vol. 40, no. 02 mastering marshmallows...
TRANSCRIPT
I n 1970, Elora Mukherjee’s father ar-rived in New York City from India on an engineering scholarship with $7 in
his pocket. After her mother joined him six years later, the two of them worked mul-tiple jobs and long hours in the hopes of providing their daughters with the oppor-tunities they never had. During childhood trips back to Patna, the capital of the Indian state of Bihar, Mukherjee began to see what it meant for her to grow up in America.
“Patna has just unbelievable poverty,” says Mukherjee, an associate professor at Columbia Law School who oversees the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “Growing up and seeing the very stark contrast between how people lived in Patna and how I lived in the U.S. made me realize at a young age that the world is unfair, and I should do what I could as I got older to make even a small dif-ference in people’s lives.”
The clinic, launched as a pilot program last spring and officially established in the fall semester, is now representing a dozen children who crossed the U.S. southern bor-der without a parent to accompany them. “All these children are legally entitled to sta-
tus in the United States through asylum or special immigrant juvenile status,” Mukher-jee said. “The 10 students in my clinic will be representing them in all aspects of the proceedings.” The clinic also represents a number of adults who are seeking asylum and other forms of immigration relief.
As head of the clinic, Mukherjee su-pervises students in their representation of clients and oversees advocacy work on immigration policy issues. She also advises students in a new Law School partnership with Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit that provides legal representation to unaccompanied minors in immigration proceedings.
Given her family history, it’s not surpris-ing that Mukherjee was drawn to immi-grants’ rights work. As a student at Yale Law School she worked in the immigration clin-ic on asylum applications. After clerking for a federal judge in Pennsylvania, she joined the American Civil Liberties Union as a legal
continued on page 8continued on page 8continued on pages 4-5
By Bridget O’Brian
DAVI
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CHANGING NATURERuth DeFries Studies How
Humans Transform the Earth | 7
MEDIA INNOVATIONBrown Institute Launches
Creative Space | 3
MUSEUM CAMPUSArt Properties Manages
Columbia’s Collection | 3
LAW SCHOOL PROFESSOR’S COMMITMENT TO IMMIGRANT CHILDREN
Columbia Professors Discuss the Issues Facing Voters in 2014
Walter Mischel’s New Book on the Power of Self-Control
By Columbia Law School News
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Elora Mukherjee, an associate professor at Columbia Law School, oversees the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.
MASTERING MARSHMALLOWS
Walter Mischel, the psychologist renowned for the groundbreaking study known as the “marshmallow test,” has finally decided to
tell the story of that research for a general audience. He dedicates the book, aptly titled The Marshmal-
low Test: Mastering Self-Control, to his now-grown daughters, saying they inspired him when they were young to study self-control in preschoolers.
“I saw dramatic changes in my own children,” says Mischel, the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Columbia’s Psychology Depart-ment. “I realized I was quite clueless about what was going on in their heads.”
Why publish such a book decades after his famed experi-ments? It’s “a way to make a dif-ference outside the academy,” he says—to offer up lessons for teachers and policymakers, parents and children, and any-one else looking to exercise self-control. Mischel’s research has shown correlations be-tween a child’s ability to delay gratification and subsequent academic success, as well as greater determination, better tolerance of frustration, healthier body weight and less substance abuse. It also shows that self-control skills aren’t immutable, but can be taught and en-hanced through identifiable strategies.
In an interview in his Schermerhorn Hall office, Mischel shows videos of how 4-year-olds delayed gratification when presented with the conundrum of
one treat now, or two in 15 minutes. “They found ways to distract themselves and ‘cool’ their temptations,” says Mischel. The children covered the treat, turned away from it, pushed it away, played with their toes and ears, talked to themselves or sang a song.
Separate experiments found that children can wait when imagining the marshmallow is something else or by creating an imaginary brick wall between themselves and the treat. Other research revealed the importance of specific “if-then” plans. For example, if I’m starting to get angry, then I take a deep breath and count backwards from 10 or if I’m working on an as-signment, then I turn off my text messages.
“It’s not hard to learn these skills with proper mo-tivation and practice,” Mischel says, adding that adults
might try similar tactics when faced with a rich dessert, the urge to smoke, or a choice be-tween saving versus spending or arguing versus compromise.
What’s important, he says, is to keep a goal in mind and to focus on the consequences of losing self-control: for the child, one less treat; for the adult, obesity or even lung cancer, insufficient retirement funds or broken relationships.
Mischel, 84, came to Co-lumbia in 1983 after two de-
cades at Stanford. He still teaches and does research and follows the subjects of his early research—some now in their 50s. He is currently studying the rela-tionship between the ability to delay gratification and economic prosperity.
He says that coming to Columbia offered him the opportunity to expand his research. He repeated his
By Georgette Jasen
“With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
tests, you can actually see the connection between what people
are doing and what’s going on in the brain. This wasn’t even dreamed of in the 1960s.”
For more on the upcoming election,visit news.columbia.edu/election2014.
To find out more about the candidates in New York City, visit Professor Ester Fuchs’
whosontheballot.org.
It is almost a given that the party of the incumbent president loses ground during the Congressional midterm
elections, and this year is not expected to be any different.
In off-year elections since 1862, the president’s party has averaged losses of about 32 seats in the House and more than two seats in the Senate, according to Politi-Fact. Only twice—in 1934 and 2002—has the president’s party picked up seats.
If Republicans take control of the Senate, as some predict, the big question is by how much? And what would that outcome mean on such issues as national security, the economy, income inequality, voting rights, campaign finance and the fate of health care reform?
The Record asked several of Columbia’s political and legislative experts for their views on these issues and others that are likely to determine the makeup of the next Congress. (See stories on pages 4 and 5.)
The flood of money unleashed by the Citizens United decision will have a decid-ed impact, but not necessarily where one might expect. Incumbents now spend so much time raising money and soliciting large donors that they devote less of it to legislation and meeting with constituents, according to Richard Briffault, the Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation at Columbia Law School.
The issue of race remains a constant, said Fredrick Harris, a political science professor and director of Columbia’s Cen-ter on African-American Politics and Soci-ety, and recent racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has brought it to the fore. But it’s un-clear at this point what role it may play in actual voting.
National security has become a more potent campaign issue than anyone ex-pected even a few months ago. Opinion polls show that Democrat and Republican voters alike are worried about the threat of the Islamist military group ISIS and fa-vor military action in almost equal num-bers. Now candidates are using this con-cern to attack their opponents either for using scare tactics or reacting too slowly to the ISIS threat.
Whatever the outcome after Nov. 4, it won’t tamp down the high level of parti-sanship in Congress and the nation. “Giv-en the ideological differences, I see noth-ing changing except, perhaps, in the area of foreign policy,” said Robert Y. Shapiro, a professor of political science whose re-search focus includes public opinion, pol-icymaking and mass media.
