Columbia Daily Spectator

Undergrads join Istanbul protests

news — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:00:20 PDT

Nergiz Ada Yilmaz, SEAS ’16, was in Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 31 when a thick fog started spreading through the crowd. The smoke, she quickly realized, was tear gas sprayed from a police helicopter.

Yilmaz is one of several Columbia undergraduates who have participated in the protests that have wracked Istanbul over the past few weeks—protests that have received worldwide media attention as the Turkish government has tried to shut them down.

The protest movement, which was triggered by government plans to demolish Gezi Park in Taksim Square and replace it with a mall, has spread to other cities in Turkey. It has tapped into an undercurrent of anger against the increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Police have cracked down on demonstrators in recent days, with one raid on Taksim Square resulting in a riot. Police also tear-gassed Divan Hotel, a luxury hotel in Istanbul, forcing protesters to scatter in panic.

Yilmaz, who went to Gezi Park with two of her friends on the first day of protests, said she left when she started experiencing an irregular heartbeat. While several of her friends were arrested, she is safe.

“While we were walking back home and away from Taksim, we saw a helicopter circle around Gezi Park and then teargas Taksim,” Yilmaz said in an email. “After that we walked back, avoiding the certain areas that the police was present.”

Erman Sener, SEAS ’16, who is also participating in the protests, sent an email to University President Lee Bollinger two weeks ago urging him to support the protesters with a public statement.

“In a matter of despair as this, where the international community should be made aware, I would like to ask you to represent your support for the Turkish community you bear with a public notice … because humanity is humanity everywhere,” Sener wrote.

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While Bollinger has not released any statement, a Columbia spokesperson said that staff from the Center for Student Advising are reaching out to students in Turkey to see if they are safe.

Columbia had planned to host a summer advising session for students in Istanbul at its global center there last weekend, but the event was moved to a private residence farther from the city center and the demonstrations.

The Turkish government has drawn criticism for its response to the protests, with news outlets reporting on tear gas and police brutality. Yilmaz hasn't seen any brutality herself, but she said that she has heard about it from friends. She said that police have been throwing rocks, beating and tear-gassing protesters, firing plastic bullets, and shooting water cannons straight into the crowds.

“One of my closest friend’s brother got beaten by three men who were then identified to him as civilian police,” she said. “He was then arrested for taking pictures, which has become a very common reason for getting arrested.”

Sener, who like Yilmaz is from Turkey, said there have been hundreds of people sleeping in tents in Gezi Park, protesting Erdogan’s regime. He said that the numbers have been growing, and that it doesn’t seem like the demonstrations will end soon.

“The most valuable thing I observed when I go to the Taksim Square and Gezi Park is the solidarity of people from diverse backgrounds and political camps,” he said in an email.

tracey.wang@columbiaspectator.com | @TraceyDWang

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Student Life

Courtesy of Can Aygen

NO JUSTICE | Protesters in Istanbul, where demonstrations have received media attention in recent weeks.

Courtesy of Can Aygen

NO PEACE | Several Columbia undergraduates have been involved in the protests.

Courtesy of Can Aygen

NO JUSTICE | Street art in Istanbul.

Courtesy of Can Aygen

NO PEACE | Some parts of the city look like a warzone.

Courtesy of Can Aygen

NO JUSTICE | Protesters have faced tear gas and police brutality.

Shabazz Center's new exhibition highlights history of protests

arts — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:17:21 PDT

Earlier this month, an academic at Istanbul’s Technical University left her office and was brutally tear-gassed by police along her way to Gezi Park. Captured by a Reuters photographer, the images went viral, making the “woman in red” a symbol for the Occupy Gezi movement.

A new exhibit closer to home testifies to the power of such images. Focused on human rights struggles in America, “ART & PROTEST: Images of Peace, Protest and Human Rights,” at the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center uptown, features symbolic gestures of protest depicted in photographs and mixed media by 16 artists.

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TV screens on the ground floor play slideshows of images of Malcolm X crusading for human rights in the ’60s, while the main exhibit space displays photographs of Vietnam War protesters. But contemporary issues such as terrorism and immigration also take center stage. Ocean Morisset’s untitled 2013 photograph shows a protester marching through the streets of New York City holding a sign that says “Kick Hamas’ ass.” Jewel Shears’ 2012 photograph, “Immigrants Protesting at DNC Charlotte, NC,” shows a group of Hispanic protesters holding up signs that say “undocumented.”

