NEWS AND IDEAS FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITYVOL. 33, NO. 08 FEBRUARY 14, 2008

COLUMBIA AT THE SUPREME COURT

Celebrating 150 years| 8

MAKING HIS MARKNew Copyright

Director| 3

www.columbia.edu/news

ONLINE HISTORY LESSONS:

The Amistad Project| 4

COLUMBIALAW SCHOOL’SCIVIL RIGHTS

LEGACY

33 ENDOWEDCHAIRS ADDED,AND COUNTINGBy Record Staff

Honor Roll:11 TeachersAre AwardedLenfest PrizesBy Record Staff

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Santiago Calatrava, SEAS Prof. George Deodatis, Robertina Calatrava and SEAS dean Gerald Navratil.

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The late Constance Baker Motley, Law ’46, who helped write the briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s

Veiled Sentiments

Zainab Bahrani

Women of Babylon, The Graven Image,

Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia

Nicholas Dames

Amnesiac Selves

ThePhysiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science and the Form of Victorian Fiction

Peter deMenocal

ColumbiaBy Adam Piore

Brown v. Board of Education

“I was on the ground floor of the civil rights movement without even knowing it”

TheRecordFEBRUARY 14, 20082

TheRecord welcomes your input for news items and staff profiles. You can submit

your suggestions to:

curecord@columbia.edu

USPS 090-710 ISSN 0747-4504Vol. 33, No. 08, Feb. 14, 2008

Published by the Office of Communications and

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TheRecord Staff:

Editor: Bridget O’BrianDesigner: Nicoletta Barolini

Senior Writer: Melanie A. FarmerUniversity Photographer: Eileen Barroso

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TheRecord welcomes your input for news items and staff profiles. You can submit

your suggestions to:

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The Columbia Women’s Swimming and Diving team is headed toward what could be its best season in the program’s 24-year history. The Lions are off to an 8-2 start, and are also 4-2 in the Ivy League, with one league meet still to swim. If the team defeats Dartmouth at home Feb. 16 (Uris Pool, Dodge Fitness Center, noon, free admission), it will establish a new Columbia league record. Head coach of women’s swimming Diana Caskey hopes to finish third behind Princeton and Harvard at the Ivy League Championship meet, which she says “would involve taking down Penn and Yale, who both beat us last year.”

Dear Alma:Who was the first black student to study at Columbia?

—Diversity Detective

Columbia College Today

Stand, Columbia

Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think

Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

—By Stacy Parker AabSend your questions for Alma’s Owl to curecord@columbia.edu.

ON C AMPUS MILESTONES

IN THE FAST LANE

Breaking the Barrier

ASK ALMA’S OWL

GEN

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YARS

DEBORA SPAR

JUDITH SHAPIRO

The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.

JAMAL JOSEPH

Raise It Up,August Rush

AtonementJAMES

SHAMUS

PADMA DESAI

VIKRAM PANDIT

NIRUPAM BAJPAI.

MONA LUCASLICHINIA BELTRE

PONISSERIL SOMASUNDARAN

TheRecord FEBRUARY 14, 2008 3

The Man Behind theLenfest AwardsBy Melanie A. Farmer

Making An Imprint On Copyright AwarenessBy Bridget O’Brian

Kenneth D. Crews

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H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest

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NEW MAILMAN DEANBy Record Staff

Linda Fried

TheRFEBRUARY 14, 20084

Some Great Columbians Who Made a Difference

AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY

Scores of elementary and middle-school students have learned about civil rights leader Rosa Parks. But, too

often, they didn’t get the whole story. The simple version, as school children are

frequently taught, is that Parks was a poor working black woman too tired to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus. In reality, historians now know that Parks was part of a well-organized political-action movement.

“This was not a woman who was tired and did it spur of the moment,” says Kate Wittenberg, manager, E-Publishing Programs, the Center for Digital Research and Scholar-ship. “She was trained by civil rights organi-zations, and as soon as this happened, the entire movement got involved—launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”

Now, Rosa Parks’s story—and those of hundreds of other African Americans—can be told in full, thanks to the Amistad Digital Resource, a joint venture be-tween Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH) and the digital research cen-ter. (The name Amistad refers to the 1839 uprising on the slave ship of the same name, which led to a historic 1842 Supreme Court decision freeing Africans illegally kidnapped into bondage.)

“So many of the stories of these remark-able ordinary people have been buried,” says Manning Marable, professor of political sci-ence and founder of CCBH. “Martin Luther King is being forgotten on his own holiday. We’re in danger of losing touch with a cen-tral moment, a great moment in American democracy. The Amistad Resource is a way to bring those stories back to life.”

In January, the Amistad Digital Resource was launched on the Web, a direct result of recent state legislation across the country requiring that African American history be

integrated into public-school social studies curriculums. Such teaching, geared toward providing a more inclusive and accurate re-cord of American history, is currently required in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Florida.

Even with that mandate, Marable says, most public schools do not thoroughly teach the African American experience or integrate it into mainstream history courses. In addi-tion, most history and social-science instruc-tors have never taken related courses and are not trained or sufficiently knowledgeable to teach it.

The Amistad project isn’t a classroom text, but a multimedia resource for high-school teachers to enhance their knowledge and ability in teaching African American his-tory. It combines hundreds of rare and iconic photographs, audio recordings, film clips, and excerpts of oral history interviews. A

descriptive narra-tive text explains significant themes and key events in African American

history, such as the brutal lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 and the Mis-sissippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Many of the images for the Amistad site were based on Marable’s book, Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle.

“Now students can see the bus boycott, hear the freedom marchers, watch those im-ages from the past,” Marable says. “That way history lives.”

The Amistad Digital Resource was made possible through a Ford Foundation grant, which paid for the prototype and the first module covering the civil rights era. Colum-bia is currently seeking additional funding to develop additional modules, which will ulti-mately integrate perspectives to include the entire sweep of African American history.

For more information, go to www.amistadresource.org.

AMISTAD PROJECT’S LAUNCH PUTS HISTORY ON A FRESHER TACKBY DONNA CORNACHIO

George E. Lewis’s forthcoming book may be the product of nearly a decade of painstaking research, but it also owes

a debt to serendipity.“I had a happy accident when I was 19,”

says Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, who also is director of the University’s Center for Jazz Studies. “I was walking home from a summer job and I saw some people in a basement with instruments, and I asked them what they were doing.” When Lewis announced that he was a trombonist, the people in the basement invited him to their next rehearsal. Thus began his membership in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the most influential American musical collectives to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century.

More than three decades after that chance encounter, Lewis has made the organization the subject of his new book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, to be published by University of Chicago Press later this year. It documents the origins, evolution and significance of the musical collective.

The AACM was founded in 1965 in Chicago, a city that Lewis describes as being hyper-segregated at the time. Numbering anywhere from 20 to 100 members over its 43-year existence, with chapters in both Chicago and New York City, the association’s original commitment to self-reliance and self-determination came straight out of the Black Power movement. At the same time, Lewis notes that the group tends to defy any and all orthodoxies, encouraging openness of musi-

cal reference while remaining firmly anchor-ed to the culture of the African diaspora.

The AACM’s music, as a result, is highly diverse. For example, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, an influential AACM group, combined elements of pop, jazz, world music and contemporary classical music, regularly appearing in elaborate costumes and makeup to create what Lewis describes as a form of intermedia. Encouraging individuality within an egalitarian framework, AACM performances often replaced extended solo improvisations with unusual ensemble textures created through the collective interplay of many different instruments—including nontradi-tional ones like sirens, bells, whistles and

found objects. All of this

made the org-anization difficult to pigeonhole—and also made the association a tough nut

for some to crack. Some jazz critics were uncomfortable with the AACM’s brand of border-crossing experimentalism and wanted to draw bright lines between high and low art, black and white musicians—all of the things that the AACM was trying to erase,” Lewis says.

Echoing the organization’s philosophy of openness, Lewis tried to include as many different voices as possible within the book, constructing a detailed history of the association that includes AACM members’ remembrances alongside the extensive written record that has come out of the collective’s many activities. “That’s an AACM way of thinking about things—let’s include everyone, let’s not leave anyone out,” Lewis says with a laugh.

A GROUP THAT BROKE DOWN MUSICAL BARRIERS, COMPLETE WITH BELLS AND WHISTLESBY ALEXANDER GELFAND

“We’re in danger of losing touch with ... a great moment in American democracy.”

The association’s original commitment to self-reliance and self-determination came straight

out of the Black Power movement.

SHIRLEY ANITA ST. HILLCHISHOLM

Teachers College 1951

The first African American woman elected to the United States Congress, Chisholm gained widespread notice as a tireless advocate for the interests of African Americans, women and the urban poor, and as a champion of greater educational opportunity for all.

Photo Credit: Rutgers University, Special Collections and University Archives

JAMES HOWARD MEREDITH

Law School 1968

In the fall of 1962, 29-year-old Air Force veteran James Meredith provided a defining moment in the American civil rights movement when he enrolled as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi—sparking a riot that left two dead and dozens injured. After graduating a year later, he continued to champion the rights of African Americans.

Photo Credit: Chris Meyer/Indiana University

KENNETH B. CLARK

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1940; Law School 1970

MAMIE PHIPPS CLARK

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1943

The research of Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark challenged the notion of differences in the mental abilities of black and white children and thus played an important role in the desegregation of American schools.

Photo Credit: Columbia University Archives

MAURICE V. RUSSELL

School of Social Work 1950, Teachers College 1964

Over his more than 40-year career, Russell taught and directed social services at several New York institutions. He is credited with establishing the first professional department of social work at Harlem Hospital and is lauded as one of the most innovative leaders in social work education in the United States. He was a trustee of Columbia from 1987 to 1995.

Photo Credit: Eileen Barroso

BEVERLY L. GREENE

Graduate School of Architecture 1945

Greene is believed to have been the first African American woman licensed to practice architecture in the United States. In 1936, she became the first African American woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, receiving an M.S. in city planning there a year later.

Photo Credit: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne

Record FEBRUARY 14, 2008 5

1) In Selma, Ala., black residents wait to register to vote in January 1965. City officials used scare tactics and made people wait all day to try to deter them from registering.

2) Elizabeth Eckford in front of Little Rock Central High School, Sept. 4, 1957. Despite the angry white crowd surrounding her as she walked to school, Eckford would become part of the Little Rock Nine, who began the desegregation of the Arkansas school system.

3) Malcolm X holds a Harlem workshop in May 1963 to discuss the deadly impact of the South’s desegregation and to urge people to support the activists in Alabama.

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Brown v. Board of Education

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Law School’s Civil Rights Legacycontinued from page 1

To learn more about this key part of our local and national history, visit www.columbia.edu/blackhistory.

PAUL ROBESON

Law School 1923

One of the most prominent black Americans of the 20th century, Robeson was a Renaissance man. As well as winning acclaim for stage and screen roles, he was an exceptional athlete, cultural scholar, author and political activ-ist. He earned his greatest fame, however, as a concert singer. During the Cold War, Robeson’s political beliefs and civil rights activities made him a contro-versial figure, and his career suffered. Only now is he getting the recognition due him.

Photo Credit: Metropolitan Musical Bureau/Columbia University Archives

MARIE MAYNARD DALY

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1947

In 1947, Daly became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. Best known for research geared toward practical applications for health and nutrition, she investigated the effects of cholesterol, sugars and other nutrients on the heart. Daly also taught biochemistry at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Photo Credit: Queens College

CHARLES R. DREW

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1940

Drew’s work as a physician and medical researcher in the field of blood transfusions led to his development of the world’s first blood bank. He also improved techniques for blood storage and created large-scale blood banks early in World War II. He protested against racial segregation in the donation of blood from donors of different races since it lacked scientific foundation.

Photo Credit: Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Barnard College 1928; Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, attended 1934–35

Hurston combined literature with anthropology, employing indige-nous dialects to tell the stories of people in her native rural Florida and in the Caribbean. One of the most widely read au-thors of the Harlem Renaissance, she died penniless and forgotten. Her reputation was resuscitated after Alice Walker’s 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” led to a rediscovery of her novels.

Photo Credit: Carl Van Vechten/Van Vechten Trust

M. MORAN WESTON II

Columbia College 1930; Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1940, 1969

The longtime rector of one of Harlem’s most prominent churches, Weston co-founded Carver Federal Savings Bank—the largest independent financial institution in the United States owned by African Americans—and provided affordable housing for thousands of New Yorkers. Weston was also the University’s first African American trustee.

Photo Credit: Columbia University Archives

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TheRecordFEBRUARY 14, 20086

www.columbia.edu/cu/senate

The above was submitted by Tom Mathewson, manager of the University Senate. His column is editorially independent of The Record. For more information about the Senate, go to www.columbia.edu/cu/senate.

