Associate professor Lionel McIntyre of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation gave a female colleague a black eye at a bar on Sunday. According to the New York Post:

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said...

"The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise," bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. "I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me."

Just when Morningside Heights was starting to look moderately safe, the Columbia faculty is gonna start race wars?

(ASIDE: Smarties who clicked through the link above now know that there were shots fired in Morningside Heights in July. But it's fine. Our Ivy undergrads weren't present to catch the bullets. That's for international summer school students.)

Details of McIntyre's regrets and the victim's black eye after the jump.

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This week The Eye (weekly magazine of the Columbia Spectator) investigates the eerily eugenics-y world of Ivy League egg donation via pseudonymic sorority girl Alex Greenbaum:

How has she been feeling since her egg-removal surgery in September? She takes a long gulp from her Ethos water bottle and pauses for a few seconds. “You know, I felt like shit for days,” she finally says. “But they were able to extract 10 eggs from me... my check just cleared, so that’s $9,000 I can put to post-graduation travel and apartment-hunting.”

Alex's financial woes stem from her lack of a "viable major" (fertility jargon infecting every area of her life, apparently) and "My parents said they won’t pay for my BlackBerry [after graduation]." Kind of makes you miss the good old days, when impoverished lady students just plain whored themselves for extra cash, right? Like high-end prostitution, high-end egg donation requires a certain nubile je ne sais— oh, who are we kidding. We know exactly which quoi they want, and it's the same Barbie doll nonsense as everywhere else. In Alex's words:

“If I was short, overweight, or a minority, I’m sure I wouldn’t have found immediate success or made that much money to start. I made more money than what’s typical because I was deemed an ‘ideal type’ by the agency."

As the article continues, the only thing creepier than the $500K payday "for an Ivy League donor who was taller than 5 feet 10 inches and scored at least a 1400 on her SATs" is author Sadia Latifi's rhapsodic description of Greenbaum's statuesque Aryan glory. (Despite "50-percent Jewy-ness" — a minority who doesn't resemble a minority! Jackpot!) Read the rest of this entry »

Columbia has moved to dismiss hometown favorite anti-feminist Roy Den Hollander's class action lawsuit against the school. The University brings the snark in its filing, stating from that start that Hollander's claim "reads like a parody" and culminating in a section entitled "All of Hollander's Claims Fail Because He Does Not Allege Actionable Discrimination." Not only is Hollander more or less nuts, it seems that there's really no legal basis for his lawsuit.

For readers in need of a quick briefer, Hollander asserts that the women's studies department both "discriminates against male students and male alumni" and "violates the First Amendment establishment clause concerning religion." How? Unclear! But the motion is a nice rundown.

Firstly, Hollander insists that if Columbia is allowed to keep its feminist indoctrination program, it must create an equivalent men's studies curriculum, "a field he does not define and does not even claim exists as a coherent scholarly discipline." Furthermore, although Hollander did graduate from the Business School, he is no longer at the University, so it's tough to prove that he has any direct claim to damages:

To begin with, he is not a Columbia student and he has never taken, or attempted to take, a women’s studies course, let alone been the victim of any discriminatory conduct in such a class. Read the rest of this entry »

This Labor Day weekend, I interviewed Lauren Salz, Executive Director of the Columbia University College Republicans, for a Q&A with Youth Vote '08. According to her, all of the right-wing groups on Columbia's campus have a budget smaller than the International Socialist Organization. This *exclusive* IvyGate iteration has bonus questions and a picture. Swanky!

NS: Why did you get involved with the CUCR?
LS: I wasn't originally planning to join any campus political group. I had just taken a year off from school and worked on a campaign [Tom Kean for U.S. Senate] and I had enough of partisan politics. But then I got to Columbia and realized I needed to have an outlet to talk to other conservative students.

Did you anticipate feeling politically isolated at Columbia?
Not at all. Maybe I was naive, but I thought that since Columbia was such an elite university, I would find people willing to listen. I also had no idea about Columbia's radical activist tradition. Prior to my first week of classes, I had never heard of the events in '68, although I did hear about the Minutemen incident. Read the rest of this entry »

• Columbia: "'Rooster’s breakfast' is Slovenian slang for 'early morning sex.'"
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton's gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: "An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event." Gin and anchovies -- busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

It's a truth universally acknowledged that, with the exception of, like, Bob Jones University, institutions of higher education are generally more progressive than the world outside their gates. But all the idealistic hippie students who came of age in the '60s and later became idealistic hippie professors are now retiring. The younger professors replacing them still disproportionately vote Democratic, but they are "less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate": 17.2% of the 50-64 age group define themselves as "liberal activists," versus 1.3% of professors 35 and younger. Sara Goldrick-Rab, a 31-year-old professor, told the New York Times, "My generation is not so ideologically driven" and the article credits the rise of civil discourse over fractious infighting. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh man, our sanctified academic standards haven't been so betrayed by a member of the ivory tower since Kaavya Viswanathan did that thing that no one cares about anymore.

