CAMPUS NEWS: DEI, a new dean, and elections: Q&A with SIPASA President Courtney Manning
Courtney Manning (MIA ’22) is 2022 President of SIPASA, SIPA’s Student Association. To contact SIPASA with feedback or questions, email sipasa@columbia.edu.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The Morningside Post also contacted the six other presidential candidates for recommended priorities and improvements to future election processes.
Can you tell us about yourself and what brought you to SIPA? What motivates you personally and professionally?
I started out, actually, kind of an alternative means of coming to a public policy school. I wanted to be a chef, so I went to the Culinary Institute of Los Angeles. And that was during high school, like a technical school program. I decided I did not actually want to be a chef in LA, graduated, and then immediately pivoted by doing a long stint in South America, Spain, and Portugal. I traveled for a little bit because I was working as a grocery store manager for $35,000 a year. I ate ramen, and I didn't spend any money on anything so that I could go spend three to six months out of the year backpacking and traveling, just kind of on the cheap.
I did that for awhile and got roped into working as a part-time journalist, travel blogger for a human rights group in South America that was trying to oppose voluntourism, the idea that people will come down, volunteer for a month, contribute very little, have that on their resumes forever, and then move on while the crisis continues. I went to get my bachelor's degree at the University of Denver because they offered me the most money. It was great. I learned so much there and decided that I should pivot to more of that human rights focus and peacebuilding.
I worked at the end of the Evo Morales administration in Bolivia, to try and assist indigenous and non-binary, agender people to make sure their rights were protected during times of turmoil. I ended up participating in a hunger strike and reporting on that. That was like 14 days long, one of the longest that they'd ever had with ADESPROC Libertad, an organization that advocates for LGBT rights in South America in the Andes. Getting to know those people, their stories, and their lives really inspired in me this passion to continue working with people who might be left out of traditional peacebuilding processes and traditional negotiating agreements, especially in times of transition. We got to picket, we got to fight with tear gas and bullies and buildings, we barricaded the doors of the health services center. I stayed down there for about two years working with different NGOs and civil society groups in the Andes.
When coronavirus came, we got kicked out. We were stuck for a month and a half in very tight conditions in Cusco, not allowed to leave. But it was a really good time to think about what I wanted to do, reorient myself in my career. Once we were finally chartered out at a very high personal expense, unfortunately, I had put in an application for SIPA and found out that I got in. That was really exciting for me because it showed that, number one, I was ready to have more of a structured focus for my career, not just going from one place to the next and selling all my stuff and going back to work in the United States to keep my visa and all sorts of stuff. That kind of hecticness, I’m like, you know, I think I want a little more structure in my life. Started at SIPA, and that's how I got here.
What motivated you to run for SIPASA President?
Well, I had actually already been working with SIPASA. They lost a ton of people due to coronavirus. When it was time to open back up, bringing people back to campus, it was hard. So they were calling all applications to take on. In my second or third week at SIPA, as a J-termer, I decided to throw in an application and join.
Immediately, it was this community of amazing, motivated individuals who wanted to make SIPA a better place with all of the chaos around: high turnover rates in the administration, nobody knowing how to use Zoom, professors and students not being able to communicate like they used to, staff — like important offices, the visa office, career services — not really able to be reached because everyone was working from home and no one knew what everybody else was doing.
Being able to lead students during that time made me motivated to take on more of a leadership role. And this year, there's still so much more to do, but at the same time, I'm really happy to have made the connections that I've made in SIPASA already, so that we can continue to push our goals forward and make sure that there's greater organization and logistics as more people come in after coronavirus.
Considering you can take on so many different issues, are there certain priorities that you really want to focus on?
While SIPASA has its goals and year-long enterprises, we are primarily guided by the interests and messages from students. We're a democracy and not a dictatorship, so all our efforts have to be voted on and thoroughly discussed before being instituted. Some of these ideas may look very different after they've been through our multi-step process of surveying, researching, statement writing, and voting.