NEWS AND IDEAS FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITYVOL. 40, NO. 02 OCTOBER 2014
www.columbia.edu/news
Dear Alma,
What can you tell me about the distinctive stone fireplace in the Twombly-Burden Room in Low Memorial Library?
—Geology Buff
Dear Geology Buff
The black limestone fireplace flecked with white and gray sits in an oak-pan-eled room on the first floor of Low Library, where David Walker, Higgins Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, recent-ly stood, leading his popular tour ex-ploring the Earth’s geological history displayed in the building stones of the Morningside campus.
Walker, a research scientist at Lam-ont-Doherty Earth Observatory, pointed to white caterpillar-shaped splotches on the mantel and squiggly marks in the dark limestone. They are fossils of a now extinct organism, cousins of corals that form the great reefs in the tropics today.
Seasonal and daily light variations can create growth marks on fossils akin to tree rings. And a powerful microscope can examine these growth bands to measure daily and seasonal cycles during the life of the corals. These ancient coral fossils date from 400 million years ago, during the middle of the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, a time “when the first amphibians were making their way to land, and mammals and dinosaurs were still yet to come,” he said.
“Things were show-stoppingly different 400 million years ago,” Walker added. Indeed, the fossil record shows that back then, each day was about 21 hours; a year had about 415 days. This is because the gravitational pull of the moon creates ocean tides
that slow down the Earth’s rotation on its axis by accelerating the moon into an orbit that is inches farther from the Earth each year. Hundreds of millions of years later, the slower rotation of the Earth results in longer days. (The length of a year remains the amount of time it takes Earth to orbit the sun.)
The Twombly-Burden Room, where the fireplace is located, originally came from an 18th century English mansion. From there it was moved to a Fifth Avenue townhouse that was torn down in the 1960s. Columbia came into possession of the room around 1964.
The chamber, now in constant use as a conference room in Low Library, is a memorial from Mrs. William A.M. Burden (née Florence Vanderbilt Twombly) and her two sons (one a Columbia trustee) for her mother, Mrs. Hamilton McKown Twombly. Today, an oval-shaped portrait of Mrs. Burden—pictured above to the left of the fireplace—now holds court above the mantel.
—Gary Shapiro
Send your questions for Alma’s Owl to [email protected]
MARC HOLLIDAY (GSAAP’90) was named to the University’s board of trustees. Holliday is chief executive and a mem-ber of the board of directors of SL Green Realty Corp, New York City’s largest owner of commercial office proper-ties. He was recognized by The Wall Street Journal as one
of the New York region’s “People to Watch in 2014,” as No. 1 on the New York Observer’s “Power 100” list in 2012 and by Crain’s New York Business in 2003 as one of its “40 Under 40” leading New Yorkers. A long-time supporter of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation’s real estate program, from which he earned an M.S., he established the Holliday Professorship of Real Estate Development in 2008. He currently chairs the real estate program’s Industry Ad-visory Board and endowment campaign. Among other civic and philanthropic activities, Holliday serves on the board of directors of the New York Racing Association and the executive committee of the Real Estate Board of New York. In 2011, he was a recipient of the Hu-manitarian Award for his efforts in support of National Jewish Health hospital.
MELISSA BEGG was named vice provost for educational pro-grams, where her responsibilities will include monitoring the Uni-versity’s academic programs and developing and implementing education program proposals, including distance and continuing education as well as partnerships with other universities. She had been vice dean for education at the Mailman School of Pub-lic Health and will remain a professor of biostatistics at Columbia University Medical Center.
MAMADOU DIOUF, the Leitner Family Professor of African Stud-ies and director of the Institute for African Studies, was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. Diouf was singled out for his role in engaging students from around the world in the
study of history and current affairs.
ANDREW DOLKART, the James Marston Fitch Professor of Historic Preservation and director of the historic preservation program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, received the Landmarks Lion Award from the Historic Districts Council, an advocate for New York City’s historic neighborhoods.
DENNIS MITCHELL, an associate professor at the Col-lege of Dental Medicine, has been named senior associ-ate provost for faculty diversity and inclusion. Mitchell is also the dean’s special adviser for community health affairs at Columbia University Medical Center and se-nior associate dean for student development at the dental school.
VALERIE PURDIE-VAUGHNS, associate professor of psychology, and BRENT STOCKWELL, professor of bio-logical sciences and chemistry, were named National Academies Education Fellows in the Sciences for the 2014-2015 academic year.
TheRecord2 OCTOBER 2014
ON C AMPUS
GRANTS & G IF TS
MILESTONES
AN ILLUMINATED ODYSSEYHundreds of people held aloft glowing lanterns honoring African American artist Romare Bearden during the third annual Morningside Lights procession.It kicked off after dark on Sept. 27 in Morningside Park and wound its way up to campus. Marchers carried lanterns and musical instruments made in workshops at Miller Theatre in the week before the parade. The workshops, led by directors of the Processional Arts Workshop, attracted adults and children from the local community. This year’s theme was Odysseus on the A Train, part of a yearlong celebration on campus of Bearden and his iconic 1977 collage series, A Black Odyssey, which will be on display in the Wallach Gallery starting Nov. 15. Bearden, a longtime resident of Harlem, based the works on Homer’s epic. For video and more on the year of Bearden-related events, visit news.columbia.edu/bearden.
ASK ALMA’S OWL
A view of the Twombly-Burden room circa 1964.
Burden Room Through Time
WHO GAVE IT: Victor J. Revenko (CC’63, SEAS’64, SEAS’68) HOW MUCH: $3 millionWHO GOT IT: Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied ScienceWHAT FOR: A bequest to establish the Victor J. Revenko and Family Professorship of Chemical Engineering.
WHO GAVE IT: Andrew W. Mellon FoundationHOW MUCH: $1.2 millionWHO GOT IT: Arts and SciencesWHAT FOR: To support continued instruction in less commonly taught languages, a shared distance-learning course initiative between Columbia, Cornell and Yale.
Vol. 40, No. 02, October 2014
Published by the Office of Communications and
Public Affairs
David M. StoneExecutive Vice President
for Communications
TheRecord Staff:
Managing Editor: Wilson ValentinEditor at Large: Bridget O’Brian
Staff Writer: Gary ShapiroArt Director: Nicoletta BaroliniPhoto Editor: Jennifer Pellerito
University Photographer: Eileen Barroso
Contact The Record: t: 212-854-2391 f: 212-678-4817
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For the latest on upcoming Columbia events, performances, seminars and lectures, go to
calendar.columbia.edu
TheRecord OCTOBER 2014 3
Hidden within plain sight around Columbia’s campuses is a museum’s worth of art donated to the University over the past two centuries. The 15,000 objects in Art Prop-
erties enliven public spaces, decorate offices, adorn the Faculty Room at Low Library, and are stored in a vault in the recesses of Avery Hall.