The exhibit’s breadth is its strongest point. With rare images of the most revolutionary moments in American history, the exhibit provides compelling reminders of the ways in which both the individual and collective efforts of protesters have shaped the United States and continue to do so today.

The exhibit “does not show a definitive view of protest,” Mark Harding, director of the Shabazz Center, said at the opening reception on June 3. Instead, it shows a spectrum of “different views and energies” of the fight for human rights.

Despite the exhibit’s diversity, all of its images manage to capture a deep sense of intimacy among protesters and establish a sense of closeness with the viewer. The focus of the photos creates a tangible sense of the joy, pain, struggles, and violence that accompanied these various movements. This effect is powerful and is a large part of what makes the exhibit worth seeing.

“ART & PROTEST” runs through Aug. 18. The Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center is located at 3940 Broadway (between 165th and 166th streets). The center is open Tuesday-Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is free.

arts@columbiaspectator.com | @ColumbiaSpec

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Art

2013-05-22

David Brann

David Brann / Senior Staff Photographer

Fight the power | A new exhibition,“ART & PROTEST: Images of Peace, Protest and Human Rights,” at the Shabaz Center in Harlem, chronicles the history of protests in the United States and around the world into 2013.

David Brann / Senior Staff Photographer

Fight the power | A copy of Alex Haley's “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” is on display as part of the exhibition “ART & PROTEST: Images of Peace, Protest and Human Rights” at the Shabazz Center.

Yankees sign Columbia pitcher Tim Giel

sports — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:37:39 PDT

Though he wasn't selected in last week's MLB draft, righty Tim Giel's baseball future is looking bright.

Giel, who graduated in May with a degree in computer science, signed as a free agent Thursday with Major League Baseball's most storied franchise, the New York Yankees. Another recently graduated Light Blue pitcher, Alex Black, was drafted by the Kansas City Royals last week.

Giel, a Gibsonia, Pa., native, had a strong pitching career at Columbia, where he made key contributions both as a starter and as a reliever in four years as a Lion.

After appearing in 12 games and posting a 3-1 record as a freshman in 2010, Giel took over closing duties for the Light Blue in 2011. He excelled, posting a team-best 1.71 ERA and logging five saves in his sophomore season. His efforts earned him a spot on the 2011 All-Ivy Second Team.

As a junior, the versatile righty made a smooth transition from anchoring the bullpen to pitching in the starting rotation. He posted a 3-3 record and a 3.83 ERA in nine starts, leading the team in innings pitched.

Giel's strong senior campaign—he finished with a 3-3 record, a 3.20 ERA, and a career-high 51 strikeouts— garnered him an All-Ivy honorable mention.

Giel, who was one of three co-captains for Columbia this year, also found plenty of success in other uniforms during his college career. Most notably, he earned a spot on the Cape Cod League All-Star Team during the summer of 2012 as a member of the Bourne Braves.

His last appearance for Columbia came on June 1, when he made the start and got a no-decision in the Lions' 6-5, 13-inning victory over New Mexico, the team's first-ever NCAA tournament win.

eli.schultz@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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Baseball

File Photo

great giel | The senior pitcher signed with the New York Yankees on Thursday.

Indus Valley lawsuit ends in settlement

news — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:25:12 PDT

Employees suing Upper West Side restaurant Indus Valley for unfair labor practices reached a settlement with management last month, ending a nearly two-year legal battle.

The employees had accused owners and managers of the restaurant, at Broadway and 100th Street, of paying them below minimum wage, withholding tips from online orders, and verbally and physically mistreating them. The plaintiffs will be paid a total of $276,000 over the next year.

“It’s a fair settlement of the lawsuit,” Eleuterio Calixto, a former Indus Valley delivery worker, said in Spanish through a translator. “My coworkers and I are very pleased with the settlement.”

Calixto said the employees, who worked as dishwashers and delivery workers, voted unanimously to accept the offer after the New York Southern District Court approved the settlement on May 9.

“Everyone’s happy with the outcome of the lawsuit,” said attorney William Massey, CC ’95, who represents the workers.

Indus Valley management did not return repeated requests for comment.

In October, Calixto said he and the other employees were suing the restaurant “to stop the mistreatment and abuse not only for ourselves, but for other immigrant workers.” He said the managers would call the workers “dogs” and yell at them to work faster.

The dispute became a focus of student labor activism at Columbia. In October and November, the Student-Worker-Solidarity group picketed regularly outside of Indus Valley, which is popular among students.

“We would like to thank the students, professors and other members [of the Columbia community] … for the support that they gave us during this case,” Calixto said.

