Memories tagged “Lectures”

A Civilian Freshman in Hartley Hall (June 1944) Graduating high school in early June 1944, I entered Columbia College to begin my freshman year the 2nd week of June. We freshman were on the fourth floor of the dorm, and...

Columbia College 1949

Almost Like Hercule Poirot! My favorite teacher definitely was Sig Grava, a distinguished guy who reminded me of Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot. He carried clippings from the New York Times into the classroom and thus connected theory with real...

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1990

AN ORIGINAL SAM Some of you will remember Sam. When I arrived at Columbia after the spring 1970 riots, he was sitting on Low Library steps or at the Broadway Gate selling his color abstracts. They were always of fanciful...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1972

Before a Seminar At Columbia, when you have an hour and a half before your next seminar, there is always a place to go. I imagine Universities–of Nebraska or Main or Iowa or New Mexico–and think their “places to go”...

School of the Arts 2006

Best Lecture I Heard While at Columbia “Define ‘American,’” Jai said. “Why do many of you call yourselves ‘American’ and not something else?” A few people tried the easy way out of tautology: “A citizen of the U.S. is an...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 2003

Best Lecture in College Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist and adjunct professor, taught a class on Freud in the early 70s. Gaylin was animated, brilliant, accessible, and captivated a huge room full of students for two hours a week. I usually...

Columbia College 1973, Graduate School of Journalism 1976

Best Lecture 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 was...

Columbia College 1986

Brilliance Personified The best teacher I had at Columbia was Professor Lloyd Motz. Beyond teaching a very interesting course in Astronomy, he gave me a real-life personification of what it was to truly be an intellectual. In every class I...

School of General Studies 1975

Civil War Draft Riots - Prof. Shenton 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 it...

Columbia College 1982

Columbia Universtiy and Orhan Pamuk Columbia University and Orhan Pamuk October 24, 2006 Columbia Universtiy in New York City became home to two new Nobel Laureates early in October this year when Prof. Edmund Phelps won the prize in economic...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1964, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1970

Combat Veterans I entered Columbia College in 1946 along with many combat veterans of World War II. I was 22 years old and one of the youngest veterans in my class. I had flown missions over Germany in B-17’s with...

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1953, Columbia College 1949

Community/Columbia Amidst graduate seminars at the Casa Hispanica, Teachers College, and SIPA, I worked at Community Impact’s adult education program where I supervised Columbia volunteers in ESL classes in Washington Heights, taught ESL and Spanish GED Social Studies. It’s really...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 2002, School of International and Public Affairs 2002, Teachers College 2002

Commuting at High Speed The dorms were full of midshipmen and v-12ers, and I lived in Hempstead, whence I commuted every day, running for the 7:20 train on the LIRR, then fighting my way into the B’way train that took...

Columbia College 1945

Dr. Charles Frankel – Five Years Later Dr. Frankel exposed this freshman to Contemporary Civilizations; each lecture, “lights” would go on! He wrote the basic history of contemporary thought. I recall inquiring on the first day of class what faculty...

Columbia College 1953, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1955

Engineering Detail for Every Shower I took a controls systems course with Dr Guy Longobardo. He was a great lecturer who could make tough concepts intuitively easy to grasp. One day he was explaining the major parameters affecting controlling and...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1968

full circle on a warm, sunny day, classes over, would sit on the sun dial and wait. and friends would walk by and sit and accumulate. and in the pre-cell phone/answering machine days, it was the best way to line...

Columbia College 1976

Ghana Be Good During my junior year (Spring 2003), I left for what would eventually become a life changing experience. I had originally been scheduled to study in South Africa, but at the suggestion of a couple of friends, I...

Columbia College 2004

Government Defined Professor Rothstein taught Government 101. His most brilliant lecture included a piercing analysis, the definition of government broken down to its lowest common denominator: “That group which has ‘legitimate’ access to violence.” The lecture occurred in 1963, right...

Columbia College 1966

Intellectual Honesty “The best lecture I ever heard at Columbia.” That stopped me in my tracks. I heard so many good ones, so many entertaining ones, even several that I remember in detail. Names crowd in, names of faculty and...

Columbia College 1972, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1974

King Lear and Professor Tayler Although at age 19 I had little understanding of Professor Tayler’s lectures on Shakespeare’s great tragedies, I knew enough to copy what he was saying as completely as I could. I recall him standing at...

Columbia College 1987, Teachers College 1994

Law to Layman Karl Llewelen, jurisprudence prof, left class after his point was made. 30 mins, 20 mins or whatever time it took. “Law to layman is a person walking down the street who looks up to see marble steps...

