AROUND THE QUADS
Campus Bulletins

Dean Austin Quigley thanks seniors for their enthusiasm during the annual Class Dinner, held this year under a tent on South Field and attended by more than 900 seniors. PHOTO: TIMOTHY B. CROSS

Around the Quads

• Bollinger Becomes University's 19th President • Cole, Cohen To Leave Administrative Posts • Campus Bulletins • Transitions • Alumni Bulletins • In Lumine Tuo • College Honors 65 Students at Awards and Prizes Ceremony • More Than 1,000 Take Part In Community Outreach

CLASS OF 2002: More than 900 seniors — nearly the entire class — gathered under a tent on South Field on April 29 for a festive Senior Dinner to celebrate their impending graduation.

Among the speakers were Dean Austin Quigley; Jerry Sherwin ’55, president of the Alumni Association; Michael Mellia ’02, senior class president; and classmates David Epstein ’02, Seth Gale ’02, Blake Lipsett ’02 and Scott Koonin ’02, the latter representing the Senior Fund committee.

Thanks to the year-long efforts of the members of the Senior Fund Committee, the Class of 2002 achieved a record participation rate of more than 50 percent, a significant increase over the mark of 32 percent set by the Class of ’01. In addition, each five percentage points reached above 35 percent triggered a matching gift from Peter Grossman ’79, enhancing the impact of the seniors’ gift to the Columbia College Fund.

The Senior Fund Committee was chaired by Koonin, Ali Hirsh ’02, Pooja Agarwal ’02 and Sarah Palestrant ’02.

CLASS OF 2006: Despite a year shadowed by terrorism and recession, the number of applications to the College once again has risen to record levels, resulting in another record for selectivity.

For the Class of 2006, the College admitted 1,637 students from a record 14,137 applications, an 11.6 percent admit rate, according to Eric Furda, executive director of undergraduate admissions. Applications were up 0.6 percent from last year’s total of 14,097, while selectivity improved from 12.2 percent a year ago.
Furda indicated that the College had received a record high number of early decision applications, 1,611, up eight percent from a year ago. The College filled 49 percent of its new class with early applicants, up slightly from previous years.

Furda pointed out that the caliber of students seeking admission was “as competitive as it’s ever been,” noting that SAT scores were higher than last year — a combined average of 1,430, up six points.
In the admitted class, seven percent of the students are citizens of countries other than the United States, with more than 40 countries represented. All states except North Dakota are represented in the admitted class.

Throughout the spring, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions worked with Columbia alumni to host admitted student receptions in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

Professors Caroline Bynum and Nicholas Dirks were honored with the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award and the Lionel Trilling Book Award, respectively, for 2002. PHOTO: SHAWN CHOY '03

VAN DOREN, TRILLING AWARDS: Students of Columbia College have awarded the 2002 Mark Van Doren Teaching Award to University Professor Caroline Bynum, the distinguished medieval historian, and the 2002 Lionel Trilling Book Award to Professor Nicholas Dirks, chair of the anthropology department, for his book, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001).

The winners were selected by the Columbia College Academic Awards Committee, which was composed of 11 students who met weekly during the past year to consider candidates. The committee was co-chaired by Yaacob Dweck ’02, Michael Fishman ’02 and Daniel Immerwahr ’02. The Van Doren Award, in its 41st year, recognizes a teacher in the College for outstanding leadership and teaching. The Trilling Award, in its 27th year, recognizes an outstanding book published in the previous calendar year by a member of the College faculty.

In accepting the awards at Faculty House on May 6, both winners noted that the prizes were special in that they came from students.

“It is a great honor to receive an award named after Lionel Trilling. It is an even greater honor to receive an award from the students of Columbia, a most discerning reading group,” said Dirks, whose book impressed the committee in part because he “was able to make some very complex arguments about the relationship between colonialism and caste in India so clear and enjoyable to read,” according to Immerwahr. He added, “Professor Dirks deals successfully with a body of theory about how archival evidence forms our knowledge of the past, but his treatment of the subect is concrete, enlightening and even entertaining.”

“What students do for you is keep you young and focused on the future,” said Bynum, who is taking a position with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to allow her more time for research but plans to continue to work with Columbia students. “It is through your students that you look to a new future, to see the possibilities of those lands beyond the horizon that you are never going to reach, but that perhaps they will.”

Bynum, who won the Trilling Award in 1992 for Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, 1991), is the fourth person to win both student awards. The others are Wm. Theodore de Bary ’41, the John Mitchell Mason Professor and Provost Emeritus; George Sansom Professor of History Carol Gluck; and anthropologist Robert F. Murphy.

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