 Welcome everyone. I'm happy to see all of you and to be able to open the fall semester together with today's conversation on the question of repair. Welcome to site and history, the first in a series of discussions that will continue throughout the academic year as part of our collective efforts to acknowledge and uncover the history of Columbia University's colonialist and discriminatory practices against black, indigenous, and people of color. In the past years, and especially this past summer, powerful voices around the country have risen to call on institutions to acknowledge this systemic racism that lies deep in their foundations and has enabled their edification, calling for a focus on these institutions' reliance on slavery to the support and promotion of racist discourses and practices. This emphasis is, rightfully, appending the bucolic image of the American campus as a kind of mythical knowledge paradise suspended outside political histories of violence to reveal instead how these seeds of power have and continue to be intimately connected with the violence they often prefer to undo. This violence is inscribed across university campus sites, buildings, monuments, and the plaques that often accompany them, rendering architecture and planning at the heart of what is erected and made visible and what is forgotten or erased. Witness in particular this summer's incredible convergence of the Black Lives Matter protest bringing powerful life and solidarity into public spaces and streets across cities in the U.S., or the removal of Woodrow Wilson's name from Princeton University's Public Policy School and Wilson College, or the inscribing of over 4,000 memory marks on the curvilinear wall of the recently completed Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in honor of the enslaved people who lived and worked at UVA between 1817 and 1865. Designed by Meejin Yoon and Eric Howler in collaboration with Mabel Wilson and many other voices, some of whom will come together here at GSAP on October 8th to share more about this incredible journey of the making of the project, the Memorial is a reminder of architecture's ability to make potent arguments and to begin to address historical and present wrongs. I also want to acknowledge that today is September 11, a day inscribed in our collective trauma memory. As we remember the tragic attacks and the loss of life that happened 19 years ago, we are also reminded of how in the aftermath of 9-11 architecture was collectively mobilized and seen as a symbolic power with the potential to produce meaning and clarity. Today, we turn to Columbia University to understand the work underway here to uncover our campus's own history of violence from how it came to occupy its current site in Manhattan and its relationship with the communities of Harlem, Manhattanville and Morningside Heights to beginning to understand in what ways we as architects, preservationists, planners, critics and developers can contribute to a process of repair. In 2016, GSAP and its publication, Arm Seaback, published a book on Manhattanville's making, giving space to the many voices that came into its process and development. This is a subject that needs to continue to be explored. But today we will focus on the main Morningside campus and its immediate surroundings from the university's founding to the turn of the 21st century. To fully consider this deep history, I begin this conversation with an acknowledgement of the Lenape. Though we are dispersed virtually today, we gather in Lenape Hoking the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations, and in acknowledging as a school that Columbia like New York City and the United States as a nation was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many indigenous peoples. GSAP is committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally and in the western tradition of architectural education specifically. So today to open up this very sort of important conversation, I'm very excited to be welcoming such distinguished speakers with whom we could spend the entire afternoon. And we certainly are going to spend part of the afternoon. Their buyers are too long almost to kind of could occupy the entire afternoon but I will introduce each of them briefly in order of the presentations. And I should say that we're thrilled and proud to report that each presenter as well as the moderator is a graduate of Columbia, half of them from GSAP. This connection with the campus and the university felt really crucial to us in organizing this first launch discussion. Erica Abrami is the James Marston Fitch Assistant Professor of Historic Reservation at GSAP and an alumna of the program. She's currently editing the third volume of the issues in preservation trilogy, which includes preservation and social inclusion, preservation and the new data landscape. And she is currently co-writing the article confronting exclusion, redefining the intended outcomes of historic preservation. Sorry, she's not currently, it was written which was published in the journal Change Over Time in 2018. Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and is one of this country's most prominent historians. He received his doctoral degree at Columbia under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. He's one of only two persons to serve as president of the three major professional organizations, the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association and Society of American Historians and one of a handful to have won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes in the same year. He's the faculty sponsor of the Columbia University and Slavery Project and the chief historical advisor for the award-winning PBS documentary series on reconstruction and its aftermath broadcast in 2019. Mark Barksdale is a Columbia GSAP alumnus, licensed architect, licensed professional planner and graduate attorney. He served as the director of planning, zoning and sustainability of the city of Newark from 2015 to 2017. He has also worked as senior architect at Metropolitan Hospital Center in Manhattan and as a health facilities planner for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. As a college student, he interned with the Harlem Office of the New York City Department of City Planning and for local community organizations such as the Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem and the Harlem East Harlem Model Cities Development Program on planning projects for the Harlem community with firms including IMP and partners as well as Roberta Washington Architects amongst others. Mindy Thompson-Foolilove is a professor of urban policy and health at the New School. Prior to joining the New School in 2016, she worked for 26 years as a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and was a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University where she also studied. Her research examines the mental health effects of environmental processes such as violence, segregation and urban renewal. Her most recent books are Main Street, How a City's Heart Connects Us All and From Enforcers to Guardians, a Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence with Hannah Cooper, both out this year. She is also the author of Root Chalk, How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods, Hurts America and What We Can Do About It published in 2016 when she was named an honorary member of the AIA for, I quote, advancing architecture and urban planning through her expensive knowledge of cities and the relationship between the built environment and the wellness of society. And last but not least, the panel will be moderated by Gallia Solomanov, who is an associate professor at GSAP, is an alumna of the architecture program and member of the university's global initiatives. Throughout her work, Gallia engages in discussions of art, architecture and how to further their public democratic mission in the cultural and political sphere. She designed too many beautiful projects to name today, but including much work with the Jewish Museum and the Dia Center amongst other. And it is now my pleasure to introduce and invite Erica Avrami to present and frame the conversation. Thank you all for joining today. Thank you very much Amal. Thank you for all of the colleagues at GSAP who helped to make this possible. I'm going to share my screen and put up some slides to share. So that while I'm speaking, you don't have to just look at me. And it also will give you a sense of the work that I'm trying to represent. Can everyone see my screen? Yes, okay. So I want to make a few comments before I speak about this work. First, I want to challenge common perceptions about the work of historic preservation. Many see preservationists as saving old buildings and places of significance. However, preservationists fundamentally about interrogating the layered histories of the built environment to understand spatial conditions over time and the social, political, environmental, and economic forces that shaped them. In that sense, the built environment is not simply a visual or physical representation of stories and publics and power, but a spatial experience of them. We encounter histories and stories in the built environment. We don't just read them or see them. And this underpins the work of the studio I'm about to present and the Historic Preservation Program writ large within the GSAP community. Secondly, I want to acknowledge that this is not my work. This is just a fraction of the work of 25 historic preservation students in their spring 2019 studio. I coordinated the studio and co-taught it with professors Tim McGill, Belmont Freeman, and Andrew Dolecart. And we had tremendous support from other faculty and staff within Columbia and members of the Morningside Heights and Manhattanville communities. Thirdly, I want to be clear about who I am and my positionality. I'm a product of Columbia. I'm a graduate not only of GSAP but also of Columbia College. I'm also its employee. In that sense, I am both privileged and biased by not only the education and opportunities that the institution affords me but by my whiteness. But I developed this studio and asked students to think critically about Columbia's past and creatively about its future because I believe that this kind of deep interrogation of the past and a reckoning with its implications can lead us to a more just institution and a more just spatial environment. So most of you probably know that the occupation of Morningside Heights by institutions, the Dean has already spoken about the fact that we are as an institution on what were traditionally Lenape lands, unceded Lenape lands. But once institutions started to take root within the Morningside Plateau, New York Hospital's Bloomingdale Asylum was the first to establish a space and claim space in Morningside Heights. St. John the Divine followed St. Luke's