“We’d like to encourage everyone to return to eating and ordering food from indus valley now that we’ve reached an amicable settlement," he added. "It’s a good restaurant."

According to the settlement, Harjeet “Bobby” Singh, a manager at Indus Valley who was named in the original lawsuit, has “left the country indefinitely.” It was unclear whether Singh’s departure was related to the lawsuit.

Over the course of the lawsuit, Singh and the other defendants—the restaurant's two owners and another manager—tried to stall a decision. When the suit was filed in August 2011, they unsuccessfully tried to get the case thrown out and did not respond to the complaint. In November, the defendants' lawyers withdrew from the case, leaving them to represent themselves.

Calixto said he hoped the outcome would inspire similar action against unfair labor practices elsewhere in the city.

“I think this can serve as a good example for other workers in New York,” he said.

news@columbiaspectator.com | @ColumbiaSpec

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Upper West Side

File Photo

FAIR SETTLEMENT | Silvano Caballero, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, pictured in October.

In letter, Teachers College students slam TC President Susan Fuhrman

news — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:04:26 PDT

Correction: An unedited version of this article, which stated incorrectly that students had called for Susan Fuhrman's resignation as president of Teachers College, was inadvertently posted last night. The edited version of the article now appears below. Spectator regrets the error.

Students are calling for greater transparency and more ethical decision-making from Teachers College administrators, in the wake of the TC's faculty's almost unanimous vote to reject the college's proposed 2013-14 budget.

A group of students has written a letter highly cricital of TC President Susan Fuhrman, slamming her association with the for-profit company Pearson Education and lambasting her administration's recent decision to honor a promoter of standardized testing. The students also denounce the "corporatization" of Teachers College and criticize the school's lack of transparency in the face of tuition increases and large administrator bonuses.

"As caring and responsible scholars and educators, we believe that TC should stand for what is ethically just and educationally sound," the letter read.

The letter argues that Fuhrman's deferral to the board of trustees on the issue of salary bonuses––Fuhrman and other top administrators received bonuses totaling over $300,000 in 2011-12 alone––is just one example of an opacity that pervades decision-making at the college.

"It seems that only a very small group of extremely well-off individuals make this decision behind closed doors," the students wrote.

'Not the lives that we thought we'd have'
The administration's proposed operating budget for the next fiscal year outlines a tuition increase of 4.5 percent, which would bring tuition to $1,344 per point. Tuition and fees currently comprise 80 percent of the school's unrestricted revenue.

For the first time in its history, TC is also planning to fund 50 full-time doctorate students by reallocating a projected grant income surplus of $1.3 million and providing an additional $1.3 million from the school. The proposed budget states that this goal will be possible in the next academic yea,r even with a reduction of $1.7 million in total grant income due to federal sequestration.

But Sarah Brennan, a third-year doctorate student in the applied anthropology program, said that the school is not planning to give any of the new funding to continuing students, who often work more than one job to make ends meet.

"Our jaws dropped," Brennan said. "We were in debt up to our ears, and that money does not seem to be distributed to us at all. They say is that it's up to the departments, but almost all of the departments have chosen to give that to new students" as enticement for them to enroll.

"If there's an opportunity to take a highly funded position that doesn't exactly align with our values, it's hard to turn that down," Brennan added.

Meanwhile Steve Dubin, chair of the college's faculty executive committee, has stated that he and other professors are not confident that TC's dependence on tuition hikes will make the move to fund more doctorate students sustainable.

In hopes of ameliorating next year's tuition hike, the 2013-14 budget outlines a net increase of 5.1 percent in financial aid, up $1.1 million from last year's approximately $22 million.

Students, however, are far from satisfied with TC's financial aid packages. The college's budgetary summary acknowledges this, noting that TC often loses potential students to schools that offer more competitive funding.

On top of being a TA for the last academic year, Brennan taught a class at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

"These are just not the lives that we thought we'd have as doctoral students," she said.

A doctorate student studying education, who asked to not to be named because he feared retaliation from TC officials, said that the funding the college does offer frequently comes with intellectual strings attached.

"Basic availability of funding is part of the problem, but the reason it becomes tricky is that where funding is available, it is increasingly closely tied to administrative oversight," the student said. "It's an unspoken but well-understood rule that the conclusions drawn from one's research had better support the objectives of one's source of funding," if one hopes to continue to continue drawing on said sources for support.

The student added that this is not a problem specific to Teachers College, but one which plagues other schools and companies like Pearson as well.