School of Law 1948

Look Up My spiritual experience at Columbia was, in a word: awful. Before becoming a student at Columbia I was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I grew up in Huntington, Long Island, New York. This was a great...

School of General Studies 1978

Mario Salvadore 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, in...

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1989

Mark Van Doren Mark Van Doren was my humanities teacher. One day in class, he asked a question and called on me. I wasn’t paying attention and asked him to repeat the question. He then apologized to me for not...

Columbia College 1954

Memorable Lecture In my 1939 freshman chemistry class, Professor Urey came into the class to tell us about the discovery of the neutron, which was not yet in our chemistry book.

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1939

My Best Teacher Even though it has been over 50 years since I was graduated from Columbia College, it took me less than a split second to come up with my “best teacher” nomination: Professor Boris Stanfield. Why? More than...

Columbia College 1955

My Favorite Professor The best professor I ( and many others) had was Gene Santomasso, who taught a very popular architecture course. He was a terrific guy, always interested in the students, but he really shone as an educator. His...

Graduate School of Business 1975, Columbia College 1973

My Favorite Teacher During my years at Columbia, I had many outstanding teachers in contemporary civilization, economics, and psychology, which was my undergrad co-major (with economics) and the concentration for my M.A. and Ph.D. In psychology, Clarence Graham, Nat Schoenfeld,...

Columbia College 1961, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1966

My Spiritual Pilgrimage at Columbia I was a fairly nominal Christian when I entered Columbia. During my second year, another engineering student, having heard via the grapevine that I was supposedly a Christian, invited me to his room each night...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1951

Porpoises and Philosophy It was the first lecture in a graduate course on German philosophy between Kant and Hegel. Dieter Henrich, a visiting professor from Germany, was giving the packed lecture hall an introduction to the subject, when a person...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1976

Professor Rice My Columbia education was a gift, especially having the opportunity to learn from Gene Rice. Each class with Professor Rice expanded my world and demonstrated the power of his unique first-person research. His lectures were perfectly crafted, totally...

Columbia College 1998

Psychological Religion During my time as a graduate psycholgy student 1948-52 I took completely elective courses on the Old Testament the New Testament. With another grad student I sat in on a course on Genesis given at Union Theological Seminary....

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1952

Quentin Anderson 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 of...

Columbia College 1980

Religion at Columbia I was a graduate student in sociology in the 1960’s. My wife and I, both white, lived in Woodbridge Hall at 115th and Riverside. Before we met, she had joined Church of the Master, a largely African-American...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1969

Religious Life as an Undergraduate As an undergraduate (1954-58) I went to services, including a few at St. Paul’s (at one, Billy Graham waved his gilt-edged Bible and impressed my friends who were interested in theater), some at Union Seminary’s...

Columbia College 1958

Shenton’s Army 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 Eric...

Columbia College 1988

Succinct as Could Be During freshman week we attended several lectures. The one that stayed with me and which I passed on to my children (Michele ‘86C, Benjamin ‘91C) is that of the late Harry Coleman. He said to us,...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1958

Summer in the City The celebration of graduation by law students is always just a little muted. In the back of your mind is always the dreaded bar exam. Columbia provided a fine legal education. I learned to “think like...

Graduate School of Journalism 1972, School of Law 1976

T.E.R. Singer’s Class It was a very hot day in June, 1959. We all were seated in Butler Hall, on the top floor, waiting for the professor to arrive. There was no air conditioning, and no fan in the room....

School of Library Service 1962

The Anabaptist Vision 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 American...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1980

The Armada Defeated Garrett Mattingly was a spell-binder who could keep history graduate students on the edge of their chairs while describing a story for which we all knew the ending. When he finished the lecture, there was breathless silence...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1956

The Best Thing Happened to Me in FRONT of the Butler Library It was an early spring-like Saturday morning in the fall of ‘04. I was brand new to June Cross’s news reporting seminar. I had always heard stories of...

Graduate School of Journalism 2005

The Everlasting Year I arrived at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in Sept. of 1967 from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was a year of many firsts for me: my first time in New York, my first subway ride,...

Graduate School of Journalism 1967

The Lectures Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my beloved Columbia University. I was drawn to share my anecdote when I read the question, “What’s your favorite part of campus?” I started thinking. As a graduate...

Graduate School of Journalism 2005

The Return of Mario Salvadori 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 his...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1988

Trying to Study When I was an undergrad, a lot of my mental energy, maybe too much of it, was expended in search of the perfect place to study. As an easily distracted student, I was always looking for a...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 2001, Columbia College 1998