Hospital. Riverside Church was part of those early institutions establishing and claiming space within Morningside Heights. And of course, Columbia University, this is the rendering of McKinney, McKinney, and Whites master plan. Columbia was moving its campus from downtown. It made the decision in 1893 to move to this northern area of Morningside Heights. And it originally purchased the property between 116th and 120th Street and actually in the foreground of this image you can see remnants of the Bloomingdale Asylum. As the population of the area grew with the institutional development as well as industrial development to the north in Manhattanville, so did the built environment and so did the footprint of the built environment. We see the IRT coming in in 1904 and the institutions continued to grow around that rail line. We also saw an expansion residential properties within the neighborhood. On the left you can see 1905, just a few residential buildings. By 1916 on the right we've seen a significant expansion of residential properties in the area. Now as institutions developed in size and prestige in the next decades, more students and faculty were attracted to the area. And you can see here on the right a list of the primary institution that were occupying space around 1920. These institutions went on to form an organization called Morningside Heights Incorporated whose mission was a long range imaginative and bold plan for community development that would be organized. The community would be spiritual, cultural, and an intellectual center of the world. And so began this collaboration, this somewhat complicit collaboration to valorize the role of institutions within the Morningside Heights area so as to ensure the development and the ongoing development of these institutions for their educational, spiritual, and cultural purposes. In this process, they further solidified the idea of the Acropolis. And it was in fact when St. John the Divine was being developed that this Morningside Heights area first got coined as the Acropolis. And in doing so Morningside Heights Incorporated took on a number of public endeavors to create public housing through partnerships, but also in doing the survey work and doing the legwork on the ground to determine where housing might go. As a result, between 1950 and the current day, we saw a significant expansion not only of the footprint of those institutions but also of New York City Housing Authority buildings. You see on the left here the tenements that were removed in order to construct Morningside Gardens. We also see in the construction of the law school and Revs in Plaza which reaches over Amsterdam Avenue the way in which the campus was also moving to the east. Mark will be talking a little bit more about how the university attempted to move even further east with the construction or the proposed construction of a gym in Morningside Park. And you see here today or at least last year this is now the footprint of those institutions in the Morningside Heights community. And you can see the way in which they have shaped the landscape, shaped our physical experience, but also potentially displaced so many communities. And in fact, there was a tremendous amount of institutional agency and influence in displacing communities. As I mentioned earlier, Morningside Heights Incorporated was actually doing surveys, going out and doing many census work to identify who lived in the neighborhood, what their ethnic and racial characteristics were. They were also determining what was blight or what they considered to be blight by doing physical surveys of buildings and attempting to identify what might be in a good position for redevelopment. They planned family relocations which, of course, eventually led to displacement, particularly of communities of color northwards and eastwards. We saw an increase in income levels, education levels, etc. in the areas immediately surrounding the Morningside Heights campus. And the media was complicit in this. Not only was Morningside Heights Incorporated pushing this, they were working in partnership with the New York City government, but the media helped frame a discourse around this idea of blight and the need for urban renewal. And this was happening throughout New York City and throughout cities across the United States. So Columbia and the Morningside Heights community were not alone in this. But it's important to recognize the way in which that dialogue and the use of words like human wasteland contributed to rationales for continuing to develop and displace. Of course, there was backlash and communities tried to push back against this. The community to save our homes was an important player in all of that. You can see some of their letters and pamphlets. And fundamentally, it created a tremendous amount of distrust between Columbia as an institution and the community who lived around that institution. Columbia was a builder. It was claiming a lot of space. And even within the Morningside Heights Incorporated Coalition, Columbia was the most significant player. And in addition to claiming space and displacing people, part of what was happening over the course of the 20th century was Columbia was fortifying itself against that community as well, physically fortifying itself against that community. Here you see an early image of the way in which low library looked out upon the city and the openness around that. But if you look over time, you can see that the campus fortified itself. It built walls, not only through buildings and the way in which people experienced the perimeter of the campus as pedestrians, but also more purposefully, an expansion, as I mentioned earlier, of the law school to the east and the creation of refs and plaza. There was a particular dialogue about trying to separate the campus more from the community. The idea was that, you know, this would be an isolated space for contemplative learning. And the more that we could separate these buildings and these places from the noise and the busyness of the surrounding community, the better the institution would be. And that rhetoric played out in the way in which the law school, for example, has no sort of way of looking inside it at that base level, at that sidewalk level. And for anyone who's been under refs and plaza, we know that it's a rather frightening tunnel. In addition, there were gates. And for those of you who are under the impression that the gates that now cover those entryways on 116th Street on both Broadway and Amsterdam, that they were part of the original McKinney and White plan, they were not. And in fact, they were not proposed until the time of the creation of the law school in the 1950s. Before, as you can see here in the 1930s, it was an open street. The street got closed first to public traffic, basically to car traffic. We see this design by Harrison and Abramowitz in 1957 again, while the development work is happening for East Campus. And then we see the gates come in in 1970. And there was clear rhetoric, as you saw from the earlier image that I had up, about maintaining security. Now, all of that, you know, really leads us to believe that there was a lot of intentionality on the part of the university to separate its students, its faculty, its community from the rest of the community. At the same time, I believe that there was so much happening within this institution, and particularly during multiple examples of protests over Columbia State. And I think that something that the students found as they dug deeply into this history was that the campus space, although it may be exclusionary, although it may have created barriers, although it may have claimed space and displaced communities, and it must be held accountable in some way for that, it also created space that afforded opportunities for speaking truth to power. And in some ways, what we then challenged our students to do was think about that idea of speaking truth to power and creating something more physical. How do we design truth to power? How do we think about spaces being a form of confronting power and acknowledging injustice and trying to write those scales of justice? So thank you very much. And for those of you who are not familiar with the banner at the top, another form of protest on Columbia's campus. Professor Foner. Yes. Well, I want to thank my colleagues and friends in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, everything for inviting me to take part in this discussion here. I'm retired actually, so I don't get to Columbia either physically or virtually all that much anymore. Like my predecessor here, I'm a Columbia product. I was an undergraduate and graduate student here. I taught elsewhere for a while, then I came back and was a professor in the history department for many years. So Columbia certainly has shaped my education and academic career. What I want to talk about today is a little earlier, I guess, than what we just heard about, even earlier than the move up to Morningside Heights in the 1880s and 90s. Columbia's deep history in connection with slavery, anti-slavery, and what we call the Columbia and Slavery Project, which was initiated a few years ago with, I have to say, the support financial and otherwise of President Bollinger and his office. And it's an ongoing project. It consists of basically of students in a research seminar every year writing papers based on original research about the history of Columbia and its connection to slavery, the legacy of slavery, race relations, etc. I was lucky enough to direct this project for a while. It's now in the hands of several of my colleagues and former colleagues in the history department. But as I say, the thing to really emphasize is how much research and writing was done by students in uncovering this very little known history of our institution. Now, Columbia is not Georgetown, which owned hundreds of slaves in the 19th century and very famously sold over 200 of them at one time in the 1830s in order to to, you know, stabilize their finances. It's not the University of Virginia, which was constructed by slave labor, nor Clemson University in the South, which was constructed by convict labor in the late 19th century. We're not a Southern institution. But nonetheless, slavery was deeply connected or Columbia was deeply connected with the institution of slavery from the beginning. By the way, speaking of site specific discussions, Columbia actually has the unique situation, I think, among Ivy League schools that it moved twice. Harvard is in the same place it always was. So is Yale, etc. But Columbia started out way downtown as King's College near where Trinity Church now is. In the 1850s, it moved up to what is now Rockefeller Center, selling its land way downtown. And that sale made it instantaneously the richest university in the country for the time being. And then as you heard in the 1890s, we moved up to Morningside