to be more democratic, but Russia contradicts this claim. One irony of the protests is that the
economic growth of the last decade has helped many of these
well-educated protesters increase their standard of living, but
many of them now see their life chances limited by the high
levels of corruption. Whether you are in the private sector or
the government sector, if you’re not well connected, you’re still
vulnerable no matter how well-educated and well-trained you
are and no matter how well you’re doing financially.
Q.
A.
Putin been publicly criticized for taking care of his
cronies. Has he been responding to his critics?
He recently wrote a piece in Kommersant [a daily business newspaper in Russia] calling for reforms, so in a
way he’s already begun to shift in response to public opinion.
But the devil is in the details. He’s been talking about anti-corruption for many years, even as many people believe corruption
has grown under him, particularly among high-level government officials. He’s announced a series of new initiatives, like
he’s going to put regional governors up for elections again, but
only approved parties will be able to nominate them and the
president will still be able to dismiss them at will. And he’s going
to reduce driving privileges for government bureaucrats, who
right now can just put blue lights on top of their cars and sail
through traffic. Moscow is an old city with horrible traffic and
the increase in the number of cars because of the new wealth
is extraordinary. You can imagine what it’s like for the average
Moscovite stuck in traffic to see somebody put the siren on and
go shooting down the side of the road.
Q.
A.
How bad is corruption?
There’s a website called Rospil which is run by an anticorruption activist named Aleksei Navalny. He and his
group scour the state procurement websites for purchases made
by state entities that seem very dodgy, then they publicize this
information and ask the state anti-monopoly commission to
investigate—things like the Chechen police force buying 30
Mercedes sedans or the federal security services trying to buy
golden fixtures for their bathrooms. And many of these entities
are linked in one way or another to United Russia, Putin’s party.
So Navalny, in a real stroke of genius, has coined the term “the
party of swindlers and thieves,” which has really taken off in
Russia and become a rallying cry for the opposition. But the
even deeper story here is that people within the Russian government were able to pass the law requiring all state entities
to put their bids for their purchases online. Without someone
deep in the bowels of the Russian bureaucracy and some academic experts pushing for this law forcing greater transparency
in the first place, Navalny wouldn’t even exist.
Q.
A.
In last year’s elections, Putin’s party, United Russia, had
a smaller majority in the elections for the Duma than it
has ever had. Is it losing its influence?
A couple of things happened. The drop in United Russia’s vote was starkest in the big cities and the big industrial centers, which is not a good sign going forward for
Putin because Russian society is still dominated by Moscow,
St. Petersburg and the big cities in the Urals. It’s a very urban
society, so most of the young people, the most productive element in society, live in the cities, and once you lose them, it’s
much more difficult to govern. Even so, particularly if the presidential election is close, United Russia will find a way to push
Putin over the 50 percent barrier in the first round of elections.
The main slogan of the Putin campaign has been “don’t rock
the boat”—we finally have stability after the difficult period of
the 1990s, we’ve had a decade of growth, and look around the
world, other countries aren’t doing very well. He has warned
against extreme nationalists or foreign provocateurs or anyone
who would disrupt the elections. This is right out of the play
book of autocratic incumbents across the globe.
Q.
A.
Is the Russian economy’s dependence on energy prices
helpful or hurtful going forward?
Russia has benefited tremendously from the high energy prices leading up to the global financial crisis in
2008. And the rebound in energy prices afterwards, which was
much quicker than many people expected, has helped Russia
bounce back fairly quickly. Still, the country is trying to diversify its economy, but it’s very difficult to do. What they have
done well is manage the inflow of hard currency into Russia.
They have built up large reserves that were helpful during the
global economic crisis—they weren’t used very efficiently, but
the scale of them was large enough that they helped the Russian
economy bounce back. But diversifying to build up other sectors of the economy is a difficult task, and few countries have
been able to do it well, particularly countries that are starting
with weak political institutions and autocratic governments.
Q.
A.
Russia indicated it will participate in the bailout of Europe. What’s the advantage to them of doing that?
The different figures that have been thrown around are
$8 billion or $10 billion to help bail out Europe. And
this is in Russia’s interest. Europe is their main trading partner.
Europe buys between 20 and 30 percent of its natural gas from
Russia. So as the European economies have suffered, demand
for gas from Russia has gone down, and this is a big portion of
state revenue in Russia.
Q.
A.
Recently Russia, along with China, vetoed a U.N.
Security Council vote condemning Syria’s handling
of rebels. Why does Russia care about Syria?
Syria is a fairly large purchaser of Russian military equipment, about $1 billion a year. It is also one of the few
countries in the Middle East where Russia has good relations
with the government. So if a new government were to come to
power, Russian influence in the region as a whole would wane.