In response to faculty asking for increased participation in budgetary decisions, Fuhrman stated that the school has worked to involve "relevant faculty committees." Students criticized that response, writing in their letter that "if everyone at TC and even those outside of TC are affected by its budget decisions, then every single member of the TC community is a relevant individual with respect to budgetary decisions."

‘A more humanistic approach to education’
Students have also expressed their discontent with Fuhrman's involvement with Pearson, the country's largest for-profit education company and a champion of quantifiable assessment tools for instructors and courses. Fuhrman serves on Pearson's board, and according to the investment research firm Morningstar, Fuhrman owned $272,088 in Pearson stock in May 2013.

Students said they are uncomfortable with Pearson's profit-driven mentaility, expressing concern that Fuhrman's association with the company will lead Teachers College—and the many public schools it influences—toward a more rigid, less academically sound approach to education.

"Markets make profit, not justice, and they should not dictate educational policy, research and practice," they wrote.

In January, 34 faculty members signed a letter expressing reservations about Pearson's edTPA, a teacher assessment tool designed to judge the skills of new instructors. The edTPA relies on examining videotapes of teaching candidates, their lesson plans, and student work samples. Beginning in May 1, 2014, the edTPA will be required for teacher certification at New York pubilsh schools.

The doctoral student who asked not to be named believes that Pearson, and graduate schools of education around the country, are brushing over important questions about how education should work.

"When we approach these sorts of pragmatic questions without really understanding the fundamental issues that are at play within them, things go from bad to worse," the student said.

Fuhrman has defended her association with Pearson.

"I realize that my affiliation with the board of Pearson is disturbing to various members of the TC community," Fuhrman wrote. But the TC board of trustees had approved her affiliation with Pearson when it hired her, she said, believing it valuable for a private-sector company like Pearson to have an educator's point of view.

The students who wrote the letter, however, wrote that Fuhrman's work with Perason is a conflict of interest. They cited the University's confilct of interest guidelines, which state that "where an officer has a significant personal interest in a transaction to which the University is a party… the officer is vulnerable to the charge that his or her influence within the University might be used to advance this private interest or benefit."

"Students across the country deserve a more humanistic approach to education,” the students wrote.

'Not a test score'
The administration's decision to award the TC Medal of Distinguished Service to Merryl Tisch was the last straw for students frustrated by Fuhrman's affiliation with Pearson.

As chancellor of the University of the State of New York, which oversees both public and private schools in New York, Tisch has championed "test-driven education reform," students wrote. The testing program supported by Tisch, they argue, is a "black hole of education" that reduces kids to data points.

Asked about the decision to honor Tisch, a TC spokesperson said in an email that administration recognizes "the need to reconstitute its work with a particular emphasis on increased faculty involvement." TC's graduation ceremony last month was peppered with silent protesters, who held signs reading "NOT A TEST SCORE" and attracted national media attention.

For some students, the college's decision to honor Tisch served as a call to action. Now, they hope they can push the TC administration to enact changes.

"As much as I have learned so many things that make me so angry and disappointed, I have also met other doctoral students who give me a lot of hope," Brennan said. " I feel like we have a lot of power."

cecilia.reyes@columbiaspectator.com | @kcecireyes

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Teachers College

Administration

David Brann / Senior Staff Photographer

UP IN ARMS | Teachers College faculty celebrate after voting not to support the proposed 2013-14 budget last month.

Committee: Revamp Frontiers, eliminate lectures

Columbia Spectator — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 06:50:14 PDT

Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul.

After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum.

“We recommend that the course be built around the seminar. This would require replacing many lecture sessions with seminar sessions, identifying relevant readings, and developing a culture of discussion based learning,” the report reads. “Rethinking Frontiers as primarily a seminar course could begin by examining principles intrinsic to other seminar based core courses.”

Columbia College Dean James Valentini, the Committee on Instruction, the Committee on Science Instruction, and the Committee on the Core received the report—which can be read in its entirety here—in April. They will consider the EPPC’s recommendation’s before deciding on any changes, which likely would not be implemented until fall 2014.

‘Less than the sum of the parts’
Columbia College students are required to take three science courses: Frontiers and two other courses chosen by each student. The EPPC—a committee of professors, administrators, and students—argues in its report that Frontiers’ structure needs to be reworked if it is to establish itself as a strong science course within the humanities-centric Core.

“A Science Core course should be designed from the start with a focus on the distinctive qualities of small-group instruction,” the report reads.