More collaboration between the law and business schools is a big one, because I know that people come here to learn more about other aspects of Columbia, and it seems like we're a little bit of an island right now. We don't have as much funding, we don't have as big of a stipend for grants as those other schools do. Greater cooperation can help our students, and then cross the border between those schools and us.
DEI is a massive thing. The contracts and all the work that they put in to establish the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Climate, Engagement (DEICE) Committee — it's a good first step, but it's really not enough. The idea that we are going to have a formal plan and stuff starting at 2027 just seems a little…I don't know where they pull that number, but I've read the full statement and all the results from last year’s evaluation. And I think there's still room to grow.
Number one, the idea that we don't have enough funding to accept our best and brightest is a major problem. Looking at administrative salaries, I don't think the money is not there. Clearly, if we're having enough funding to pay for larger, kind of ridiculous initiatives that very few people participate in, we have the funding to provide more grant and tuition stipends for underserved youth. That's something we need to focus more on.
And equal treatment in classes, from the curriculums not participating in a breadth of sources — as an international school, you'd expect us to have an internationalized set of curricula that makes sense for international students and students from the United States to both be able to expand their horizons. That's not something that we have yet, in my opinion, but I think it's something that if we continue to push, we continue to involve the DEI committee in a lot of these types of decisions, and we continue to speak up about certain courses that people are taking that maybe don't have a single minority voice in the syllabus — which is sadly too frequent — that we can start bringing in more of those voices to the table.
Digging into the DEI question more, are there particular actions or issues that you and SIPASA will focus on? Which avenues do you think you'll leverage? Is it with the dean or administrators or students? Or what kind of tactics are you thinking of?
We're planning on appointing a DEI spokesperson. They're going to have weekly sessions with the DEICE Committee, the deans and the provost, hopefully, in order to have more sway over that process in maintaining accountability and transparency, so students know what's happening behind the scenes.
I think that's a major problem: things do happen behind the scenes, and students don't see it. Then they are upset or complain, or maybe they don't even comply and just think, ‘Oh, this is an unfair situation,’ then policies change out of nowhere. And they're like, ‘Well, why didn’t we have this before?’ More transparency on what the breakdown is of these meetings is important. By having a DEI representative, we can focus on that issue as its own specific problem to face, but also be able to better integrate inclusivity and diversity into other policies that we fight for. Having that person at the table, being there to reiterate our stances and communications with the deans in meetings with the provost, and in our Senate — I think that's really important, because that's how we're going to be able to make the most change.
Also, when individual issues come up, a big part of SIPASA is fielding emails from students who are having a tough time. A lot of those emails, they've already messaged deans, they've messaged offices and other people, and they haven't received a response, or received a formulated short response, and our problems don't get solved. While I think that SIPASA has traditionally been a last line of defense, we can work harder to make it a first line of defense so student voices are being heard as early in the process as possible.
SIPA Dean Search Committee, from left to right and top to bottom row: Lee Bollinger (Chair), Mary Boyce, Geoffrey Heal, Gillian Lester, Jacob Lew, Tamar Mitts, Michael Nutter, Kenneth Prewitt, Robert Shapiro, Claire Shipman, Joseph Stiglitz, Mozelle Thompson, Eric Verhoogen, Keren Yarhi-Milo
Regarding the search for the new dean, will you, SIPASA, or students broadly have input into the process? Looking at the list that President Bollinger sent out in October, it was nine men, five women. It didn't seem like there are any people of Asian or Latin descent, which is concerning for a policy school.
What are your thoughts on the process, how they're approaching it, how students can get involved, or whether you have been in any conversations about it?
At the end of our last meeting that I was part of as a social chair, we sat down with the deans, including Merit Janow, and brought up pretty transparently that students want to have an influence in the choosing of our new dean, that other Ivy League schools have gone much farther and done much more to include students in that process, including Yale and Harvard. Both had student committees in charge of pushing up students who can be part of the committee to choose the new dean.