The collection, part of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Li-brary, reflect all cultures, time periods and media, from Neo-lithic pottery, Chinese ritual bronzes, Etruscan pottery and Mesopotamian cylinder seals to Polaroids and black-and-white silver gelatin prints taken by Andy Warhol in the 1970s and ’80s and used for his portrait paintings of celebrities, royalty, drag queens and others.
Roberto C. Ferrari, an art historian and librarian, was hired as the new curator of Art Properties in 2013. He previously worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he oversaw digitization projects in the museum’s Digital Media department. In the short time he’s been at Columbia, he has already started reshaping Art Properties.
Ferrari said that historically, Art Properties had been per-ceived largely as a decorative collection since many of the piec-es embellish offices and public spaces. But recently, he added, “the department’s mission as a study collection is being given more attention, focusing on education-related programming and curricular integration.”
Last spring Ferrari worked with Robert E. Harrist Jr., the Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art History, and Ph.D. students in his curatorial seminar on Chinese art to con-duct research on the Chinese bronzes and ceramics and Bud-dhist stone sculptures on permanent display in Low’s Faculty Room. Most of the material, a gift of the renowned psychiatrist, art collector and philanthropist Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, hadn’t been touched since it was first displayed in cases there around 1970. Sackler, of whom it was said, “he waves his arm and a museum wing appears,” gave more than 2,000 Asian artworks to Columbia.
Working with curatorial specialists from the Metropoli-tan and the Harvard Art Museums, the students conducted a hands-on study of the objects. Their research led to updated catalog entries as well as object labels that were used when Fer-rari and his team reinstalled the works in August. As an added bonus, pieces of Korean ceramics, also from the Sackler collec-tions, were temporarily displayed in the Faculty Room, where they were identified by retired Harvard curator Robert Mowry as being very important works in the history and production of Korean ceramics.
Last winter, to raise awareness about Columbia’s sculp-ture, Ferrari started a blog, Public Outdoor Sculpture at Co-lumbia, that features updates about the works and a Google
map for self-guided tours. In a recent post Ferrari discussed the cleaning last sum-
mer of three of the University’s most recognizable bronze sculptures: William Ordway Partridge’s statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. Since the Jefferson statue is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, the time was ripe for its facelift. And the Rodin, recently vandalized when someone brushed and sprayed gold paint onto parts of it, needed treatment to re-move the paint and restore the protective wax finish.
Other well-known works at the University include sculp-tures by Henry Moore and Anna Hyatt Huntington as well as Daniel Chester French’s iconic Alma Mater on Low’s steps. The collection also includes the largest repository of paint-ings and drawings by Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), a New York-based artist whose paintings also can be found in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum. A selection of her works from Art Properties and Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library are now on loan to the Lenbachhaus in Munich through January for the first international retrospective of Stettheimer’s work.
Assisting Ferrari is a team whose duties include inventorying and documenting objects in Art Properties’ collection. He and his colleagues spend a good deal of time inspecting paintings and other works hanging in offices and galleries. Because there is a limit to how much of the collection can be showcased in this way, they have begun developing an online inventory and exploring social media options to make more of the collection digitally accessible not only to the Columbia community, but to art lovers everywhere.
“Our goal is to spread the word about this vital part of Co-lumbia’s cultural heritage,” Ferrari said. “Like many great muse-ums, much of the art remains in storage, hidden from view, but we’re working to change that.”
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Columbia Cares for A Museum’s Worth of Cultural Treasures
Innovative Storytelling
W ith the parting of a leopard-print curtain and the flash of cameras, the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation
officially opened Sept. 16 in its new space in the Journalism School’s Pulitzer Hall.
The Institute, endowed by longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown in honor of her late husband, the movie producer of such hits as Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy, opened in 2012, but its specially designed space has been under construction since then. A collaboration between the Journalism School and Stanford Engineering—David Brown was an alumnus of both—the Brown Institute was founded with the mandate to invent and apply cutting-edge technology to journalism and storytelling.
“With each moment of technological innovation, our conception of what constitutes a story has changed and been a catalyst for new innovation,” said Mark Hansen, director of Columbia’s Brown Institute. “When we evaluate projects, we put equal weight on finding good stories and telling them in unique, compelling ways.”
One of those different ways is through the work of Shantell Martin, a visual artist known for her enormous line drawings in public spaces such as the corporate headquarters of Viacom and Y&R, the luxury clothing store Lane Crawford in Hong Kong and MIT’s media lab. At the Brown Institute, Martin used a Krink K-51 permanent black ink marker with a wide tip to draw freestyle up a staircase, going where her pen took her to make row upon row of faces with phrases such as “open your door find out more” and “don’t hide in the corner.” Martin, who will be a Brown fellow starting in January, also draws with computers, setting her work to music.
To read more about the Brown Institute, visit news.columbia.edu/digitalmedia.
For video on the recent reinstallation of works from the Sackler Collection in Low Library’s Faculty Room,
visit news.columbia.edu/sackler.
The collection includes the largest repository of paintings and drawings by Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). Pictured above is Family Portrait No. 1, 1915.
By Eve Glasberg
At the opening celebration, visual artist Shantell Martin, a Brown Institute fellow, finished a site-specific work that climbs the Institute’s staircase.
TheRecord4 OCTOBER 2014
I t’s still the economy, stupid. With much of the nation still recovering from the 2008 financial meltdown, the U.S. economy will be one of the top issues in the midterm
elections, says Sharyn O’Halloran. “What’s going to divide the parties is the disparity in how
Americans are experiencing the aftermath of the Great Re-cession,” says O’Halloran, the George Blumenthal Professor of Political Economy.
While the top 3 percent of earners have returned to eco-nomic levels that haven’t been seen since 2007, all other in-come percentiles have either declined or remained constant in real dollars, according to recent statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, women, minorities and young workers, traditionally Democratic voters, have been hit hardest.
O’Halloran explains that voters have real questions about the fairness and equity of the nation’s tax structure, including the way different forms of income are taxed. For instance, cap-ital gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages, a boon to people who are wealthy enough to have investments. In this way and others, the very wealthy can take advantage of the tax laws and loopholes to significantly lower their tax bills, a point the bil-lionaire investor Warren Buffett has made publicly many times.
As they have in the past, Democrats will try to convince voters of the need for more robust safety nets, O’Halloran says. They’ll rally around issues like raising the minimum wage and keeping the earned income and child tax credits.
Republicans can be expected to campaign against those same issues, citing the costs of the Af-fordable Care Act, unemployment insurance and other benefits that they say stifle small business ex-pansion and suppress hiring.
