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CAMPUS NEWS

MOSES: Robert Moses is known as New York’s master builder for developing projects from the 1930s through the 1960s that reshaped the city, from apartment houses and civic buildings to highways, bridges, parks and beaches. A huge exhibition across three venues, “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” surveys his impact on New York and how people live in and around the city. The exhibit’s curator is Hilary Ballon, professor of art history and archeology, and the exhibit is accompanied by a book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (Norton, $50), by Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences.

One part of the exhibition, “Slum Clearance and the Super­block Solution,” is at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery on the Morningside Heights campus. The others are “Remaking the Metropolis,” at the Museum of the City of New York, and “The Road to Recreation,” at the Queens Museum of Art.

APPLICATIONS: Continuing a trend that has lasted more than a decade, applications for the College Class of 2011 rose by nearly 5 percent. The College received 17,964 applications for roughly 1,000 places, up from 17,151 a year ago, an increase of 4.7 percent. Overall, applications to the College and SEAS climbed to 21,213, up 6.7 percent.

Applications to the College came from all 50 states and from 130 countries. According to Director of Undergraduate Admissions Jessica Marinaccio, the largest proportional increases by region came from the South and the Midwest, although New York, New Jersey and California remain the leading states for applicants.

ARTS: The Arts Initiative at Columbia University has announc­ed a new alumni benefit, the Columbia Alumni Arts League. Members can take advantage of discounts and exclusive events at New York’s premier cultural institutions, including the New York City Ballet, Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Opera, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The New York City Center, Film Forum, The Public Theater and many more. The annual membership fee, which admits two guests to most venues, is $40 ($25 for alumni age 35 and under). For more information, go to the Arts Initiative's membership website.

RELAY: Beginning at noon on March 31, supporters can raise money for the American Cancer Society by participating in the annual 15-hour Relay for Life on Low Plaza. More than 1,600 participants raised more than $234,000 in the last three years. For further information, go to Colleges Against Cancer.

DDC: The Double Discovery Center was a winner of the national Coming Up Taller Awards, which is selected by the Presidents’ Committee on the Arts and Humanities in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The center was one of 17 winners from among more than 300 applicants to be recognized as an outstanding after-school program offering exceptional humanities to at-risk youth. The award included a $10,000 grant and was presented at an awards ceremony on January 22 at the White House, presided over by First Lady Laura Bush.

DANCING: “Kind of like a big bar mitzvah” is the way Mary Yeotsas ’07 Barnard, chair of the Columbia University Dance Mara­thon, described the scene in Roone Arledge Auditorium on January 27–28, as students danced for 28 hours to raise money for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation. The annual event, which raised more than $50,000 a year ago, began at noon on Saturday and ended at 4 p.m. on Sunday. Many student groups and clubs participated, including dance and a capella groups and fraternities.

SCRIPTORIUM: Columbia University Libraries has launched an enhanced and expanded version of Digital Scriptorium, an online visual catalog of medieval and renaissance manuscripts. The new website includes more than 17,000 images from manuscripts in some 20 American libraries. The database, available online, also provides significant new searching capabilities that allow for the retrieval of detailed information about content, illustrations, provenance, bindings and locations of more than 4,000 manuscripts.

The manuscript collections currently displayed in the scriptorium are from the California State Library, Columbia, Harvard, the Huntington Library and Museum, Jewish Theological Seminary, Johns Hopkins, NYU Public Library, San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Missouri and Texas. In the first half of 2007, additional manuscript collections will be incorporated from the Free Library of Philadelphia, Fordham, Oberlin, Rutgers, Kansas, Notre Dame and Penn.

Digital Scriptorium, initiated in 1996 by Columbia and UC Berkeley, is the most comprehensive database of its kind and provides an enormous range of materials for the study of the texts and their transmission, paleography and codicology, as well as illumination, heraldry, bookbinding and the history of collecting.

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