Burundi Deogratias Niyizonkiza’S Mission to Heal a Nation
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SUMMER 2014 COLUMBIA MAGAZINE Heart of Burundi Deogratias Niyizonkiza’s mission to heal a nation. C1_FrontCover_v1.indd C1 7/14/14 3:53 PM C2_PlannedGiving.indd C2 7/6/14 10:49 AM CONTENTS Summer 2014 81424 DEPARTMENTS FEATURES 3 Letters 14 The Road to Kigutu By Stacey Kors 6 Primary Sources Having escaped Burundi’s civil war, Deogratias Nico Muhly talks Beyoncé . Brian Greene and Niyizonkiza returned to his impoverished home and Gideon Yago . Kara Walker’s sugar sphinx opened a rural health clinic. Can it heal souls as well as bodies? 8 College Walk Love boat . Gene stories . Baldwin’s country 24 Card Sharks . Magic for beginners . “Friendship”: a poem By Paul Hond Beau Willimon’s sharp-toothed drama House of Cards 46 News might circle Washington, DC, but the political hunt Gillian Lester appointed dean of law school started at Columbia. Addressing sexual assault on campus . Marshland park opens in Inwood . 30 Fickle Fortunes Baseball team repeats as Ivy champs By Douglas Quenqua Columbia researchers are dispelling myths about 54 Newsmakers an elusive, widespread social condition: urban poverty. 55 Explorations 34 A Sound of Trumpets By Paul Hond 56 Reviews The African elephant is being poached to the edge of extinction. Can research fellow Kevin Uno’s forensic tool 63 Classifi eds help turn the bloody tide? 64 Finals 42 Madame Bovary, C’est Moi: Fiction By Kristopher Jansma A carriage scene unfolds beneath Manhattan’s streets. Cover photograph of Deogratias Niyizonkiza by Kristy Carlson 1 ToC.indd 1 7/14/14 3:18 PM IN THIS ISSUE COLUMBIA MAGAZINE Interim Executive Vice President, University Development & Alumni Relations Amelia Alverson Irwin Garfi nkel is the Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Publisher Contemporary Urban Problems at the Columbia School of Tim McGowan Social Work. An economist and social worker by training, he Chief Editorial Adviser is a founding director of the Columbia Population Research Jerry Kisslinger ’79CC, ’82GSAS Center. His most recent book is Wealth and Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader? >> Page 30 Editor in Chief Michael B. Shavelson Managing Editor Rebecca Shapiro Senior Editor Joshua Ginsberg teaches in the Department of Ecology, David J. Craig Evolution, and Environmental Biology and at SIPA. A retired Associate Editor fi eld biologist, Ginsberg is the senior vice president in charge Paul Hond of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s global conservation program. This fall he will become president of the Cary Institute Copy Chief Joshua J. Friedman ’08JRN of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. >> Page 34 Contributing Editor Eric McHenry Art Director Eson Chan Kristopher Jansma ’06SOA is the author of The Assistant to the Editor Lauren Savage Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, which received an honorable mention in the 2014 PEN/Hemingway Awards. Editorial Assistants Juwon Kim, Elisabeth Sherman His work has been published in the New York Times, the Believer, and the Millions. He is an assistant professor of Mailing Address creative writing at SUNY New Paltz. >> Page 42 Columbia Magazine Columbia Alumni Center 622 W. 113th Street, MC 4521 New York, NY 10025 Tel. 212-851-4155 Fax 212-851-1950 [email protected] Claire Shipman ’86CC, ’94SIPA is a regular contributor www.magazine.columbia.edu to Good Morning America and other national programs for Address and Archive Assistance ABC News. She has interviewed George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, [email protected] Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Queen Rania of 212-851-4155 Jordan. She is a University Trustee. >> Page 60 To update your address online, visit alumni.columbia.edu/directory, MARISSA RAUCH MARISSA or call 1-877-854-ALUM (2586). Advertising: 212-851-4155 [email protected] To download our advertising brochure or Beau Willimon ’99CC, ’03SOA studied painting and submit a classifi ed advertisement online, playwriting at Columbia. His play Farragut North was visit www.magazine.columbia.edu/advertise. made into the Oscar-nominated fi lm The Ides of March. Columbia Magazine is published for He is the creator and writer of the Netfl ix political drama alumni and friends of Columbia by the House of Cards. >> Page 24 Offi ce of Alumni and Development. © 2014 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 2 Columbia Summer 2014 2 Contributors.indd 2 7/6/14 11:03 AM letters MONEY SHOT patience he takes us on a tour of researchers What I fi nd curious is that within the Reading in the Spring 2014 issue about who make emotionally fraught statements, debate about marijuana in America, there the Columbia Campaign raising $6.1 bil- such as Guohua Li’s “The legalization of is rarely any mention of the Netherlands, lion, I wonder sometimes where Colum- marijuana is open surrender” and Herbert where marijuana has been legal for decades, bia University and