Student Life - Columbia College - Columbia University

Columbia CollEgE Today STUDENT LIFE
“Dean orenduff was an adviser and friend, in the truest senses of the words.”
in the NSOP Schedule Book students receive upon arrival.
Student organizations provide a niche for students looking
to engage in politics, explore ethnic or racial issues, or perform
community service in the greater New York City community.
Students of color, for example, participate in a leadership retreat.
In another program, called Under One Roof, students learn the
skills required of living in a diverse community.
“Because Columbia’s campus community is so diverse, part of
our role is to help students develop tools so they can thrive in a
culture that celebrates differences,” says Martinez. “We want students
to recognize where biases may exist and to support them in
the difficult conversations that often result.”
Students are encouraged to not only participate in planned
community-building activities but also explore interests that may
initially appear outside of their comfort zone.
Carmen McClure ’12, a psychology major, discovered her passions
through the Double Discovery
Center, which serves
more than 1,000 high-need,
college-bound New York City
teens in programs that improve
their academic and personal
skills. The DDC, which
was founded in the 1960s, is
not under the oversight of Student
Affairs.
Last spring, McClure took
DDC students to Columbia
classes to give them a taste of
college pedagogy. This fall,
she’ll train Columbia students
to work as DDC tutors
and will meet monthly with
the student volunteers to support
their work.
Dean Michele Moody-Adams speaks with former student leaders Sue Yang ’10
and Isabel Broer ’10 at a campus event last spring.
Better communication and collaboration between administrators
and students is a key underlying element in the
improvement in student engagement.
When Moody-Adams arrived at Columbia in summer
2009, she was interested in establishing informal, unscripted
monthly meetings with small groups of students. At about the
same time, Weiss had proposed a similar concept to the Student
Council. “The dean wanted to meet with students, and Student
Affairs latched onto the idea and ran with it,” recalls Weiss.
The concept drew a huge response. Fifteen students were chosen
at random from among 600 who expressed interest in sharing
tea and conversation with the dean. The teas became a monthly
event last academic year, with different groups of students attending
each time. The dean plans to continue these informal
gatherings with students in the future.
“The teas are not really about airing any grievances or concerns
that students may have, though they certainly allow students
to do that when they feel so inclined,” says Moody-Adams.
“More important is that the teas provide a low-key environment
in which students can talk about their experiences at the College,
about how they see the world and what they care about, and
about what things are working well at Columbia as well as what
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things might need to be examined and possibly changed.”
During the academic year, the Community Development staff
works collaboratively with students on campus issues and supports
several hundred student organizations. Policies on cuttingedge
campus issues, such as hosting controversial speakers,
drinking at parties and gender-neutral housing, also are developed
collaboratively among students and administrators. “There
was a time when these issues could have created an adversarial
relationship between students and the administration,” says
Shollenberger, who says his focus in each instance is on developing
the best policy for Columbia. “It used to be a very ‘we-they’
thing on many issues. We are working together now.”
For example, Student Affairs worked closely with the Inter-
Greek Council on a policy, adopted in 2009, for social events in
fraternity and sorority houses. Students wanted to defuse the tensions
that arose over crackdowns on drinking by campus security.
David Salant ’10, an officer of
Delta Sigma Phi, said the old
policy didn’t work because
fraternities were forced to hire
costly security details and register
parties weeks in advance.
Rather than adhere to those
policies, some fraternity parties
went underground, which
Salant says encouraged unsafe
behavior.
The new policy allows fraternities
to register parties five
days in advance. The fraternities
or sororities name three
event monitors for each party
to check IDs at the door and
distribute wristbands to those
21 and older, who are allowed
to drink. A maximum of 75
guests are allowed per party. Alcohol can be served to those 21 and
older at a rate of one drink per hour, and parties must end at 2 a.m.
“We got more freedom in exchange for subjecting ourselves to
higher standards,” says Salant, who now is an equity derivatives
analyst at JP Morgan. “We wanted to show them we could run
parties that were safe, and that we could be held accountable. It
took a lot of faith on their part to trust a bunch of frat boys. We’re
glad they did.”
For Shollenberger, resolved issues like this one have been central
in a career in student affairs that included stints at the University
of Hawaii at Manoa and American University in Washington, D.C.
Developing good relations with students is a key to his success.
“We try to be very visible,” says Shollenberger. “We can’t just
sit in our offices and expect students to come to us.”
Moody-Adams says Shollenberger’s encouragement of student
engagement has paid dividends.
“He respects students and values their active leadership but
also understands the importance of creating an environment in
which they can remain safe in the exercise of their leadership,”
she says. “He welcomes diversity of all kinds, and works hard
to ensure that students give one another space in which to act on
their diverse values and opinions, without harming others.”