Heights. Sadly, because of those moves, a lot of the records of the university no longer exist. Our historical, the documentation that exists of the early history of Columbia is pretty thin compared to many of our so-called peer institutions. Nonetheless, it is certainly clear that Columbia was founded as King's College in 1754. And while the college did not own slaves, everybody connected with it did more or less. The first presidents, Samuel Johnson, the first president and his successors, most of them were slave owners. But maybe more important even the money, to follow the money, the money for Columbia came from well-to-do New York City merchants. This was a merchants college. The board of trustees or the governors, as they call them, were mostly prominent merchants. Some of them were ministers in the Episcopalian Church, to be sure. Many of the students, or male, of course, then came from merchant families that owned slaves themselves. Now, again, this is not a plantation society. Those who owned slaves generally owned household, people who labored in their households, a few slaves. But they were all familiar with the institution of slavery. Slavery was a major factor in the economy of New York City into the late 18th century. At the time of the American Revolution, the population of New York City was about 19,000, of which 3,000 were slave laborers, mostly working, as I said, in people's homes. But they were farms in New York City too, and there were slaves working on many of these farms as well. But the main point is this was a commercial city, and its commerce was basically with the West Indies. So New York merchants became rich by transporting the goods produced by slaves in the West Indies, notably sugar, of course, and selling agricultural products, basically, grown in New York to the West Indian islands. Some of them were also involved in the Atlantic slave trade. There were some governors or trustees of Columbia who were slave traders, and there are now online, there's now online information about all these slave voyages, and some Columbia figures pop up as owners of some of these ships. There are many runaway slave ads in colonial newspapers in New York, and indeed after the Revolution, for slaves seeking to retrieve slaves owned by people connected with King's College, or Columbia as it became after the Revolution, seeking to retrieve those who had run away. So if you add up the number of people involved with slavery and the money coming from dealing in slaves and in the products produced by slaves, you find that King's College was very closely connected with the institution of slavery. This is deeply rooted in our institutional history. Now, just as in many other aspects of life, the American Revolution raised the question of the future of slavery in this new nation, and a kind of mild anti-slavery movement developed during and after the Revolution, known as the New York Manumission Society, and some prominent Colombians were actively involved. The first president was John Jay, a graduate of Columbia, and also later on the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Our most famous graduate, although actually graduate is a misnomer, our most famous dropout, Alexander Hamilton, also was, although he had been raised early on in the West Indies, he came to the American colonies here, he was sort of vaguely anti-slavery. He criticized slavery, but he married into a prominent slave-owning family, the Skyler family. Those who have seen the musical know all about this, more or less, as long as you don't take it too seriously as history. Very entertaining. But anyway, Hamilton was also a figure in the Manumission Society, and the Manumission Society encouraged slave owners to voluntarily free their slaves in New York City, which many of them did, and it pressed for a law which was eventually passed in 1799 for the gradual abolition of slavery in New York State. It was very gradual. New York didn't completely rid itself of slavery until 1827, and so even into the early 19th century, there are Columbia professors, Columbia trustees who owned a few slaves, although slavery declines pretty rapidly in New York from the 1790s onwards. The Manumission Society is sometimes considered lacking in backbone compared to the more radical anti-slavery movement of the 1820s, 30s, 40s, et cetera, but actually they did some very valuable things. They set up the African free schools to educate people who had become free. They said, well, you can't just free people who would deny education and leave it at that, so they put in money to try to educate African Americans in New York City. They monitored the implementation of the gradual emancipation law, and when some slave owners in the city tried to violate the law by shipping slaves out of state to be sold, which was against the law, they stepped in to try to stop it, but they certainly, they were rather an elite group. They were all white. There were no black members of the Manumission Society, but nonetheless there were some, a good number of Columbians had a connection to that society. If you want a more radical kind of anti-slavery, you won't find it at Columbia. In fact, basically the only real radical abolitionist connected with Columbia before the Civil War was John Jay II, the grandson of John Jay, the Manumission man, and John Jay II, who was an undergraduate here in the 1830s, became a pretty prominent New York City abolitionist. He was a lawyer. He fought in court to help fugitive slaves try to prevent them from being sent back to the South. He was a Garrisonian, the radical wing of the abolitionist movement, but you won't find too many of them in Columbia in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, 50s, et cetera. Another thing you won't find at Columbia in that period, which sets us apart from other institutions such as Harvard or Princeton or Yale, is there were no Southern students here at Columbia, and we're still downtown, remember, around Trinity Church. There were no dormitories, so you had to have a place to live, and a few, if any, Southern unlike Princeton, where half the students were from the South, and then when the Civil War broke out, went down and fought in the Confederate Army. You didn't have the Southerners here. You did, though, at PNS, the medical school, which was founded in the early 19th century. It was part of Columbia, then it wasn't part of Columbia, then it was part of Columbia again. The medical school was in the news the other day because President Bollinger announced that Bard Hall, one of the main residence halls up there at the medical campus, was being renamed. It's unclear after whom right now, but Samuel Bard, who was one of the founders of PNS, the College of Physician and Surgeons, and a very prominent physician of that time, was a significant slave owner also. In 1810, he owned, I think, about 10 or 12 slaves, which was quite a few for us of New Yorker as late as 1810. Because of a movement of students and faculty at PNS to change the name, so as not to honor him as a slave owner, this is finally being done now. It indicates the connection. Many more Southerners studying medicine up there at PNS and they objected strenuously to the possible presence of any African Americans, any Black students at PNS. One Black student was discovered, so to speak, by these Southern students. He's very light-skinned and been admitted to PNS. He'd studied and suddenly someone discovered he was Black by the American definition of Black, the so-called one-drop rule, one ancestor, etc. He was expelled by the faculty for being Black, basically, from PNS. A few three or four Black students were admitted to PNS and in fact graduated in the late 1830s. Why were they there? Well, the reason is they were being trained to be doctors in order to go to Liberia, which had been set up by the American Colonization Society as a place that emancipated slaves would voluntarily or forcibly go once they were free. These three or four Black students were forced to sign an agreement that after they graduated, they would leave the country. That was the only basis on which they could get an education. A couple of them did. One refused when he graduated, therefore his degree was rescinded or not bestowed, but he did remain in New York City as a kind of physician after that. Of course, there were no Black students at Columbia College at that time. In fact, Columbia would be one of the last of the Ivy League schools to have any Black students, unlike some of the others who had a few, a handful, before the Civil War. Columbia didn't have any. A student from Liberia was admitted to what they called the School of Mines in the 1870s or sort of like an engineering school. But as far as I can tell, the first African American student at Columbia College was in the early, around 1906 or 7, and they're much later than Harvard or Dartmouth or places like that, but a lot earlier than Princeton. I do have to say, I think in Princeton, the first ones from the 1940s. After the Civil War, of course, now during the Civil War, Columbia sided with the Union. The President of Columbia was a strong advocate of emancipation of the slaves. Columbia became a target by this time we're living, we're up there around the 50th Street where Rockefeller Center is now. The New York City draft riot of 1963, the mob, mostly Irish immigrants, resentful of the draft and resentful of Black people who they blame for the war. They burned the colored orphan asylum, which was at 43rd and 5th. Fortunately, the children were evacuated before the building was burned. And then they made their way up about seven or eight more blocks to try to attack Columbia. The President of Columbia rapidly got a Roman Catholic priest to come and address the rioters and tell them to go home, which they did, fortunately for Columbia. But Columbia was associated with the Union war effort, in other words. It was associated with emancipation at this point. It was associated with raising Black soldiers to fighting the Civil War. After the war, however, it went back to its normal status of having little or nothing to do with African American New Yorkers. And I'm going to stop in a minute because one could go on and on about this. But I do want to make the point, as I said, that even though Columbia was very late to admit Black students as undergraduates, it was actually very open in the early 20th century to African American graduate students. If you look at the Black intelligentsia, the academic intelligentsia of, let's say, the 1920s and 30s, a lot of them got their degrees at Columbia, PhD degrees. And Teachers College here trained a lot of Black students to go out and become teachers. So it's a kind of funny thing of exclusion at the undergraduate level, but a certain openness, much greater openness than many other Northern universities at the graduate level. The only other thing that I want to mention, and you heard