In a rare sign of bipartisan-ship, Democrats and some Republicans in Congress are seek-ing to craft legislation that would crack down on inversion deals, which is when a U.S. company buys a foreign company so it can relocate abroad to pay lower corporate taxes.
There are other issues in play in this election cycle as well, including education. The Common Core, a set of math and En-
glish standards for K-12 schools set by the U.S. Department of Education, is playing an unexpectedly prominent role as par-ents, state governments, teacher unions and education organi-zations disagree on how or even whether the standards should be implemented. Initially 45 states adopted the academic stan-dards; several states are now seeking to back out and some, like South Carolina and Oklahoma, already have.
O’Halloran points out that while education is an issue that both the Democrats and Republicans should be able to support, the debate is in the strategy for implementation. “Adopting a Common Core and increasing standards is great, but if you don’t have the staff and student population prepared to undertake that, you have a problem,” O’Hallo-ran says.
States are grappling with wheth-er to finance the Common Core, raise basic standards across the board, establish charter schools or encourage public/pri-vate partnerships. And even though Common Core started as a bipartisan effort to better prepare schoolchildren for college and careers, for some voters it has become an example of an overly intrusive federal government.
R ace remains a touchstone of American politics, never far from the electoral fray, says Fredrick Harris, professor of political science and director of Columbia’s Center on
African American Politics and Society. However, Republicans have learned that the more they
inject race into the election or try to smear President Barack Obama, the more they galvanize black voters to come to the polls, Harris said.
Meanwhile, Democrats up for reelection in conservative states like Louisiana and Arkansas are trying to distance them-selves from the president’s policies. In these Southern states with high-profile senatorial contests, he said, Obama’s low standing in
the polls could make the difference in very close elections. One group, however, is unwavering in its embrace of the pres-
ident. “Obama remains wildly popular among African American voters,” Harris said, noting that over 95 percent of blacks vot-ed for Obama in the 2012 presidential election. “Blacks are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party,” he said.
But Harris noted that Republicans are far more motivated to vote in the midterm elections because they see the opportunity to win the Senate. “For Democrats, it’s more like, ‘Can we main-tain the status quo?’ and for many of them, the status quo does not seem to be producing much other than inertia,” said Harris.
He sees a paradox in contemporary politics: The country that elected its first black president and saw black voter turn-out in 2012 exceed that of whites for the first time in history, has also seen the Supreme Court “gut” a key provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he said.
Under the law any changes in voter rules and redistricting in certain jurisdictions had to be pre-cleared with the U.S. Justice Department or federal judges in the District of Columbia to ensure that they were not discriminatory. The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Congress must reexamine the decades-old criteria that determined which jurisdictions are covered by the act. No such congressional action has been forthcoming.
As a result, Harris said, there may be less voter participation and political representation in certain states in the South. “My fear particularly is for state legislatures and some city coun-cils in small towns and rural areas in the South.”
While the shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Mo., has elevated the issue of police conduct within minority communities to the national agenda, its electoral im-pact is hard to gauge, Harris said. It could play a role in shaping the Democratic political agenda, but probably not until the 2016 presidential election cycle. Since black voters comprise a fifth of the Democratic primary electorate, some Democratic primary voters will likely be asking the presidential candidates questions about how to ameliorate this problem.
Voting, of course, is only one tool of political expression—the shooting in Ferguson has led to marches, packed city council meetings and traffic blockades in the St. Louis area. But it’s hard to know what to make of such activism, he said. “Predicting so-cial movements is far more difficult than elections,” Harris said.
Harris said that Ferguson made it abundantly clear that the United States is not a “post-racial” society, as some said after Obama was elected. He said that while overt racially discrimi-natory acts have declined since the 1960s and legalized racial discrimination has disappeared, racism today remains subtler and at times “subterranean.”
“We live largely in a post-racist society, not a post-racial one,” said Harris.
F or all the prognostications about how the midterm elections may alter the balance of power in the House and Senate, the American public can be assured of
one thing: “We will have another do-nothing Congress,” says political science professor Robert Y. Shapiro.
That’s because, whatever the outcome on Nov. 4, both parties will be far too busy positioning themselves for the presidential election in two years.
“The election is a warm-up for 2016,” says Shapiro, who specializes in partisan polarization and ideological politics in the U.S. “It could determine how aggressive Republicans can be in attacking liberal policies such as abortion rights or environmental regulation. But even if they don’t win big, Re-publicans will emphasize the fail-ures of the Obama administration and, at a minimum, try to make the Democrats look bad.”
No one expects Republicans to lose seats in the House, and most forecasts give Republicans an edge in taking control of the Senate, al-though it’s unclear by what margin. Winning by a big margin could be a risk for the GOP. “If that hap-pens, Republicans run the risk that they overreach and start propos-ing things that the public doesn’t want,” Shapiro said. “There could be a backlash.” If the economy continues to recover, “that’s good news for Democrats,” he adds. “But if Obama looks weak and indecisive on other issues, that isn’t good for the party in the next election.”
Whatever the outcome, “we still won’t have a function-ing Congress,” Shapiro says. “The current level of partisan-
ship is extraordinary. The temperature level, the decibel level, is strikingly high.”
Shapiro points out that the political temperature has been higher, such as during the presidency of John Adams, who won the nation’s first contested election after serving as George Washington’s vice president for eight years and then wound up in the nation’s first party war in a bitter and unsuccessful battle against Thomas Jefferson for the presidency. And, of course, there was the costly and deadly partisanship during the Civil War years followed by more than a decade of political turmoil during Reconstruction.
In the context of the modern era, Shapiro’s research demonstrates that ideological and party partisanship has grown stronger in recent years. Clin-ton’s impeachment, the contested 2000 election and every election since have become charged. “This is a relatively new thing,” Shapiro says. “It’s very interesting for a political scientist to have such an identifiable left and right.”
Today’s political temperature is a far cry from the situation in 1950, when the American Politi-cal Science Association put out a widely read report titled “Toward a Responsible Two-Party System,” which lamented the lack of dif-ference between the political parties and said voters weren’t being given clear choices.
Not anymore. The parties today are ideologically divided on virtually everything, Shapiro notes, and just as Congress is divided, so is the nation.
“What’s become apparent is that this partisan and ideo-logical conflict has fully penetrated to the level of public opinion,” said Shapiro. “The parties are competitive, the stakes are higher, and it’s made politics heated and vicious.”
By Bridget O’Brian
ELECT ION 2014
Professor Robert Y. Shapiro: “It’s very interesting for a political scientist to have such an identifiable left and right.”
Professor Fredrick Harris: “Ferguson made it abundantly clear that the United States is not a ‘post-racial’ society.”
Professor Sharyn O’Halloran: “Increasing standards is great, but if you don’t have the staff and student population prepared to undertake that, you have a problem.”
