Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

ALUMNI CORNER

Creating One Community

By Brian Krisberg ’81
First Vice President, Columbia College Alumni Association

One of the most important, if not the most important, initiatives undertaken by the College administration in recent years is the effort to grow significantly, and improve the quality of, student and alumni programs. The Student Affairs Office and the Office of Alumni Affairs and Development have been working together to implement an extensive program to bring together students and alumni, to educate undergraduates about the ways alumni support Columbia and to create long-term loyalty to the College community.

To understand the need for such programs, we must review a little Columbia history. For a variety of reasons, Columbia started far behind peer schools in instituting alumni/student programming. Low alumni participation rates following the unrest of the ’60s, the College not being fully residential until the ’80s, the delayed arrival of coeducation (1983) and a historic University tendency to focus on a narrow core of generous alumni all contributed to a lack of investment in alumni. For many years, alumni/student programming at Columbia centered around group-based loyalty (e.g., events for fraternities, publications, athletic teams, etc.). Ironically, this focus on separate communities, while enhancing alumni commitment to particular activities, did little to increase broader institutional loyalty to the College.

While it is hard to pinpoint any one date or event, Columbia’s attitude toward student and alumni programs changed in the late 1980s and a new spirit and interest level emerged. Then Dean Robert Pollack ’61 brought students and alumni together in 1987 at a College-based event at Lincoln Center hosted by George Segal ’55 to celebrate the College’s New York State charter bicentennial. In the early 1990s, Jerry Grossman ’61 funded and led an “alumni partnership program” to bring alumni back to campus to visit with students and share life experiences. Events and programs such as these demonstrated that the College was moving in the right direction. However, for many undergraduates, having contact with alumni continued to feel almost accidental, and their perspective of Columbia continued to be limited to their four years on Morningside Heights.

Throughout the 1990s, as applications to the College soared and Columbia became one of America’s hot schools, the College administration struggled with the issue of why alumni participation in the life of the College (measured not only in the fund-raising sense) was not increasing similarly. Growing out of various reports and studies done by the Alumni Office, a unit within the Student Affairs Office was established nearly five years ago to install, wherever possible, programs that bring together students and alumni so that undergraduates can begin to understand the role of alumni in the Columbia community and, in doing so, consider their place within it. While it may sound obvious, Columbia finally had come to the realization that it needed to instill in students and alumni the ideal that one’s connection to Columbia lasts well beyond four undergraduate years and, indeed, should last a lifetime. When one considers Columbia’s advantage of having so many interesting alumni within minutes of campus, connecting students with them seems a painfully obvious opportunity.

I am pleased to report that I have met with student leaders active in the programs’ implementation and participated in a number of the programs. They are extremely successful, well attended and fun. I encourage all alumni to contact Kathryn Wittner, associate dean of student affairs (kb4@columbia.edu), or Sabrena Gant, assistant director, student development, in the Alumni Office (scg2103@columbia.edu) to get more information about the programs and to find out about ways in which you can become connected with today’s undergraduates.

A few examples will give you the flavor of the programs. Prior to coming to campus, entering students are invited to academic planning and advising sessions at which alumni welcome them and their parents into the Columbia community by handing them a gift of The Iliad, the first reading assignment in Literature Humanities. Each year the “Grandfather Class” or “Bridge Class” programs bring together, in a series of receptions and dinners, current students and alumni whose experience is separated by 50 years (e.g., Classes of ’58 and ’08). Professional panels organized around architecture, business, medicine (“Doctor in the House”), law (“Legally Speaking”) and journalism (“Read All About It”) demonstrate the breadth of interesting careers that alumni pursue. Finally, “Family Meals,” hosted in campus venues, or “Sunday Suppers,” dinners for groups of students at alumni homes, present informal opportunities for in-depth discussion of Columbia experiences.

Issues remain in the full implementation of the programs. First, the College needs to increase the infrastructure and funding available to the programs. Second, the College needs to demonstrate long-term commitment to the programs. Only in this manner will they become institutionalized and not another episodic effort that perishes with a future change in administrators. Finally, the College needs to listen to, and work closely with, the students in taking the programs in directions the students want, including, for example, access to the Columbia E-Community (subject to reasonable guidelines).

The fact is our peer schools have done a better job than we have at cultivating alumni involvement and creating a culture where alumni meaningfully support those who come after them. If Columbia is to compete successfully with these schools during the next 20 years, we must make up for lost time and create a larger community of Columbians who stand ready to support each other and share our personal and professional experiences with the next generation.

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next