As the first Columbia College graduate prepares to take the oath of office for president, historians, journalists, public officials and many others are

reaching for historical comparisons to both the man and the moment.

Is Barack Obama (CC’83) more like Franklin Delano Roosevelt? The similarities are striking. Each succeeds an unpopular Republican who oversaw a financial collapse. Each effectively channeled his message through the new media of the day—Roosevelt through radio, Obama through the Internet.

Or is the better comparison to Abraham Lincoln, another president who got his political start in the Illi-nois state legislature and later became renowned for his oratorical skills and the quality of his writing? Obama quoted Lincoln in his victory speech on election night and has spoken of reading Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln’s fractious cabinet.

Columbia faculty members are at the center of the discussion on Obama and his role, both historical and history-making. After Election Day, Columbia professors Eric Foner of the history department and Patricia Williams of the law school appeared on Bill

Moyers’ PBS show to discuss Obama’s victory—on the same night, Provost Alan Brinkley appeared on Charlie Rose with fellow historian Michael Beschloss and New Yorker editor David Remnick. Foner joined Rose a week later, as part of an hour-long conversation about Obama and Lincoln.

Remarkably, a week apart in mid-November the University hosted two long-planned historical conferences: On Nov. 15, there was a conference co-sponsored with The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute on the theme “Restoring America Through a New New Deal.” And on Nov. 22, the American Studies department sponsors a public symposium in Low Library rotunda marking the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 1809 and the publication of Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, edited by Foner, who is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History. More than a dozen historians are speaking on topics ranging from “Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Rights of Black Americans” to “Abraham Lincoln, Commander in Chief.”

In FDR’s case, Columbia played its own role in New Deal history, with a number of prominent faculty members serving on his informal “brain trust” of academics, who advised Roosevelt when he was New York governor and later president. They included

NEWS AND IDEAS FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITYvol. 34, no. 04 november 20, 2008

www.columbia.edu/news

new barnard president

Spar Inaugurated | 3

science meets artOliver Sacks

Muses | 3

conundrums for kidsPhilosophy for

Children | 5

By Record Staff

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Student groupS aid tranSition of veteranSBy Erin St. John Kelly and Melanie A. Farmer

Sean O’Keefe felt compelled to enlist in the U.S. Army shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks,

and in doing so fulfilled a childhood dream. For five years, he served in the 10th Special Forces—the Army’s Green Berets—in locations such as the Balkans and Africa.

Now, as a 24-year-old junior at the School of General Studies (GS), he is one of about 50 students en-rolled there who are active or re-tired military personnel. He also is a member of a six-year-old student group called U.S. Military Veterans of Columbia (MilVets), and he cred-its such campus organizations with providing much-needed support in helping students like himself make the transition from military to campus life.

“It’s nice to hang out with other military veterans who can understand my situation,” he said. “They can relate.”

O’Keefe just learned that in January he will be deployed to Iraq.

“That news unto itself is devastating and difficult to deal with,” said O’Keefe. “But for me, when I am around other veterans

who understand what I am going through and know how I want to be treated, it eases the stress of having to go to Iraq once the semester ends.”

MilVets promotes dialogue on military life, says Peter Kim, presi-dent of the group and a U.S. Marine who served six months in Iraq. “I hope we can bring a viewpoint with experience behind us that will help shape [non-military] minds, rather than be just driven by whatever they read about the war or about military culture, for example,” add-ed Kim, a 28-year-old senior at GS. A key goal of the group is to push for a dedicated Veterans Affairs rep-resentative on campus to help ex-military students understand and obtain veterans benefits under the GI Bill and health care plans.

Law school students this fall formed the Columbia Law School Military Association, founded by Abe Cho (’10) of the U.S. Marine Corps, who served in Iraq; Marine John Power Hely VI (’10), who served in Afghanistan; and Sang-joon “Simon” Han (’09) of the U.S. Army, who also served in Iraq. “Our goal is to provide a forum both for veterans facing the tough transition

“it’s nice to hangout with other military veterans.”

barack obama on campus at the servicenation Presidential Forum, sept. 11, 2008 in roone arledge auditorium

The Institute for Religion, Cul-ture and Public life marked its inauguration Nov. 6 with

three public lectures, examining the themes of religion as it relates to art, politics and the imagination.

Who better to discuss the lat-ter—on religion and imagination—than novelist Salman Rushdie, who faced death threats after publishing his 1988 book The Satanic Verses, considered blasphemous by many Muslim communities.

Rushdie, who spoke to a packed audience in Low Rotunda, sat in conversation with Gauri Viswana-than, professor of English and com-parative literature at Columbia, and was introduced by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Rushdie talked about the univer-sal quality of language. He said, “We are all a language animal,” and “have to use language to define ourselves.” But he added that some things can-

not be expressed without using a religious word and that the power of this language is felt whether or not one is religious.

He offered the word “soul” as an example. “What does that mean if you are not a religious person?” he asked. “I don’t believe in an afterlife or a heaven or hell, and yet I feel when I use that word it has some meaning…There isn’t a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood.”

When discussing his latest book, The Enchantress of Florence, Rush-die admitted that he does not have “utopian tendencies.” Indeed, he said, his writings frequently contain a bleak point of view, a reflection of how he feels about the world today.