Midterm Forecast: More of the Same in Congress
The Economy Is Still No. 1 Issue for Voters POLITICAL SCIENTIST PONDERS IMPACT OF RACE IN MIDTERM ELECTIONS
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By Gary Shapiro
By Sabrina Buckwalter
“What’s going to divide the parties
is the disparity in how Americans are
experiencing the aftermath of the
Great Recession.”
TheRecord OCTOBER 2014 5
A s a flood of cash from wealthy individuals finds its way into campaign coffers for this year’s elections, Law School Profes-sor Richard Briffault is following the money.
The effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United deci-sion allowing corporations to make independent contributions isn’t exactly what many people feared, says Briffault.
Although some big businesses and trade groups are engaged in spending, the big development has been the surge of very wealthy individuals who are giving money, pooling their resources, and cre-ating or supporting organizations that hire political strategists and buy advertising to make their voices heard.
“Of course, these often are people who made their money in busi-ness. It’s the Koch brothers, not Koch Industries,” he adds, referring to Charles and David Koch, who have donated large sums of money to conservative and libertarian causes.
The impact on this year’s midterm elections won’t be clear until the votes are counted, he says, but what may be more important is the impact on what candidates do before and after the campaign.
“People need to have a certain amount of money to be credible,” says Briffault (CC’74), the Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legis-lation and an expert on campaign finance. “To what extent does this affect the legislation they’re willing to support and the votes they’re willing to cast? How does it affect what they’re willing to do as an elected official?”
At the very least, he says, the need to raise substantial amounts of money is “a huge distraction keeping legislators from thinking about issues, working on policy and meeting with other constitu-ents who are not big donors.” It also can be a deterrent for potential candidates to get involved and an incentive for some officials to step down, sometimes even before their terms are up.
Individuals can contribute a maximum $2,600 to a federal can-didate, in both a primary and a general election. Even if spouses and children also contribute, that doesn’t add up to a huge amount, Briffault says.
But if those donors pool their funds with others in an organi-zation separate from a candidate or party, they can spend millions. Super PACs are just one way this is happening, he says. Although offi-cially independent, they can accept unlimited contributions and en-gage in unlimited expenditures supporting or opposing a candidate. There also are organizations formed around a common ideology, such as cutting taxes, reducing the size of government or abortion rights—pro and con.
Briffault, a summa cum laude graduate of Columbia College who
joined the Law School faculty in 1983 with a law degree from Har-vard, is currently working on a book about campaign finance.
The system is falling apart, he says, and the result is likely to be either no regulation of election spending, “which some people think is not that different from what you have now,” or public financing of elections, something he favors. Briffault served on New York State’s Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, known as the More-land Commission, which recommended public financing of elec-tions. Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo generated controversy and was criticized by Columbia alumnus Preet Bharara (LAW’93), U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, when he disbanded the commission in March.
Besides the congressional races, there are interesting state con-tests to watch this year, says Briffault, whose teaching and research also focus on state and local government. For example, there’s a tight race in Florida, where former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist is run-ning as a Democrat against the current GOP Gov. Rick Scott. In Wis-consin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who survived a recall vote in 2012 and has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2016, faces a tough challenge from Democrat Mary Burke, a former Trek Bicycle executive and state commerce secretary.
The Republican victories in many state legislative elections of 2010 will continue to have huge consequences this year through the redistricting plans they adopted after the 2010 census, and through new voter identification laws and limits on early voting that make it harder for some people to vote. “This especially affects the poor, the elderly and people who have moved around a lot,” Briffault says. “This could have a real partisan effect on election outcomes.”
ELECT ION 2014
Professor Richard Briffault: “This could have a real partisan effect on election outcomes.”
ALAN
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In Aftermath of Citizens United, Law School Professor Keeps an Eye on the MoneyBy Georgette Jasen
givingday.columbia.edu
#ColumbiaGivingDay
Researchers Identify Marker of Autism in Children
A n examination of the brains of autistic children has re-vealed a surplus of synapses caused by a slowdown in a normal brain “pruning” process during development,
researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have found. The discovery could lead to new ways to diagnose and treat autism.
During normal brain development, a burst of synapse for-mation occurs in infancy, particularly in the cortex, a region involved in autistic behaviors. Natural pruning eliminates about half of these synapses by late adolescence. Many genes linked to autism affect synapses and some researchers have hypothesized that people with autism may have more synapses.
The research team, including Dr. Guomei Tang, an assistant professor of neurology at CUMC, set out to investigate this hypothesis by exam-ining the brains of children with autism who had died from other causes.
“It’s the first time that anyone has looked for and seen a lack of pruning during development of children with au-tism,” said Dr. David Sulzer, the study’s senior investigator and a professor of neurobiology in the Departments of Psychiatry, Neu-rology and Pharmacology.
Using a mouse model of autism, the researchers traced the pruning defect to a protein called mTOR. When mTOR is over-active, brain cells lose much of their ability to degrade their old and damaged parts, leading to excess synapses.
The findings suggest that a drug that restores that ability and improves synaptic pruning by inhibiting mTOR may be used to treat human patients. The method has been successful in re-versing autistic-like behavior in mice studies.
E-Cigarettes May Lead to Marijuana, Cocaine Use, as Well as Addiction
A lthough electronic cigarettes have been touted as a tool to curtail the harmful effects of smoking, the nicotine in e-cigarettes, like that in conventional
cigarettes, may lead to the use of more dangerous drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, Columbia researchers have found.
“While e-cigarettes do eliminate some of the health effects associated with combustible tobacco, they are pure nicotine-delivery devices,” said Dr. Denise B. Kandel, a professor of sociomedical sciences in the Department of Psychiatry and Mailman School of Public Health, in a paper that appears online in The New England Journal of Medicine co-written with her husband, Dr. Eric Kandel, University
Professor and co-director of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.
The Kandels reviewed work on the effects of nicotine on reward centers of the brain and its role as a gateway drug, including research revealing
the rate of cocaine dependence was highest among users who started using cocaine after having smoked cigarettes.
In light of the rising popularity of e-cigarettes, particu-larly among adolescents and young adults, the researchers said that more effective prevention programs need to be developed for all nicotine-containing products.
“Nicotine clearly acts as a gateway drug on the brain, and this effect is likely to occur whether the exposure comes from smoking cigarettes, passive tobacco smoke or e-cigarettes,” Eric Kandel said.
Study of Jewish Origins May Improve Personalized Medicine
S ome 10 million modern-day Jews of Central and Eastern
European origin are de-scended from just 350 an-cestors living in medieval Europe, making them all 30th cousins, according to new research that may lead to advances in genetic medicine.
The study by Columbia Engineering’s Itsik Pe’er, an associate professor of computer science, and Dr. Lorraine Clark, an associate professor of pathology and cell biology at CUMC, provides a genomics reference panel for the Ashkenazi Jewish population for the first time.
