• Brown: Student nabbed in Thomas Friedman pie-throwing incident; accomplice remains at large, calls himself "Colonel Custard"
• Columbia: Startling noninformation: Some in Harlem like to walk around campus, whereas others do not
• Cornell: Current Cornell cheaters not as bad as old Cornell cheaters
• Dartmouth: "The liberal student has died"
• Harvard: Plastic surgeon writes children's book in which Mommy gets breast implants, infuriating a freshman, who gets the title wrong
• Penn: Something called "Hey Day"moved from Friday to Tuesday!
• Princeton: Band rides up to campus in van run on vegetable oil
• Yale: "No human blood" in Shvarts art studio

IMPORTANT: Are you Colonel Custard? Do you know who Colonel Custard is? Please contact us if either is the case.

Well, Columbia's General Studies Student Council may be filled with inept constitution breakers bickering about minutiae in the least popular corner of the university, but at least their meetings are dramatic. Take the recent potentially unconstitutional reattempt to impeach President Niko Cunningham, for instance.

The machinations began when Council members at the latest meeting waited for the pro-Cunningham people to leave, because evidently most of the people on his side leave meetings early. Then Junior Class President Karly Curcio introduced a motion to impeach him, and voting began. On BWOG, Cunningham describes his cunning political reaction: "I immediately got up and walked out."

To the untrained observer, that might seem like exactly the kind of petty, stupid move that has made Cunningham-impeachment proceedings such a hot GSSC fad. But Cunningham was trying to break quorum, since they needed everyone present to maintain it. So, assuming it's even possible to break quorum after a vote has started, it was actually a petty, devious move.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to a professional-looking invitation, various Yalies will attempt to set a world record in their Law Auditorium on Friday: Largest Gathering of People Dressed as The Hills' Lauren Conrad. This should be the first record in the Yale Law auditorium that doesn't involve torts. Whatever organization wrote the invite didn't specify exactly how to dress like Lauren Conrad, but they are providing "unlimited" free eyeliner. No word on whether Guiness will accept people who show up in their normal clothes and put on some eyeliner. Could this be an elaborate prank, timed to coincide with an actual law-related event in the auditorium? Will someone put eyeworms in the eyeliner as a blight on fans of The Hills? Either way, someone is making history.

Traditionally ignored by everyone else at Columbia, students from the School of General Studies did something slightly newsworthy two days ago when they attempted to impeach their comically incompetent Student Council President, Niko Cunningham.

[Ed: There's a picture of him here, but I happen to prefer lazy cats to upstanding young whippersnappers]

Accused of "constantly circumventing constitutional rules," Cunningham has allegedly spent a lot of his time in office not going to important meetings and then lying about it, with a dose of not getting GS a good financial aid package thrown in. Cunnigham counterargues that he "was voted in as an activist," which evidently exempts him from most activities. He did manage to attend the impeachment hearings, where the vote was 9 for, 8 against, and 3 abstentions, statistical proof that most people don't like him but not enough to impeach him. Those against the impeachment took the confusing stance that you can't really blame Cunningham because, actually, they were also incompetent. As GS senior class president Chikodi Chima put it, "Let those without sin cast the first stone."

In a Spectator op-ed, the sum total of the press leading up to the event, two GS students spread the blame even further, arguing, "Every one of us is culpable in this disastrous year." This policy of admitting to failures that aren't even their fault is a strange move for GS, which has been trying to raise its status in Columbian minds from "vague resentment" to at least "feigned politeness" for some time now. Fortunately for GS, most at Columbia probably aren't even aware of the event; even the GS student who sent IvyGate a tip about the meeting noted that he missed it. --J.D. Porter

Perhaps finally noticing that someone put a bunch of tents on their lawn, the Columbia administration has responded to the Hunger Strike. In a University-wide email, they mainly cite initiatives that they're "already taking," including hiring some new ethnic studies faculty that they were already hiring anyway and talking about the Core curriculum in Task Force meetings they were already having. It may seem like their offer is basically, "How about we change nothing?" but consider this: When the hungry raised their voices to cry for a Vice Provost for Multicultural Affairs, the administration said that their ongoing review of that office "will be extended to incorporate consideration" of that. Guess incorporating consideration wasn't the pipe dream we all thought it was.

The Columbia College Student Council has formally stated its support for a less ludicrous version of the Strikers'demands. It almost makes you wonder if the representatives that Columbia students actually elected are more reasonable than those who appointed themselves through the alternative "pitch a tent and stop eating" method.

Of course, the student council doesn't have the media savvy to put a giant paper octopus in front of its tents. Somehow representing Columbia expansion, the octopus lasted about a day before it was covered with a besloganed banner to protect it from rain. Ah, Hunger Strike demands: the thin shield between reality and a melodramatic, confusing spectacle.