“We live in a harsh world,” he said. “We don’t live in this world of tolerance, happiness, music and dance…We live in a world of death, bombs and destruction.” However, he did concede that he was having an uncharacteristically “optimistic week,” referring to the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections just two days earlier.

“I hope something happened on Tuesday which can change that,” added Rushdie, “but it’s difficult to

salman rushdie speaking in low rotunda

ruShdie SpeakS about religion and imaginationBy Melanie A. Farmer

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In drawing possible connections between the current Presi-dent-elect and Franklin Roosevelt, it is stated that each followed a ‘two term Republican..” Herbert Hoover served one term, not two.

TheRecord2 november 20, 2008

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Happening at ColumbiaFor the latest on upcoming

Columbia events, performances, seminars and lectures, please go tohttp://calendar.columbia.edu

USPS 090-710 ISSn 0747-4504 vol. 34, no. 04, november 20, 2008

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Obama is the first Columbia graduate to be elected president, but he’s hardly the first to be elected as a world leader. Who are some others? —Citizen of the World

Dear Citizen of the World:When President-elect Obama takes

office come January, he’ll join two other Columbia graduates who are currently running their countries: Mikhail Saakashvili (Law’94) was elected president of Georgia in 2004, and Toomas Hendrik Ilves (CC’76) has been president of Estonia since 2006.

While they’re the only ones currently in office, they’re in good company historically. Columbia can count among its alumni one-time leaders of Italy, Poland, Afghanistan and even pre-revolutionary China. Also included: a founder of both

the League of Nations and the United Nations, many government ministers and leaders of political parties spanning both the globe and the last century.

Giuliano Amato (LAW’63) was Italy’s prime minister twice, from 1992 to 1993, then again from 2000 to 2001; more recently, he served as Italy’s interior minister from 2006 to 2008. Abdul Zahir (CC’35, P&S’39) was prime minister of Afghanistan in 1971 and 1972. Tang Shao-yi, who studied at Columbia for two years during the 1870s without graduating, was a prime minister of the Republic of China in 1912.

grants & g if ts

World Leaders Alumni

miLEstonEs

Victory at kraFt Fieldcolumbia defeated cornell University 17-7 on senior day, the lions’ home finale, nov. 15. Here the gridiron teammates celebrate victory by singing Roar, Lion Roar after the win at robert k. kraft Field. columbia closes its football season at brown University this saturday, nov. 22.

Tang was also the father-in-law of another great Columbia leader: V.K. Wellington Koo (CC’1908, GSAS’1912). Koo, helped found both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Many years later, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a former Fulbright Scholar at Columbia, became U.N. secretary-general in 1992, after serving as Egypt’s deputy foreign minister. Madeline Albright, who received her master’s and doctorate from Columbia, served as U.S ambas-sador to the United Nations and later as secretary of state under Bill Clinton.

And of course, no list of Columbia leaders is complete without mention of the Roosevelts, Franklin and Theodore; although both attended the law school, neither graduated. Similarly, Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the University as its president from 1948 to 1953, though he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

—The Record Staff Send your questions for Alma’s Owl to curecord@columbia.edu.

Pablo PiCCato, associate professor of history, was named director of the Institute on Latin American Studies at the School of International and Public Af-fairs. Piccato is a historian of Mexico focusing on the nation’s modern intersection of crime, politics and cul-ture. He will lead the institute through July 2011.

DonalD Keene, professor emeritus of Japanese cul-ture, received Japan’s Bunka Kunsho Award the high-est honor bestowed on individuals for their cultural achievements. Keene is the first non-Japanese to re-ceive the award, apart from the Apollo 11 astronauts. It was presented to him at a ceremony held at the Impe-rial Palace in Japan.

latHa VenKataraman, assistant professor of applied physics and ap-plied mathematics, was awarded a 2008 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The fellowship pro-vides $875,000 to the nation’s most promising young professors in the

science and engineering fields. Venkataraman will apply the grant toward her research on understand- ing fundamental properties of single-molecule elec-tronic devices.

The Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) along with Pfizer, presented Peter a. muennig, M.D., assistant professor of health policy and management, with the 2008 Early Career in Public Health Award. Muennig is one of three notable recipients selected for their teaching excellence, remarkable practice, and their service and achievements in fostering the education of future public health leaders.

DonalD W. lanDry, professor of medicine, was named chair of the Department of Medicine at Col-lege of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S) and chief of medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. A physician and organic chemist, Landry joined the department’s faculty in 1985.

riCHarD mayeux, professor of neurology, psychiatry and epidemiology, has received the John Stearns Award for Lifetime Achievement in Medicine by the New York Academy of Medicine. Mayeux currently leads an ongoing epidemiological investigation of Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions, known as the Washington Heights-Inwood Community Aging Project, which is in its 19th year. He has authored more than 300 papers, chapters and books on identifying factors that lead to Alzheimer’s.

WHo gaVe it: Carmel Hill FundHoW muCH: $11.25 millionWHo got it: College of Physicians and SurgeonsWHat For: Department of PsychiatryHoW Will it be uSeD: for the Columbia University TeenScreen program, a mental health risk screening program for young people.

WHo gaVe it: Robert Wood Johnson FoundationHoW muCH: $4.45 millionWHo got it: Graduate School of JournalismWHat For: Program in Science and Health JournalismHoW Will it be uSeD: for faculty, curriculum development and student financial aid over five years.