A reference panel—a collection of genomes from healthy people—is necessary when clinicians examine a patient’s genome for clues to illness. Geneticists compare the patient’s genome with those in the panel to see which of the patient’s variants are benign and which are potentially pathogenic. Knowing the genetic cause of a patient’s disease can guide physicians to more effective treatments.
Since not all genes and gene variants that cause disease are known, the new data is expected to help researchers find variants associated with complex diseases affecting everyone, not just Ashkenazi Jews.
Computer scientist Itsik Pe’er
RESEARCH NEWS FROM COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
For more Medical Center news, visit newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu.
TheRecord6 OCTOBER 2014
A n ew book by Colm Tóibín, the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities, is always a much-anticipated event. An award-winning author of such critically acclaimed bestsellers as The Testament of Mary and
Brooklyn, his latest work, the novel Nora Webster, portrays a young, strong-willed mother of four as she navigates life in a small Irish town after the death of her beloved husband. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted in a column admiring Tóibín’s decision to imagine the inner life of Mary, mother of Jesus, after the crucifixion, “Colm Tóibín has plenty of experience getting inside women’s heads.”
Q: Over time, you have moved more toward works that focus on women. How would you characterize this thread in your work and the reasons behind it?
A: The past three novels, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary and Nora Webster, have dealt with the lives of women, but many of the short stories in Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family have been about men. Also, some of the new short stories I have been working on, plus the novel I am now trying to write, are about men. I wish I could tell you I had a plan, or I saw a pattern, or I knew why some novels are about gay characters, others about women, and so on. All I know is that nothing can start unless an idea, a memory, an image, or something I have heard moves into rhythm almost of its own accord. So when that happens, I can work.
Q: In addition to other themes that have been noted in your books—home and being away from home, self-identity, creativity—there is an overarching one of giving a voice to the voiceless, to marginalized characters, members of minorities. Do you agree with that description?
A: I see the characters as oddly powerful, at least to me, despite their powerlessness. Or at least as ambiguous—ambiguous enough to interest me. But I see them in very particular ways, rather than as members of minorities or marginalized. I think that would be a good subject for a sociologist or a politician, but not a novelist.
Q: New York magazine described Nora Webster as a partial sequel to Brooklyn. Is that true? Are any of the same characters in both books?
A: Nora Webster is set in the town that the protagonist in Brooklyn leaves. They are both from the same generation. And yes, some of the characters in the earlier novel have walk-on parts in Nora Webster.
Q: What courses will you be teaching at Columbia in spring 2015? What distinguishes this University from others where you’ve taught?
A: I am teaching a course on Irish prose, which will include Joyce and Beckett, and also a course on the development of the heroine in the 19th century novel, which will include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Columbia, for me, is a place dedicated to learning. There is an ethos at the University, which I think makes its way into the classroom and into every area of the students’ lives, and this ethos is deeply serious about study and reading, and about thinking and being intelligent. It is remarkable how this ethos has survived. I feel inspired by it.
Q: How does the intersection of teaching and writing affect you? Does one part of your life bleed into the other, or do you keep the two spheres totally separate?
A: Teaching sharpens me. Working with students who are dedicated makes me want to write better books and work harder. I come away from each class caring about the books we have been reading, knowing more about the machinery of fiction, and this has to make a difference to the work I do as a writer.
—Eve Glasberg
COLUMBIA PEOPLE
Vincent Santana
Colm Tóibín’s New Novel, Nora Webster
WHO HE IS: Chief Administrative Officer, Department of Neurology, Columbia University Medical Center
YEARS AT COLUMBIA: 24
WHAT HE DOES: Santana is responsible for human resources, information technology, resident education administration and departmental operations. As part of the senior manage-ment team, he plays a part in the strategic development of department initiatives.
MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT: Working with family members of Alzheimer’s patients while he was conducting interviews for a study on genetic susceptibility to the disease. “Meeting people from different walks of life and learning their family stories was significant for me,” he said. He also met his fu-ture wife there: Helen Mejia-Santana, a Senior Staff Associate at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center, his old department, at Physicians & Surgeons.
BEST PART OF THE JOB: Helping those who come into contact with the neurology department, including faculty, staff and patients. “Everything is tied to serving patients. I work keep-ing in mind the patient’s perspective,” he said. His long tenure at the University combined with his gregarious nature led one supervisor to call him the Mayor of 168th Street, because she could not walk from one corner to another without Santana saying hello to someone.
ROAD TO COLUMBIA: Columbia-Presbyterian, as the hospital was then known, hired Santana as a security guard in 1989. At first he was assigned mainly to the emergency room, which bustled with patients on summer weekends. He sometimes escorted celebrities to and from the hospital to shield them from the public, and his discretion continues to this day. “I can’t tell you their names, it’s against patient privacy laws.”
A few years later he escorted physicians and staff of the Sergievsky Center around the neighborhood as they stud-ied aging in Washington Heights and Inwood. But he tired of working security, and after a few years he walked into his
supervisor’s office and said he felt there was nothing more for him to learn. “She grabbed me by the hand, walked me down the hall to the office of Richard Mayeux and said, ‘Vinny could do a lot more. He can run a study.’” Mayeux, director of the Sergievsky Center, chair of the neurology department and co-director of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, agreed. “That set the stage for me eventually being given a family study to run,” Santana added.
Before long, Santana was named coordinator of a new study of Alzheimer’s disease, which involved interviewing close rel-atives of people with the disease and writing up their fami-ly and medical histories. The study, which continues today, looks at genetic susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease among families in New York, and from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The project involved Santana’s returning to his parents’ homeland in the Dominican Republic. “I came away with a better understanding of where I come from,” he said.
Santana says his experience as a security guard in the ER has helped him throughout his career, calling on his “ability to listen to the patient and carry out my job while being com-passionate and empathetic.”
He credits his co-workers at Columbia and “the work eth-ic of my parents” for giving him the opportunity to take on broader responsibilities. Santana has earned three degrees while working at CUMC: a bachelor’s degree from Baruch College in finance and economics, completed in 2001 af-ter years of part-time study; an M.B.A. from Marist College in 2006; and a master’s degree from the Mailman School of Public Health in 2010.IN HIS SPARE TIME: He represents CUMC administrative staff on the University Senate. Santana also is involved in his son and daughter’s afterschool sports teams—soccer, basketball, girls’ softball and boys’ football and baseball. “It allows me to meet people from my own neighborhood,” he said. “It also gets me outdoors.”
