As a university long dedicated to human rights around the globe and civil rights here at home, we in the Columbia community feel acutely the loss of a true world leader like Nelson Mandela. Few among us can imagine acting with the determination and dignity he maintained in standing up against a brutal apartheid regime he did so much to dismantle, whether from a South African prison cell or president's office. Perhaps the greatest testament we could pay to his humility, grace, and vision would be to rededicate ourselves to scholarship and action energized by his ideals of racial equality, social justice, democratic change, and peaceful reconciliation.