Last week, while the General Assembly met across town at the United Nations, world leaders ventured up to Morningside Heights to speak to students, staff, and faculty at Columbia University.
In opening her first World Leaders Forum, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik talked about how much she had long admired this series (founded two decades ago by her predecessor, Lee C. Bollinger) and the astonishing number of individuals who have participated, all of them well-known figures in 21st century history.
“Lee’s idea was to create a University-wide forum where members of the Columbia community could gather to engage directly with world leaders on issues that matter,” she said. “And in the spirit of free expression and intellectual inquiry that is at the heart of Columbia’s mission, each speaker who attends has to be willing to debate in an engaged and vigorous way and answer questions from our incredibly clever students.”