November/December 2008
Around the Quads
Campus News
MacPHEE: Donna MacPhee ’89 has been appointed president of the Columbia Alumni Association and v.p. of alumni relations, President Lee C. Bollinger announced in October. CAA, now in its fourth year, represents all Columbia alumni worldwide.
A member of the varsity tennis team as an undergraduate, MacPhee has remained involved in Columbia athletics, serving on numerous committees and co-founding the Women’s Leadership Council. She was chosen as one of Columbia’s 25 most influential athletic alumnae this year.
MacPhee earned an M.B.A. from NYU’s Stern School of Business and then dedicated her career to companies related to professional athletics, including managing finances for various departments of the National Hockey League. For the past 10 years she was co-founder and manager of Event Management Associates, which provided event and meeting planning services to a broad range of not-for-profit and corporate clients.
ARC: The Admissions Office has launched a new online system for use by members of the Alumni Representative Committee, alumni who interview prospective College and SEAS students. “During the last year, we have worked to update ARC Online to make it more user-friendly,” said Alec Milton, director of ARC. “We have added some features that we hope alumni will find helpful in support of our outreach and recruitment goals.” ARC members can log into the new system by clicking here.
For more information, e-mail arcinfo@columbia.edu.
SUSTAINABILITY: Columbia has earned the highest grade given this year for sustainability efforts across college campuses nationwide, according to the 2009 College Sustainability Report Card compiled and produced by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Columbia was the only university in New York State, and one of 15 nationwide, to earn an A-. Last year, Columbia scored a B+.
The College Sustainability Report Card is released annually and ranks colleges and universities in the United States and Canada based on 43 indicators in nine categories. The profiles of 300 schools were created using information gathered through independent research as well as through voluntary responses from school administrators to three surveys. The average grade for all schools surveyed was C+. Columbia earned an A for six categories, including administration, food and recycling, green building, student involvement, shareholder engagement and investment priorities.
For more, visit www.columbia.edu/cu/news/oncampus/sustainability.html.
WE’RE NO. 8: Columbia tied for eighth in the most recent ranking of national universities issued by U.S. News & World Report, released in August. Harvard was No. 1, followed by Princeton and Yale, with MIT and Stanford tied for fourth and Cal Tech and Penn tied for sixth. Columbia was tied for eighth with Duke and Chicago.
LIBRARIES: Building on the success of the New Media Teaching and Learning Center in helping faculty to use technology in the classroom and in online learning, Columbia Libraries has created the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship.
“Our goal is to get librarians more effectively into the research centers,” says V. P. for Information Services and University Librarian James Neal. “We want to help faculty to use library resources creatively and to use them in their research. We’re trying to get our faculty and resarchers to think differently about ways to communicate their research.”
Tools and services offered by CDRS include, according to its Web site, Web-based research and discovery tools; online collaboration, data-sharing and communication spaces; faculty and researcher career development tools; scholarly communication policy and practice; scholarly database development and interactive tools; Columbia’s publication and data repository; pre- and post-publication peer review for data and publications; campus-produced publications; collaborations with university presses; Web site design consultation; and video services.
Also to better serve faculty and researchers, the Libraries has launched a copyright advisory service designed to “educate, advocate and advise faculty and on copyright issues that arise relative to education, research and teaching,” according to Neal. “These are extensions of ways in which the librarian tries to serve faculty,” he noted.
In other Library news, University Professor Emeritus Fritz Stern ’46, ’53 GSAS, a distinguished historian of modern Germany and former University provost, has donated to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library more than 500 letters to his parents, Rudolf and Käthe, from a galaxy of noted German scientists and professionals in the first half of the 20th century. Both parents were accomplished practicing professionals whose lives and careers intersected with important figures of the time. The letters complement materials already held by the RBML, including correspondence between Stern’s parents and Albert Einstein that Stern earlier donated.
Also, the RBML has received a two-year grant of $145,000 from The Getty Foundation in Los Angeles to arrange and describe the archives of the late University art historian Meyer Schapiro ’24, ’26 GSAS, ’35 GSAS, a modernist, medievalist and theorist. The Meyer Schapiro Papers are composed primarily of drafts of lectures, manuscripts, and published and unpublished articles as well as substantial correspondence with family members and arts institutions. The papers complement other Schapiro holdings in the RBML, including hundreds of tapes of lectures.