Committee on Global Thought
Nobody's really sure what they do. They seem to be a PR move, designed to keep Columbia's "superstar faculty", such as Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz, and Orhan Pamuk, in the limelight. The are well-funded and their events have good, free food, even if the content ranges variously from the incomprehensible to the incoherent.
Fun Fact: Came up with the slogan "Think globally, act locally."
The name is a ripoff of the University of Chicago's much older and more intellectually rigorous Committee on Social Thought, which actually awards its own PhDs.