Baze v. Rees

RESEARCH

Seminar on Bioethics as the Supreme Court Considers

Lethal Injection

Help Wanted: Tear Off And Discover YourselfBy Erin Carlyle

EXPERTS DISCUSS ETHICS OF LETHAL INJECTIONSby Kelsy Chauvin

SENATE SEEKSAPARTMENT RENTALPOLICY REPORTBy Tom Mathewson

TheRecord FEBRUARY 14, 2008 7

FACULTY Q&A

FREDRICKC. HARRIS

Ken Harlin

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POSITION:

Professor of Political Science and Associate of the Institute for Research in African American Studies

(IRAAS)

Director, Center on African American Politicsand Society

LENGTH OF SERVICE:

Joined Columbia in January 2006

HISTORY:

Professor of Political Science, Universityof Rochester

Founder and Director, Center for the Study of AfricanAmerican Politics, University of Rochester

Director, The Frederick Douglass Institute at University of Rochester

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Q.What is your primary goal for the center?

A.

Q.Why is this new center essential to the University?

A.

Q. Has there been a greater focus on Democratic candidates since one is African American and the

other a woman?

A.

Q.How did you first get interested in politics?

A.

Q. You are currently writing a book about black activism in the wake of the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett

Till. How did that event change things?

A.Brown

“Race, Reform and the 2008 Presidential Nomination Process” www.iserp.columbia.edu/centers/downloads/caaps_report.pdf.

WHO HE IS:

YEARS AT COLUMBIA:WHAT HE DOES:

ROAD TO COLUMBIA:

MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT:

BEST PART OF THE JOB:

IN HIS SPARE TIME:

The New York Times

—by Melanie A. Farmer

SPREADING THE SMILESOn Feb. 1, Columbia’s team of dental professionals and volunteers provided free dental services to over 500 children from the Washington Heights/Inwood and Harlem area, as the College of Dental Medicine helped celebrate the 6th Annual Give Kids/Families A Smile Day. The American Dental Association sponsored the national event to promote oral health awareness and treatment to children in underserved areas of the country. Children from five different schools in the area received oral health education and screenings, as well as gift bags that contained toothpaste, toothbrushes and other materials to reinforce oral hygiene.

TheRecord FEBRUARY 14, 2008 8SCRAPBOOK

Lenfest Faculty Awardscontinued from page 1

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?

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Hint: Her name is Justice but it’s been more than four decades since she belonged to a legal library. On which books does her stained glass glow? Send answers to curecord@columbia.edu. First to e-mail the right answer wins a Record mug.

ANSWER TO LAST CHALLENGE: The bird’s perch is a sculpture on the south side of Earl Hall; Winner: Harry Van, SEAS ’08.

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HE WAS LEGENDThe latest stop on John Legend and Jeffrey Sachs’ Poverty Action Tour was Roone Arledge Auditorium, where the celebrated recording artist and world-famous economist hosted a question and answer session for students and faculty, followed by a performance by Legend. The discussion was moderated by Kweli Washington, Rhodes Scholar and organizer, and Legend’s musical set included crowd favorite Ordinary People. Legend first became interested in Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, after reading The End of Poverty, Sachs’ bestseller about what can be done to end extreme global poverty.

GINSBURG HOLDS COURT WITH LAW SCHOOLThe law school is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year with a series of high-profile events, the most recent of which was a black-tie reception at the United States Supreme Court hosted by Justice and former Columbia law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ’59. Addressing students, faculty and alumni, Ginsburg reflected on her time at the law school and noted that her appointment to the Supreme Court hinged upon a recommendation from Dean Michael Sovern. Pictured above from left to right are President Lee C. Bollinger, ’71, Ginsburg and Dean David M. Schizer.

giving.columbia.edu.

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33 New Professorshipscontinued from page 1

Sharon MarcusApartment

Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London

Amber Miller

Shahid Naeem

Colin Nuckolls

Pablo Piccato

ity of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931

Sudhir Venkatesh’s

American Project

Katja Vogt

Skepsis und Lebenspraxis: Das pyrrhonische Leben ohne Meinungen

Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa.

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THINK PINK:At the Feb. 15 women’s basketball home game against Dartmouth, fans are encouraged to wear pink to show their support for breast cancer research and awareness, and staffers from the Columbia University Medical Center and other New York City hospital staffs have been invited to attend the game. Coaches will wear pink and players will wear pink shoelaces (see picture at left of sophomore Sara Yee, whose shoelaces have been turned pink with a little digital assistance.) Half of the game’s proceeds will go to the Herbert Irving Columbia Comprehensive Cancer Center Breast Program, and fans also can make a donation. The Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s (WBCA) Think Pink initiative is a nationwide unified effort to raise breast cancer awareness on the court, across campuses and in surrounding communities.