this in the previous speaker, is Columbia's long-fraught relationship with the community around it. You heard about its move uptown. You heard about the efforts to sort of get rid of quote-unquote slums and this sort of thing. Certainly in the 1950s, there was a strong sentiment among the trustees to move Columbia altogether to Westchester County because the surrounding neighborhood with migration from the South and from Puerto Rico, the surrounding neighborhood was becoming racially and ethically undesirable as far as the leaders of the university were concerned. Columbia did not move to Westchester, thankfully, but it began buying up residential buildings in what is considered the Columbia neighborhood in order to make sure who was living nearby. And as you heard, it began expanding eastward toward Harlem. This eventually culminated in the student uprising of 1968. One of whose demands was to stop building a gymnasium in which the university was going to be building in Morningside Park there, which is a public space, of course, but was going to be a private gymnasium with a small, separate, and very unequal little gym in the bottom for community residents. Even today, of course, Columbia and the local community have tensions, not necessarily unlike those that other universities have, town and gown kind of tensions, fears about crime, fears about homelessness, fears about the wrong kind of people moving into the neighborhood. So let me just stop by saying that those who want to pursue this history more, I direct you or commend you to look at the website, just Google Columbia University and Slavery, and you will find a much longer report that I wrote. You will find papers written by some of these undergraduate students, you will find videos that they created, and it's a very good project, and it is keeping, it is still going strong. And as I say to their credit, it still is getting support from the administration, from the president, even if some of its findings do not show the university in the most flattering light. So thank you for listening, and I will stop there. Thank you so much. Mark? Can you see me? Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Great. Thank you. And I just want to, before I start the presentation, my presentation, just give thanks to Dean Andreos and Associate Dean Cohen and Lyla Cotelia for making it possible for me to be here today and for inviting me. And I feel honored to be among such distinguished scholars on this panel. I don't feel I measure up, but there's something perhaps that I can add to the conversation. And being that today is 9-11 and we remember the anniversary of this event. I just wanted to speak a moment about that and how it relates to me, because on that day in 2001, I was working for the city of Newark. And I usually, on that particular day, would take public transportation from Manhattan to Newark. And that particular day, I took the A train down to the World Trade Center, where I would transfer over to the pass train, which took me to Newark. And that morning was a beautiful morning, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me. So by the time I got to my office and sat down and got comfortable in my chair, I started getting reports that a plane had struck the World Trade Center, and I couldn't believe it. So we had a little Black and White TV set up in the lunch area of the building where I worked. And we went in there, my co-workers were in there to watch what was going on. The only thing we could see were images of the smoke rising from one of the towers at first. And the only station I was broadcasting was the Spanish language station, so I didn't understand what was being said, but we could see the images on the TV. And from the image, I could see that there was this huge gaping hole in the building in the first tower that was struck. And now from my own training as an architect and training with structural engineering, I could tell that the building was in imminent danger of collapse because of this theory of the structural phenomenon called the imminent, I'm sorry. Anyway, it was an eccentric load applied to the building because of this hole. So I could tell that there was going to be some, there was a huge amount of structural damage to the building. And I could tell that there was going to be some damage that could result in collapse of the building. But yet I felt helpless. I felt helpless. I couldn't do anything. I was just watching this on the television. And little did I know that the workers, the people that were in the building were being told by the security people in the building to stay in their offices and shelter in place, close their doors and shuttle in place. Yet I knew that the building was in imminent danger of collapse. So sure enough, an hour later after the first attack, we could see now it took an hour because you have to remember that this plane hit the building full force and the temperature from the fuel in the jet was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. So that was high enough to actually melt the supports between the floor girders and the columns. And that caused the building to collapse like a pancake, both towers. And it was just a horrifying experience for me to watch and feel so helpless to see that happen. Now, I had a colleague, a fellow architect who actually was in the building at the time that the first plane hit. He was there to deliver some documents, I think, to the Port Authority. And so he delivered the documents. And as he was walking out the building, bodies were falling from the sky. And a body actually fell and hit the ground right next to him, still strapped into the airline seat. And they just completely freaked him out. So today will always have special meaning to me. You know, it's more than just an event I reread about in the history books or watch on TV. It's a very personal thing to me to survive and to be here today to talk about that. So now, today I want to actually discuss three questions as part of my presentation. By the way, before I thought that I just wanted to challenge Professor Foner just a little bit because he mentioned how Columbia or King's College at the time when it was founded was all white. And he mentioned Alexander Hamilton and the New York Men and Mystery Society being all white. But we know that Alexander Hamilton, his mother was a mixed race woman. And so by the definition of the one drop rule, he would actually be considered black. So he may be considered the first black student for King's College, Columbia University and Men and Mystery Society. So we can maybe debate about that. But you know, I think, you know, using that one drop rule definition, he may actually have been the first black student at King's College. So now I'm going to switch over to my presentation. If I can just do this. Is everyone seeing this? And I need to switch over to Shia. Okay. So today, are you still hearing me? Can you still see me? Okay. So today I want to address three questions. First being the who, the how and the why on and when I'm talking about the who I'm talking about who am I, you know, why am I part of this conversation? Now, on the surface, we can say that I am, you know, a double degree alumnus of GSAP. I'm licensed architect, and I'm a licensed professional planner, and the former director of planning for the largest city in New Jersey. The how I want to talk about is how did, and we've talked in Erica's presentation a bit, and also Professor Bohn's presentation about how Columbia University ended up being in Morningside Heights. So that has been covered. So I may just add a little bit more to that. And then the why? Why are we here? Why am I here today? Why are we here today? So excuse me. So this is my great grandmother. My great grandmother on my mother's side of the family, and she was born a slave on a plantation in South Carolina in 1852. Now, you can see by her complexion, you know, she wasn't completely African, but her mother was a slave on a plantation, a 14-year-old girl who became pregnant by the plantation owner's son. And the plantation owner was a man named Robert Austin, who eventually became governor of South Carolina. So, you know, there's this little known and little discussed story about slavery, about how slave owners were creating their own slaves on their plantation. Why is that? Why is that is because it was a law that Congress, the U.S. Congress passed in 1807 called the Slave Importation Act, which banned the importation of slaves beginning as of January 1st, 1808. So the slave, the plantation owners could no longer import slaves from Africa, and so what they started to do was create their own slaves. And so this, my grandmother, was a product of the slave owner's family and a young 13-year-old slave who became pregnant, gave birth to her when she was 14. And you have to remember at that time slaves were considered property, shadow property. They were no better than any farm animal that may have existed on the plantation. They had no rights. They were not citizens. And the fact that, you know, they were not citizens was enforced in the Dred Scott decision of 1856, which the Chief Justice, Chief Justice Tawny, actually wrote that decision and actually stated in that decision that black people, whether they are slave or free, were not U.S. citizens and had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. So this particular Supreme Court decision was a catalyst for the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. And that's a war where 600,000 soldiers gave their lives. It was the deadliest war that the United States has ever fought. I hit the wrong button. Let's try this. So my great-grandmother, Amarenza, had six children shown in this photograph. Four of those children actually left Charleston and they made their way to New York. They migrated to New York. They were migrants as opposed to immigrants because of the conditions in the South. The two on the left remained in Charleston. The one that was second from the left actually was a doctor, medical doctor, became a director of the hospital in Charleston. They treated African American patients. So my grandfather's in the middle, the third from the left, and he made his way to Harlem because he wanted to get out of the South because of the horrific conditions in the South. And this is in Harlem is where he met his wife, who was from the South also from North Carolina. In fact, all of my grandparents were from the South, either from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. And so they met and formed the family in Harlem. And one of those children that they had was my mother on the right in this photograph. And we can see the progress from slavery to the point where I became a graduate of Columbia University within the space of 100 something years. And those are my siblings on the left by my mother's second marriage. And so this photograph was taken in 1976 in