the rest of academia Kleber’s condemnation of the medical-mar- or Uruguay, which just recently legalized are going with enormous construction ijuana movement as “a stalking horse for it. Have the Dutch gone insane? Has their projects and ever more specialization. Is legalization.” This emotionalism, he goes society collapsed or deteriorated? Is there an the world a safer place? Are the graduates on to show, is a conspicuous part of the epidemic of couch-sitting ice-cream eaters wiser? Are politics more settled and rea- history of marijuana legislation. Emotional wreaking havoc in Uruguay? I don’t think sonable? Are the problems that confront rhetoric combined with political expedi- so, and yet here we are still wrestling with society any closer to resolution? Even a ency has driven presidents and governors ideas about marijuana that are more appro- cursory reading of the headlines provides to condemn or silence the reports of promi- priate to the 1950s than 2014. the grim answers. nent commissions and task forces that rec- People are fi nding marijuana to be a The issue is not how much money a ommended reason-based policies. godsend after years of taking pharmaceuti- university can raise, but whether the very Hond brings his tour of institutional bias cal drugs with unpleasant or dangerous side purpose of education is being undercut by to an end in the offi ce of the neuroscien- effects. Show your readers the respect they an emphasis on the marketing of education tist Carl Hart, where the light of reason deserve by acknowledging the good things rather than upon developing the critical- burns brightly. Hart points out illogical cannabis can do. thinking skills without which knowledge thought and fl awed hypotheses operating Marc Peraino has no real place or meaning. at Columbia. Is anyone listening? Mount Vernon, WA Stephen Schoeman ’69SIPA William Himelhoch ’83SW Westfi eld, NJ Jamaica Plain, MA How proud Columbia must be to be home to neuroscientist Carl Hart, who does not POT SHOTS I was appalled by your article on marijuana. equate lowering IQ to getting “dumber,” Paul Hond’s remarkable journalistic You didn’t interview anyone who uses mari- so long as the lowered IQ “stayed in the skill reaches a high point in “Breaking juana to treat a particular illness, and you normal range.” I guess that means the New Through” (Spring 2014), his investigation didn’t talk with any researchers who are Zealand study is wrong, so long as only of what I would call the anti-marijuana actually looking for ways marijuana can people with higher than average IQs par- establishment at Columbia. The research- benefi t people. Instead, you interviewed take of Mary Jane. ers he interviews include a former drug czar researchers who seem to want nothing more Bob Fately ’82BUS under George H. W. Bush. With tact and than to prove marijuana dangerous. Van Nuys, CA Summer 2014 Columbia 3 3-5 Letters.indd 3 7/3/14 9:19 AM LETTERS Carl Hart argues for evidence-based con- a state cannot secede, that the Union must ambivalent and whose public statements clusions and well-constructed arguments to be preserved at all costs, that the presi- seldom touched on anything more spe- further a discussion about drugs, crime, and, dent has the right and duty to wage total cifi c than the need to ‘show compassion’ it seems, race. Yet he implies that equating war on his fellow citizens, kill their young toward victims of war.” a regression of IQ with getting dumber is men, steal their property, burn their cities, Pius XII faced two options: speak out somehow misleading or inaccurate. How destroy their farms, and deprive them of assertively against the Nazis and their does that elevate the discussion? Hart fur- their rights? Don’t we normally call people unspeakable brutality against the Jews, ther states that many researchers “don’t like that despots? a tactic that had proved disastrous, or know anything about drugs” but come to Were the liberated slaves immediately speak in more veiled terms and quietly but conclusions that support their perspectives. established as free and equal citizens in aggressively work to save as many Jews as His views, and “research,” do just that. I Southern society, or were they discrimi- possible. Pius XII chose the second option don’t question the truth of Hart’s experi- nated against for a hundred years more? and is excoriated for it. ence, but I think the discussion needs to be Would not the Confederacy have ultimately Albrecht von Kessel, an offi cial at the Ger- based on fact. There is too much at stake. freed its slaves in a more just and amicable man Embassy to the Holy See during the war John Anderson fashion, as agricultural technology and who was also active in the anti-Nazi resis- Old Bethpage, NY the growing recognition of human rights tance, wrote in 1963: “We were convinced around the world made slaveholding unten- that a fi ery protest by Pius XII against the per- It’s great to hear that Columbia faculty are able? Might not the Confederacy have ulti- secution of the Jews .