EMMA ASHER
Back in 1989, he was a residential teaching assistant with the Double Discovery Center’s Summer Academy. He earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion and had a doctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, where he taught Contemporary Civilization for several years.
Kahn went on to spend two decades as a professor of religion, Africana and American studies at Vassar, where he also was director of engaged pluralism and special adviser on inclusion and engaged pluralism. Last year, however, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to return to Morningside Heights, to co-lead the Practices in Community Building Fellowship, offered through the Undergraduate Community Initiative (UCI). His began his deanship in July.
“Working with the students in Practices in Community Building shaped how I think about community not as something inherited, but as something built through care, disagreement and persistence,” Kahn said in September. “I carry these experiences with me into this new role, committed to creating spaces where dialogue can take root and trust can grow.”
Kahn recently shared more about background, his vision for UCI and the importance of involving students in planning.
You’re the first-ever Dean of Community and Culture; how would you describe your role?
My charge is to build connection between and among students, faculty and staff — so it’s a huge job. But the way that I think of it is starting at a grassroots, “bringing people together who have common interest” type of level. You know, nobody can transform an institution in a short amount of time. But what I’ve started doing — which has actually been really fun — is to begin to bring groups of students together to say, “What are the things that we want to work on?” Or to bring staff together who have common interests around alumni and student engagement.
I think there are many people here who are ready to do some new things, if we can give them a little bit of structure that allows them to think and dream together. And so that’s at least the beginnings of this job, to provide those structures and gathering spaces.
You’re of course not new to Columbia — you went to grad school here and very connected to the community through the Double Discovery Center and teaching the Core Curriculum. What was that early experience of Columbia like?
I’m not overstating it to say that my experience with DDC changed my life. As an undergrad at Princeton, I was studying pre-med and played on the golf team; then between my sophomore and junior years I started drifting away from both of those interests. I knew that I wanted to be a teacher on some level, but I had never really had enough concrete opportunity — until that summer, living in Furnald and working with DDC students. I was given the opportunity to create classroom syllabuses and readings in the humanities — and it was then that I got a sense of the fire that I had for teaching and thinking about course development.
What drew you to teaching in the first place?
That’s like, a mystical, spiritual question [laughs]. Some people are just born with a sense of their passion, and mine is watching young people learn. After college I taught high school for three years, and while I loved that, I’ve since come to realize that my sweet spot is teaching college-age students. And that’s probably because all these incredible, transformative things in my life happened during those years — it’s when I began to get a sense of myself and found my own voice. So maybe it’s just by the transitive property that I really enjoy seeing undergraduates begin to develop their own sense of themselves.
So how has it been to return to Columbia 20-plus years later?
In a way, a lot is the same. So many of the great people and professors who were there then are still working here; some whom I think of as my mentors, like Roger Lehecka CC’67, GSAS’74.
The other thing that seems to be the same is the type of creative and passionate undergraduate life here that I experienced while teaching Contemporary Civilization. I love that my engagement with students today feels very familiar to me from 20 years ago.
Of course, it’s no secret to anybody that being an undergraduate today is different and probably significantly more challenging than it was 20 years ago or 30 years ago, when I was an undergraduate. This is a group of students who have been through the most substantial technological change since, I don’t know, the mid-19th century. How do we deal with what’s going on with our attention spans and the effect of that technology? What is social life like now, given that people are able to communicate with each other in these virtual ways? And the latest is AI, which I think is something that we’re going to have to figure out in order to maintain a type of vibrancy to undergraduate education. And then you’ve got the complications of national world politics that have had a particular form here on campus. All of those things — even one of which would be enormous on its own — are currently at play with our undergraduates.
What are your priorities this year, and how are you acting on them?
There are a couple of different buckets I’m focused on. Maybe unsurprisingly, the biggest one is developing connections with students. I’ve got five UCI fellows who work with me; getting students involved in the direction of UCI is something I’m working really hard on. We’re talking about what they perceive the campus ought to be bringing to our conversations, and getting the word out that UCI is a place for students to come and do some creating. We’re working together to develop programming that the students are saying they’d like to experiment with.
Then, expanding connections between students and faculty is the second biggest focus. I’ve created a program called Fac’ to Table, in which students and faculty will talk over a meal. What I want to do is to use these occasions for students to learn about the relationship between a faculty member’s personal history and what they’re doing today — like, what it is to be a college professor, and what they’re trying to accomplish. The best advice I’ve ever gotten from attending however many pedagogy workshops is to explain to students why you’re doing what you’re doing. Because if we’re not explaining ourselves, students don’t know how to orient themselves. Why are we reading this text in this way, or why are we having a conversation this way? Just telling the students the purpose helps.
And then the third focus is deepening student-alumni engagement. We’ve started a five-part lecture series this year called “We Were Students Once Too.” It’s alumni talking about their path, purpose and profession, and their paths and purpose always begin here at the College. The first one was with [sports documentarian] Gotham Chopra CC’97, the next one is going to be with [investigative journalist] Jodi Kantor CC’96; she’ll be speaking on Monday, Dec. 1.
Tell us more about some of the upcoming projects and events with UCI.
The first initiative is a student-run storytelling workshop called “Our Stories.” It’s a space for students to gather and frame their memories, which allows them to make some sense of what they and their classmates have been through. The first prompt they are starting with is “A story you wish you could tell yourself before you came to Columbia.”
Theater of War is also coming back; the show is Monday, Nov. 17, and we’re considering is inviting them to do a campus residency. We could engage as many as 50 students over the course of the Spring semester, ending with a performance the students would create and perform. That’s an example of how I like to do this work — one-off events are great, and they’re important, but they’re not sufficient. Getting people who are really passionate about engaging with each other and giving them structure and the chance to go deeper and more time to develop, is, for me, essential.
Then of course there will be the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day event; the Practices in Community Building Fellowship will also return, as well as the Community Engagement Mini-Grants program.
What are you most excited about for the year ahead?
I’m excited about the things that the students are creating and developing on their own — things that are bubbling up from our conversations, like the storytelling project, or one of my students who’s very interested in making a podcast. And having UCI provides some resources and structure through which to do it. Another thing is that I think our faculty are a bit of an under-tapped resource for a type of depth and wisdom and lived experience that our students really need. So I’m eager to continue to find faculty members who are inspirational in the way they think about their job. It would be exciting for students to have more exposure to the full person that each faculty member is.
But really, I am the most excited when students reach out to me and say, “Hey, I would like to come and talk to you about something that I’m thinking about or that I’m feeling about campus.” Just the idea that there’s another person here on campus, in the Dean’s Office, who can represent students’ concerns, interests and passions — and I appreciate that the students are really good at holding me accountable for representing those things. I’m pretty excited by the development of relationships, where students feel comfortable coming to me and then saying, “This really is important.” Like, let’s see if we can make some change.