front of Low Library. But going back to the history of the University, we can see from this image, from this map, the site where the University would eventually locate. And it was occupied by what is called an insane asylum. We don't use that terminology anymore. But it was the Bloomingdale insane asylum. And that actually is the site where Low Library was built. And we can see that the area around was pretty much vacant. It was an area that was still undeveloped. And so, you know, Columbia University at the time in the 1890s had plenty of room to locate there and to expand. But it was with actually the opening of the subway, New York City subway in 1804, that created this development explosion, particularly in upper Manhattan. So as we go forward, we can see that as Professor Avrami mentioned, you know, there was a lot of development took place after the opening of the subway. And actually that first subway went from, and if you don't know the history of the subway, went from City Hall in Lower Manhattan up to 42nd Street across 22nd Street and then up Broadway to 145th Street. So it was perfect. This area was perfect for development because it was, you know, a rapid transit system, a public transit system that provided easy access from upper Manhattan to lower Manhattan where a lot of businesses were. So this image of the campus, as we've seen before from Professor Avrami's presentation, we can see in the 1920s that the campus actually ended around 114th Street. This was at a time when Butler Library hadn't even been built. And that didn't happen until the 1930s. And the campus actually, if you look at the top of the image, you'll see that it pretty much ended around 118th Street, I'm not exactly sure. But it's not what we know as Columbia University today. So fast forward to 1966. And Columbia University is having all of these pressures to expand. They have this desire to expand. And they're noticing that their gymnasium was not up to snuff in terms of matching the facilities of other Ivy League universities. So they decided, well, we're going to, we want to create a new gymnasium that's state of the art. But there was very little land left. So the university said, well, let's expand to the east into Morningside Park, a public park. We're going to put our gymnasium in a public park, and we're going to cut it off to everyone else except university students. Now, that was the plan in 1966. The construction actually started in 1968. Construction started in late April 1968. Now, you have to remember back to 1968. 1968 was a time of great revolution in the United States. We were, Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated on April 4, 1968. Bobby Kennedy, our President Kennedy's brother was running for president that year. He was assassinated in June of 1968. Students were upset about the Vietnam War and the university's complicity with the war effort. You have to remember that Columbia University was the site of the Manhattan Project and that where the atomic bombs were developed that were deployed over Japan in World War II. There was also an organization that was connected with the federal government called the Institute for Defense Analysis that was housed on the campus. So the students, you know, when the Black students, particularly on campus, discovered that construction on this gymnasium was starting in late April and that community residents wouldn't be allowed to use the gymnasium. They took to the campus and demonstrated and demonstrated to the point where they actually took over Hamilton Hall. And so a lot of the white students also were sympathetic and they came and occupied the hall also, but they had a larger agenda more than just the gymnasium. And the attempt by the university to take over part of this public part for private gymnasium. So the white students on campus wanted to expand the conversation to also the Vietnam War, which was going on at the time and wanted to protest the Vietnam War as well as the gymnasium. And so it was a compromise made between the Black students and the white students where Black students said, okay, well, we're going to continue occupying Hamilton Hall. And the white students agreed to go and occupy Low Library. So there was a split, but eventually students on campus eventually ended up occupying I think at least five buildings on campus. Hamilton, Low, Bayer Weather, and Ferris-Booth Hall, which is now I think Lerner Hall, the Student Activities Center. And I think there was maybe one other building. And that those protests on campus were shut down the entire university. And we can see on the right this poster that was handed out to rally students to protest the construction of this gym. And which eventually, and it was the plan words because Jim Crow was an anachronism for the segregation laws that were in place in the United States during the period between Pussy versus Ferguson and Brown versus Board of Education decision. So they were known as Jim Crow laws. And I think maybe even during reconstruction, I think Professor Poner can probably expand on the definition of Jim Crow. But anyway, it was a plan words. But it catalyzed the students. And it was the reason why there were so many protests on campus. And eventually, as the construction started, students attempted to tear the fence down at the construction site in late April. The first demonstration started on April 23. And by as we can see here, they were occupying the buildings. They had completely taken over Hamilton Hall. They had taken over the dean's office in Hamilton Hall. And they were also occupying Low Library. That was a time of revolution. Perhaps students today don't have a complete comprehensive, comprehensive. But 1968 was also the year of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And the birth of students for Democratic Society, SDS and the underground, a lot of other revolutionary groups among students. And it was not just at Columbia, but Columbia catalyzed protests among students at universities all across the country, including Berkeley and California. So what happened? They were there in the hall occupying Hamilton Hall. And they were there for a week. And finally, the university said, we've had enough. So the university decided to call in the police. And over 1,000 police showed up on the campus on April 30th to make arrests. Over 700 students were arrested. But, and we can see local community people and people who were in support of the demonstrations were there at the construction site to stop the construction from going forward. So as a result of all the demonstrations, with the students, the university administration negotiated with the students and the community. They came to a resolution where they would stop the construction of the gymnasium. But we can see in this photograph, there's still scars in the park where, on the left, where the construction had actually been started. So this is part of the reason why, why I'm here today to talk about that history. But another reason is because of Dr. King and his assassination made the university have a conversation among yourself, you know, what are we doing and how can we answer to Dr. King's legacy in the United States. So as a result of Dr. King's assassination, the university opened up and became more diverse in terms of its student body. And I guess I was a beneficiary of that in 1973 when I became a student at Columbia. But the other reason why I'm here today also is to remember George Floyd and how he catalyzed demonstrations and protests all across the United States as a result of his murder. And so it was because of him that we're having a conversation today and why I'm here. And there are many other people like me who could be here, but fortunately the university decided that, you know, I would be the one to talk about some of this history and why we're having this conversation today. So I'd like to thank you, thank everyone for putting up with me for these few minutes to talk a little bit about the university and its history in terms of the tension it's had with the community. I also, you know, wanted to mention that as an undergrad, I worked for an organization called the Architectural Neural Committee in Harlem. I did a lot in terms of planning work for the community. I also worked for the Harlem East Harlem Model Cities program, which did some planning work also for the community. But there's always been this tension between the university up on the hill on the Apropolis and the slow income community below in Harlem. And even today, even most recently at December of last year, we've seen this tension flare up with the unfortunate death of Tessa Majors, who was an undergraduate student, Barnard. So with that, I want to thank you and we can move on to the next presentation. Thank you so much, Mark. Dr. Fulila? Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me and really enjoyed everything that's been said so far. As I'm a psychiatrist and not a historian, I thought I would just, and I also don't work for Columbia University anymore. Thank God. What I thought I would do is just talk about Columbia and me. So as was mentioned, I'm a graduate of Columbia. I have a master's in nutrition and I have my MD from Columbia University. But what I wanted to talk about today was, for some reason, this reminded me of a conference I was at in February. I was actually thinking the conference had to be in 2019 because we've been in lockdown for a long time, but actually it was in February. It was just shocking to think about how strange time is in this lockdown period. But I was at a wonderful conference by the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference. It was called Decade of Destiny, Engaging the Powers. And this is from Ephesians and the three verses that are relevant are put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness in this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God that you may be able to understand in the evil day and having done all to stand. The conference was a wonderful time to engage with very senior Black clergy, some of whom I've known for many years, and to really understand how they thought about this. This set of verses are commonly referred to as powers and principalities and the recognition that we're in struggle with powers and principalities, that it is what this is about. So my understanding of this as powers and principalities started when I was in Columbia as a student in both of those programs, that Columbia was always a mixed bag. There were certainly cutting edge concepts in my nutrition program, which really is the foundation of my approach to the world. We learned about sort of nutrition from molecules to society. So we studied how vitamins act at the level of molecules, but we also looked at how hunger and other kinds of problems are created by society. But I also had the extraordinary experience of thinking that the director of the program, Myron