—By Gary Shapiro
COLUMBIA INK New Books by Faculty
The Emerald Light in the Air: StoriesDONALD ANTRIMFarrar, Straus and Giroux
In his first collection of short stories and first book to be published since he won a MacArthur genius grant in 2013, Antrim, an associate professor of writing in the School of the Arts, of fers seven stories that initially appeared in The New Yorker. The title of the collection refers to the quality of light before an approaching
storm. In keeping with that moody image, Antrim creates a variety of characters—artists, writers, lawyers, teachers and actors—engaged in ordinary activities but filled with delusions and despair. Hungry for life, they search for communion in a sometimes menacing city, wanting to love and be loved.
The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Signifi-cance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities
CALEB SCHARFScientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus set off a scientific revolution by proposing that the sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the universe—a seeming demotion in Earth’s importance. In his new book, astrophysicist Caleb Scharf uses the latest scientific findings to suggest that in fact we do live on a special planet at an unusual time in an extraordinary solar system. Yet life
here, he asserts, also is built from the most common chemistry in the uni-verse, and represents just a moment in billions of years of biological evo-lution. He believes the fundamental questions of existence will come from embracing the peculiarity of our circumstances on Earth.
ALL-NIGHT RIDE THROUGH NEW YORK HISTORY
When historian Kenneth Jack-son teaches his “History
of New York City” course he takes his students out of the classroom to help them fully experience the city’s history. During a nighttime bike ride that wends its way from Morningside Heights through Cen-
tral Park, Times Square, Madison Square, Gramercy Park, and the West Village to Borough Hall in Brooklyn, riders pause along the way for Jackson to deliver lessons through a megaphone. For video of this year’s ride, visit news.columbia .edu/bikenyc.
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Environmental geographer Ruth DeFries is a pioneer in the study of how humans have transformed the sur-face of the Earth. Using satellite data, she explores how
changes in Earth’s vegetation can affect climate, ecosystems and the relative ability of humans and other species to sur-vive on this planet.
Her new book, The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, takes the very long view of human history, describing how, for at least 10,000 years, we have continually created new technologies that have allowed our numbers to grow. But each new invention creates a new prob-lem, which we solve with yet another innovation that in turn creates the next problem—whether it’s climate change, loss of habitat for other species or global pandemics.
“Societies adapt, learn and alter course when conditions change,” said DeFries, the Denning Professor of Sustainable Development in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. All species seek to expand their territory and grow in numbers, of course, but what sets us apart is “the extraordinary ability of our species to twist food from nature,” she writes. “Through trial and error we have found new ways to extract more food with less work.”
These trials and errors have enabled population to boom, especially over the last century, as our numbers doubled to 7 billion. Today we struggle with an abundance of food, which in turn leads to new crises: obesity, for one thing, along with insufficient food for the millions who don’t have enough to eat because the surplus is unevenly distributed.
DeFries compiles datasets that have changed the scale and focus of ecosystem research, allowing her and other researchers to make better projections of future climate change and contribute to understanding how human ac-tivities are altering habitat needed to conserve biodiversity.
“Our role is to provide input for sustainable decisions about land use,” says DeFries, who joined the Columbia fac-ulty in 2008. She has received a Fulbright award and been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the Amer-ican Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2007 she won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work.
Q.Your book discusses the idea that there’s a limit to how far we can manipulate nature before something goes
wrong. Is that a new idea?
A.No, it can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, and most likely to thinkers long before them. We often
talk about [18th century scholar Thomas] Malthus in rela-tion to ecological catastrophe because of his predictions of famine at the start of the Industrial Revolution. But pre-dictions of catastrophe and collapse haven’t turned out the way they’ve been prophesized. It’s human nature to extrap-olate into the future from what you see around you without taking into account human ingenuity. The predictions seem logical, but history tells a different story.
Q.Your book describes a historical cycle you call “ratchet, hatchet, pivot.” Can you explain that?
A.A ratchet is a tool that creates motion in one direc-tion so that once you have that motion, you can’t go
backward. We keep ratcheting up ways to manipulate nature to produce more food. This allows civilization to support more and more people. But after manipulating nature on such a grand scale, it’s inevitable that new problems result, whether it’s disease or famine or pollution–the hatchet. The solution is the pivot. Then the cycle starts again.
Q.What would be an example of a ratchet, a hatchet and the subsequent pivot?
A.For most of human history, the biggest issues were famine and shortage. The domestication of crops
was probably the biggest ratchet in history. The hatchet was that diets became starchier. People became shorter, life ex-pectancy dropped, and there was tooth decay, as well as smallpox and tuberculosis from crowding. The pivot has been long and slow. Whenever people could afford to raise livestock, they have increased the animal products in their diets. We have also devised antibiotics and vaccinations to counteract diseases caused by crowding. A more recent example of food-related ratchets is the introduction of the potato from the New World to Europe in the 16th century. Because it’s nutritious and grows easily, it allowed popu-lations to grow. In Ireland people relied almost solely on potatoes, and they were planted closely together. However, the potatoes were genetic clones, so when a fungus hit in the 1840s, it caused the Irish potato famine, which killed at least a million people. Ireland then stopped relying so much on the potato. Potatoes are not planted so closely togeth-er anymore, and there are new varieties. People emigrated from Ireland to other countries. While it was a tragic event, the aftermath shows the resilience of humans to overcome and move on.
Q.In the 20th century the ratchets seemed to turn faster than ever. How different is our age from earlier periods?
A.The hatchets falling now have more to do with abun-dance. Today the share of family income devoted to
food is lower than at any other time in modern history. In the past the hatchets had to do with shortage—shortage of fertilizer, shortage of food. Now, we see too much of certain things. Obesity is spreading worldwide. Too much nitrogen is causing pollution, too many greenhouse gases. Our prob-lems have mainly to do with the abundance we have creat-ed. We haven’t learned yet how to manage and live with it.
Q.On the other hand, we also see the destruction of eco-systems, such as seas emptied of fish, taking place at a
faster pace than ever. Isn’t that the opposite of abundance?
A.Resources may be declining faster now, but the phenom-enon [of resource depletion] is not qualitatively differ-
ent. People have always taken as much as they can. All species do the same thing. We just do it more efficiently now because we have better technology.
Q.As of 2007, for the first time in history half of us now live in cities. Are we still connected to nature?
A.In a couple of decades, more than 70 percent of us will live in cities. That is a qualitatively different re-
lationship with nature. Most of us are not growing our own food; someone else is. In the United States less than 3 per-cent of people are farmers. But to me, it’s science fiction to think that even if every single one of us lived in cities, that we would be disconnected from nature. Even if you go into a grocery store and pull your shrink-wrapped chicken or whatever off the shelf, we still rely on the planetary support machinery even though so many parts of that machinery are out of our control. Then again, I try hard not to hang onto this romantic notion that once upon a time, people lived in harmony with nature. While we can do a much better job of maintaining the ecosystems that we have, it’s not realistic to think that we can go back to some fictitious harmony with nature.
Q.Does it bother you to see so much of the planet converted to our own uses?
