Update for Our Community

Dear fellow members of the Columbia community,

I hope all of you are taking time this summer to rest, recharge, and have time with loved ones. My team is doing some of that, but we are also hard at work, aware of how important this coming year will be, with an intense spotlight on global, national, and local events and with high stakes for our institution. The world is in need of wisdom, and Columbia, with its enormous intellectual capability, has so much to offer. I have no doubt that, by working together, we can fulfill this fundamental responsibility.

To that end, we have been focused on several key measures in preparation for the new academic year, and I want to offer a midsummer update. We need to be able to manage our campus together in this critical moment, in which sharing information as well as reaffirming basic values is essential. We must be able to sustain the educational and research mission of this university while reestablishing our sense of community.

Throughout the summer, the University Leadership Team along with faculty, staff, and student leaders have been working hard to put in place more mechanisms for community consultation, more clarity about our rules going forward, more training on discrimination issues for everyone (staff, faculty, and students), better capacity to handle incidents and complaints, and stronger internal engagement and communications. This is all in line with the Values Initiative I announced last December, which was grounded in efforts to renew our commitment to one another. We must redouble our efforts in that direction, applying the many critical lessons of last year—some painful, but all useful—in our work for the Fall.

Faculty Engagement

Working with and listening to faculty from across all our schools is vital. Our faculty are the heart of this institution; their guidance is an essential resource. I am dedicated to creating new, more effective ways to hear those voices. Provost Angela Olinto has been working with each of our deans to set up faculty working groups focused on sustaining academic freedom and free speech in a community free of discrimination and bias. These bodies will be essential as we seek to educate future leaders and develop new knowledge.

Staff Engagement

Our University staff are the backbone of the institution and key to its day-to-day functioning. Our Chief Operating Officer, Cas Holloway, has been leading efforts around staff engagement and will continue to build our capacity to better understand the concerns and feelings of our workforce. This will also include improved consultation mechanisms and ways to support their professional and personal development.

Student Engagement

Our Executive Vice President for University Life and Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, Dennis Mitchell, has been regularly meeting with students and student leaders over the summer to listen and receive feedback on how we can enlist students to support a broad range of community-building activities across campus over the coming year. We look forward to sharing more on this soon.

To address issues raised by the student protests this past year, including breakdowns in constructive dialogue and good faith engagement, we have asked two faculty from the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at the School of Professional Studies to facilitate a process with affected students to hear their views and work toward mediated outcomes. To date, the two faculty members have held meetings with students, University leadership, faculty, and other stakeholders from across our community, to understand the many perspectives that are relevant to the conflicts dividing our campus.

We use the word “mediation” rather than “negotiation” because we believe it more accurately reflects our goals: to engage in a facilitated process of productive dialogue with students to identify paths forward that can support our community’s shared educational mission. The University will continue to update the Columbia community as these processes move forward.

Rules

The University Senate's Committee on the Rules of University Conduct is hard at work on a review of the Rules, which govern conduct in protests on campus. We thank the Committee for its commitment to this vital work over the past year and, particularly, through this summer. This work is ongoing, and we look forward to updating the community in the coming weeks.

We are addressing concerns we have heard from the community over the time required for investigations and are strengthening our processes. The entire community should be able to easily understand what behavior we expect from each other and what will happen if rules are violated. We also must consider the need for robust educational opportunities around discrimination and bias that affect all members of our community.

Student Orientation and Dialogue Across Difference Programming

We are developing new components for both University-wide orientation for all first-year undergraduate and graduate students, as well as school-level orientations, to connect back to our University values and principles. This Fall will be another moment to reset, to consider how we might, as a community, start to take in broader perspectives, and to do as much listening and understanding as shouting and declaring.

Alongside more robust orientation resources, the Office of the Provost and University Life will be working with colleagues across the institution to offer an expanded slate of Dialogue Across Difference programs, conversations, and events.

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Much more is underway, and I will offer additional details as we get closer to the start of the new term. The cornerstone of all these efforts is your input and engagement—please continue to share your feedback and insights with the University Leadership Team.

This must be a collective endeavor. At Columbia, we excel because of our commitment to academic excellence and scholarly values. We truly flourish when we engage with different perspectives from a foundation rooted in mutual respect and a commitment to rigor and open inquiry. For me, a good place to start our quest for common ground would be agreeing that we all love this remarkable, stellar institution, and that we will do whatever we can to protect it and enable it to thrive. We all understand the positive impact it can have on the world through its mission of education and research. The world needs us to deliver together on that mission now more than ever.

Warmly,

Minouche Shafik
President, Columbia University in the City of New York