The report praises some aspects of the course as it is currently structured, including the inter-departmental nature of its faculty, the “well crafted, engaging, and informative” lectures, and the Science Fellows program, which financially supports the research of some postdoctoral students who teach Frontiers sections. The report also notes that in recent years, students have given high marks to Frontiers lecturers and seminar leaders on course evaluations.

But despite these strengths, the committee wrote, Frontiers “continues to suffer problems of coherence.”

“The whole is less than the sum of the parts,” the report reads. “We feel, in particular, that the combination of a unit based structure and the priority given to lectures (in themselves excellent) has diminished the seminar component, burdened the seminar instructors, pushed aside the need to identify good readings, and made it impossible to institutionalize the course properly.”

The committee recommended addressing those issue by eliminating the lecture component of the course and shifting its focus to seminar-based instruction, in the vein of Literature Humanities or Contemporary Civilization. A faculty group should be appointed to develop “what one might call FoS II,” to be ready for the 2014-15 academic year, the EPPC wrote.

“In the seminars as implemented by FoS, recitation of basic science taught in the lecture has come to dominate too many seminars, to the exclusion of the habits of mind and discussion alike,” the report reads. “Giving seminar leaders greater autonomy in organizing the blend of direct instruction, practice, and discussion would better allow them to make the difficult choices required to facilitate informed instruction and the habits necessary for it.”

A seminar structure, the committee wrote, would resolve some of Frontiers’ other issues by reducing the number of units to better engage students and instructors, fully integrating the scientific “habits of mind”—skills ranging from back-of-the-envelope calculations to data analysis—into the course, and making the course more accessible to students regardless of their scientific backgrounds.

Evaluating Frontiers
Last summer, at the request of Valentini, the EPPC formed an eight-member subcommittee—co-chaired by history professor Susan Pedersen and biology professor Stuart Firestein, a former Frontiers instructor—to examine the structure, content, and role of Frontiers as an undergraduate science course.

A group of four science professors from peer institutions were chosen to help the committee complete its review. Over the course of the school year, the reviewers interviewed professors and administrators involved with Frontiers, spoke with students and alumni who took the course, and attended lectures and seminar sections.

Their report, submitted to Valentini in April, said that Frontiers has the components of a successful and integral part of the Core, but that its current structure—a weekly lecture and seminar meeting—limits its effectiveness.

While students “find the material interesting,” the report reads, “This does not seem to be particularly because it is at the ‘frontier’ of some field or another so much as the content is well-taught and intrinsically interesting.”

“We think it regrettable that FoS has chosen to deliver so much of its content through this lecture format,” the report continues.

The report also emphasizes the talent of the course’s faculty, some of whom were brought to Columbia through the Science Fellows program. But these strengths, it says, have been limited by Frontiers’ “inability to routinize the syllabus and content, the lack of attention paid to readings, the recitation-like quality of the sections, the overburdening of seminar instructors.”

Unlike other Core courses, Frontiers meets for a 90-minute course-wide lecture and 110-minute sections each week. The course is based around four units, each one focused on a different scientific discipline, which are supposed to expose students to essential knowledge while also teaching them the scientific habits of mind, tools for analyzing scientific data and theories.

The reviewers “found the lectures excellent, but not so exceptional as to justify the heroic level of preparation required.”

The committee also wrote that classroom discussion of the scientific habits of mind felt disconnected from the rest of the course’s content, and that the course often failed to engage students with varying scientific backgrounds and abilities.

Points of tension
Since Frontiers became a part of the Core in 2005, it has been a source of constant controversy, with many students criticizing the course both for alienating humanities-oriented students and for being too cursory to interest science-oriented students.

Students have also argued that the course lacks clearly defined goals and fails to instill scientific habits of mind. Some professors, meanwhile, have said that the course has improved over time, and that old students’ negative reviews have made incoming first-years predisposed to dislike Frontiers. The course has been subject to town hall discussions, input from students and faculty, and numerous Spectator editorials—both supportive and critical.

“Our greatest concern, in conducting this review, has been to discover the depth of polarization and the level of strong feelings the course has generated,” the report reads. “This conflictual attitude is unworthy of us, damaging to our students, and at odds with the values of deliberation and collective purpose at the heart of the core.”

Ivana Hughes, the course’s associate director and a chemistry lecturer, believes that the Frontiers faculty has already made improvements to the course over the last few years.

“In the early years of the course, there was a perceived disconnect between lectures and seminars, in that lectures dealt with specific content, while seminars dealt with the scientific habits of mind,” Hughes said in an interview at the end of the spring semester, before Spectator had obtained a copy of the EPPC report. “What we have done more recently is to make sure that there is better integration between the two pieces.”

