Home
Will Columbia change as much in the next 50 years as it has in any other half-century in its history? No doubt. Earlier drivers to change included such historical events as industrialization, shifts in global geopolitical power and the race to the moon. Our response was to increase scientific specialization, invent discipline-based departments, expand professional schools, adopt the Common Core, and create hundreds of centers and institutes – each in their own way designed to respond to both external and internal forces for change.
Today we have new global challenges to overcome – environmental degradation, poverty, and crises of capitalism, inequality, marginalization, ageing, and the future of cities. Columbia is ideally situated to study these issues, but more ambitiously, to apply its prestige and vast intellectual resources to pioneer a response.
The question is not if this university community will respond, but how.
For example, imagine Columbia 50 years from now, not located in one urban center, but simultaneously in eight or ten cities worldwide. Imagine our curriculum globally themed, students choose across a wide and still expanding spectrum of courses. Is it possible that students also choose where they study and in what language? Is it possible that what we study and how we learn is transformed in the process?
On April 20, in Low Library, the INTERACT Conference will bring together faculty and students across the university to ask these questions and consider not whether, but how Columbia will “go global."
Registration coming soon.
Today we have new global challenges to overcome – environmental degradation, poverty, and crises of capitalism, inequality, marginalization, ageing, and the future of cities. Columbia is ideally situated to study these issues, but more ambitiously, to apply its prestige and vast intellectual resources to pioneer a response.
The question is not if this university community will respond, but how.
For example, imagine Columbia 50 years from now, not located in one urban center, but simultaneously in eight or ten cities worldwide. Imagine our curriculum globally themed, students choose across a wide and still expanding spectrum of courses. Is it possible that students also choose where they study and in what language? Is it possible that what we study and how we learn is transformed in the process?
On April 20, in Low Library, the INTERACT Conference will bring together faculty and students across the university to ask these questions and consider not whether, but how Columbia will “go global."
Registration coming soon.
Last edited by Admin on Fri Mar 11, 2011 7:17 pm; edited 1 time in total