WHo gaVe it: Tides FoundationHoW muCH: $1.9 millionWHo got it: Earth InstituteWHat For: Millennium Cities Initiative HoW Will it be uSeD: to match gifts that support the sustainable development of mid-sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa.

WHo gaVe it: Philip H. Geier Jr. (BUS’58)HoW muCH: $1.5 millionWHo got it: Business SchoolWHat For: the Philip H. Geier Jr. Professorship of MarketingHoW Will it be uSeD: to endow a new chair in marketing, with additional support from the Samberg matching program.

Left to right : Mikhail Saakashvili, Lee C. Bollinger and Toomas Hendrik Ilves

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TheRecord november 20, 2008 3

Barnard College inaugurated Debora L. Spar as its 11th leader and seventh president on Oct. 23.

The ceremony in Riverside Church was attended by hundreds of representatives from colleges and universities around the world. In her speech, Spar laid out her vision for a new era at Barnard, in which she sees the women’s college becoming an incubator designed to shatter what is left of the glass ceiling.

She spoke to Barnard’s legacy as a bastion of education for women, but drew a distinction between the women of 1887, who defied conventional wisdom that women couldn’t go to college, and the Barnard women of today who face the challenges of a dizzying array of choice. “Our job now is to shoulder the obligation that comes with choice,” she said. “If we can do whatever we want with our lives, then we need to build lives that matter. And if we can shape and change the world, then we must.”

Spar also detailed the three major initiatives she plans to launch at Barnard. One will be to expand Barnard’s international presence, “bringing what we know about women’s education to the women who need it most, and expos-ing our own students to the complex realities of the global economy.” Another

is a plan to launch a Presidential Research Fund, which will award $100,000 a year to fund faculty re-search projects at home or abroad. And Barnard also will build and de-velop an interdisciplinary institute devoted entirely to the theory and practice of women’s leadership, to be called the Barnard Leadership Institute. The institute will draw from the academic expertise in Morningside Heights, and, she said, “also from the wealth of experi-ence and wisdom that are found in this extraordinary city and from the lessons in leadership provided by women around the world.”

Spar, a political scientist, came to Barnard from Harvard Business

School, where she was the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration and an expert on issues of international political economy. Her latest book, The Baby Business, was published in 2006 and explored the economic, political and social issues surrounding reproductive technologies.

ON EXHIBIT:UTOpIa’s GHOsT: pOsTmOdErNIsm rEcONsIdErEd

the arthur ross architecture Gallery in buell Hall hosts Utopia’s Ghost: Postmodernism Reconsidered through dec.

12, an exhibition reinterpreting the postmodern period. original works from Peter eisenman, John Hejduk, aldo rossi, James stirling, are among a select group of works that demonstrates a contradiction of utopian ideals critical in the architectural production of the past-half century.

the installation by student curators is designed to trigger

a discourse on utopia by juxtaposing original works against images from 1970s and 1980s postmodernism, confronting the traditional understanding of postmodernism and suggesting a new framework for approaching the architecture of this period.

Utopia’s Ghost is the third in an ongoing series. babble/babel, islands, roads to nowhere, (in)human scale and Worlds within Worlds were the earlier installments.

—Kelvin Dumè

The topic of the talk was “Mind, Memory and the Actor,” and with participants like neurologist and Columbia faculty member Oliver Sacks and Michael

Boyd, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the conversation could go anywhere. “I don’t know exactly what we’re going to be talking about,” admitted President Lee C. Bollinger, who moderated the panel, at the outset. “That’s part of the thrill.”

As it turned out, the speakers struck an art-meets-science balance that moved from the challenges of memorizing lines to an analysis of the brain’s mirror neurons.

Boyd started the conversation with observations about the actors in his productions of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, parts 1-3, and Richard III. He first directed these plays at the RSC in 2002 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for his work. Four years later, Boyd reassembled much of the cast for a revival, but immediately ran into a problem— the actors couldn’t remember their lines.

“They were panicking,” Boyd recalled. Things didn’t improve when the cast gathered around a table to speak the plays together. So Boyd came up with an extreme solution. “We decided to cut to the chase and just fling them onto the stage,” he said.

Amazingly, this worked. As the actors moved through the familiar blocking of the play, interacting with each other and their characters’ emotions, the text came rushing back to them. “It was very clear,” Boyd said, “that the memory they had been trying to retrieve [on their own] was a broken bit of the memory. It was only complete when the action of their bodies was combined with the recall in the mind.” Boyd added, “Maybe our memory is in our bodies as well as elsewhere.”

Could this phenomenon, Boyd asked Sacks, be related to the hippocampi? These twin parts of the brain have been connected to both short-term memory and spatial navigation.

Sacks demurred, noting that many people who have lost the use of their hippocampi are still able to remember certain things—often with the aid of just the sort of movement Boyd described.

As an example, Sacks told a story about a gifted British musician who had lost his hippocampi and, with it, almost all his short-term memory. “But this man with a 10-second memory is able to play the piano with feeling for hours and hours,” Sacks said. “If you ask him to describe such-and-such Bach fugue, he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. But set him down, give him the first couple of notes, and he’s off.”

The give-and-take between Sacks and Boyd was a good example of the multidisciplinary approach to scholarship that Bollinger has prioritized at Columbia. With its commitment to the Mind/Brain Behavior Initiative, the University has particularly focused on connections

between neuroscience and other disciplines such as economics, sociology and the arts. The appointment of Sacks last year as a Columbia artist and professor of neurology and psychiatry is an example of this.