Other revisions to the course have included more challenging homework assignments, assignments related to lecture content and the scientific habits of mind, a term paper assignment that helps students learn to analyze scientific articles, and a trip to the American Museum of Natural History that is now mandatory for most sections.

Additionally, professors have modified the activities they do in seminar, making them more challenging to help students build critical-reasoning skills and learn to evaluate scientific evidence.

“I think one of the really wonderful things about the seminar environment in our classes is that they’re very student-centered,” Hughes said. “Students answer and ask questions, and they spend time discussing topics in small groups.”

Hughes believes that these changes have begun to improve student opinions of the course.

“Many of the things that we have done are working,” she said. “We just had our best academic year yet, as judged by student evaluations, by a long shot.”

Last fall—the most recent semester for which course evaluations were reviewed in the EPPC report—students gave Frontiers an “overall quality” rating of 3.28, the highest rating the course had ever received. Still, it was significantly lower than the “overall quality” ratings typically received by Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, which have ranged between 4.0 and 4.4 over the last few years.

On the whole, Frontiers’ “overall quality” rating has improved over time, from an average of 2.68 between fall 2004 and fall 2008 to an average of 2.95 between spring 2009 and fall 2012. Student ratings for “seminar leader effectiveness,” meanwhile, have gone up more consistently, from 3.54 in fall 2004 to 4.33 in fall 2012, and lecturer ratings have generally improved as well.

A full breakdown of the Frontiers course evaluation data appears in Appendix 5 of the EPPC report.

“Students value both the lecture and the seminar component of the course, and we find that they give us very high marks for many specific items, such as homework assignments, clarity of expectations, integration of lectures and seminars,” Hughes said.

Measuring success
Frontiers faculty, hoping to measure the success of the changes they have implemented, administered a survey on basic analytic concepts—including statistics, probability, and graph comprehension—to 966 first-years during orientation in the fall of 2012. Students averaged a score of 28 percent on this test.

The survey was then administered again, at the end of the fall semester, to students who had taken Frontiers. This time, the average grade was 76 percent.

Spectator removed a copy of the survey questions and answers from the EPPC report before publication, because the Frontiers faculty plans to re-administer the survey to students when they are seniors, to test for retention of Frontiers material.

“This type of research always has its limitations,” the Frontiers executive committee said in an email to first-years in March. “However, the results with and without FoS are so different that the conclusion is inescapable. The scientific habits and knowledge that FoS imparts are new to, and effectively learned by, first year students after one semester of intense study.”

But statistics professor Andrew Gelman, who has not taught Frontiers and was not part of the committee that prepared the report, wasn’t convinced by that conclusion.

While he respected the Frontiers faculty’s effort to measure what students had learned in the course—which, he said, not many professors even attempt—he questioned the survey’s effectiveness in a post on his website last month. Gelman noted that students took the survey during their final exam, meaning both that they had spent time studying and that they were allowed to use their exam cheat sheets.

“It certainly looks like great evidence, but the conditions under which the experiment is done can have large effects,” Gelman said in an interview.

Gelman recommended adding more questions to the survey and using an outside evaluator to create and moderate it in the future.

“The point, especially for a Core class, is to give students new ways of thinking,” Gelman said. “You wouldn’t want the instructors to know what was on the exam, so then you wouldn’t have to worry that they would teach to it.”

“It’s better than doing nothing,” he added. “But I think you really have to be careful about claiming that the students in this program have been a stunning success.”

Frontiers’ future
Whatever changes come to Frontiers, the EPPC and the Frontiers faculty agree that science should continue to play an important role in the Core Curriculum.

“We feel strongly that for students to be exposed to this is just as important as them being exposed to literature, philosophy, art, or music,” Hughes said. “The critical reasoning skills they learn in Frontiers will serve them well in their lives and future careers.”

The EPPC, too, emphasized the importance of keeping Frontiers in the Core—as long as it is structured more like other Core classes.

“So long as Columbia College preserves a distinct core curriculum of seminar courses, we should strive to include a similarly structured science course within that core,” the report says.

It remains unclear just how Frontiers will be reworked, as the EPPC’s recommendations will now reviewed by Valentini, the Committee on Instruction, the Committee on Science Instruction, and the Committee on the Core. The EPPC report advises Valentini to form a working group, made up of Frontiers faculty and faculty from other science departments, which would refine Frontiers and solidify its place in the Core.