What we received in response was that they don't know about the legality or the contracts that they've signed in regards to non-disclosure, that they weren't sure, but that they'd definitely take student input into consideration. We did ask for an action plan on how we would be able to be involved and what their steps were to include students. If they released a response, it didn't come to me. And that's something that we need to work on, as far as having action items written out, having them emailed, as far as — hey, this is the kind of stuff that we need to hear from you guys. If it's going to be more action and less talk. And we often don't receive it. Or if we do receive it, again, we receive a formulated statement that doesn't leave much room for compromise.
That's something that, maybe, while not quite possible to fix in a year, we can begin to address more frequently in meetings to try and enforce the student perspective more abruptly, more transparently, and hold more accountability because it's hard as a student with a limited timespan. And they know that you and SIPASA have a limited timespan to push for more institutional change. But if you can just smile and keep pushing, don't fall into conversations about people's pets on Long Island, which is a problem in meetings where you have one hour. 20 to 30 minutes is pleasantries and greetings and introductions and ‘how was your kid, is your uncle still doing well,’ and then you get down to the issues and you're like, ‘Oh, actually, we have two to three hours worth of issues that now we need to compress into a very short period of time.’
Tackling those, it's going to be a big step for us. I have high hopes in Interim Dean Thomas Christensen. Having seen the way he teaches and the way he provides instruction to students, I have full hope and faith that he will do the right thing by allowing a greater degree of student voice and input into the conversation. And I trust that he would maintain the accountability that we require.
I also want to talk about international students. How will you approach advocating for their interests? How will you ensure you're also covering any blind spots, gaps, or potential biases that you might have?
One of the biggest problems with our administration specifically, in comparison to other schools that I've attended, is that the resources are often there. But the communication about the resources is so long, muddled, thrown into some sort of larger cable with 100 other things on the docket.
International students need clear and transparent communication. I mean, obviously, we all do. But specifically, if you're not in the state of mind to read a four- or five- page email to find the one information that you absolutely need to find on visa information, you're going to be stuck.
One of the biggest problems, as well, is the fact that even the career services center — very limited walk-in hours and opportunities for international students to pursue work in the United States and abroad. We need more representation in the career services center that can help not only with mentorship, [but also] a pathway for international students to find former students who are now either established or work in the United States, are working for international organizations, or working in their home countries — seeing all the pros and cons of those pathways. Making this communication more concise, readable, clear, and comprehensive without repeating too much of what gets thrown in on all of these cables.
On a greater scale, having more internationalized authors, focuses, and coursework. Students are coming here to go to an international school. They're not coming here to go to American policy school. And for SIPA students who do come from the United States, it's also not helpful to go to an international school that's all United States foreign policy. We were raised with that, we know that already. We're here to hear that other side of the coin and be able to hear from more voices. That's something we should be pushing not only in our hiring, the inner syllabuses, and in our mentorship opportunities. One of the programs that I pioneer through the Saltzman Institute, where I work, is the Emerging Voices mentorship program, where we pair up SIPA students with undergraduate students. So giving back to the community, especially General Studies and Columbia College students who may have come from an unconventional pathway to Columbia. Being able to give back to the community by teaching the lessons we've learned as SIPA students to the next generation, I think is super interesting and important. And I hope to expand that program beyond just security and intelligence, but to a whole bunch of other concentrations, because it has been such a gift that we can give to the community.
And speaking of gifts to the community, we don't do nearly enough for Harlem in the surrounding areas. We have a massive problem with taking over the local neighborhood, building ridiculous — as I'm sure you've passed by every day — skyscraper-type edifices, and taking advantage of students using construction companies that have proven track records of exclusion and even, sometimes, violence against Black people and people of color. That's just not the kind of organization that we want to work with. On the construction side, we don't want to damage the community, and I think that having more events where the purpose is to give back to the community, whether offering tutors, more hiring opportunities. Our Columbia community hiring office, which I walk by every day because I live on 125th — it's been closed for as long as I've lived here. And that was supposed to be a pathway for people in the local community to get a good job at Columbia with benefits and the kind of experiences that we should be bringing to everybody, not just students in Colombia, but to the surrounding communities. That office has just been closed. Why? That's something we can work on with our senator, to try and bring forward to the rest of the community — as well as within SIPASA, organizing more volunteering, giving-back events where our purpose is to give back to the community that sacrificed so much for us.