Winnick, might like to help out in Newark, New Jersey, where colleagues of mine were working. And so he came to visit but was so arrogant and so intolerant of the black leadership in Newark that they kicked him out. It was really shocking to me to see that. So the sort of ways in which classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia were always present. There was always there. So then I went to medical school and certainly in medical school there were lots of opportunities to see these things. At that time, the structure of the hospital was that there was a whole hospital for wealthy white people. And then the Presbyterian Hospital was for poor people who lived in the neighborhood. The encroachment of the hospital on the neighborhood was a constant presence. And then within the medical school itself, or within all the whole structure of it, it was run by white men. And then down at the bottom, the people who had the lowest paying jobs were people who were black and brown. As a black student, they are so grateful that they were there because they helped take care of me and helped buffer on the experience of being in that kind of structural classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, the ways in which that comes at you. Which is what I think is like why you have to put on the whole armor of God. However you want to think about that metaphorically. That sometimes the people who are cleaning the hospital who are black and brown people are the armor of God when you're a black student in that kind of isolation and that kind of hostility. So I would say that I encountered Columbia as a corporate actor most dramatically when I published my book, Ruchak. So I came to the study of urban renewal kind of as an outcome of looking at the AIDS epidemic and the ways in which the AIDS epidemic had been shaped by urban policies. And so urban renewal was one of those urban policies and I wanted to understand the black perspective. So Erica and her earlier remarks were talking about it sort of from the perspective of really of the white actors. But it turns out that nobody actually talked to the black people who were the majority of those being displaced about what their experience was. So though my work was retrospective, we wanted to go back and say to people, you know, what do you remember? What happened? What was that like? So this is actually cartoon from France. But this is really it kind of conceptually what is happening that this kind of the earlier 19th century American city which has been completely built out and completely developed is being transformed into these towers in the park. And in a way it's very fundamentally about enclosure of the land for and in an American process they talk about it as clearing the land for higher uses which basically was not housing black people. I spent a lot of time in Pittsburgh and it was one of the primary places where I learned this story. And so this is the depiction of the lower hill as it abuts downtown Pittsburgh and the way that the urban renewal plan was depicted having sort of plastic cutouts on an aerial photo. With the theory being that they would clear the land they'd put in some highways basically making a barrier between the hill and downtown Pittsburgh and also that they'd put in that circle which was the spaceship of the civic arena. This is what it looks like before. The whole district was a very famous African American community, one of the great jazz spots, but full of life and organization, extremely vital place. So that was bulldozed and then the civic arena was put in and very spaceship looking and I as psychiatrist read this as three levels of barriers that are put in between the African American hill district and the downtown, the highways, the huge parking lots, and then the spaceship. And if you think about sort of 1960s jokes about spaceships, basically you don't want to walk past a spaceship. This is another view of the spaceship which has now been demolished. This photo is I think a very important photo because it's the people who made the urban renewal plan. One thing about Pittsburgh is that it's a city that loves to take pictures of itself. So you have pictures of the people who made the plan here and I believe they're in the Morgan bank and they made the one of the reasons they were making the civic arena was that sorry my mouse dropped was that they wanted to have a place for Edgar Kaufman the department store magnet to listen to the civic light opera in the open air. And this is another very important picture because there are about five black people in this photograph but all the rest of the people are white. So they were clearing the black neighborhood the important black neighborhood for white entertainment. A picture of the neighborhood and another picture of Wiley Avenue one of the important corridors of the neighborhood Crawford grill that you see on the left was one of the important jazz clubs and one of the few to survive. So you see the density all the number of shops the vitality people in the streets and there are happen to be tens of thousands of photographs of this neighborhood which document what I'm saying about his vitality its complexity and its importance. This is just one by Charles T. Harris who was called one shot because he would go to an event and take one shot of the scene and when I talk with my students about this photo I like to raise the question how many organizations does it take to make a marching band and you can really find many. Actually my next door neighbor photographer Richard Saunders was in Pittsburgh as part of the Pittsburgh photographic project and took this picture along with many others but it's this picture that I think most stands in stark contrast to the earlier photo of the men who made the urban renewal plan. They made the urban renewal plan but it was these men who lived in the neighborhood who had no voice in what was going to happen to their neighborhood. So this is a sort of how do you read a street scene and what do you know about a neighborhood from seeing that people can sit on the street and play checkers and other people can stand around and watch this sort of theater of the open air. I mean for one thing you know that there's not COVID but for another thing you know that there's peace and safety. This is another photo that I think is of fundamental importance for understanding what was going on in the Hill district. So this photo was taken by Esther Bubly also of the Pittsburgh photographic project at Hill House and the importance of such a moment of quiet learning is that just as it takes many organizations to make a marching band it takes many organizations to create quiet learning and they have to be on the same page. So this is testimony to the nature of the neighborhood which outsiders were saying was blighted and was a slum. I've come to think that we ought to think of we ought not to ever say blight again we ought to call it the B word and we ought never say slum we ought to say the S word just as we now say the M word that they ought to be considered as equally defamatory and chased out of the language. The community fought back against urban rule they were not able to stop the first round of urban renewal but the city came back to do a second round community race this billboard on a corner that is now recognized as a local park and site of local activity and organizing. So it's become a hallowed site in the aftermath of this billboard. So the community learned from what happened to them the many many many losses that were incurred because of urban renewal and the list of losses is so profound because it has to do with the wreckage not only of the individual life but of the matrix in which that individual life is being lived that that matrix of the many organizations on the same page that have created the calm for learning. In a way if you think of Maslow's hierarchy as a kind of triangle you've taken the bottom out of the triangle and the whole thing has collapsed which of course on this day resonates with Mark's very touching story about the collapse of the World Trade Center. We have an urban renewal done the same thing for people taken gone through the middle and made the whole thing collapse. So I published this book in 2004 second edition came out in 2016 but the first printed in 2004 which was just as Columbia was starting was really starting its public campaign to snatch Manhattanville and to do eminent domain to do urban renewal of Manhattanville and I was at a talk that President Bollinger gave to leaders in Washington Heights and one of the stunning things that he said was that Columbia needed this land because it had to expand a 2.2 million square feet every couple of years every so many years in order to be a top research university but this was progress and you wouldn't want to stand in the way of progress and I was stunned because that was exactly the language the headline for example the newspaper in St. Louis announcing its urban renewal plan that they would clear slums and blight for progress and progress was the whole rhetoric around it. So I was stunned that so many years later it was the same rhetoric and no acknowledgement of the cost. So I went to everybody I could go to at Columbia at the top of the provost and president people who had reached out to me that I talked to on other occasions I've been invited to cocktail parties so I thought you know listen I want to tell you about my research and I'm gonna tell you what I found and I think you should be taking it into account as you do this project. Nobody returned my calls nobody returned my emails and a colleague of mine told me that she'd been asked to write a review of my book for one of the alumni magazines she chose an alum and it was accepted and then rejected and afterwards I was not invited to cocktail parties with the provost or the president anymore so the kinds of of access and warmth that I had experienced I did not and even the kind of recognition that I had done a major piece of scholarly work there was no recognition in any of the Columbia publications so that was my my real encounter a real encounter with Columbia as powers and principalities as a corporate actor but and here I use the word principalities um Columbia as a set of principalities so these are not all the same and I just wanted to talk a little bit about a project that I've been involved with uh which is now 16 years old going into its 17th year the climb project city life is moving bodies which we started out of mailman school of public health my research group the community research group um basically Highbridge park had been abandoned um by the city and we it was a very dangerous park there were all kinds of horrible things that were happening in there and we wanted to reclaim this beautiful park as a part of of the neighborhood so the climb project was focused on making a hiking trail to connect what we