But the bigger issue is one of national sovereignty. The Russian
government has been pretty consistent in saying that the international community should not be choosing leaders for any
other country, and that this is interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. When the international community
rallies together to push out an autocrat, one can trace a thread
back to thinking in the Kremlin, ‘Well, this has happened in
other countries and could it happen to us someday?’”
Q.
A.
How would you describe U.S.-Russian relations currently?
There have been a number of substantive achievements
that President Obama can point to, most particularly
the approval of the New START arms control agreement and
an agreement to allow the U.S. to use Russian airspace to help
supply troops in Afghanistan. Russia’s been somewhat helpful
in Iran, canceling some sales of surface-to-air missiles after suggestions from the Obama administration. Russia’s set to join the
World Trade Organization after negotiations of more than 17
years. So on all these points there’s been cooperation. Now, it’s
often the case in U.S.-Russia relations that with elections on the
horizon, many initiatives are put on hold because both sides
recognize that there are some domestic political costs to being
too friendly. It could be very interesting for Obama because on
the one hand, he can point to some real successes working with
[President Dmitri] Medvedev and Putin. On the other hand, if
the protests continue and if there’s perceived to be lots of election fraud, or if there’s a crackdown after the elections, that
card becomes a lot less valuable for Obama. It’s going to be very
interesting to see how that plays out politically in the U.S.
The Record
February 23, 2012 8
Columbia Ink New Books by Faculty
Buell
continued from page 1
The Vanishers
Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases Forever?
By Heidi Julavits
Doubleday
Nancy Leys Stepan
Cornell University Press
In her latest novel, Julavits questions whether the bond
between mother and daughter is unbreakable, even in
death. An adjunct assistant professor of writing at the
School of the Arts, Julavits has composed a meditation on
grief, female rivalry and the furious power of a daughter’s
love. She tells the story of Julia, a student at an institute
for parapsychology and her legendary mentor and nemesis, Madame Ackermann. As the two battle for power, Julia
discovers that her ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes far
deeper than she ever imagined.
Stepan, professor emeritus of history, examines one of the
most controversial issues in public health today—whether the
complete elimination of a disease through deliberate human
intervention is the best way to improve human health. Critics
argue that the huge resources needed to achieve eradication
could be better allocated toward developing primary health
services. Stepan examines the pros and cons of single-minded
efforts to rid the world of particular diseases, including present-day campaigns against
polio, Guinea worm disease and malaria, and concludes that under the right circumstances, eradication and primary health care need not be in conflict.
Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy
Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature,
and the Arts
Mark C. Taylor
Columbia University Press
Taylor, co-director of the Institute for Religion,
Culture, and Public Life, claims that contemporary art has lost its way and is now commodified
to the point that it no longer has its critical edge
and is a financial instrument calculated to maximize profitable returns. He explores the work of artists Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney, James Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy, arguing that they are some of the few artists
who understand that art is a transformative practice drawing inspiration directly and
indirectly from ancient and modern, Eastern and Western forms of spirituality.
Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea:
Freedom’s Frontier
By Theodore Hughes
Columbia University Press
Hughes, the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean
Studies in the Humanities, investigates developments in literature, film and art during Korea’s years under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). He shows how Korean writers and
filmmakers used new forms of expression in the first decades
of the century to represent the realities of colonialism and
modernism. He then demonstrates how emerging political,
social and artistic movements influenced the generation of
artists after World War II as they confronted the aftershocks of colonialism and the
formation of separate regimes on the Korean peninsula.
By Haruo Shirane
Columbia University Press
Shirane, the Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and
Culture, illuminates the deeper meaning behind Japanese
aesthetics and artifacts by tracing how, when and why elegant representations of the four seasons came to fill a
wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and
screen painting to tea ceremony, flower arrangement and annual observances. His research into the use of images, the
seasons to which they were attached, and the changes in
cultural associations across history, genre and community, shows the seasons to be as
much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.
Screenwriter’s Compass: Character As True North
By Guy Gallo
Focal Press
Gallo, adjunct assistant professor of film at the School of
the Arts, has written a writers’ guide with practical tips for
rooting screenwriting in character motivation and voice. He
demonstrates how effective stories on screen are grounded
in the creation of vivid, fully realized characters and explores
ways to produce screenplays that will make readers identify
with the characters. Gallo’s first produced screenplay, Under
the Volcano, was directed by John Huston. He has written over
a dozen feature screenplays and had four others produced.
J-school Gift
continued from page 1
at the journalism school, whose holder will be the institute’s East
Coast director; Stanford will likewise have a West Coast director.
