The University partners with lending agencies that provide financing options to international students at the lowest interest rates and fees. The international atmosphere of the Columbia campus is all-pervasive. No single element assumes unique importance. Students in this University become quickly aware, through hundreds of sights and sounds each day, that they are part of the larger world. Passersby speak in languages and accents that arriving students will soon find familiar.
Posters urge enlistment in efforts to combat world hunger and protect human rights.
There is a biannual International Crafts Fair held on Low Plaza, crowded with products from Guyana, Guatemala, and countries all over the globe. Study abroad programs attract substantial interest, even as visiting scholars arrive from abroad to enrich the intellectual life of our campus. Human rights advocates and religious leaders from Europe and the former Soviet Union were brought to campus last year as visiting scholars by the Project on Religion, Human Rights, and Religious Freedom, supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts. A grant from the Ford Foundation enabled the Public Interest Law Initiative for Transitional Societies to bring over public interest fellows from grassroots human rights organizations for courses in human rights and constitutional law. Generous support from Arnold A. Saltzman '36C, a loyal friend and thoughtful benefactor whose own professional accomplishments include diplomatic assignments in the former Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union, Austria, and Latin America, will assure visits from policy makers in those regions.