call the cliff side parks so this includes Morningside Park St. Nicholas Park Jackie Robinson Park and Highbridge Park this was our ours the map that Marshall Brown urban urban architect and designer Marshall Brown made for us when we started the project and he made our logo climb city life is moving bodies um and we wanted to make a hiking trail through those cliffside parks based on our observation but they almost touched and that if we could just figure out the best path to get from one to the other people could hike through those really quite glorious um spaces so our project was called hike the heights and focused on has focused for the past 16 years on an annual party in the parks on the first Saturday of the month and so this is one of the additions of hike the heights my daughter Molly is hiking with kids who are coming up the path to the party in Highbridge Park they're in Highbridge Park for the party and they're kids with the Harlem Children's Zone so this is very early hike the heights too one of the things was that the one of our graduate students had the idea that our trail looked a bit like a giraffe and so the giraffe became our spirit animal and continues to be our spirit animal and uh during this advocacy for the parks much has happened much investment so in 2005 you see a photograph by Rod Wallace what the park looked like at that time when we were starting and in 2011 as the investment was coming in to reopen the Highbridge what was starting to happen in terms of the reclaiming and the reopening of the park and we are are very proud to have been part of of this um reanimation rebirth of these parks and to have helped advocate for what is now about 150 million dollars of investment in that area and this was very much done with the support of a wide array of projects at Columbia University Melbourne School of Public Health so the Center for Children's Environmental Health was a crucial early supporter and Bruce Link who had a Center for Youth Violence Prevention was a crucial supporter for a number of years the students have been very active in keeping this project going and did practicum where they ran the project so without mailman school of public health as a as an advocate for this we would not have been able to do this work so the principality of mailman school of public health and then it's kind of sub-peafdoms were active in this way of being good neighbors so the um thing and what so this is a a map we made of height the heights and our trail has been recognized as in the New York Times as one of the five places to be outdoors and see nature and actually when you're there uh you don't actually have the sense that you're in the city they have a beautiful beautiful video on the New York Times site about little little raccoons because it's gorgeous so uh this we made this icon for our 10th anniversary and you can see the hiking giraffe who is our spirit animal and obviously has been had many paper mache versions made every year school kids and others collaborate to make versions so um so confronting the power of Columbia University had a lot of ramifications ramifications in my own life as a scholar at Columbia University um but um within the principalities there was a lot of a lot of places where people could use the resources that they had for good so i think it's a complicated place and what's going to be difficult in the work that gsa pp is setting out on is that if you don't confront the powers and what they did for example to Manhattanville you will have not done the whole work but if you confront the powers it may be very costly so in this moment um especially on today as we think about 9-11 i'd like to leave you with this this photo um that we took in the park because we have um a massive attack on love coming from the president of the united states who is every day doing something to increase fear and to increase hatred and to increase racism and so as a social psychiatrist i believe that it's incumbent on every organization including the gsa pp including Columbia University every organization whatever we succeeded at or failed at in the past in this moment to think how do we turn on the love and confront the fear so that the united states can have sound conversations about the huge crises that face us which include not only racism but obviously ecological catastrophe so with that i'd like to stop thank you so much amazing presentations uh by all of you erica eric mark uh mindy and amal uh thank you so much for your presentations and and if i may i will call you by your first name um i there are some very interesting questions and i have my own but i i thought that i would go through some of the questions um the first one is uh addressed to uh professor forner and it's from uh professor for geotero pilots um regarding the renaming of columbia facilities have there been any discussions about john jay dining hall can you speak more about how your project withstands our relationship to this historical fear who are part of being recent of columbia college president of manu mission society was also an slave owner very let me unmute myself sorry uh am i can you hear me now yes sorry um i'm not a hundred percent sure what discussions are going on in the university about in the administration about figures like this as i said the name of samuel barge has just been removed from a major building up at the medical center john jay is an interesting character he was a slave owner indeed but he was also president of the manu mission society and assisted emancipated slaves in new york city um frankly i think he's more honorable than some of the other people who have things named after them around columbia university um but i i think there will be this fall a uh or this spring and and then this fall and then next spring a um a discussion as is going on in many other places about naming of in of things statues to people buildings monuments should there be more monuments on campus what there is no monument anywhere that i know of to an african-american person connected with columbia uh although some very distinguished ones have been students or teachers here um so i think that's a conversation that is going to be happening uh and now um and i think it's important that everybody who has an opinion about this should weigh in with the administration with the president with the provost uh just as many people up at the uh college of physicians and surgeons the surgeons weighed in about changing the name of barred hall um so i i i i i think more changes will be coming but i don't have any particular information about that and um i would love to see a little monument to john j the second as i said the only true abolitionist who was an active columbian before the civil war so um john j hall is really about his grandfather but maybe we can do something for john j the second in that context also thank thank you um this is for you mindy uh when an anonymous person says when i was an undergraduate circa 20 2010 protest against columbia expansion into manhattan bill was an enormous part of our student culture my peers who organized this protest have grown to become important activists in the realm of immigration police brutality and land use thank you dr fully love for bringing this comment up why did gizab in the well this is not a question for you but for gizab actually why did gizab recent book on manhattan bill campus completely this means this descent i i would like to ask you mindy if um if you'd like to comment on this comment yeah of course i don't know anything about why you're the gizab book didn't comment on the dissent the dissent was very important and the dissent was really a coalition between community activists and student activists on campus uh and that but the i i really appreciate the point that acting against columbia taught people how to take on other issues and the powers are are very much united the the people who are on the board of columbia university are on the boards of lots of other important corporations and they're political figures so the powers that run columbia are also the powers that are running the nation and making immigration policy making police brutality policy so taking on columbia teaches us about taking on uh the the powers and principalities and so i think what is important is the advice that the black ministers were helping me understand that the conference in february which is put on the whole arm of god when you're going to do it thank you um i wonder if erica you want to comment on this topic too so i will say that students in our studio did also look at manhattanville um and the way in which uh uh you know that the the claiming of space within manhattanville not only in our recent history but also going back to um the mid 20th century for sure was problematic i mean it as you saw from some of the protest posters and things um this was um you know i i have to defer to minby's you know words on this this was root shock you know this was uh an uprooting of a community um and that the institution chose to repeat that in some way um with uh the expansion northwards and the creation of the manhattanville campus is troubling as someone who's both a preservationist and an urban planner um i also take mindy's point about the danger of me saying that i'm a not yet tenured faculty member and i fully recognize that me saying this um puts me in a vulnerable position but as i mentioned at the early part of our conversation i think if we don't reckon with this if we don't put it out there and talk about it um as a way to work toward more just solutions we will continue to repeat the past well i think not only that i think uh i mean this point is that confronting the power of clumbia is the only way to to be a full person within clumbia if it's like if if if we don't then um we are we are failing our mission statement of being part of this this community and furthering this community um and um i wonder if anyone else wants to comment on on that point or if i should go to the next question that is also about manhattanville the next question i think uh probably uh probably probably mark you can comment on this on the manhattanville site clumbia used eminent domain domain to also take hold of the mcdonald site in 125th street designating this as a new site for the columbia secondary school in 2019 it was made public that clumbia was designing a hotel faculty housing on that side to my to my knowledge there have barely been any protests regarding this move university why why don't we see protests anymore can can you talk about um the the difference in the mood from 1968 to now in terms of like speculating why you think that protests um student protests namely columbia student protests have shifted well you know as i said in 1968 it was more than just about columbia um occupying a public park for the private gymnasium it was also there were also other issues that were involved and it was just