All memories from graduates in the 1980s.
I arrived at Columbia in September of 1971. My room was in Ruggles Hall, behind John Jay Hall, across 114th St. from Butler Library. I had contracted for the cheapest room available. It was 9...
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1980
There are so many people who pass through our lives, like breezes on their way to the sea - they might jostle us, or soothe or please us before they disappear, or they...
School of Social Work 1980
I remember many great times being at Columbia’s schools of social work and public health. The one memory that was “therapeutic” was the time when I just finished all of my exams from S.W. I had so much...
School of Social Work 1977, School of Public Health 1980
When I was at Columbia, I was on the Health Science Campus at 168th St. which is not known for it’s “beauty.” At that time, the School of Nursing was located in Maxwell Hall, and we...
School of Nursing 1980
(“I’m with you in Rockland”)
down Baltimore Avenue, West Philadelphia grey winter twilight stone obelisk in the graveyard shrieks catches my eye and jerks it jerks my eye to the cemetery
ominous stone finger...
Ruminating on St. Augustine’s Confessions, the great Professor Quentin Anderson sat at the head of the boardroom table, we twelve or so sophomores tucked around in confidence of his sage and gentle pronouncements on the humanity lessons...
Columbia College 1980
Desmond Tutu was to have been the Commencement speaker in 1980, but he was unavoidably detained, apparently assisting the police with their inquiries back in South Africa. I forget who spoke in his...
One of the more momentous, though still little-known, lectures ever given at Columbia was delivered by Harold S. Bender on December 28, 1943, in the Men’s Faculty Club. The occasion was the annual meeting of the...
The Casuals were a New Wave band c. 1980 who often performed in the crowded front room of that wacked-out fraternity on 114th St that kept having spectacular drug busts. Band members were all Columbia College undergraduates,...
The Hungarian Pastry Shop was my place to study and relax. The comfort of exquisite pastries and refillable coffee mugs with a quality of coffee ahead of its time took you from ecstasy to a riveted...
Teachers College 1981, Columbia College 1973
Earl Hall was the hub of Friday noon congregation (JUMMAH) for the small group of Muslim students, Faculty and staff. Muslim worship requires ablution (WUDU cleaning of body parts with water) before attendance. The small crimpy restroom...
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1981
When I first arrived at Columbia, I was put on the fencing “jock” floor because I was going to be on the fencing team. I was not a jock. After first playing clarinet with the...
Columbia College 1981
In Canada, where I’m from, September marks the end of summer, with days getting shorter and temperatures dropping. In November, snow starts, and it gets really dark outside. Then, in December, it gets very cold,...
Graduate School of Business 1981
My home city, Louisville, while being in the state of Kentucky, is not a part of the “sunny south.” However, I was somewhat concerned about spending the winter of 1980-81 in New York City. I had...
Graduate School of Journalism 1981
My brother Ted also went to Columbia, and though he is an education major, he really loves music. He was the producer of the coffee house at St. Paul’s Chapel. I went there with boyfriends, family, and friends...
Program in Physical Therapy 1982
I arrived at the College in September 1952. At that time, a large percentage of Columbia “Men” (remember those dark days before women were admitted?) lived at home in the city or nearby...
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1982, Columbia College 1956, School of General Studies 1976
This in response to your solicitation: “What’s the bestââ¬âdippiest, funniest, most brilliantââ¬âstudent comment you heard at Columbia?”
“More people died at Chapaquiddick than at Three Mile Island.” -Anonymous
School of Law 1982
Professor James Shenton’s lecture on the Civil War draft riots that took place in New York City in 1863 was an exceptional experience for the several generations of Columbia students who heard...
Columbia College 1982
My children and I live so much closer to NYC than we have in quite some time. We visit the city often and always visit Morningside Campus, where I point out various spots and...
School of General Studies 1982
When I went to Columbia, my favorite place to study was the lounges in what was then the new science building attached to the Engineering building. The building was relatively new and...
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1982
After transferring from a school with cinderblock housing, metal bunk beds, and views of the nothingness of the middle of Indiana, I found myself in an end room of Maxwell Hall overlooking the Hudson. It was 1971....
School of Public Health 1973, Teachers College 1982, School of Nursing 1972
I was a freshmen the fall of 1979 in Carmen Hall. During that time the upperclassmen would yell up to us: “Four more years!” I didn’t quite get what they meant at first, but I soon understood.
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1983
I arrived on Manhattan’s Morningside Heights 27 years ago, a Baltimore suburbanite with little experience of urban living. I immediately fell in love with the place, embracing its grunginess with much...
Columbia College 1983
The new East Campus facility was a great living experience with suites and a nice kitchen and communal area. We had great parties (who didn’t?) and romantic adventures (who said college wasn’t a learning experience?). But...
During my first year at Columbia I lived in Ruggles Hall. The main steam pipe went right through my room. It was so warm that I had to keep the window cracked open all winter...
School of Law 1983
Hang time at Columbia was the best. The swim center was a real favorite of mine–both the old pool and new. We used to have green towel chips…I wonder if they are still in...
During my junior and senior years, I resided at the College Residence Hotel on West 110th Street with several other College men. The apartment was close enough to campus to enable us to enjoy Columbia life, but we...
On the last day of policy class, a core requirement of the Graduate School of Business, Professor Don Hambrick took us through a brief exercise that challenged us to think about the choices...
Graduate School of Business 1985
As a freshman I was told by one of my professors at SEAS: “You should only know as much as I’ve forgotten.” Here it is 25-plus years later, and I often say to myself:...
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1980, College of Physicians and Surgeons 1985
My favorite teacher at the GSAPP was Richard Plunz, whose role at the time was akin to that of a mole. He dug deep into architectural history and politics at a time when it was much more...
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1986
The best lectures I had at Columbia–among many competitors–may well have been Richard Wollheim’s aesthetics lectures, in which he walked us rather philosophically naive undergraduates through his own theory of criteria for the identity of artworks. He...
Columbia College 1986
Actually, this was an event heard and not seen. The momentous occasion when Columbia College’s soccer team made it to the finals of the NCAA championships in my final year at CC. It was a...
As an impressionable young freshman in 1979, I had the distinct pleasure of attending Joseph Bauke’s CC class. It was more than a class. It was a wake-up call to what higher thinking was all about....
Columbia College 1983, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1986
To be honest, at that point in my life, spirituality was not on my agenda. I have examined it later on. I would say though that learning about and therefore becoming comfortable with my family’s cultural, and...
As a freshman member of Columbia College’s last class to be admitted as an all-men cohort (women transfers graduated with us), we who lived in Carman Hall were likely also the last to experience a...
My mentor, Everett Dennis of the Journalism School, once handed me a pen that had no ink and bristled: “What do you do now?”
On the first day of classes, I sat next to a tall young man. We talked about nothing in particular waiting for our first graduate class to begin, both a little nervous about what...
School of Social Work 1986
I sat at my desk, arms hanging to the side, furrowed brow, mouth slightly agape. It was a computer vision class, and Dr. Kender was talking about how we humans live in more of a two-dimensional...
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1987
This was a tough call (as I had many great profs), but my favorite professor was Edward Mendelson… who apparently is still in Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. Prof. Mendelson was sharp, funny, and taught...
Columbia College 1987
Being a part-time graduate student from the business community in New Jersey, my Columbia “social life” consisted of long, afternoon commutes into the city and somewhat shorter drives back home. The many...
I am now teaching fourth grade! Would love to hear from any friends.
Graduate School of Business 1987
In response to your call for anecdotes regarding weathering the NYC cold…
As a native Texan, I was grossly unprepared for the NYC cold (circa 1983, when I began college there). This was particularly challenging for me...
In the fall of 1986 I somewhat reluctantly entered the School of Library Service. In the five years since graduating college, I had considered law, theater, journalism, wildlife ecology and clown school. I’d worked in libraries through...
School of Library Service 1987
New York at its meanest - circa 1986
Infested with Goetzes, panhandlers and pricks
“God Save the Winos” said the man with the stick
And what did we do, journo-stars of tomorrow?
Grew stubbly chins a la “Miami...
Graduate School of Journalism 1987
As a member of the Women’s Swim Team at Columbia from 1983-1987, I vividly recall both the thrill and agony of the arrival of wind, snow and ice on the CU...