NYPD increased patrols in Morningside Park after the fatal stabbing of Columbia PhD student Davide Giri in December 2021.
What do you think of the response from Columbia and SIPA so far since the death of Davide Giri and the increasing security presence and NYPD?
We, as a group, and myself, personally, were very disappointed to hear that their response to this really, truly awful tragedy, honestly, was to increase daytime policing of the surrounding area. Already, over-policing in Harlem has led to a general feeling of insecurity and unsafeness among the people. And I think that increasing a daytime security presence does very little to prevent the kind of senseless violence that we saw and had to go through, and that the family had to go through, and the entire community. I think it's natural when terrible things happen to want to fix it. But the problems that lead to acts of senseless violence are not ones that can be solved by shutting down a public park or gathering space for a community that is outside just Columbia students. We're not the only people that live here.
When we received that email, that was pretty concerning that they were going to increase daytime policing and then not increase their Via transportation system, which, if students feel unsafe, the solution has been to guide them to this free shuttle for Columbia students. We've received, I would say, 15 to 20 screenshots from students who have not had the app either working, it's over an hour to two-hour wait time to take those shuttles, or they hire one and it never shows up. It's a massive issue that could very easily assist students from the Columbia side without jeopardizing the security of the community and without over-policing the local neighborhood.
Instead, they just keep parroting this, ‘Oh, no, look at all these options that we have for you guys.’ And it's really unreasonable. I think, as far as Columbia's response goes, I don't agree with it. I think there are much better ways of making sure that students feel safe on and off campus, as well as just expanding the Via neighborhood. For some reason, Via really only wants to go in the very small Morningside Heights area. So many of our students live in Central and East Harlem and just don't have the same opportunity to take those shuttles as students who live in the more expensive Morningside Heights area. That's a little peculiar and pretty unfair for students who may not be able to afford an expensive high-rise or on-campus apartment, especially for graduate students who are not given as much credit or discounts on housing as the undergraduate students.
We don't agree as well — I think there was a petition going around from the architecture school about how we need to increase policing even more and close the park and all this kind of stuff — that's absolutely atrocious stuff. We received calls to support that initiative, and while we respect the concern of the students that were involved in creating that initiative, I don't support it — we voted to not.
Thinking big picture about the international public policy field more broadly, do you think there are particular issues or ways that SIPA and Columbia can really lead the way? Whether it's particular topics, subjects, or thinking about diversity? Are there ways that we can push the field forward? What's your vision for the rest of the policy space?
I am inspired every single day by the people that I get to take classes with. I try and take as many different electives from different fields as I can to try and get a more comprehensive image of the diversity of our students and what they're studying. SIPA’s one of the few schools where you can take an urban policy education course on Tuesday, a military tech assessment on Wednesday, and then an art, culture class the next day. It's really diverse, not only in the student body, but also in the range of subjects that we teach.
With that in mind, there needs to be something that can bring us all together as SIPA students, and I think one of the things we could do for that is greater participation in local New York City policies. There's this insular bubble that Columbia creates where people are focused on finals, understandably, in clubs, and limited personal time. But I think one of the things that we may be able to replace — yoga in the park, for example — is to read up on, study, and attend lectures and seminars with the public policy that's happening around us in Harlem and in New York City. We live in one of the biggest policy locations in the world, where massive decisions are being made about local and country-wide policies, and massive debates are always being had with New York City and DC as well, as an epicenter. Not a lot of people talk about local politics, which is fascinating. I understand as an international school, you can't always take the time to sit down and look at those policies. But maybe one way that the student body can be more engaged is to host when debates are happening, have our own debates on these issues, address policies that we see not just in the United States, but all over the world — India, China, and the EU — and see if we can have more of a student dialogue around real public policy issues.