after the assassination of dr montanese king and it was also during the period of the vietnam war when students were afraid that they may be drafted in that and and their own you know um um their own objections to to fighting in a war that some considered to be unjust so we haven't seen that kind of protest on campus where students actually took over the entire campus and shut it down and i you know i i neglected to mention that one of those buildings that was taken over by the students in 1968 was every hall so um uh the architectures were very much a part of the protests and demonstrations but i you know i was part of a a group of architects called arch five two seven that actually tried to get a contract under the minhattenville project had to be you know honest and saying that we we saw this as as an opportunity meaning that we were um local local architects and and that the university had actually negotiated a community benefits agreement with the community that said that the university would hire local people but then when this group of architects i was associated with approached the university to say you know we would be interested in working on the design of this new campus the university said oh no you know you don't count you're professional so we we don't really think of you as being part of the community benefits agreement so um i don't know you know these specifics of what's happening with the mcdonald's side and the hotel but um you know the the the kind of attitude that this that university has had is has carried over from 1968 to minhattenville and even beyond um i i also think it's important to talk about some of the words that uh that all your presentations commented on uh the use of the word blighted slam uh the use of the word progress uh the contrast uh between uh uh ways of seeing new buildings uh uh and ways of uh describing existing conditions um i'm also would like to throw into um our conversation the real estate term the uh the best um was the highest and best use uh which is usually associated and it's something that as architects uh are told uh often that we need to aim to the highest and best use and of course this is not related to community or um any kind of um democratic ideals but is highest and best use as it appears in a spreadsheet of uh cost calculations and so um i would like from your point of view in the different disciplines um can you comment uh further on the use of these words yeah i can definitely comment on that you know when i began my uh um my career as a student at columbia 1973 as an urban planning student um you know i started going through the literature and i started reading you know this you know the literature has been existing at the time about slums and and blighted communities and you know i was i was quite shocked because i was a kid that grew up in new york i mean i was born in dc i was born at a time when when watching in dc the nation's capital was still a segregated city um and then as a as a as a as a child you know my uh my family moved to new york and we lived in the south bronx we lived in bedford stuyvesant we lived in in bushwick brooklyn and a housing project for nine nine years and eventually removed the queens uh when my parents bought bought a home but um you know i was quite shocked where these these places these communities where i live were being were were were being described as slums uh and blighted communities when i knew them as as home so it was quite a shock that you know that's you know the words we use are are very important and and sometimes you know we we need to take a re-examination of of the terminology we use as professionals i would i would underscore that galia um and i i i take the point that that language is incredibly powerful a mess right and and the rhetoric and the discourse that that involves um is really uh can be both damaging um as well as um an opportunity to reframe narratives uh but i i would also since we're in this context of of g sap uh i would also paraphrase um something that that was written by emma osor who is a co-founder of black space in that as architects and planners we are trained to look at disinvested space as opportunities like you know if something is poorly maintained or crumbling etc we look at that as oh it's an opportunity it's close to a blank slate so to speak when in fact we are not looking deeply enough at why certain places certain communities certain properties are disinvested in um we're not looking at enough of the history of redlining and how that was complicit in in um uh marginalizing communities limiting their access to capital we're not looking enough at the role of power in in urban renewal and the way in which choices about quote unquote progress very uh explicitly sought to marginalize certain populations um and so we see these landscapes of of quote unquote disinvestment and we think about highest and best use in response to that um in part because of the conditioning we have as architects and planners so i challenge us to really in this conversation about repair um to look deeply to really interrogate the past in every place not simply look at a place at face value but understand the spaces and the people that were part of that place um absolute i think you are making also a point for um for preservation uh community preservation not just preservation of um the physical aspects or the physicality of of spaces but the human aspects of it or uh or the embody of histories within it i'm getting a 10 minute warning here there's two other questions i'm just going to read them and then you can decide which one to reply to or how to reply um an interesting point about Colombia being laid in admitting students of colors at the underground level versus at the graduate level was brought up what is in your opinion may have been the reason for that discrepancy the other question is is there any research on how colorism shadism played out in the racism of the specific histories around Colombia perhaps perhaps as a counter narrative to the idea of the one drop rule being a great equalizer i yeah i it's a good i don't know the answer to why the graduate school here was so much more open to and the professional schools were so much more open to uh students of color of one kind or another and indeed of course women were in teachers college on the graduate programs where long before they were admitted to the columbia college the college you know i graduated from columbia college in 1963 just on the beginning just before the uh uprisings that mark barksdale was talking about um i think there was like one black student in my class there were about 700 men in my class there were no women and there was one black student this is 1963 and i'm not talking about the university of mississippi here we were in new york city and yet the college was a totally closed community there for a long time they wouldn't allow jewish students in or if they did you know columbia had a little satellite campus in brooklyn where jewish students would sort of be sent for a year or two to um i don't know make them more waspy in somewhere and then uh they would come for two years at columbia so in other words there was a long long tradition of this and remember i mean to my mind this is going off the point but i'm gonna stop after this one of the columbia's most terrible liabilities in the 20th century was basically that nicholas murray butler lived too long he was president of columbia for like 45 years you know 1900 to 1945 and um that's much too long he it was a it was run as a personal fiefdom uh while other universities were sort of becoming bureaucratized and having more professional leadership maybe that's not so good in some ways but you know butler just world war one he just fired professors who opposed american involvement in world war one so um you know probably nicholas murray butler didn't want black undergraduates around then there was no one to tell them that uh that this was not a good policy um so it's uh it's an interesting and even you know even by the late 60s there were very few african-american students in columbia college the significant rise in numbers came in the 70s 80s etc yeah as a result of dr king's assassination yeah and that even you know even before um 1954 is the brown versus board of education decision by the supreme court you know the segregation laws were still very much enforced in the united states and so columbia university was no different than any other institution in the united states in terms of you know preventing black students from oh yeah very much so although it wasn't a law here in new york it was columbia's own decision uh in in alabama it was the state law in uh in new york state there was no such law but segregation existed anyway as you said exactly yeah just to echo what mark is saying and also at the medical school there were might have been some but there weren't many it was really one or two black students a year until after 1970 when the american association of medical colleges decided that they would go for population parity and instituted a program and then columbia got in line after that so when i started in 1974 there were seven black students in my class so that was more than the one or two but the numbers were not substantial and still to this day the number of minority medical students are very low in the world in in the american world but it all happened as a result of dr king's assassination where the university decided to have a this conversation with itself and decided to open up uh its enrollment and admissions process to to be more diverse let's put that way well it's possible not that that's not a terrible moment but it comes in a decade of 15 years right dr king starts the montgomery bus boycott was part of starting the montgomery bus boycott december 1st 1955 so there's been an arc of this organizing all around the country so and we don't want to we don't want to isolate that moment no but it that his assassination was was a catalyzed event that really similar you know to george floyd's death uh in may this year that just sparked a lot of changes among institutions within the united states or it's like the forest fires where a spark fell in a ecosystem that was ready to burn yes well um thank you very much i think that these are grave things and uh it's been uh there's a lot there's a lot of work to do obviously in uh in mending our histories and mending um i'm bringing more um love into the uh into the politics and politics uh in making politics more um harmonious and welcoming environment for all i i thank you um very much in the name of the students uh please know that this is something that the students a conversation that the students requested to have and something that may continue in the classroom and we thank you and we may come back to you with more thoughts in the near future thank you so much for today thank you you're welcome thank you