Live the Core

(L to R): Alondra Nelson, professor of sociology and president of the Social Science Research Council; MacArthur “genius” grant winners Ai-jen Poo CC’96, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; Eric H. Holder Jr. CC’73, LAW’76, former U.S. Attoney General; and Bernard E. Harcourt, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, professor of political science and director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and executive director of the Holder Initiative. PHOTOGRAPH: BEN HIDER

On November 17, 2017, Columbia College announced the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights. Named after former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. CC’73, LAW’76, the Holder Initiative will carve out a distinctive experience for Columbia University’s undergraduate students. Through an anonymous donor, $10 million has been raised to secure the Holder Initiative, halfway towards its $20 million goal of becoming an institute.

With the foundational knowledge nurtured in the Core Curriculum — the College’s distinctive set of common courses required of all College students — as a building block, the Holder Initiative will sponsor courses, public events, student internships and fellowships for practitioners that extend the themes and questions of the Core into a more focused interrogation of the mechanisms that promote justice and civil and political rights. Discouraging retreat into what Holder calls “the quiet prejudice of inaction,” the Holder Initiative will encourage students to “live the Core” by supporting their civic action on and beyond campus.