Columbia College has announced the names of 22 seniors who will be initiated into Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society, on February 17. The students were chosen by a faculty selection committee of Phi Beta Kappa members based on the breadth, depth and rigor of their academic programs, as well as recommendations from faculty members who have worked closely them.

Each year, 10 percent of the Columbia College graduating class is elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Two percent (Junior Phi Beta Kappa) is elected in November and the remaining eight percent is elected in the spring

Phi Beta Kappa celebrates and advocates excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Members receive a distinctive gold key, which symbolizes the core principles of Phi Beta Kappa – freedom of inquiry and liberty of thought and expression.

The Class of 2012 Junior Phi Beta Kappa members are:

Alexander Bedrosyan
David Berke
Zachary Brill
Stephen Chan
Megan Fauci
Alexander Frouman
Mario Gabriele
Matt Getz
Amin Ghadimi
Alexa Goldson
Jonathan Huggins
Kazunari Inoki
Joon Ho Kang 
Ashley Kummerlowe
Sheldon Kwok
Zachary Levine
Elizabeth Munroe
Erik Nook
Tara Pesce
Anthony Testa
Anoushka Vaswani
Qiurui Wang  

Seven Columbia College alumni are presenting films at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah this month. These movies will be presented in a variety of festival categories, including “Dramatic Competition,” “U.S. Dramatic Competition,” “American Short Film Competition,” “Premieres,” “Documentary Premieres,” “World Cinema Dramatic Competition,” and “U.S. Documentary.” College alumni who will be presenting include directors, producers, editors, composers and screenwriters.

The Sundance Film Festival is an annual celebration of independent filmmakers sponsored by the Sundance Institute. It provides a platform for independent artists to showcase their work to a global audience and a place for viewers to discover filmmaking’s newest talent. Each year, the festival selects 200 films for exhibition from more than 9,000 submissions, and more than 50,000 people attend those screenings. In recent years, The Sundance Film Festival has featured some of the most influential independent films, including Reservoir Dogs,  American Splendor, An Inconvenient Truth, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Cove. This year’s festival takes place from Jan. 19 to 29.

Below are the Columbia College alumni whose work will be screened at the festival:

Keep the Lights On: Elisabeth Vastola, CC ’07 – Costume Designer
About Face: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, CC ’74 – Director, Producer, and Photographer
Bachelorette: Carley Hugo, CC ’06 – Co-Producer
Celeste and Jesse Forever: Yana Gorskaya, CC ’96 – Editor
The Pact: Ronen Landa, CC ’01 – Composer of Original Score
Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie: Ben Cosgrove, CC ’90 – Executive Producer
Love Free or Die: Macky Alston, CC ’87 – Director and Screeenwriter

On Wednesday, March 7, five accomplished alumni will be presented with 2012 John Jay Awards for distinguished professional achievement at the annual John Jay Awards Dinner.

This year’s honorees are Dede Gardner ’90, Ellen Gustafson ’02, Ben Horowitz ’88, Daniel Loeb ’83 and Li Lu ’96, ’96L, ’96 Business.

Proceeds from the dinner benefit the John Jay Scholarship Program, which aims to enhance academic and extracurricular experiences for outstanding first-year College students. John Jay Scholars are invited to participate in panels, discussions and outings. A John Jay Scholar will speak at the dinner, along with President Lee C. Bollinger, Interim Dean James J. Valentini and the honorees.

As president and producer of Plan B Entertainment, Gardner oversees a wide range of the studio’s films. Her recent productions include The Tree of Life; The Time Traveler’s Wife; and the Academy Award-nominated drama The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Previously, Gardner was e.v.p. of production at Paramount Pictures.

Dedicated to fighting hunger and malnutrition, Gustafson is founder and executive director of the 30 Project, which addresses the current crisis in the global food system that has led to both hunger and obesity. She also is co-founder and a board member of FEED Projects and the FEED Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money to benefit the United Nations’ World Food Programme’s School Feeding Program through the sale of its iconic “FEED” burlap bag and other products. Gustafson’s work has provided more than 65 million meals to children around the world.