A.It does, because we can do better. We can all live well; there’s enough food in the world to feed everyone
right now. Yet a billion people still don’t get enough food. We just haven’t learned to use our abundance efficiently. If we did, then we wouldn’t need to be destroying so much of nature.
Q.Do you think your book will anger environmentalists?
A.There’s a line of thinking that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity and once we hit that, we will have
some enormous catastrophe. The story is more complex. We have overcome problems time and time again. We need peo-ple whom we might call alarmists in order to move forward toward solutions. I think someone like [Silent Spring author] Rachel Carson did a huge service by calling attention to the problems created by pesticides. But then again, if there’s too much doomsday thinking, which I think there is today, then people turn off. On the other side, you have people who say we have infinite resources, that technology and free enter-prise will fix anything. Yes, technology can solve problems, but solutions just don’t arise spontaneously. There’s a lot of hard work. I’m trying to step away from either extreme.
Q.What do you do to live more efficiently?
A.I try my best. I compost. I eat very little red meat, and I’m very conscious about wasting food; I’ve been labeled
“the tofu mom” by my kids. I try not to drive too much. I put my efforts into working with my students—they’re already making the world a better place. But as far as what anyone else should do–I don’t want to get preachy.
Q.So, is there hope?
A.I do think there’s hope. Solutions create new problems, and problems will generate new solutions. But we can’t
predict the future; the only guide that we have is what’s hap-pened in the past.
RUTH DEFRIES
FACULTY Q&A
DOUG
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Interviewed By Kevin Krajick
POSITION
Denning Professor of Sustainable Development in the Department of Ecology, Evolution
and Environmental Biology
JOINED FACULTY
2008
HISTORY
Associate Professor and Professor in the Department of Geography and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center,
University of Maryland, 1999-2008
MacArthur Fellowship, 2007
Associate Research Scientist, Department of Geography, University of Maryland, 1992-1999
Senior Project Officer (1983-1992), National Research Council
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SCRAPBOOK: WORLD LEADERS FORUM 2014
Immigrants’ Rightscontinued from page 1
Mischel’s Marshmallowcontinued from page 1
To read the introduction to The Marshmallow Test, visit news.columbia.edu/mischel.
fellow and litigated her first cases involving children detained at a prison-turned-detention center for immigrant families 35 miles south of Austin, Texas.
Mukherjee investigated the grim conditions at the center, where children and parents alike wore prison garb and were locked in cells for 12 hours a day. Many children hadn’t been outside in a month. Paper and pencils were banned from cells after a 9-year-old boy’s drawing was taken out of the center and drew attention for the words he wrote in bright orange marker: “I don’t like to stay in this jail.”
In 2007, Mukherjee and her ACLU colleagues negotiated a far-reaching settlement that improved conditions and short-ened the length of time that families were detained. All 26 children represented by the ACLU team were released. In 2009 the federal government ended family detention there; now the facility only houses adult women.
Right now, immigration by undocumented minors is at an all-time high, particularly in the border states, where for the 11 months through August, 65,005 minors were apprehended compared to 38,045 for all of fiscal 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The influx of these children isn’t confined to the Southwest; their second-largest destination is the greater New York area, where many have family members.
Undocumented minors who can prove they’ve been aban-doned, abused or neglected by either of their parents, making family reunification impossible, can seek special immigrant juvenile status. Victims of human trafficking, as well as crime victims, are also eligible for other forms of immigration relief.
Litigating these cases can be immensely complex because im-migrants have few constitutional rights, and those in removal proceedings have no right to counsel. “Many immigrants with le-gitimate claims to status have no one to help them navigate the complexities of the U.S. immigration system,” Mukherjee said. “Our clinic provides critical legal services to individuals who would oth-erwise be forced to navigate the immigration system alone.”
As clinic director, Mukherjee also works to develop rela-tionships with a broad range of Columbia scholars and de-partments, such as physicians at the medical center who might help with psychiatric and medical evaluations of clients. Such connections, Mukherjee notes, can benefit clients while at the same time ensuring that clinic students become adept at work-ing with professionals in other fields.
“Our clients have been pursuing the same dream that my parents had when they came to America,” she says. “And that is the opportunity to create a better life for themselves, for their families, and especially for their children.”
experiments at schools in the South Bronx, with similar results. He also has collaborated with neuroscientists at Columbia and elsewhere to study the relationship between self-control and changes in the brain.
“What’s going on in cognitive neuroscience is so exciting and so important,” Mischel says. With functional magnetic res-onance imaging (fMRI) tests, “you can actually see the connec-tion between what people are doing and what’s going on in the brain. This wasn’t even dreamed of in the 1960s.” One portion of the brain, which he labels the hot brain, reacts immediately to stimuli, while the prefrontal cortex, or the cool brain, can exercise self-control.
His own daughters, Judy, Rebecca and Linda, all took the marshmallow test and were successful delayers, he says, although as family members they were not included in his data. Linda Mischel Eisner (CC’87), a lawyer, is director of special projects in the office of Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin. Mischel proudly notes that she was the College’s first female vale-dictorian. Rebecca is now a neonatologist and Judy is a banker.
Mischel was born in Vienna but left with his family in 1938 after the Nazis annexed Austria. He grew up in Brooklyn and earned his bachelor’s degree at NYU while working as a depart-ment-store delivery boy and then as an elevator operator. He became interested in clinical psychology after a stint as “an un-licensed social worker” at the Henry Street Settlement House in lower Manhattan. He has a master’s degree from City College of New York and a Ph.D. from Ohio State.
The early research wasn’t planned as a longitudinal study, but as his daughters became teenagers, they would talk about what their friends were doing and he became curious, Mischel recalls.
Of the 500-plus children who participated in the Stanford ex-periments, more than 100 are still followed, and he goes back to them every 10 years. For the most part, he says, those who were able to delay gratification as children and continued to exhibit good self-control have become successful adults.
It’s a lesson worthy of Sesame Street, and for the last two years Mischel has been a consultant to the show for a series of episodes on self-control. Cookie Monster takes the “marshmallow test,” though with his favorite treat, chocolate chip cookies—naturally. Focused on his goal of joining a gourmet cookie club, he finds ways to resist his passion for frantic cookie gobbling—an exercise valuable for all of us, at any age.
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The University’s World Leaders Forum kicked off its 2014 series Sept. 22-26 when many presidents and prime ministers—in the city for the U.N. General Assembly—came to Columbia to discuss the key economic, political and social questions of our time. Speakers included:
1. Dr. Mohamed Moncef Marzouki, President of the Republic of Tunisia2. Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Norway3. Bronisław Komorowski, President of the Republic of Poland4. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of the Republic of Estonia5. Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan6. Queen Silvia of Sweden7. Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, Minister of Health of Rwanda8. Benigno S. Aquino III, President of the Republic of the Philippines