As the Class of 2010 celebrated Class Day on May 17, the College’s newest alumni were treated not just to mild temperatures and sunny skies but also to a rousing call to arms from keynote speaker Benjamin Jealous ’94, NAACP president.

“These are days when we each are called on to be clear about what we want not just for ourselves, but for the world,” Jealous said shortly before announcing that the NAACP would be filing a lawsuit with the ACLU to invalidate Arizona’s new immigration law. “Now is the time for you to decide that you will move this country always forward and never backward. Now is the time for all of us who believe in hope, not hate, to speak up and be heard, because change happens every day, not just during elections.”

Jealous touched on his suspension from Columbia before launching into a story about his time as an activist in the South, when college students threatened to lynch minorities and old white men sometimes sided with the change that was inevitable. He warned of the need to always be questioning who are your enemies and who are your friends.

For the seventh year, the procession included the Alumni Parade of Classes, with 115 alumni from as far back as the Class of 1936 marching with their class banners to welcome seniors into the alumni community.

Presiding over her first Class Day, Dean Michele Moody-Adams received a rousing ovation as she addressed the graduating class. “You dove into this big pond that we call Columbia College and you did what was required of you not only to stay afloat, but to swim with assurance and power, and to do so in more than one sense,” she said, drawing a laugh with her reference to Columbia’s famous swim test. She quoted from John Dewey, who said, “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself,” and urged the graduates to remain lifelong learners.

Moody-Adams also referred to John Stuart Mill, who wrote that truly happy people always have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. “Now, that object might be the happiness of others, it might be the improvement of mankind, it might be some other art or pursuit, as Mill says, ‘followed not as a means but as itself an ideal end,’ ” she said. “Aiming at something else, Mill concludes, we will thus find happiness by the way. But now it’s your turn. You must find something in life that takes you outside of yourself, something that provides a goal far richer and more compelling than the fleeting pleasure of the moment. Your Columbia College education has taught you just how to find such a goal, and its value in this regard may mean more to you in the future than it already means today.”

Adam Bulkley ’10, Senior Fund chair and recipient of the 2010 Alumni Association Achievement Award, announced that a record 92.7 percent of seniors had donated $18,628 this year, and that surpassing the participation goal of 91 percent triggered a gift of $50,000 from Charles Santoro ’82. Bulkley, accompanied by the nine Senior Fund vice-chairs, presented Moody-Adams with a scroll bearing the names of the 945 seniors who contributed.

While the weather smiled on the College’s Class Day on May 17, it wasn’t as happy the following day at University Commencement, where the sea of light blue in the center of campus was somewhat obscured by waves of umbrellas.

President Lee C. Bollinger addressed the crowd, which did not seem to mind the drizzle, and College graduates tossed replica apples into the air, symbolizing the Core Curriculum.

Ethan Rouen ’04J

Tania O'Conor, CC'10, was recently awarded the Ministry of Education Huayu Scholarship to study Chinese in Taiwan starting in September.  This program aims to contribute to a greater understanding and appreciation of Taiwan's culture and to promote friendship between Taiwan and countries around the world.

Grace Zhou, CC '10, and Sarah Ngu, CC '12, were awarded the Foreign Language Areas Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for the 2010-11 academic year.  The FLAS award offers fellowship assistance to meritorious students undergoing beginning, intermediate, or advanced training in modern foreign languages with concentrations in related international or area studies.

Jenny Davidson, associate professor of English and comparative literature, received the 49th annual Mark Van Doren Award, and Katharina Volk, associate professor of classics, received the 35th annual Lionel Trilling Award, at a ceremony to be held in the Faculty Room of Low Library on Wednesday, May 5.

The Van Doren Award honors a Columbia professor for his/her commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership,” and is named for Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist and literary critic. The Trilling Award honors a book by a Columbia author from the past year — in this instance Manilius and his Intellectual Background (Oxford 2009) — that best exhibits the standards of intellect and scholarship found in the work of Lionel Trilling ’27, the noted literary critic and author. Van Doren and Trilling both were longtime members of the Columbia faculty.

The Columbia College Academic Awards Committee, composed of students representing a cross-section of majors within the College, selects the award winners. Committee members spent much of the academic year auditing the classes of Van Doren award nominees to observe the quality of their instruction and reading books under consideration for the Trilling award. The committee met weekly to confer on the selection process and to evaluate nominated professors and titles before announcing the winners in April.

Davidson, who earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1999, specializes in 18th-century literature, though she is also an expert on British cultural and intellectual history and English literature. She has taught at Columbia since 2000 and was cited by the committee for “her innovative assignments, her ability to facilitate student participation — even in lecture classes — and her genuine care for her students’ educational experience.”

Volk received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1999 and has been teaching at Columbia since 2002. Volk is also the author of The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford 2002) and several other edited volumes. Manilius is the first English-language monograph on Marcus Manilius, a Roman poet of the first century A.D., and committee members found it “engaging and accessible, which is a testament to Volk’s ability to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural milieu of Manilius.”