Horowitz is co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He began his career as a software engineer after earning a master’s in computer science from UCLA. Horowitz quickly rose to v.p. and general manager of Netscape and is credited for the company’s revenues of more than $100 million. He founded the software company Opsware, which he sold in 2007 to Hewlett-Packard. In June 2009, Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, which holds stock in high-valued tech companies including Facebook and Twitter.

Loeb is CEO of Third Point LLC., an employee-owned hedge fund managing more than $7.5 billion in assets. Also an activist, Loeb is known for his public letters to other financial executives — and government leaders — denouncing their financial misconduct. Before founding Third Point, he worked at Citicorp.

Prior to simultaneously receiving three Columbia degrees, Li Lu was a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, organizing protestors to encourage political reform in the People’s Republic of China. He is chairman and founder of Himalaya Capital, a fund focused on publicly traded securities and venture capital. Li Lu was named a global leader for tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2001.

For more information on the dinner, contact Robin Vanderputten, associate director, events and programs: robinv@columbia.edu or 212-851-7399.

The Columbia University Libraries' Rare Book and Manuscript Library is launching two online exhibitions on the Core Curriculum: "Core Curriculum: Contemporary Civilization," and "Core Curriculum: Literature Humanities." The exhibitions celebrate the Core as the cornerstone of the Columbia College education and display the Libraries' collections related to the Core, which range from printed editions of Core texts to manuscripts dating from before the advent of printing.

The Core Curriculum is the set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major. The distinctive feature of the Core are communal learning – with all students encountering the same texts and issues at the same time – and critical dialogue in small seminars. The Core seminar thrives on oral debate of the most difficult questions about human experience. 

The University Libraries Rare Book and Manuscript Library, located on the sixth floor of Butler Library, preserves and provides access to important editions of the majority of authors taught in the Core Curriculum. The collections include autograph manuscripts and subsequent editions, translations, and adaptations of Core texts, which demonstrate the transmission and reception of these works across centuries and attest to their continuing importance.

The manuscripts and printed texts in the new online exhibits come from a wide variety of Rare Book and Manuscript Library collections, including those of Stephen Whitney Phoenix, the Libraries' first special collection, George Arthur Plimpton, Gonzalez Lodge, and David Eugene Smith. Early materials include a papyrus fragment of Homer's Iliad dating from the 1^st century BCE; a manuscript portion of the Quran, written and illuminated in 1259; a 14^th century fragment from the Hebrew Book of Numbers; and a 14^th century manuscript of Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, and Economics.

 Other highlights include a copy of Herodotus's Historia (Venice, 1502) owned by Erasmus; a copy of Homer’s Works (1517) owned by Melancthon and Martin Luther; the first printed polyglot Bible (1514-1522); Galileo's Starry Messenger(1610); Shakespeare's first folio Works (1623); Rousseau's The Social Contract(1762); John Jay's manuscript of  Number 5 of The Federalist Papers (1788); Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813); and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1926).

These online exhibitions were created by Karla Nielsen during the summer of 2011 as part of her work as Association of Research Libraries CEP Fellow, based in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

For those interested in the history of the Core, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds not only the files of the University Archives, but also the papers of many of the important figures in the founding and development of the Core, in particular those of John J. Coss and John Erskine. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library is also home to the papers of Jacques Barzun, Nicholas Murray Butler, Harry J. Carman, Irwin Edman, Moses Hadas, Douglas Moore, Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Jack Beeson, among many others involved in the development of the various branches of Core Curriculum.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library Curators regularly host visits from Core classes and welcome inquiries from Core instructors for sessions tailored to their specific needs. Holdings are not limited to the material presented in these two new online exhibitions.

For more information or to arrange a visit to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, visit http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/rbml.htmlor email rbml@libraries.cul.columbia.edu.