It is a privilege to be able to support Columbia College. Columbia was the place where I was first exposed to the great ideas and works that have influenced our culture, to professors who stimulated intellectual excitement, and to other students who were eager to learn and had so much to share. I still remember as if it were yesterday listening to Professor Joseph Rothschild, my CC professor, lecturing on Hobbes' view of human nature and of life as "nasty, poor, mean, brutish, and short", and have often reflected on how modern Hobbes' sensibility was. A Columbia education taught me that ideas matter and instilled in me a passion for learning that has stayed with me to this day. I support Columbia in gratitude for the experience it gave me and also to enable it to afford the same experience to future generations of Columbia students.