Columbia’s Commitment to Our International Community

Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:

Like most colleges and universities in the United States, Columbia University is home to faculty, staff, and students from all over the world. Some of our community members are on temporary visas; others are green-card holders or naturalized citizens. These Columbians contribute to our University and to our nation in countless ways; through their energy, creativity, innovation, and dedication to academic excellence in the service of advancing our society and world.

Columbia University welcomes all those who honor us with their talent, experience, and ambition. We support them whether they came to the United States as children, as students, as refugees from war or authoritarian regimes, or simply in the pursuit of the opportunity that a great institution like Columbia can provide.

Our commitment to an internationally diverse community is not new. Columbia—and the City of New York in which we make our home—for generations has benefited greatly from the contributions of our international students and scholars. Importantly, international students and scholars enjoy the same rights of academic freedom as all Columbians, as well as the responsibilities that go with them. Their presence and contributions have been crucial to our 270-year history of excellence.

We pride ourselves on our global engagement and impact. We strive to study our world in all its complexity. We provide education, training, and services to communities both around the world and in our local community here in New York City. Our faculty, including our international members, have achieved renown as the recipients of Nobel Prizes and comparable honors. They are social workers, scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and architects. They are the inventors of life-saving technologies, and the authors of transformative new theories. They have defined the cutting edges of their disciplines in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, in law, medicine, and the arts—leading us forward toward understanding, problem-solving, and future-imagination. Over many decades, they have trained students who went on to be leaders of their nations and of international institutions, having learned in our midst from both Americans and other scholars who, like them, came from elsewhere.

In this moment of uncertainty, it is imperative that Columbia University and other institutions of higher learning come together to affirm and openly reassert these long-standing principles, in support of our international faculty, staff, and students, and for our collective well-being.

Sincerely,

Katrina Armstrong
Interim President, Columbia University in the City of New York

Angela Olinto
Provost, Columbia University in the City of New York