Doing that comes with more solutions than it does critiques, because everyone's really good at critique. But of course, we're here to learn solutions and those practical steps. Maybe also identifying courses where people feel like they received a lot of critique and not so much practical instruction that they can take home either to their communities, to their families, to their jobs. Evaluating those programs, syllabuses, and courses, and seeing if we can make them more practical — giving people a step forward with strategies they can utilize in their communities wherever they go. It'd be more helpful for the student body than repeating the same pattern of ‘Oh, this is the theoretical thing that we've been teaching forever.’
I also want to talk about the election process. You ultimately were elected with 21% of the vote. How would you respond to students who question the fairness or validity of the election?
Yeah, I think I won by a margin of 44 people. [Note: Courtney won by 38 votes, out of 699 total votes across seven candidates.] And of course, that's pretty okay, if you were only looking at, you know — as many people actually do end up voting. We obviously did a major push for voting, we want every single student to vote. And we had super clear guidelines to the candidates and elections beforehand, as far as not only having copies of the constitution being given to everybody, but as well as everyone receiving the same documentation.
I removed myself from that process as someone who was already a social chair, not getting to hang out outside of the classroom, like the dunce cap kid, while everyone else is talking about things, which of course is — I wouldn't have it any other way — it's for very important reasons.
And I do find it interesting that with seven candidates, the most — I've talked to some alumni, some people that are still working in the campus — the most anyone has ever seen. That's pretty astounding. And I was so happy to see all those people, of course, we have to now hire for four or five other positions that nobody ran for — I think usually it's a little bit more, even in that sense.
But I think that with having the election setup, as they were always set up to have one or two contestants — very, very rarely would they have three or more contestants. So to have this many candidates running would either involve a last-minute constitution change, which nobody is really enthusiastic about. It's something where once you have the constitution, you have to go through all these different steps to fix or to change it. And you don't want to go against the constitution and set a precedent of arbitrarily changing rules based on individual circumstances.
But I think in the future, something that we can do is to — now that we know this is a thing that can happen, that seven people could run for president and nobody will run for a whole bunch of other positions — it's something that we need to either have a clause in the constitution or in the voting election process that plans for that, either through a runoff process or through a non-first-past-the-post voting method. I think that something that came up in the debate that was really interesting was a ranked choice voting system — full support of that, I think that that's one way in which even if students maybe won't really want one candidate, if everyone is more okay with a different candidate, that that would be a more fair method in order to really gauge the sentiment of the student body.
I think we had the biggest turnout, at least in the CampusGroups side that we'd had in over six or seven years, as far as documented CampusGroups history exists. Which means that, if anything, this is the year to really focus on not only SIPASA and the election process, but also to focus on the passion and enthusiasm that people have for making SIPA a better place. And I think we're seeing a lot of that because with the post-COVID chaos, students [who] come in are now like, ‘What's going on? I'm attending a school in person that has this pre-established set of rules, not quite understanding the madness behind the scenes, but wanting to make change and get things back on track.’ And that's so inspiring, because I think that we can basically, all as candidates, continue to work together to push for everybody's expectations. I'm having everybody write down their goals on a big ole spreadsheet. We're condensing them, codifying them, sequentializing them, so that nobody's campaign promises are just being thrown to the wayside because one person won. Ideally, if 111 people or 96 people are voting for somebody’s platform, we want that platform to happen regardless, right? So working with those other contestants to make sure that their campaign promises aren't forgotten and that they're included in that process as much as they want to be through the end.
And we can always use the extra hands too, right, because at the end of the day, the success of SIPASA is how many people are willing to put in that 20, 30 hours a week doing arbitrary stuff, taking out the trash, showing up to a board meeting for a specific student, and just hearing them out. Throwing a party in Publique for a different club that you may not be associated with, sacrificing your midterm and finals time to pour alcohol, or to talk to campus security, or to solve issues in the middle of the night — somebody gets horribly sick, they don't know what to do. These kinds of crises really require the time, effort, commitment of everybody, and how good the organization is and how good the president is doesn't really matter as much as how many people we have on board and how many cumulative hours we can spend, because there is always more work to do.
