“Two houses, both alike in aggregation,

in fair Columbia where we lay our scene.

From ancient grudge break new mutiny,

Where civil link makes civil comments unclean.”

Okay SO! Some weird stuff, and a debate about the borderlines of both censorship and advertising, is going on in the Bwog comments thread for the article “Freaking Out? Free Roti?.” Someone — maybe a Spec staffer? — posted links to the new blog Spectrum, which were quietly expunged from the site. At 1:40am, a commenter wrote: “why are you deleting comments of most of the things people say about spectrum like that’s weird.” At 2:00am, site Co-Editor Anish Bramhandkar wrote: “Bwog routinely removes comments that advertise other web sites.”

And then it was ON! Bramhandkar started outing commenters’ IP addresses to reveal they were posting multiply at 2:18am. At 2:50am Bwog’s Webmaster Hans Hyttinen commented “Again, we are only removing comments that do not add to the discussion in any way, such as a comment which was, in its entirety, ’spectrum’.” So I guess we know what the comment said! Their true feelings on the subject may be revealed in the first comment in the thread — “Spectrum: MORE LIKE RECT’UM.” [sic] What a great conversation this is, on all sides! [Spec, you are not immune.]

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The Spectator reports that acclaimed actress Meryl Streep (is there any other way people describe her?) is speaking at Barnard commencement. Your humble IvyGate editor has had THINGS to SAY!

• Columbia: “Another linguistic charm of the magazine’s name is the resemblance of ‘hoot’ to ‘haute’ as in ‘haute couture.’”
• Yale: Facebook invitations now considered a journalistic source; nothing compares 2 u, Toad’s.
• Dartmouth: Kim on MLK Day: “King would have loved this thing that I would have done anyway!”
• Penn: Social networking for people who have no problem with networking IRL.
• Cornell: “Before Lady Gaga, there was Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” There was music before Lady Gaga?!?! We can hardly remember…

• Dartmouth: President Kim announces dining hall renovation; OMG will there be a waffle station?!

• Yale: President Levin “regrets” the t-shirt controversy, like a sissy would.
• Columbia: “The Diana” finally opens at Barnard, CC student hopes for “a lot of access.”
• Princeton: Applications jumped 19 percent, for some reason.
• Princeton: “A lot of access”: “In the winter of her freshman year, Veronica ’12 had sex for the first time, with a senior boy the week after Dean’s Date.”

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 »