A frequent New Yorker contributor and best-selling author, Sacks has written frequently about the connections between art and science, most recently in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

He seemed to relish the opportunity to trade ideas with a theater artist like Boyd.

“These are wonderful and very important observa-tions,” he said. “And they’re the sort of observations that neurologists and neuroscientists usually aren’t in a posi-tion to make.”

“this man with a 10-second memory is able to play the piano with feeling for hours and hours.”

By Russell Scott Smith

By Johanna Smith

Barnard Inaugurates Spar as New President

aldo rossi. “cube of Fear”: Model, c. 1992

Debora L. Spar, at her inauguration, with Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger at left.

Much Ado About MeMory when Art Meets science

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TheRecord4 november 20, 2008

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A research team led by Columbia University Medical Center has discovered that chronic inflammation alone can cause stomach cancer, the second leading cause of cancer-related

deaths worldwide.The team described, for the first time, how elevated levels of

an immune system protein called interleukin-1 Beta can start the

progression toward stomach cancer. The results were published in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Cancer Cell. The researchers hope to use this finding to develop ways to block this process and prevent cancer from developing. Stomach (gastric) cancer kills some 900,000 people worldwide each year. Only lung cancer kills more people.

“This study shows that accumulation of IL-1 Beta, which is induced by infection with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori in the gastrointestinal tract, is a significant contributor to the onset of stomach cancer,” said lead author Timothy C. Wang, M.D., chief of the Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases and the Dorothy L. and Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. “We show in this study that IL-1 Beta works by activating a type of white blood cell known as myeloid derived suppressor cells [MDSCs], which in our study appeared to be strongly pro-inflammatory. Blocking IL-1 Beta or the myeloid cells may represent a potential strategy to prevent stomach cancer.”

H. pylori infection can lead to both stomach cancer and stomach ulcers, but in the vast majority—more than 80 percent—of infected people, it causes no health problems. The bacterium is thought to be acquired in childhood through kissing and other types of person-to-person contact. It lives within the stomach just beneath the stomach lining, where the infection induces a mild inflammatory response known as gastritis. H. pylori infection is generally associated with poor hygiene. Infection with H. pylori is gradually disappearing from industrialized countries and is now seen predominantly in underdeveloped countries, particularly in Asia and South America.

As the idea of getting rid of environmentally harmful carbon dioxide by removing existing emissions from the air and storing them away—a process known

as sequestration—gains traction among scientists, it now becomes imperative to find a viable storage place.

That certainly is a daunting problem because we are talking about an enormous amount of CO2: The United States alone emits about a sixth of current global CO2 and already produces enough waste carbon to fill Giants Stadium 3,200 times over every year with liquefied CO2. But it’s not a problem without several proposed solutions, and we think the best one is to store the CO2 below the ocean floor. This can be accomplished in the current generation. Here is why we favor the deep ocean floor option.

Most ideas for sequestration involve pressurizing the gas into a liquid and pumping it underground. The two currently favored options are injection into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, or into deep, salty aquifers. These have the advantages of being near metropolitan power plants and near existing commercial pipelines. However, there is a danger that in some rock formations CO2 could leak out, posing serious health risks in populated areas for generations. Even if the safety questions were resolved, there would be a tangle of legal issues surrounding underground property rights, overland access and long-term liability. We doubt that underground solutions on land could come close to sequestering a globally significant volume of CO2.

Deep-sea sites provide unique and important advantages over land. In particular, CO2 injected into old basaltic rocks under the deep ocean will react chemically with those rocks to form immobile solid minerals such as calcium carbonate–limestone. And if this process does not soak up every bit of CO2, a series of redundant safeguards will protect the oceans, and us.

For one thing, at depths below 2 miles or so, CO2 is heavier than seawater; it can’t rise. And even if it could, most rock formations are blanketed with fine-grained sediments that form a virtually impermeable cap. Also, under the cold temperatures and high pressures of the deep ocean, any CO2 that does leak will turn into a hydrate—an ice-like solid substance. Vast quantities of these basalt rocks covered with sediments exist in different parts of the world. They offer a virtually limitless reservoir where CO2 could be locked forever.

We compute that approximately 28,000 square miles

about 100 miles offshore of Washington and Oregon could permanently store as much as 250 billion tons of carbon. At the current annual CO2 emission rate in the United States, this region alone could provide sufficient sequestration capacity for as long as 140 years. While at safe distances from earthquakes, this region remains within short pipeline distances from industrial ports. The legality of the sub-ocean option is already established under international agreements such as the London Convention.

If the U.S. investigates the deep ocean floor in parallel with conventional on-land possibilities, we as a nation will build a portfolio of viable options that may be a satisfactory solution to this problem within the current generation. But it isn’t being pursued vigorously yet; this year, perhaps $40 million–about the opening-day box office for Disney’s Finding Nemo–will go into studying carbon sequestration problems on land. A policy change is needed today in the government science agenda to energize research beyond our coastlines. With climate change issues now on every political platform, citizens have a clear opportunity this year to demand that finding a safe and secure carbon storage solution become a priority.

If knowledge begins with curiosity, as Aristotle says, children would be among the greatest philosophers. But while the study of philosophy

flourishes at universities, it has been rarely taught at the elementary school level. Recently, however, a global movement has emerged aimed at philosophy instruction for children.