That's why I think that the elections are a very small, small part of what is a massive call to get involved, not just for candidates, but for all students. We can always use more people. It shouldn't be an exclusive club or anything by any means. All of our meetings are open to any student to come in and attend. I think we've had two students attend in the entirety of last year, despite our calls to action. And I think that's just a sign of how busy and already overloaded people are. But getting as many people's opinions in the circle and table, and having them help us work to build those structures so that we can fix things — vital.
In terms of process, will you commit to implementing a system for runoff elections and/or ranked choice voting?
Absolutely, yeah, I think so. It would have to come down to what the entire student body wants, right? I think, for sure, if we're going to probably have to do some sort of CampusGroups voting for the voting system, because I know that no matter what change you make, what we find is any time a policy is changed, we get about 60% support and 40% against. Doesn't matter what kind of policy it is, there's always going to be people who are unhappy, confused, unsure of the process. We'll try to make that as clear as possible and have as much input as possible.
But I have high hopes that we can change the system based on what the students really want to see, right? And also have an option if nobody runs for a position, right? We obviously need those positions filled, maybe there can be a more formal process to bring people in. We got a bunch of messages from people after the debates that were like, ‘Oh, I didn't run because I thought so many other people were running. Now that I realized that there were only one or two candidates, I want to run.’ And that was after the debate, so it was a little too late. But it clearly shows that when people do tune in, suddenly they do want to get involved. And there should be avenues for that, as long as it can be as fair and equitable as it can be. I don't want to shut anybody out of the process.
And I think that part of committing to a more fair and equitable election process is taking a massive survey of all the students and saying, is this what we want? And if it is, immediately implementing that and having it codified in the constitution, so that last-minute kind of getting thrown into chaos doesn't happen. And then just having those contingency plans for the most extreme situations.
Is there anything else you would say to students who may have already lost some trust and confidence in SIPASA, given how the process went?
Yeah, I would say that they should contact us. I would love to hear more feedback. We've sent the materials for the elections to people who've inquired, ‘Hey, I don't think this was very fair. I don't quite understand why this happened.’ I'm giving them the information. We want to be as transparent as possible. We’ll give anyone any of the information that we have, save confidential information between specific candidates or specific people.
I would recommend if anybody has any concerns at all, not even about SIPASA — about the administration, about their classes, about their teachers — come to us, because we are here to serve you, right? We're here to serve the student body. And it's a bunch of just unpaid labor that we're ready and eager and willing to do. As soon as things are brought to us and people want to talk, we are so ready to listen.
What are you most looking forward to working on?
I'm kind of just trudging along. Honestly, I love my job, but I recognize that a lot of it is kind of repetitive and tenuous, as far as sitting in meetings where you're not really allowed to speak, but you're expected to be there for five to six to seven hours. Just reading those 40- to 50- to 60-page statements that are released after the introduction of certain things, basically doing a bunch of homework and listening.
That stuff I'm really excited for in the sense that I like to see behind the scenes. And I like to see the process. And I like to try and advocate for people as someone who's in the background, fixing and changing and adjusting and listening. So that kind of stuff is really exciting. For me, the stuff that I'm not so excited about — public speaking, I'm not a very public speaker. And I'm not excited to give people long speeches.
Is there any other message or impression you want to leave SIPA or Columbia as you start your term?
I think, just that we have a long way to go. That hopefully the initiatives that we start, don't end with us. A huge problem with having a year appointment is that you come in with all these ideas and inspirations. The administration knows that, the staff knows that. And then once your term ends, those initiatives often die with you.
I want to codify and write things down for the future boards, so that they know the stuff that we've tried already, the stuff that we are still working on, the stuff that we want to work on, but either didn't have the capacity or the timing, and the lessons that we've learned. And I think giving that is kind of a gift to the next administration, since we didn't really receive that ourselves coming in this year. We had to re-get all the passwords to everything. We had no knowledge of any of the stuff that they did. It was all kind of off the books, and I think that meant that we spent a lot of time playing catch up. I want to set us up for success down the line.