“As faculty consider how to make the course more ‘core-like,’ they should also bear in mind the relationship of any specific seminar-based science core course to the science requirement as a whole, asking which aspects of the goals of the science requirement are met through lecture courses and which might be best achieved through a course taught in the seminar format central to the Columbia core experience,” the committee wrote.

samantha.cooney@columbiaspectator.com | @sammcooney

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Academics

File Photo

UNDER EVALUATION | Columbia College Dean James Valentini, along with several committees, will consider the EPPC’s recommendation’s before deciding on any changes, which likely would not be implemented until fall 2014.

Alex Black drafted by Kansas City Royals

sports — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:46:03 PDT

The good news keeps on coming for Columbia baseball, as the Kansas City Royals selected senior Alex Black in the 29th round of Major League Baseball's First-Year Player Draft.

Kansas City took Black with its eigth pick in the round, making him the 864th overall selection. He was the Lions' first baseman and closer in the 2013 season.

Though the senior led Columbia in a bevy of offensive categories—including batting average, hits, RBIs, and home runs—the Royals may feature him on the mound. The draft announcement listed Black as a right-handed pitcher rather than as a position player.

Black went 0-1 with a 2.76 ERA and five saves in 13 relief appearances this season. His final outing as a Light Blue pitcher saw him strike out 12th round pick D.J. Peterson of New Mexico for the final out of Columbia's first NCAA Tournament victory.

Check back for updates.

myles.simmons@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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Baseball

Kiera Wood

Kiera Wood / Senior Staff Photographer

royal black | Senior Alex Black was drafted by the Kansas City Royals after a stellar final season for the Light Blue.

Hospital executive appointed head of Columbia environmental office

news — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:34:37 PDT

Jessica Prata, the sustainability officer of New York Presbyterian Hospital, will start Monday as the head of Columbia’s Office of Environmental Stewardship.

Scott Wright, vice president of campus services, announced Prata’s appointment as associate vice president in charge of the office on Wednesday. Wright said in an email to staff that Prata’s new role will involve “collaborating with University leadership, departments, and student organizations to develop annual sustainability priorities, strategies, implementation plans, and performance measurement.”

The Office of Environmental Stewardship, which was established in 2007 by Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin, works to reduce the University's environmental footprint. The AVP position has been open since July, when former head Nilda Mesa stepped down to become associate dean of administrative affairs at Columbia Journalism School.

Environmental student leaders have voiced concerns that the environmental office is relatively unknown on campus and does not engage students enough. Wright, who took over the AVP position in the interim, said that looking forward, the office would try to address these issues and make itself more visible to students.

Wright said Prata, who attended the School of International and Public Affairs and Colgate University, would “implement sustainability principles into short and long term practices, support opportunities for individuals to incorporate sustainability practices into daily work and routines, and serve as a source of information for the entire campus community.”

As New York Presbyterian’s first sustainability officer, Prata established an executive council to guide the hospital’s new sustainability program—an experience that makes her well suited to her position at Columbia, Wright said. Prata organized 200 staff members into “green teams” for the program, which promotes environmentally sound practices throughout the hospital. She also organized an international forum on sustainability in health and wrote the hospital's first Hazardous Waste Minimization Plan.

“Given her related background and impressive accomplishments, we are confident that Jessica will make an important contribution to Columbia’s own continued sustainability efforts,” Wright said.

Prata had previously served in positions on the hospital’s Division of Support Services and Office of Development and, before that, worked in broadcast communications.

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Office of Environmental Stewardship

Administration

Creators give authentic feel to spy thriller ‘The East’

arts — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:43:47 PDT

Many films strive for authenticity, but not many directors go the extra mile to experience what “The East” writer-director Zal Batmanglij did. He and Brit Marling, the film’s co-writer and star, lived without money for a summer. Diving through dumpsters and hopping trains, they spent time with and learned from religious groups and anarchists on the fringes of society as research for “The East,” which hit four theaters in New York and Los Angeles on May 31 and is set for wider release on June 7.

The film explores corporate crime and its effect on consumers—children dying of cancer from contaminated water, for instance, or pharmaceuticals leading to slow decay of the brain. These crimes inspire a response from a group called the East, a collective of anarchists, rebels, and misfits bent on exacting retaliatory acts of terrorism against corporations. Sarah (Marling) is a spy sent by her corporate employer to stop them.

Batmanglij, brother of Rostam Batmanglij, one-fourth of the band Vampire Weekend and a Columbia alumnus, said that what makes the film "really eerie" is the research that his team did on corporate crime.