Madonna Constantine, a tenured professor at Columbia's Teachers College, was just fired for plagiarism. Background (for those of you who haven't been following our pretty extensive coverage): Constantine became infamous last fall after reportedly finding a noose on her office door, but some folks were a tad bit suspicious because her claim emerged in the midst of the university's 18-month investigation of her work. Constantine called out the TC community for stirring up a "conspiracy and witch-hunt" and, always down for a protest, hundreds of Columbia students and faculty rallied in her support. Anthony Kelley defended her in the batshittiest Columbia Spectator column you will ever read. In a nice Orwellian twist, Constantine's attorney said that her accusers, two former students and a former colleague, had plagiarized from her. It now appears that Constantine mooched from the trio in a dozen separate instances. Read the rest of this entry »

The world works in mysterious ways: Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes bad people are really pretty. And sometimes that guy who hits on all the girls at the bar, the one who uses phrases like "my mojo" and "the sweet spot" and "When it Rains, It Whores," actually has a big dick. Quoth Spec's sex blogger, The Big Bad Wolf:

I've always been told I have a huge cock. When I was 14, my first girlfriend to engage in heavy petting started a rumor that must have helped me to get quite a few handjobs in high school. She told everyone I was enormous.

A 14-year-old girl's expertise on male anatomy. Unassailable.

Wolfie is theoretically anonymous, but seeing how Commentariat's "author" pages use suffixes featuring the author's first initial and last name, and seeing how the Wolf's author page uses the suffix "/cchima," we're guessing the Big Bad Penis belongs to this guy. And if it doesn't, some poor kid named Chikodi is going to be pissed that the world now thinks he masturbates chronically.

More on The Big Bad Wolf's penis after the jump!

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A busy week for racists at Columbia: Amid the modicum of offensive bathroom-stall doodles inherent to public restrooms in New York, someone hung a noose on black Teacher College professor Madonna Constantine's door. And, you know how when you learn a new word, all of a sudden you start hearing it everywhere? Nooses are now materializing on lampposts and in lockerrooms city-wide (and in at least one burb). Expect ironic nooses at MisShapes any day now.

As much as we Ivy League hacks enjoy naming Columbia the source of all trends (good, bad, ugly, and  St. A's-related), Newsday suggests the more likely source is recent media attention on the Jena 6.

Oddly, CU TC officials resisted NYPD requests for security tapes of Constantine's building. Officials cited "policy" and "student privacy" (you know, the expectation of privacy one has when scaring the shit out of strangers in a public building). Those inclined to conspiracy theory suspect a nefarious Bollinger plot to turn hate-speech into free-speech (NYCLU is already salivating, say various rumormills). Cat-fight enthusiasts point to Constantine's ongoing book-credit battle with fellow TC Prof. Suniya Luthar. Is Columbia's derelection of crime-fighting duty a sign of taking sides? Could Luthar's desire for bylines have driven her to the proliferation of treacherous ropes? *

And, haven't we already seen this on Law & Order?

In the meantime, the Spec's cup runneth over with bias crime meta-talk: PrezBo interview, five op-ed headlines, and a handy-dandy Hate Crimes at Columbia timeline.

* No, says New York magazine, and stop spreading so many rumors. But seriously, what's the fun in that? 

And that editor is me. To the relief of most of you, I'm stepping down from my short-lived stint as an IvyGate 2.0 editor next week after accepting a new bloggy job that, you know, pays an income. I will maintain a loosely defined contributing editor's role, meaning I won't do shit but reserve the right to troll the tipbox for hilarious Spectator articles to make fun of every so often. Hal and Jacob will fill you in on however they plan to fill this tragic, heartbreaking loss, once they've stopped sobbing.

On another note, I'll be embarking on my first and presumably last IvyGate road trip this weekend to cover the "Kill the Ivy League" thing at the New Yorker Festival. So if you're going to either that or the Sasha Frere-Jones-hosted, Diplo-laced dance party this weekend, come and say hi! I have red hair, but no touchy.

XOXO,

Jim