“The goal is to help children develop their ability to think abstractly and interact with peers in a more open-minded fash-ion,” says Columbia philosophy Professor Achille Varzi, a propo-nent of teaching children philosophy. He recently published a philosophical book for children titled The Planet Where Things Disappeared: Exercises in Philosophical Imagination. “We must keep alive the spirit of curiosity that children have,” he added.

A scholar of logic and metaphysics, Varzi has focused his re-search on identity and change over time. Two years ago, Varzi published a version of that same book for adults, Insurmount-able Simplicities: Thirty-nine Philosophical Conundrums, which has since been published in nine languages. Another book, Holes and Other Superficialities, published in 1994, made him briefly an on-air “hole” expert during the 2000 presidential election’s hanging-chad ballot controversy in the Florida vote.

His children’s book, written in his native Italian for children as young as five, poses philosophical questions and provides stories and puzzles. He introduces philosophical themes like change, doubt and possibility, while emphasizing rationality, imagination and modesty.

Of course, he offers no answers, only questions: Is the suit-case I pick up on the conveyor belt the same suitcase I dropped off at the airport, or has it changed? Do I see colors the same way as you? Who cooks for cooks?” Varzi, who wrote and illus-trated the book with his friend and fellow philosopher Roberto Casati, hopes to publish an English translation next year.

Varzi is not the only Columbia scholar to advocate philoso-phy instruction for children. Indeed, the movement got its start at Columbia during the 1970s, when philosophy professor Mat-thew Lipman (GSAS’54) wrote the first elementary-level phi-losophy curriculum. Lipman went on to found the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University. Most philosophy courses offered in U.S. elementary schools are taught by educators who attended the institute, ac-cording to its director, Maughn Gregory.

Scholars like Lipman and Varzi strongly disagree with the view, argued by Swiss philosopher and child psychologist Jean Piaget decades ago, that children younger than 11 simply can’t grasp philosophical problems. “Piaget’s claim was based on the belief that children are not capable of second-order thinking—thinking about thinking—and there is a growing body of em-pirical evidence to the contrary,” Varzi said.

Varzi says philosophy differs from most other subjects in its instruction: “In math and science, you simplify the compli-cated. In philosophy, you complicate the simple,” he said. “By putting questions before the answers you see the importance of the answer. You don’t just buy into a theory or ideological view of another.”

Elementary schools aren’t the only educational institutions that could benefit from a higher dose of philosophy, argues Varzi. In America, where philosophy was met with sneers un-til the 1930s, most top-level high schools offer just one intro-

ductory philosophy course, with a predictable bent on history. Such disregard for the world’s original academic discipline is irresponsible, says Varzi, citing recent articles suggesting that college graduates who majored in philosophy find jobs faster than their peers.

Varzi says his goal is to develop the curiosity that burns so powerfully and naturally within children. Adults would be wise to adopt it, he says. “Children are curious about absolutely everything,” says Varzi. “They haven’t bought into all the answers. Adults, instead, are full of answers, but have forgotten the questions.”

rEsEarch

Philosophy, Isn’t Just for Grown-Ups Anymore

Researchers: Put Carbon Emissions Under the Sea

SCientiStS traCK DoWn StomaCH CanCer CauSe

By David Goldberg, and Taro Takahashi

By John H. Tucker

By Elizabeth Streich

Basalts on the seafloor near Juan de Fuca Ridge, under the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington state.

Varzi, above, says, “We try to show children that things that look simple are in fact marvelously complex.”

An illustration from Varzi’s book

IL-1 Beta induced invasive gastric cancer with ᵝ-catenin activation.

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David Goldberg is Doherty Senior Research Scientist, and Taro Takahashi is Doherty Senior Scholar. They both work at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. This article was taken from an op-ed by the two scientists.

coLumbia pEopLE

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Samuel SewardWHO HE Is: Assistant Vice President and Medical Director, Health Services

YEars aT cOLUmBIa: 5

WHaT HE dOEs: Seward directs Health Services at Columbia (HSC), which serves the health and wellness needs for the Morningside campus and three affiliates: Teachers College, Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary. He oversees some 120 medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, nutritionists, health educators, psychologists and social workers who cater primarily to students, although a few programs and services are open to faculty and staff (such as urgent care and travel vaccinations). HSC’s program offerings and services cover a wide variety of health-related topics and issues including psychological services, disability services, health promotion and sexual and domestic violence prevention. The department’s health promotion program operates Go Ask Alice!, an Internet question-and-answer resource where students can get information about their health and well-being.

GrEaTEsT jOB cHaLLENGEs: “Stress is one of the top three challenges undergraduate, graduate and professional students face in achieving their academic goals,” Seward says. “We’ve got some great programs to help students (and sometimes faculty and staff) understand how they experience stress and cope with it.” For example, each Wednesday Columbia staffers and students can get a free mini-back rub in Wien Hall. HSC’s “Stress Busters” are students who give free neck and back massages to the campus community; they attend select campus events and will come, on request, to offices or residence halls. HSC also offers CU Move, an online exercise motivation program that participants can use to design and track their personal fitness activities, set exercise goals and record their progress.

a GOOd daY ON THE jOB: “When we efficiently, creatively and in an evidence-based way join with students to support them through their health challenges.”