“The crimes that the corporations commit are all 100% real,” he said in a recent video press conference. “They have not been exaggerated in any way."

Corporate displays of wealth and civilization provide a marked contrast to the wooded, rust-covered world where the East lives and plans. Sarah abandons her old comforts and gets dirty to infiltrate their world. Her time with the group like a trip to another country, and as she travels back and forth, she begins to question which one she really belongs in.

Attacks by the East are deeply symbolic and involve punishing offending board members and CEOs with their very own products. “We want all those who are guilty to experience the terror of their crimes,” Ellen Page’s mistrustful and heated anarchist character declares in a message to the corporate offenders. These attacks give the film the suspense of a spy thriller, with the pendulum of moral ambiguity shifting constantly.

One thing that attracted Alexander Skarsgard—whose character leads the East—to the script was that “it was not preachy."

“It had no right or wrong,” he said.

Members of the East fight among themselves about how far they should go, while the corporate side, despite occasional moments of shame and humility, is unrepentant.

This premise feels like it comes straight out of the Occupy movement’s playbook, but the plot was actually conceived in 2009, with Batmanglij and Marling drawing on a general frustration with current events at the time.

“The first scene we wrote was an oil spill in the CEO of an oil company’s house in the Hamptons,” Batmanglij said, though the scene didn’t make the film’s final cut. “Two months later, the BP oil spill happened, so we felt this fire under our butts to keep going. About 3 weeks before we shot the movie, Occupy Wall Street happened.”

In addition to the research about corporate crimes, the film’s creative team went above and beyond to make sure that “The East” was authentic. They even borrowed their clothing from anarchists and freegans in New Orleans.

Marling and Batmanglij also drew inspiration from two weeks living with an anarchist collective. After meeting with a mysterious girl covered in garbage bags, they followed her to a rundown compound of 150 anarchists.

“They were some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered. Their intelligence was wild and free, and they were so open to teaching themselves and other people,” Marling said. “We learned to dumpster-dive with them, and we learned to train-hop and convert cars with biodiesel. On the other side of it, I was not the same person and I feel that we are still trying to make sense out of it.”

arts@columbiaspectator.com | @ColumbiaSpec

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Film

2013-05-22

Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

go east, young man | Writer-director Zal Batmanglij's research lends an air of authenticity to his new film, “The East,” a thriller about anti-corporate freegans.

Development corporation changes name, looks to long-term role

news — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:24:02 PDT

By dropping the word “local” from its title, the West Harlem Local Development Corporation is moving toward a longer-term role in the community.

The New York State Supreme Court approved a petition last month to transfer all assets of the WHLDC, which is responsible for distributing funds from Columbia to the neighborhood, to its successor entity, the West Harlem Development Corporation.

The procedural move will allow the development corporation, which was established as part of the 2009 Community Benefits Agreement in the wake of the University’s Manhattanville expansion, to take complete control of the $83 million promised by Columbia.

It will also permit it to seek additional funding from third-party groups or philanthropic foundations—paving a way for the group to exist after the money from Columbia runs out.

WHDC executive director Kofi Boateng said he had been preparing for the transition since his first day on the job, in part by changing all of the corporation’s business cards and signs early. This led to some confusion, with many locals still calling it by its original name, Local Development Corporation.

But the change goes deeper than business cards—the development corporation will now be able to focus more heavily on specific projects that have long-term impacts for Harlem residents, Boateng said.

“Our approach has thus far been to go wide and give to as many organizations as possible,” he said, referring to the $2 million in grants the organization dished out to 83 local nonprofits this spring. “By 2014, we are going to be more strategic in terms of lasting impact, which will also mean leveraging our resources to get outside of Columbia.”

The WHDC also reshaped its board, adding several new members including City Council candidate Zead Ramadan, representatives for local politicians like Council member Robert Jackson and Rep. Charles Rangel, and Milton Tingling, a justice on the New York County Supreme Court.

Boateng said the new members would diversify the board and enable the WHDC to approach future problems in dynamic ways.

“We have Latinos in there, we have an Arab-American, we have women, we have people with different language skills,” Boateng said. “And all of those people give us a breadth of language and diversity when looking at problems.”

chris.meyer@columbiaspectator.com | @cmeyer201

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West Harlem Development Corporation

West Harlem

File Photo

ALPHABET SOUP | The West Harlem Local Development Corporation (WHLDC) is now the West Harlem Development Corporation (WHDC)—a move that Executive Director Kofi Boateng says will actually make it easier for the organization to help the local community.