President Mnookin has sent her first community-wide email in her new position as University President. She takes the opportunity to acknowledge the complexity of both the institution's founding history and its more recent history, while simultaneously weaving in a hopeful message of discovery and service. To the delight of our Department, she utilizes the function of a telescope as an analogy for Columbia's own pursuit of discovery and new horizons. It starts with an anecdote from early Columbia lore, when the University was said to have lent then-General George Washington a telescope that he used during the Battle of Long Island. Lamentably, the telescope never made its way back to Columbia (would this outstanding loan mean George Washington is the Department's oldest delinquent collaborator? One wonders...).
At the end of her email, she included a link at the end of the email for "a special first-day message," which thrilled our Department further when it redirected users to a welcome video filmed in the University's nearly 100-year-old Rutherfurd Observatory, which she points out is a place "from which Columbia has looked outward and upward." While members of our Department are hardly unfamiliar with this historic facility perched atop Pupin Hall, it may be less familiar to those in the Columbia community who do not spend much time on the north side of Morningside Campus.
The Department has additional cameos, like when the video cuts to an enormous weather balloon lifting off from the Antarctic ice sheet. Though she doesn't mention the experiment by name (but we will! It's the General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS) experiment), President Mnookin enthusiastically explains how only months prior, Columbia scientists (i.e., our very own Chuck Hailey and Kerstin Perez) released this balloon over the South Pole in search of dark matter, which she notes "remains one of the great unresolved mysteries of our universe" (we're working on it, President Mnookin!).
As the video wraps up, she asks us to remember that the work of inquiry and discovery is " a sentiment that surely echoes in the classrooms and hallways of Pupin Hall.
We'd like to issue a warm welcome to President Mnookin, and to reiterate her observation that the work of scholarship and discovery is "both a responsibility and a deep privilege."
Click here to watch President Mnookin's video in full
