Alumni form

 Using this form, you can add your name to the list of Columbia alumni who pledge to withold any contributions to Columbia's capital campaign until their expansion plans conform to the 197-a plan developed by the West Harlem Community, including respect for existing residents and businesses, and for the health of the community.

 
In order to ensure that our list of signatories is accurate, and contains only actual alumni of Columbia, we are requiring that you include your full name, year  graduation, and the name of the college that you graduated from. Please also leave your contact info, so that we may be able to inform you of any developments in this campaign.

 

Name


Email


Year Graduated or last attended


School Attended


Degree Earned


Area of Major


check this box to receive information about how to join the struggle to preserve the neighborhood's interests 
Home
the Concerned CU Alumni campaign

Who We Are
Concerned CU Alumni are a growing group of Columbia University alumni from all discplines who have pledged to make no contributions to CU's Harlem expansion plan unless it conciliates it with the community board "197-a" development plan.   The university's current plan would bulldoze a substantial portion of Harlem, displacing resident and businesses from a community which has been there for more than a century, unnecessarily and unsuccessfully trying to put the university's private interests in opposition to the surrounding community's need for more, not less, affordable housing, living wage jobs, health and environmental protection, economic development, and preservation.

 

Our Letter  to the Board of Trustees

Dear Fellow Columbia Alumni,
 
As many of you may know, Columbia is seeking City approval of its proposed expansion plans in West Harlem.  It has inaugurated a $4-billion capital campaign to fund this $7 billion, thirty-year project.  As concerned Columbia alumni, we believe many aspects of the plan are unwise and have set the University on an unnecessary collision course.  Many in the community are concerned that Columbia has refused to rule out using eminent domain to displace long term businesses and residents who wish to remain in the expansion area, and see this as confirmation that Columbia is planning to expand at the expense of, rather than in harmony with, the community.

Columbia's plan, in its current version, fails to incorporate the community 197-a land use plan (created over 10 years by the local community board and supported by elected officials and long term community residents) which is being considered for approval by the City Planning Commission simultaneously with its consideration of Columbia’s 197-c and requires preserving and increasing affordable housing, living wage jobs for the community, historic preservation and environmental safety.  Columbia, a community institution, has not responded  adequately to concerns about its proposed development of a biohazard  level-three laboratory in an area which contains 1 million residents, many of them low income Hispanic and Black, within the immediate vicinity.

Even as Columbia attempts to negotiate with local businesses and residential tenants within the Manhattanville expansion zone, the University holds the "nuclear option" of eminent domain as a threat over their heads, a form of coercion which precludes negotiations in good faith as long term commercial tenants, who have survived disinvestment within the expansion area, face removal.

The use of eminent domain constitutes a repetition of Columbia’s ill-advised conflicts with the community of previous years.  We do not wish out alma mater to go down that road again.

President Bollinger has said that he must have all or nothing in West Harlem.  The Community is asking that the University's plan be integrated into the existing community and the community's 197-a plan so that both the University and the community may benefit.  This is a choice between bulldozing all but three buildings on 17 acres or creating an expansion contextual to what already exists and supportive of the needs of the community it seeks to join.  It is the choice between being a neighbor or an invading force, dispersing the growth, jobs and housing in process under the promise of upzoning with which the 197-a plan is so profoundly engaged.

Please join us, the undersigned Concerned Columbia Alumni, in sending this message to Low Library and the Trustees of the University by pledging to withhold any contributions to the capital campaign until the use of eminent domain is ruled out and a development policy that is in harmony with the community board and the concerns and needs of the local community is adopted.