From Dean Quigley and Vice President Dirks
A Letter to the Columbia Community
Dear Columbian,
In reflecting on their undergraduate years and on how Columbia changed their lives, many alumni will recall the small seminars, beginning with the Core Curriculum, in which they engaged with major thinkers of the past and with each other. They also remember with special fondness the professors who moved so readily between the research frontiers of their chosen fields and a Hamilton Hall seminar room. Their shared experience as Columbia undergraduates in a major research university leaves indelible memories of intense intellectual debate and sustained social and personal inquiry, activities that define habits of mind that often last a lifetime.
By any measure, Columbia offers an outstanding college education. Our student body, one of the most
talented and diverse in higher education, is drawn from an applicant pool that has grown at a record
rate over the last decade (the fall 2007 admit rate is the second 
best in the history of the Ivy League).
Our faculty are renowned for their path-breaking scholarship and their exemplary commitment to
teaching. We compete with the best, and the best-endowed, universities in the world for students and
professors, to whom we offer the unmatched experience of a thriving academic community on an Ivy
League campus in one of the world’s greatest urban centers for culture, finance, and communication.
At a time when institutions across the country are rethinking their undergraduate programs, Columbia College’s leadership represents one of the Universitys great strengths and presents it with one of its greatest challenges. The challenge is partly intellectual—how should we best characterize undergraduate education today?—and partly financial: Given the high cost of providing our students with the education their talents demand, and given our limited endowment relative to that of many of our peers, how do we sustain our leadership in this field, and how do we guarantee the same quality of education to future generations? What can we do today to provide the resources to continue to bring the best students and faculty to Columbia? How do we open the gates of opportunity still wider at a time when educational costs far outstrip tuition? And where should we look to ensure that Columbia continues to evolve in creative ways to meet our students’ changing academic, social, and professional needs? To answer these questions, we have engaged in an extensive process of institutional planning informed by the views of faculty, students, alumni, and friends. To help implement the plans that have emerged, we have launched The Columbia Campaign for Undergraduate Education, with an overall goal of $865 million.
For Financial Aid
Nothing characterizes Columbia more than the cumulative intellectual capacity and wide-ranging
diversity of its student body. The single biggest goal in the Campaign is to preserve that inclusive character
by building endowment for student financial aid, with a campaign objective of $400 million for Columbia
College alone. That is the only way to secure and strengthen the College’s need-blind admissions and
full-need financial aid programs that help bring to campus the very best students of their generation.
Campaign gifts will enable us to keep our current commitments, replace loans with grants for more
lower- and 
middle-income students, and increase financial aid to students from abroad. All admitted
students deserve full access to the Columbia educational experience and to a full range of career choices,
unimpeded by a heavy burden of debt. The nontraditional students in the School of General Studies also
have crucial needs in this area, and securing endowment for financial aid is the highest fundraising priority
of that school. Increased endowment for financial aid to undergraduates is so important that it represents
nearly half of the total undergraduate campaign goal.
In April of 2007, Columbia received the largest pledge ever for financial aid at any university, $400 million from John W. Kluge, Columbia College Class of 1937, of which $200 million will be directed to support students in Columbia College. John’s historic gift is in addition to the $110 million he has already donated to Columbia, largely for undergraduate students in the Kluge Scholars Program, created in 1987. His unprecedented generosity will change the course of thousands of lives, and it brings our ambitious Campaign goals within closer reach. But our hardest fundraising lies ahead of us. Nearly $160 million remains to be raised for financial aid in Columbia College alone, and meeting that goal will require significantly increased participation at all levels. Kluge himself thinks of his gift as a challenge to others, saying at the announcement: “I would like this gift to be a token of what alumni can and should do.”
For Integrated Student Experience
A college education today coordinates learning inside the classroom with experiential education outside the
classroom and with career education for life after graduation. Students live in residence halls not just for
convenience but to enable them to learn a lot from each other. A college community in an international
city helps advance social skills, personal development, leadership abilities, community responsibilities,
urban expertise, cultural understanding, and creative thinking. 
Student interaction with alumni helps them
learn not only about themselves, each other, and the world around them but also about how to present
themselves in the world of work, how to enter today’s global world of careers, and how to move about in
it. A successful campaign will enable us to increase substantially the number of academic advisors and
career counselors, strengthen residential life staff, leadership programs, internship opportunities, study
abroad options, and fellowship guidance, and also to improve the facilities and technological support these
initiatives require. Enhanced experiential education of every kind, coordinated closely with curricular
programs, will better prepare students to be leaders, innovators, and explorers in our world of social
diversity (both national and international), and to deal with global opportunity and responsibility.
For Faculty
The third pillar of The Columbia Campaign for Undergraduate Education is building endowment to
sustain our outstanding faculty, chiefly through the establishment of endowed professorships. By increasing
faculty across a range of departments, the University will be able to strengthen the undergraduate majors
and the Core Curriculum, 
to maintain coverage of foundational disciplines, and to create opportunities in
new interdisciplinary fields. A successful campaign will provide the resources to increase the size of the
professorial ranks teaching undergraduates by up to 10 percent. The creation of 50 new professorial chairs,
spurred on by a $37.5 million matching challenge established by University Trustee Gerry Lenfest (’58LAW)
at the September 2006 launch of the Campaign, will enable us to reward outstanding teacher-scholars,
to recruit and retain the best, and to build a larger full-time faculty for the long term.
To strengthen teaching in the Core Curriculum, we have also created, and seek to endow, a number of positions at the rank of postdoctoral lecturer. These are designed to enable some of the most outstanding new Ph.D.’s from Columbia and elsewhere to teach in the Core classroom for several years as they launch their academic careers.
To strengthen teaching in the departments, institutes, and centers, our priorities include endowment and ongoing support for programs through which faculty conduct research that integrates students into intellectual discourse. The Campaign will help fund the construction of a new interdisciplinary science building on the last available site on the Morningside campus, and it will support the renovation of laboratories, offices, and classrooms, incorporating the latest technology for teaching and learning.
The Campaign focuses us all on core academic needs at an auspicious moment. A Columbia education has never been more highly valued than it is now, and for good reason. We have an opportunity to strengthen for the long term the foundation upon which our undergraduate mission depends. By providing funds at whatever level they are capable, alumni and friends will also enable us to seize still unforeseen opportunities that lie ahead—to better educate our students, create new knowledge and understanding, and further serve our society and our world. The ambition of Columbia’s faculty and the energy and enthusiasm of our students make this potential seem limitless. We invite you to become our partners in our renewed efforts to build an even better Columbia.
Yours,
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| Nicholas R. Dirks | Austin E. Quigley |
| Vice President and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences | Dean of Columbia College |