THE rOad TO cOLUmBIa: Seward, 47, studied political science as an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal. After working in Washington, D.C., as a copy editor and editorial assistant, Seward decided journalism was not the right fit. Since he was drawn to volunteerism and interested in helping others, “a career in health care naturally followed,” he says. He received his M.D. in 1994 from the University of Texas in Dallas.

Before joining Columbia, he ran a physician training program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York for five years and was a consultant to CUNY’s student health service. Seward is also an attending physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and teaches the second-year medical student course Foundations of Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

BEsT parT OF THE jOB: “First, working with Columbia students, who in their diversity, brilliance and openness teach me new things about myself and the world almost daily. Second, working with my excellent staff who, quite simply, all share the same goal: to help.”

mOsT mEmOraBLE cOLUmBIa EXpErIENcE: “We’ve had some tragic moments during my time here, students who have been badly injured in accidents or have suffered serious consequences of medical and mental health illnesses. My best moments have been when we came together as a community to support these students as well as their friends and families who suffer with them.”

IN HIs sparE TImE: Seward still volunteers for Habitat for Humanity in Newburgh, N.Y., and by providing pro bono medical services to those with Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome, a rare congenital syndrome. He enjoys time off with his wife and three children. “Lately, my nine-year-old daughter, Grace, and I have been playing simple clarinet duets together, which for a parent, is just flat-out fun.”

—By Melanie A. Farmer

TheRecord6 november 20, 2008

The University Senate de-voted the bulk of its Oct.

24 meeting to a report from Anne Sullivan, executive vice

president for finance, on accounts payable and purchasing operations. At the end, as the result of a last-minute question, senators ad-dressed the impact of the current financial crisis on student loans.

Sullivan’s talk was an update on problems she had addressed at the April 11 plenary, particularly the glitches that had attended the introduction of a new technology last year, which had swelled processing times for routine invoices to a month or more. Several measures taken since then have drastically reduced processing times, Sullivan said. A study conducted by her office had also found that many bottlenecks were attributable to delays in departments submitting the invoices and purchase orders. In the extensive discussion that ensued, senators vented a range of complaints, particularly at having to wait several months for reimbursement of travel expenses, which requires proof of credit card payment.

In his own remarks to the Senate, President Lee C. Bollinger said predictions of a significant, prolonged global recession have prompted new planning efforts by the University. He wanted to avoid both over-optimism and alarmism in anticipating conditions six months from now. While Columbia’s fundraising has not suffered yet, he said there has been an effect on the endowment. He repeated an earlier remark that universities have sometimes escaped the worst effects of economic downturns.

The student loan issue arose thanks to a

question, as the Senate was adjourning, from Stephanie Hughes, a student observer from Union Theological Seminary. Her bid for supplementary student loans this year, with her father as co-signer, had been rejected, and she said she might have to withdraw. Noting that international students face similar obstacles, she asked how the University could help.

Responses focused on international students. Provost Alan Brinkley said loans that don’t require co-signers in the U.S. have largely dried up, and Columbia has less access to other funding than before. While financial aid would be increased, it could not cover the large losses in loan funds, he said.

Senators brainstormed about a range of possible solutions, from the admittedly out-landish—making personal loans to one’s own students—to the more practical—innovative efforts among engineering alumni to guar-antee loans for some international students, and possible attempts by Columbia schools to redirect other funds for students loans.

Brinkley said the University cannot co-sign loans, and individual schools should only consider such steps in consultation with the general counsel. “It’s a very painful thing for the international students most of all,” he said, “but for everyone in the University, because we prize our international character and the international students. But we’re in the midst of a historic crisis, and it’s going to take a hit on almost everything we do.”

The next two plenaries are on Thursday, Nov. 20 and Friday, Dec. 5. Anyone with a CUID is welcome.

Tom Mathewson is 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.

By Tom Mathewson

senate discUsses ProcUreMent issUes, loss oF stUdent loans

Veteranscontinued from page 1

from military to student life and for civilian students who want to learn more about the military,” said Brian Donnelly (’11), the asso-ciation’s president.

The group has about 25 members, including civilians and current and former military. Its military members have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and several other foreign countries, in a wide variety of jobs, including infantry, artillery, computers and public affairs. One member is a future Army lawyer whose active-duty service will begin again next year in the JAG Corps.

While some of these students find adapt-ing to law school difficult, others say their military experience eases the adjustment. “It allows me to have a slightly different perspective from others who have come straight from undergraduate or even who have worked civilian jobs between under-graduate and law school,” said Han, one of the founders. “Nothing seems quite so hard in law school.”

Columbia has a long history of veterans coming to campus to complete their degrees. In 1947, the University Extension Program was reorganized as an undergraduate college to meet the needs of GIs returning from World War II; it was called the School of General Studies. In 1946, three-quarters of the law school’s incoming class were ex-military.

Students called to active duty are granted a military leave of absence by the University for the period of their active duty and for one year after its end.

Charles Taylor, also a member of the Mil-Vets who served in the Marines for six years, agreed that switching from military life to campus life has not been too difficult, and in some ways, the pace is equivalent. A sopho-more at GS, Taylor had two deployments to Iraq and also served in Africa, Armenia and Japan. For Taylor, student groups for veter-ans are a necessity.

“They remind returning vets that we are not alone,” he said.

Former Marine brian donnelly (laW’11) when he was on deployment in Fallujah, iraq.