Having visited campus twice before entering the College, I was quite ready to move into Carman for the complete co-ed experience. When I got my room assignment for 304B Carman, I was disappointed with the...
Columbia College 1988
The first memory that I have of Columbia is getting into a long, snakelike line on the sidewalk of 114th Street outside Carman Hall with my parents after grabbing a parking spot somewhere in...
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1988
It’s one of my definitive memories of graduate school. I’d been struggling for a week to complete my final master’s essay to get my M.A. in English (as a part-time student, I had always intended...
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1988, School of General Studies 1985
June of 1988 saw the Freshman Heavyweight Crew wrap up an extremely long season that included fall racing in Boston and New York, January work in Tampa Bay, Spring Break in New York City, and daily...
Coming to Columbia from Cleveland in 1984, I was pleasantly surprised to find the temperature relatively balmy in New York, with the buildings trapping heat and generally knocking down the wind. So after growing up on...
Coming into Columbia as an apparent economics major, and pretty much taking all core classes my freshman year, I decided to try a history class my sophomore year. Entitled “The Radical Tradition in America,” and taught by...
It had to be a tie: first, watching Frustration’s End win the 1988 Intramural B-Ball championship, only because it made Brendan Murnan cry for joy and Rob Daniel (the fearless coach who put our rag-tag team together)...
I was ecstatic when I was accepted into the Fall 1985 class of Arts Administration students studying for MFA degrees in the School of the Arts. The only problem–no on campus housing available for students...
School of the Arts 1988
In 1978, all engineering freshmen were required to attend a once-a-week engineering overview lecture. The professor was Mario Salvadori, who was prompted to “un-retire” for this class.
During our first class, Dr. Salvadori explained...
The best comment I heard was actually the title of an essay on Dante’s “Inferno” for Literature Humanities: “To Hell with Dante”!
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1989
In the late 1980s, New York City seemed to have more car alarms than cars. By the time I arrived in Mornignside Heights in 1986, car alarms rang with such frequency that they rarely,...
School of Law 1989
It was 1987-1988 when Electrical Engineering was a still a popular major to pursue.
I still get shivers when I think of my E&M class with Professor Diamond. That was the mother of all weeding...
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1989
I imagine anyone who had the opportunity to be part of the Catholic community at Xavier while Fr. Paul Dinter was the Catholic chaplain will remember that time...
Columbia College 1989
After having attended a rather conservative and traditional high school, I was immediately excited and electrified by the freedom of my first semester at Columbia…the variety of intelligent classmates from all over the world made my first...
My religious experience at Columbia began from my first day moving in to John Jay hall as a Freshman, where I lived adjacent to an Orthodox Jewish student, a Muslim, a Buddhist and an atheist!...
I experienced snow “for the first time again” when, at my freshman dorm (John Jay), the whole floor went out to baptize my next door roommate (who was from India) with a good old fashioned snowball fight....
Mario Salvadore taught me to see the world differently: a transparent reality emerged, which is invisible to most. Salvadore taught a seminar called “Tower of Babel, or Why Buildings Stand Up.” It was a philosophical history course,...
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1989
My life is now a fast paced blur of events as I run though the treadmill of life with work, family, and the kids, however, first memories of Columbia are still sharp and...
I had a wonderful oportunity to take part in an Oxford summer study program while a junior at Columbia. Studying along with British and other American students in such a classic setting was memorable. I rememebr with...
I took a course at Barnard in 1983 called “Religious Ritual”–because I was personally interested in the subject and because I had heard of Elaine Pagels, who normally taught it. Unfortunately, she left Columbia just before the...
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1989, School of General Studies 1984
Walking in the crisp fall air at Columbia, I always wondered why my computer science lab was in this underground bunker type space next to the gym. It was 1985 and anyone who took a computer science...
When I was a student at the College, the most amazing place to sit back and relax was in front of Alma Mater on “the Steps.” On a spring or summer day, and even into early fall,...
I lived in the Schapiro residence hall the year that it first opened. It was (and I hope still is) an excellent dormitory. Perhaps the most bizarre experience of my life at Columbia was when URH had...
