Prioritizing Community

JÖRG MEYER. Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

“What will you do in the face of all that you remember — from this time, this place?”

Dean Josef Sorett posed that question, paraphrased from poet Langston Hughes, at Class Day in May. This year’s celebration showcased the strength and resilience of the Class of 2024 on the heels of a turbulent academic year, for our campus as well as for colleges and universities across the nation. Here, the reverberations will be felt for some time, as we rebuild community, recommit to our mission and refocus on our most fundamental values.

In July, CCT sat down with Sorett to reflect on the past year and to speak to what’s next for the College. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The climate in higher education and here at Columbia has evolved so much in the past year. Now that it’s July, we have some opportunity for perspective. What’s top of mind for you right now?

Recently, an alumna said to me, and I paraphrase, “My approach is always that we should stay at the table.” I couldn’t agree more with this statement, and it has helped to crystallize my belief that continued engagement — with the whole College community — is at the center of our path forward. Setting tables, and inviting more students, staff and alumni to take a seat and share their perspectives, is a really important part of that work of rebuilding and renewing the community.

Last year was challenging, to say the least, for many colleges and universities. That was certainly true for us, too; we sought to fulfill our academic mission while sustaining space for students to ask the hard questions — about war, history and their roles at Columbia and in the world. Looking ahead, we must continue to respond to these kinds of questions in ways that allow us to deliver an extraordinary learning experience in a safe and supportive environment — an environment with a storied tradition of protest.

Often we are asked whether this tradition is part of Columbia’s core mission or a disruption to it. To me, this isn’t, and can’t be, an either/or question. Rather, it’s a question that requires us to set aside nostalgia for the past and carefully reconsider the fundamentals of our academic mission in this new moment. In some ways, this is always the question: How do we best balance the power of tradition and the necessity of innovation?

How do you approach striking that balance?

By keeping an open mind, embracing opportunities to learn, and listening carefully — and remembering that, at the heart of this tradition, is a commitment to providing a transformative, holistic educational experience to every student in the College.

This past year, I learned from our students about what they need to feel supported and valued. I learned from our faculty and staff about how both internal and external factors can influence teaching and learning in, as well as beyond, the classroom. And I learned from our alumni about the urgent need to communicate a more complete picture of campus life so that they have better information and greater context about what’s happening here.

Right now, at every level of our community, many feel disappointed with Columbia as an institution. As dean, I am responsible for setting the culture and tone for the College, and we have a lot of work to do to rebuild trust, especially as our own team goes through a rebuilding process. I am committed to leading us to higher standards of professionalism. Our work will include building a shared understanding, expectations and accountability through robust professional development for all staff on Title VI, inclusion and belonging, diversity (in the fullest sense), discrimination and more.

You’ve said there are three areas of focus the College will prioritize going forward. What are they?

First, we know that our most fundamental responsibility is to make sure that our students are physically safe and also feel safe. That requires us to consider our students’ experiences as individuals. Before becoming dean, I helped lead the Inclusive Public Safety Advisory Committee, and we often talked about how students’ notions of safety on campus are informed by the communities they grew up in. Among other questions, we are asking now — and must understand more deeply — what does it mean for all our Jewish students to feel safe? And how do we ensure that we are both confronting antisemitism and maintaining an environment that is free of discrimination and harassment for every student?

Second, we pride ourselves on being a community — as a collective — that has a diversity of experience, interests and viewpoints. We also pride ourselves on the Core Curriculum as a space where that diversity enters the classroom, and where debate and contestation, rather than consensus, are the priorities. So, in that space of diversity and dissensus, how do we foreground the need for each of us to hear, take seriously and reconsider our views in light of others’ experiences, ambitions and interests? And how do we make sure that, in the face of our differences, every student feels valued, seen and heard?

And lastly, we must better understand what it means to be a college within a university. We must provide our students with the ability to take full advantage of all that the University has to offer, while also ensuring that they are grounded in the shared experience of the Core and the residential life of the College.

Across these three priorities, we are focused on strengthening structures for our students to live together, think together and to disagree together, all with empathy and respect.

In order to be a strong advocate, you’ll need to be in conversation with students. How will you ensure their voices will be heard?

It begins, for me, with having a sense of how wide the range of student experience is and then finding ways to listen and engage authentically through both formal and informal channels. We worked hard at this last year, and there is certainly more to do in this regard.

I think of the group of Arab, Muslim and Jewish students whom I invited to meet with me after they were doxxed last October. They were looking for safe spaces to be together, as well as for institutional resources to support them.

I also think about the number of times this year that I ran into students on campus and enjoyed casual conversations. I started making a practice of having lunch in John Jay Dining Hall, just to drop in and sit with students. There was the transfer student from a public institution on the West Coast who told me he was having the best semester of his life and was enjoying NYC’s music scene. There were three seniors — two of whom were athletes — and they were talking about their internships and midterms, as well as what they were doing after graduation. And then there was a first-generation student from New Jersey, who shared how she understood the complex relationship between the current conflict in the Middle East, its impact on our campus and the full range of advocacy efforts that our students take up.

I also sat down for Shabbat on several occasions with Jewish and Israeli students and heard, among other things, about the fear, grief and pain they were experiencing, while also sensing their strength, and the joy of just being together.

Late in the Fall semester we formed an advisory group of student leaders from different clubs and organizations to advance these conversations. We wanted to hear what they thought was working well and what areas of the student experience could really use some attention.

I look forward to many more opportunities like these to hear from the full range of our students, and the broader community, in the year ahead.

How will the College bring the community together this year?

I’ll start by saying there was a lot of concern — across campus and from alumni — for supporting our students with the resources to navigate the complexities of the moment. Beyond my own conversations, a priority for us was to strengthen the bonds for civil debate, if you will. There is still much work to do here.

That was front of mind this past spring when we launched — with Columbia Engineering and Columbia General Studies — the Undergraduate Community Initiative (UCI). In the fullest sense, those programs were meant to invite all of our undergraduates to different kinds of shared tables, from a College event that celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, to an Engineering event on artificial intelligence and misinformation, to a film screening by the LGBTQIA+ alliance, led by General Studies.

We are now working to build upon what we learned with a new set of opportunities this Fall, and to place the academic mission at the center of our efforts to re-engage students — and then to connect that to a set of opportunities outside the classroom. Regardless of a student’s major, we want to ensure they still have occasions to think together about how the perennial questions that define the Core Curriculum show up in new ways with each generation.

It’s been heartening that a number of alumni have reached out to say they want to support this kind of work. The work of challenging and supporting students — in partnership with faculty and staff — to engage with the most vexing questions and conversations, in our deeply pluralistic context, has never been more important. And it is from this persistent vision that an invitation to the table extends anew to every generation of alums.