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TheRecord november 20, 2008 7

facuLty Q&a

that people have three days of food and water, so if you had to stay in your house for whatever reason that you’d have those basic necessities cared for. So those basic elements are things that people can do. And maybe as important as collecting those things is the need to sit down, as a family, and work out what would happen in the event of large-scale disaster; where would family members actually meet up, who would be the out-of-state contacts if local communications were down. …Those kinds of things, we believe, would make a great deal of difference in how people manage and how people survive.

Q: In Americans at Risk, you talk about how ill prepared the U.S. was in responding to Hurricane Katrina. Were

the consequences of Katrina a surprise?

A.We’re barely scratching the surface with improving disaster response planning, but I am truly surprised that

no one has seriously grasped the importance of understanding what we need to do in the long-term aftermath of a major disaster. Disaster planners seem particularly overwhelmed by the challenges of long-term recovery, especially for vulnerable families. People want to return to New Orleans, but there is no affordable housing. The neighborhoods are slowly getting physically rehabilitated, but there’s no assurance that there’s a functioning school or accessible health care facility. People are going back into economically challenging communities. There are no jobs. The federal government is supporting rental subsidies, but just until March. So jobs are hard to find and rents are out of sight, plus there are problems identifying schools and health facilities. So, we have a very precarious situation that is not going away anytime soon.

Q: What can be done?

A.One of the things that is unique about the center that I run is that we’re very focused on policy and advocacy

around disaster issues. We have since last fall been pushing

hard on something we called a “prescription” that pertains to the status of these displaced families and children in particular. We basically have been saying that before you close the FEMA trailer parks and put these people, in essence, onto the streets of New Orleans or other parts of Louisiana, let’s make sure that this prescription is filled, which involves access to school, access to medical care that’s appropriate and a reasonably safe community for people to live within. These are among the essential elements of an effective recovery.

Q: I s here a priority in the disasters that your center focuses on?

A. We are most focused on megadisasters, very large scale disasters. Megadisasters are defined as essentially a

catastrophic event that overwhelms or threatens to overwhelm local capacity to save lives, to treat victims, and to maintain social order. If the situation is heading in that direction or has reached that place where it is unable to be handled locally, that’s considered a megadisaster.

Q: Disaster preparedness was not your initial career path. What excites you about this type of work?

A. I think when I began getting deeply involved in this, especially around the creation of the National Center for

Disaster Preparedness, I was concerned about how much work needed to be done in this area, how little research is driving these enormous expenditures and how far we were from achieving a level of preparedness that would be appropriate for the United States. What excites me is helping to shape policies and concepts about preparedness that have national and local impact. But my biggest goal in this work? I want to convince policy makers that we will never be adequately prepared for disasters unless we modernize our public health system and address the general health care crisis in our nation. With the new Obama administration, I am actually optimistic that we can get there.

POsitiOn:

Director, national Center for Disaster Preparedness, mailman School of Public Health

Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health, mailman School of Public Health

Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, College of Physicians and Surgeons

jOined fACulty:

2003

HistOry:

Co-founder and President, Children’s Health Fund

President, Children’s Hospital at montefiore medical Center

Director of Grants and medical Director, USA for Africa and Hands Across America

Interview by Melanie A. Farmer

irwin redlener

Most people would do anything to avoid thinking about potential disasters. Not Irwin Redlener. As director of the National Center for Disaster

Preparedness at Mailman School of Public Health, Redlener thinks about disasters round-the-clock.

Someone has to. As he says in his 2006 book, Americans at Risk, people for the most part are not prepared for a di-saster. The book criticizes the U.S. government’s ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina and discusses the lack of im-provements since then. He says a main challenge of disaster preparedness is motivating citizens to prepare for something that might not happen.

“What should have been wake-up calls turn out to be more like snooze alarms,” says Redlener, referring to recent catastro-phes like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. “The country gets very distraught. Attention is focused on these ma-jor events, and we get aroused, we spend money and then we drift off, back into a kind of complacency—and end up not making as much progress as we should be making when these kind of events occur in the United States.”

Redlener hopes to change this mindset through research and new policy. The center has begun investigating topics such as workforce availability in the event of major disasters, the readiness of public health systems and disaster communica-tions. It also runs programs for training public health workers in emergency preparedness. Another of the center’s goals is to collect more data that could point the way toward handling a mega-disaster.

“We’re trying to establish how to most effectively use the preparedness dollar by supporting research that says this di-rection is better than another direction,” Redlener says. To that end, Redlener is advocating to make nuclear terrorism an item on the list of disaster planners. In May, he testified on that topic before the Senate Committee on Homeland Se-curity and Government Affairs. But according to Redlener, at the core of the nation’s inability to prepare for disasters is the fact that the U.S. public health system has been deeply eroded over the past two decades. And when coupled with an on-going crisis in the health care delivery system, it’s no wonder that we seem unable to make sufficient progress in preparing for large-scale disasters.

Redlener, who also teaches at Mailman, would seem to be an unlikely candidate for a disaster planner. The 64-year-old pediatrician gravitated to the field after developing a center for pediatric preparedness at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He is president and co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund, a nonprofit that develops health care programs in medi-cally underserved communities and sets up mobile medical units to assist at disaster sites.