Both schools will offer graduate and post-graduate fellowships and
award “Magic Grants” for the most promising and innovative ideas.
“David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young
people to follow their passions and to create original content,” Gurley Brown said in a statement. “Sharing a language is where this
magic happens.”
The creation of the Brown Institute is a highly visible acknowledgement of the melding of journalism and technology. Even as it
continues to teach students the basic and advanced skills required
of good journalists, the J-school is adding an increasing number of
classes and degree programs that reflect its strategic shift toward
teaching new skills for the digital age.
Office of Communications and Public Affairs
402 Low Library, MC4321
535 W. 116th St.
New York, NY 10027
“David and I have long supported
and encouraged bright young people
to follow their passions and to
create original content.”
These initiatives include the establishment in 2010 of the Tow
Center for Digital Journalism, a research and development center
run by director Emily Bell, who oversaw digital content for Britain’s
Guardian News and Media; a new master of science program in digital journalism jointly offered for the first time this academic year
by the J-school and Columbia’s Engineering School; and a series of
digital media continuing education courses aimed at burnishing the
technical skills of journalists, taught by J-school faculty.
In January, the journalism school hosted its second Social Media
Weekend. Led by Professor Sree Srinivasan, the school’s dean of students, it drew 502 attendees, double that of 2011’s event. In addition
to numerous workshops and lectures, the school also had “social
media doctors” on hand to help improve participants’ digital presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media outlets.
David Brown worked for several newspapers and magazines after his graduation from the journalism school and was the managing editor of Cosmopolitan before going into the movie business in
the early 1950s. He is best known for producing a string of Academy
Award-winning hit films such as The Sting, Jaws, Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy.
and Glaucon, protagonists of Plato’s The Republic, are stuck in traffic on Interstate 95,
where they have no choice but to contemplate
the nature of the suburb and begin imagining
alternatives.
Who better to realize those alternatives
than architects? According to Bergdoll, the
mandate of Foreclosed is “to reveal that design
is central to solving” America’s housing crisis.
The architects he and Martin chose—three
of them Columbia faculty members—formed
teams with economists, ecologists, activists
and engineers to develop new ideas for America’s declining suburbs.
Last year, the architect-led teams presented
their ideas at a series of workshops. In September, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan reviewed the proposals
at one such workshop, where he praised the
participants for thinking about “what should
these places look like, and how do we begin, if
tentatively, to grasp those opportunities.”
MOS, a firm headed by Columbia faculty
member Hilary Sample and her husband,
Michael Meredith, focused on East Orange,
N.J., outside Newark, where they proposed
reclaiming streets as sites for long narrow
buildings mixing residential and commercial
uses. The buildings are intended to reduce
the tax burden on a financially struggling city
and redevelop the street as an engine of economic growth. A new financial model would
give residents 50 percent ownership of their
homes; the other 50 percent would be held by
a cooperative.
WORKac, a firm run by Amale Andraos, also
a Columbia faculty member, and her husband,
Dan Wood, developed a proposal for Keizer,
Ore., that would house several thousand people on 220 acres. The new buildings would be
five times as dense as the surrounding suburbs,
but with three times the amount of open space.
The reinvented suburb of Salem, the state capital, would include a facility to process organic
waste into compost while generating methane
that would power fuel cells.
The firm Visible Weather, a collaboration
between Michael Bell, director of Columbia’s
Master of Architecture Program Core Design
To see a video about the Foreclosed exhibit
at MoMA, visit news.columbia.edu/buell
Studios, and Eunjeong Song, focused its attention on Temple Terrace outside Tampa, Fla.,
where the architects designed a series of large
buildings with spaces set aside for city government, municipally owned “incubator” offices
for business start-ups and housing.
The team headed by Jeanne Gang, a prominent Chicago architect, worked to help Cicero,
Ill., strengthen its identity as a haven for immigrant families, or “arrival city.” Modular
housing would allow residents to add and
subtract rooms as families change over time.
Andrew Zago of Zago Architecture salvaged
a largely abandoned subdivision in Rialto, Calif., near San Bernardino, offering a variety of
housing types including apartments and twofamily homes instead of the rows of detached
houses that had been planned before the real
estate collapse.
The show helped kick off the 30th anniversary of the center, which was endowed
by Buell, a renowned Colorado architect
(M.Arch’17) who died in 1990.
Based at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the center
sponsors research projects, workshops, public
programs, publications and awards. Martin,
director of the center since 2008, sees the
show as one of the center’s triumphs, pairing
its research capabilities with MoMA’s ability to
mount large public exhibitions. Foreclosed,
he said, “has demonstrated that we can do
together what neither of us can do independently.”
See related article on Buell Center history
on page 2.