Last week, Princeton professor Cornel West and Columbia professor/Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz made low-key visits downtown to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. Few paid attention, if not other than to smile sadly at the old, bearded academics’ futile support of the young, bearded protesters.

However, today the movement received a tremendous dose of support from a high-profile, decidedly non-bearded source: Columbia President and Chair of the New York Federal Reserve Lee Bollinger himself (pictured right). In an interview with the Spectator, Bollinger (who, with his annual salary of $1.38 million, is definitely a one-percenter) declared his solidarity with the protesters, explaining that he too marched down to Wall St. to protest — in the year 1968, when he was a Columbia Law student. Quoth the PrezBo:

“In both [protests], very, very serious things happened. The political systems seemed unable to cope with those problems, and civil demonstrations are perfectly legitimate, reasonable, and at times highly effective ways to change that… My own view is that Wall Street bears a very significant share of the responsibility for the failures of these systems and the resulting, negative effects on the entire society and beyond.”

If that weren’t enough, Columbia’s Bwog reports that 200+ update: at least 300 Columbia faculty members have signed a petition declaring their support for Occupy Wall St. Keep reading to view the full text of the petition and list of signatories.

“We, Columbia and Barnard faculty, write in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere. Many observers claim that the movement has no specific goals; this is not our understanding. The movement aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few. The demonstrators are demanding substantive change that redresses the many inequitable features of our society, which have been exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession. Among these are: the lack of accountability on the part of the bankers and Wall Street firms that drove the economy to disaster; rising economic inequality in the United States; the intimate relationship between corporate power and government at all levels, which has made genuine change impossible; theneed for dramatic action to provide employment for the jobless, and to protect programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in part by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes; the disastrous effects of the costly wars that the United States has been conducting overseas since 2001. Only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe. It is this identification that we applaud, and we call on all members of the Columbia community to lend their support to this peaceful and potentially transformative movement.”

List of signatories can be viewed here.

As one commenter on Bwog puts it: “ohhhhhhh snap.”