Letters to the Editor
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‘Columbia Capitulates to Hunger Strikers’
On page one, November 16, the Sun reported: “A week-long hunger strike staged by five students at Columbia University could cost the institution $50 million. Columbia officials said Wednesday night that, after a faculty committee grants approval, the university would spend the funds to pay for an expansion of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and a restructuring of Columbia College’s core curriculum that would add faculty for courses on non-European civilizations” [New York, “Columbia Capitulates to Hunger Strikers,” November 16, 2007].
But as the multiple communications to students from our vice president of Arts & Sciences and dean of Columbia College have consistently made clear, the relevant faculty committees on undergraduate education have been working for the past year on proposed enhancements to our Core Curriculum as part of the University’s effort to add greater global perspectives to students’ educational experience.
This includes a proposal to make the existing Major Cultures course more consistent with other key parts of the Core that have small seminars. As the campus community well understands, this ongoing and still incomplete curriculum development process was not undertaken in response to the recent student hunger strike.
The only thing the number $50 million reflects was an informal, hypothetical estimate of how much of Columbia’s current $4 billion fundraising campaign it might take to provide the incremental endowment revenue to pay for the additional professors needed for these faculty-proposed enhancements to the Core Curriculum, if they are ultimately approved by the relevant faculty oversight committees. Moreover, it has not even been decided whether any such enhancement to the Core, if approved, would be funded with endowment income, or through other revenue sources.
But given the rule of thumb regarding endowments, the amount of spending being discussed here would be only $2.5 million per year.
DAVID STONE
Executive vice president for communications
Columbia University
New York, N.Y.
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