And the best news of all? The Hunger Strikers met President Bollinger outside his classroom to hand him some slogan-heavy balloons He gave half of them to a stranger on 117th Street before, as Spec has it, he "carried the remaining balloons into his compound." Striker Victoria Ruiz, CC '09, responded with what may be the best cryptic threat of the whole Strike: "This is the first of many things he will be receiving."

Possible other things he will be receiving:

• Party Hats painted as black as Bollinger's soul
• Cotton Candy as substantive as his response
• One of Those Things You Blow at a New Year's Eve party... painted as black as Bollinger's soul
• Tootsie Rolls

It may seem like the Columbia Hunger Strikers could achieve just as much by challenging the administration to a Hungry Hungry Hippos tournament, but don't be fooled: The message is spreading. Four students plan to join the protest "early next week," and are currently weaning themselves off of heavy foods. At this rate, by Sunday as many as twelve students could be eating slightly less to get ready for Wednesday.

What's more, all this is happening even though the Strikers tragically lack a boombox. Fortunately, like political prisoners at Guantanamo, they've asked for one through their blog (though the prisoners at Guantanamo, for the record, don't actually have MacBooks and wireless). Unlike Cuba's tropical paradise, the day here began with a cold November rain, but the two Strikers I spoke with (nice people, actually) seemed to be in good spirits, possibly because they were headed indoors. The meeting with administrators started at 12:30, but the administration can't just make this go away by recruiting Native American studies professors. The Strikers are clear: We may not ignore their four demand categories and attendant subsets of zillions of sub-demands! Also, someone apparently put up Christmas lights around what history will undoubtedly remember as the Hunger Strike Lawn.

After the jump: some juicy snippets from the Hunger Strike blog.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ed: When we heard about the latest racial incident at Columbia, we were flummoxed, flabbergasted, and hornswoggled of our very wits. We decided to consult our man in Morningside, J.D. Porter, who is an expert in hate-crimes. Maybe he could explain the upsurge and make sense of these troubled times. Here is what he wrote instead:

You may remember Columbia racism from such recent displays as noose-hanging and racist bathroom graffiti, but it wasn't until someone spray-painted a swastika on the door of Teacher's College professor Elizabeth Midlarsky that the New York City Council decided to take notice. The Council has declared November 29th an official "Day Out Against Racism".

Much more than an awkwardly worded empty gesture scheduled a month after it would be relevant, the Day Out will include both an "interfaith prayer breakfast" and "discussions involving senior citizen centers".

Reaction at Columbia has been relatively muted so far, possibly because a "been there, done that" mentality is starting to take hold. Another factor in muting the fury is that both Midlarsky and professor Madonna Constantine, victim of the noose incident, work for Teacher's College. That's the Columbia graduate school for education, and most students are only vaguely aware that it exists, like the fencing team, but with widespread racism.

Even the crazed far-right zealots who comment on the Spec's website (who told these people about the Spectator? Why?) have quieted down, with fewer than 20 people claiming that Midlarsky faked the event, compared with the 80-plus who made the same claim about Constantine.

Of course, the usual pointless anti-racism rhetoric, which failed to prevent a follow-up to the noose incident even within the month of October, made an appearance. Student activists held a teach-in and came up with a list of demands ranging from unrealistic ("Columbia withdraw its 197-C proposal to rezone Manhattanville immediately") to confusing ("research the steps necessary for the creation of... Native American Studies"). Can racism stand up to Political History of the Cherokee and interfaith prayer breakfasts? Check back in a month.

--J.D. Porter

Ed: No, but seriously, enough with this schlemiel. To conclude our coverage of Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia, here's Columbia miscreant J.D. Porter again with a roundup of the reactions in the news and on campus. Hopefully Lee Bollinger won't take offense at one of J.D.'s statements and yell at him, but that's his problem.

Of all the media covering the Ahmadinejad speech, Fox News was the most impressive. After a week decrying Columbia as maniacal liberals supporting a dictator, a weaker network might not have known how to report on an orderly hour spent ridiculing him. In classic form, however, Fox simply elected to report on their own fictional version of the event.

More of J.D.'s trenchant commentary and edgy photography after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ed: IvyGate dispatched Columbia undergrad and Spectator columnist J.D. Porter to weigh in on the hype surrounding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the school. The Iranian Prez's event began at 1:30, and we'll have a recap coming later this afternoon. Someone instigate some mob violence out there! The media world is waiting. Just no one get hurt. OK, I'll shutup... here's J.D., with his own photos, from around noon:

Ahmadinejad fever took its time heating up today, but it looks like it's finally starting to spread, much like the deadlier literal fevers. Although event organizers scheduled the madness to begin at 11:00, the crowd only really began to swell around noon. Low Plaza, the main site of the student protests, went from almost empty to packed in about twenty minutes. The numbers don't look anywhere near the estimated 10,000 protesters, but the main action is supposed to get under way closer to one, with some protesters supposedly busing in.

More words and pictures, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »