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AROUND THE QUADSKantor, Yang Earn CCYA Achievement AwardsColumbia College Young Alumni presented its third annual achievement awards on November 12 to Jodi Kantor ’96, Arts & Leisure editor of The New York Times, and Welly Yang ’94, founder of the Second Generation theater company.
More than 100 alumni, administrators and friends gathered at the Duke New 42nd Street Theater near Times Square for the awards presentation. Dean Austin Quigley opened the ceremony with a witty talk centered on Columbia’s 250th birthday and the foibles of the University’s early presidents. He praised the accomplishments of the College’s young alumni as a group, saying, “You go to Columbia College and take the world by the scruff of its neck, and in a local or large way, make it different and make it better in some way.” Kantor spent a year after graduation studying and working in Israel, followed by a year as an Urban Fellow in the office of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, before starting Harvard Law School. She left law school to pursue journalism and spent four years at the online magazine Slate.com before moving to the Times in 2003 as editor of the Sunday Arts section. In a self-effacing acceptance speech, Kantor talked about how she had valued the Core as an enrichment exercise, not knowing that her future job would “require working knowledge of Freud’s theory of human psychology and Brahms’ symphonies.” “Everything about me, what I’m doing, who I married, is [due to] having gone to Columbia,” she said. “It’s not always direct — it’s refracted in different ways.” Yang performed a lead in the Broadway show Miss Saigon while studying at Columbia. He pursued acting after graduation and in 1997 founded the Second Generation theater company to bring Asian-American stories to the national and international stage. Yang, a second-generation Taiwanese-American who continues to perform on stage, television and in films in addition to running Second Generation, has won several artistic and entrepreneurial awards. “Though I could have a lucrative career as a performer,” Yang said, “something from my Columbia education made me realize that wouldn’t be enough for me, that — as Dean Quigley said — we do have a responsibility as world citizens to leave this world better than we found it.” Shira J. Boss-Bicak '93
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