Columbia Life Histories Project - Incite at Columbia University

Initiated in the fall 2016 semester, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Life Histories Project sought to conduct oral history interviews with graduate students at Columbia University as a first step toward cultivating a more actively inclusive Columbia campus environment.

The project was significantly inspired by the racially charged conflicts that transpired at the University of Missouri, Yale College, and other American institutions of higher learning in the fall 2015 semester, to which GSAS Dean Carlos Alonso responded in a November 2015 letter to students: “There are members of our community who feel that their rightful sense of belonging to it is not fully recognized or realized. Let us first acknowledge that real experience of disavowal and then assume the responsibility that we all have to work together to address that circumstance. Only then will we be able to legitimately claim that we are building an enduring community at Columbia.”

Our training as oral historians, in conjunction with our experience as alumni of both Columbia College and GSAS, led us to assume that students’ experiences of disavowal could only be fully understood in the context of their personal biographies. We have therefore taken a life history approach to these interviews. We asked our interviewees to narrate the experiences, relationships, and social contexts that have contributed to the formation of their individual self-identities, from their early life to the present moment.

Moving chronologically through the interviewee’s life story, we paid particular attention to the sources of his or her decision to attend Columbia for graduate school and his or her expectations of academic and social life here before matriculating. We devoted much of our time to questions designed to elucidate ways in which Columbia has either met or failed to meet those expectations, how the individual interviewee has in turn responded to those experiences, and reflections and suggestions that could prove useful for future generations of Columbians wrestling with the same dilemmas of alienation and disillusionment on campus.

This project created a space for students to share their personal history with Columbia in a much more comprehensive, nuanced, productive, intimate, and honest way than they would on a simple survey.