Columbia Professor Eric Foner appeared on The Colbert Report last night to lay down the gauntlet against some down-home history-rewriting conservatives. (The Texas School Board recently axed apparently-too-liberal Thomas Jefferson from their textbooks.) Colbert had Foner “answer for his liberal crimes,” and in so doing, provide a lot of food for thought on the politicization of the classroom. Watch and laugh your Wednesday away:

• Brown: Snoop Dogg, MGMT to perform at Spring Weekend — jealous! Although we hear MGMT’s new album is dreadful :-(
• Columbia: Fifteen years of renovations, and Butler Library is still something out of a Bosch painting this time of year.
• Cornell: “Cornell Law School: Ever Heard of It?”
• Penn: Tom Green could win an Oscar and a Nobel, and his obituary would begin with that “My bum” song.

• Brown: Mayoral candidate banned from campus after “tossing pro-life video” — only in Providence, I guess?
• Columbia: Or maybe not only there: New York state politics — it just keeps getting better!
• Dartmouth: Senior starts his political career really early, hoping to become either Chris Young or Charles Rangel, depending.
• Harvard: Extra! Extra! Rich people, or students, or something, should spend more money, because that’s “honest”!
• Princeton: “This is the first in a three-part series on careers in investment banking and consulting.”

“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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• Brown: “Brown Dining Services’ new Club Plan meal option, which allows seniors to enjoy gourmet food at the Faculty Club, kicked off this year and attracted four subscribers.”
• Columbia: This blurb on an Italian restaurant has — so far! — 51 comments. Welcome to the internet, Spectrum!
• Cornell: “Wind turbines. PRETTY WIND TURBINES.” -Cornell Daily Sun
• Harvard: Faust indicates that she is literally the opposite of Larry Summers — like, if they were in the same room, the room would explode.
• Princeton: The image accompanying this article, of a Princeton girl buying Cheerios at the supermarket in lieu of an eating club is poignant. Very penultimate-scene-of-Hurt Locker. It’s after the jump!

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The Columbia Spectator launched its new blog Spectrum last night around 3 a.m., a launch heralded with a full-page banner ad on the cover of today’s paper. “We’re trying this blog thing again,” an all-caps headline pronounces, and trying they are! The new blog takes up the entire left side of the page, granting, as of this reading, equal visual precedence to an article, by the news editor, on the permanent appointment of a Dean of Student Affairs and an article beginning “What happened to you, Columbia? You used to be cool.”

This is bloggy, no doubt! And aggregatey! Spec’s site now grants a great deal of visual presence to a blog whose content promises to be less dry, if less newsworthy, than the daily paper itself. If the site maintains its current pace of uploading new posts — past blogging efforts, including “Spec Blogs,” the Opinion blog “Commentariat,” and the Arts blog “Spectacle” died a somewhat protracted death — it could become a go-to place for Columbia students. It’s certainly attractive! Really nice looking. This gives us pause, though: “Unlike Spec’s previous efforts, the new blog, Spectrum, will be supported by a dedicated blog team, meaning that it’ll be updated around the clock.”

And that’s kind of the problem, right? News worth reading isn’t constantly happening — the Spec, like every college daily ever, has to do a lot of stretching just to make its daily eight [or whatever] pages relevant. Minute-by-minute, what can Spec’s voice add to the discourse? Spectrum is a shot fired in Columbia mainstay Bwog’s direction, perhaps, but Spec and Bwog will end up fighting over the same stories, and Spectrum is at a disadvantage given how long Bwog’s had to establish its voice.

Well, hm! It’s not so much contributing a Spec voice to the discourse as letting the discourse change Spec, maybe! Right? It seems that opinion columnists will play a large role in the day-to-day workings of Spectrum, as will “daily editors” [a la Bwog, itself the well-defined internet outlet of monthly magazine The Blue and White] who will edit the site one day a week. Which gives them about as much power to define Spectrum’s voice as the editor-in-chief and managing editor have to define Spec’s? And both, Spec and Spectrum, are, again, equally prominent on the site. Which one is the cart and which the horse?

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• Columbia: Winter Olympics ongoing; less than a week until your IvyGate blogger gets his Parks and Recreation back.
• Dartmouth: This is all well and good, but what does ZAC Posen think about Iran?
• Penn: Shrug, um, we’re not sure how to feel about this. “Good”!
• Princeton: OMG ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THAT HORRIBLE COLUMN AND INSANE HYPOTHETICALS?!?! Thank god Princeton kids are confined to Princeton where they can’t infect us.
• Yale: Yale Law alum tapped for court seat. This could be taught in j-school as an example of a “dog-bites-man” story.

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!

• Princeton students get bloggy, observant, and frustrated—“Today, Princeton has a $12.6 billion endowment, and the foosball table in Forbes is being held together by 2 plastic pens. FML.”
• Brown seeks volunteers for “piloting boats, tending the fires, selling merchandise.”
• Yale encourages eating Fritos in the library by rendering fines fiction.
• At casino night, Columbia students rolle dice for the dough, fedoras fly.
• Harvard dominates in the Rice and Bean Pot Burrito Eating Contest.
• Italians come to Dartmouth, get “very involved with the Italian club.”
• Penn students meet the internet, “About five clicks in, I see a screenful of penis all up in my grill.”