Thank God for Columbia. Every year that campus blesses us with a major scandal -- but this early in the year? Twice? It's like Christmas before Halloween!

In the latest development of the Minuteman fallout, two Columbia students crossed swords on The O'Reilly Factor tonight. In one corner: Chris Kulawik '08, Columbia Conservative Club president, Spectator columnist, right-wing firebrand with boy-band good looks. In the other: Avi Zenilman '07, Blue and White editor, brainy ubermensch with, uh, David Brooks good looks.

Kulawik won the coin toss (which on O'Reilly's show tends to land dickheads up) and got the first question. O'Reilly asked him if he felt personally threatened since the event. Kulawik, to his credit, was pretty level-headed in noting that threats "were out there" but had received none personally.

Zenilman tried to frame the protest as "an isolated incident in terms of a breakdown in the conversation." O'Reilly shot back that on a "Kool-Aid campus" like Columbia, this kind of stuff is expected. He is "convinced there's a left-wing jihad" afoot -- that nothing like this would ever happen with a liberal speaker.

The biggest slam of the night went to Columbia president Lee Bollinger, who O'Reilly called a punk for not showing up to defend the university's free speech climate himself. At least he's consistent. On the Oct. 5 edition of the Factor, O'Reilly said Bollinger was "hiding under his desk, as he always does" -- and then noted 25 words later that he himself, who once gave a talk at Columbia, didn't have the "courage" to return there.

(Full disclosure: We know Avi, and worked with him at one point. We may still have a turtleneck of his we borrowed once.)

UPDATE 10:53 p.m.: President Bollinger sent out a school-wide e-mail today, calling the Minuteman disruption "one of the most serious breaches of academic faith that can occur in a university such as ours." Finally, Bollinger and O'Reilly can agree on something. Read his e-mail in full after the jump.

UPDATE 11:52 a.m. Saturday: Here's the video. Having watched again, we thought we should toughen this up a bit. Avi definitely got floored on a couple questions -- notably the one where O'Reilly asked him if he knew the J-school was 100 percent liberal, and Avi just said nothing. He joins the ranks of the 99 percent of other not-conservative guests on the show who mostly get bulldozed.

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It's a scandal-off! Columbia is abuzz -- or trying to be -- over two controversies right now. One involves right-wing allegations of a slush fund subsidizing elite Manhattanites' abortions. The other is about ... a club sports flyer. The contest is closer than you might think. Observe:

Junior Chris Kulawik, the school's resident conservative, penned a column last week pointing out that if Columbia will privately cover abortion costs up to $500, and students pay only $350 in Health Services fees, the remaining $150 must be coming from "somewhere else." Ominous! Just the kind of abortion hors d'oeuvres the New York Sun would love to sink its teeth into. But Kulawik is up against ...

"Stop being a pussy." That's the line on an orientation week flyer that landed the club hockey team in surprisingly hot water, with all four student council presidents co-signing an outraged letter to university administrators. That's two more presidents than signed a letter protesting the scheduled lecture from Holocaust-denying, Israel-off-map-wiping Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one student noted. (He also found the university-approved 2004 t-shirt at right. (Disclosure: We know the guy.))

Which wannabe furor will prevail? We'll bring the nachos, you bring the Columbia student's uniquely insatiable appetite for protests.