This last year has been particularly busy for Redlener, who served as senior health care adviser and national campaign sur-rogate for Sen. Hillary Clinton and, since June, in that same role for Sen. Barack Obama. His forthcoming book, The Politics of Children, will explore the current status of children in America with regard to their education, health and well-being.

Q: Can we really be prepared for a disaster?

A.It’s challenging but you can…We think it’s important that you know where your important papers are, so if you

had to leave in a hurry you’d have that. We think it’s important

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What arE you Looking at?Hint: columbia’s core curriculum might be tough as rock, but this core used to be part of a different foundation. What is it and where is it located? send answers to curecord@columbia.edu. First to e-mail the right answer wins a Record mug.

ANSWER TO LAST CHALLENGE: Lamp fixture inside the dome of the gazebo in Van Am Quad; No winner

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Rushdiecontinued from page 1

live at this moment in the history of the world and be an optimist.”

In a question-and-answer period, Rushdie offered a humorous response to a question from the audi-ence about whether his oppression contributed to the wide attention he has received as a writer. “I was doing just fine before then,” he said with a laugh. “I would’ve been quite happy, thank you very much, to chug along at that level” rather than dodging death threats. Rushdie in 1989 received death threats made by the former leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who ordered international mercenaries to carry out the sentence.

More seriously Rushdie added, “A lot of writers are oppressed. Whether their work continues to be inter-esting or not in the end has to do with the work, not the oppression.”

The Rushdie event capped off the day of religious-themed discussions. On the topic of art, religion and politics, Thomas Krens, director of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, talked about the Guggen-heim Abu Dhabi and how the foundation hopes the museum will serve as a platform for reasonable dia-logue, continuing education and cultural exchange.

In another discussion, Columbia faculty members engaged Charles Taylor, emeritus professor of philos-ophy at McGill University, on his most recent book, A Secular Age, which traces the modern age’s emer-gence of secularism not in opposition to religion, but in the midst of the religious.

Mark Taylor, chair of the Department of Religion, co-directs the institute with Alfred Stepan, profes-sor of government at the School of International and Public Affairs, (SIPA).

“We need to understand religion historically but also critically,” he said.

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Celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse(left), alongside Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center co-directors, robin goland M.D.(center) and rudolph Leibel, M.D.(right), celebrates the 10th Anniversary of the Center at the Metropolitan Club on Oct. 28. The event featured diabetes-friendly cuisine prepared by top chefs, including Lagasse, and promoted the center’s mission to provide care to adults and children living with diabetes worldwide.

Surgeons at the Columbia Medical Center donned pink lab coats Oct. 29 in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This particular group at Columbia, called Powerful Pink, was organized by Doris Leddy, a breast cancer survivor and longtime administrative coordinator in the Department of Surgery. Leddy collected 20 old lab coats from surgical attendings and residents (above) and dyed them pink herself. This photo was sent to Susan G. Komen for the Cure as part of its fundraising and awareness program, Passionately Pink for the Cure, which urges people nationwide to wear pink any time of the year as a reminder to women to get a mammogram, do a self breast examination or give support to those battling the disease.

Obamacontinued from page 1

Rexford Tugwell, later Roosevelt’s undersecretary of agriculture; law professor Raymond Moley, who was described by Time magazine in 1933 as Roosevelt’s closest adviser and was named by Roosevelt to be an assistant secretary of state; and law professor A.A. Berle, a faculty member (from 1927 to 1963) and economic theorist who helped craft Depression-era banking and securities law reforms. Roosevelt also appointed Columbia law professor William O. Douglas as chair of the fledgling Securities and Exchange Commission in 1937 and two years later to the U.S. Supreme Court. Both FDR and his cousin Theodore Roosevelt attended the law school but left before graduating; they were recently granted posthumous degrees.

The president-elect’s inner circle also includes a number of Columbians, including former assistant attorney general Eric Holder (CC’73,LAW’76) and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (LAW’88), who jointly led the vice-presidential selection committee; and technology adviser Julius Genachowski (CC’85).

Brinkley, a leading historian of the New Deal, told The Record that Obama’s victory is remarkable for reasons beyond his mixed-race heritage. “Not since 1932 has the United States faced such a severe financial crisis—a crisis that could ripple through the nation and the world and create severe social, economic and political problems,” Brinkley said. Lincoln and Roosevelt illustrate how great crises can be great opportunities for new presidents, he added, “but great crises can also be the undoing of presidents who might otherwise have been successful. Obama has many of the qualities of temperament and discipline that are important to a president. And he has, at least for now, another far greater asset, the support and confidence of a large majority of the American people, who see in him the possibility of transformative leadership.”

Turkey’s Prime Minister reccep tayyip Erdogan spoke to a packed audience Nov. 14 at Casa Italiana about the nation’s growing role in world affairs and its hopes to become a regional power. He discussed resolving land and border disputes between Russia and Georgia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan, and stabilizing the Middle East, particularly in regard to Israeli-Palestinian relations.

austin Quigley celebrates 14 years as Columbia College Dean at a Nov. 13 dinner held in his honor at the American Museum of Natural History. Quigley was presented with the 2008 Alexander Hamilton Medal by the College’s Alumni Association at the dinner, which also served as a fundraiser for the campaign for undergraduate education, raising more than $2 million. Above, Quigley (center) is pictured from left to right with: daughters Laura brugger and caroline Denison Quigley, wife patricia Denison; and daughters catherine Denison Quigley and rebecca cooper.

november 20, 2008 8