This year, Columbia College launched a $400 million fundraising and engagement campaign to enhance our undergraduate liberal arts education and support students and faculty. The campaign, “Core to Commencement,” is the first-ever fundraising and engagement campaign to be dedicated exclusively to Columbia College.
The campaign paints a comprehensive vision for the future of Columbia College, which is centered on the Core Curriculum, a set of seminar-style liberal arts courses in which students encounter great works of literature, art, music, political theory and science, and consider the most difficult questions about the human experience. The campaign also seeks to endow the Core, which has been required of all undergraduates since 1919, and to bring the Core into its next century using innovative technologies and interdisciplinary programming.
Photo: © 2015 Scott Rudd. See video of the event.
“I often say that Columbia College is the greatest college in the greatest university in the greatest city in the world. The Core to Commencement campaign is a commitment to sustaining this greatness for our students and the faculty who teach them.”
— James J. Valentini, dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education.
In addition, the campaign seeks to provide teaching fellowships, to increase the number of endowed professorships as a means of attracting and honoring the best faculty and to support the departments that make the Core possible. Another goal is to offer all students at least one funded summer internship, research fellowship or global experience in order to apply lessons learned in the classroom and to further ensure success after graduation.
The campaign also will reinforce the Columbia College Fund, the College’s essential source for ensuring its institutional excellence, and will strengthen connections among students, parents, faculty and alumni.