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 »

IvyGate dispatched Fernanda Diaz, Columbia undergrad, former Spec columnist, and current deputy opinion editor, to follow in the illustrious footsteps of J.D. Porter. Her report of Ahmadinehad's rambling speech -- from within the belly of the beast -- is below. See also the award-winning (in our heads, at least) coverage at Bwog and the Spec's Ahmadineblog. Well done to you both, kind sirs.

Maybe it was the presence of Secret Service agents roaming the aisles, or the baffling smirk on President Ahmadinejad's face as he listened to President Bollinger recount his achievements in human rights abuse and Holocaust-denying, or maybe it was just the fact that we all wanted to seem cool and over it before it even began, but today's Ahmadinejad-at-Columbia extravaganza was nowhere near as tense, shocking, nor revolting as it was supposed to have been. For the most part, it was actually pretty hilarious.

Structured like the Ivy League version of a boxing match, in which Columbia President Lee Bollinger, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and SIPA Dean John Coatsworth were given an allotted time to throw their punches before a bell literally rang and allowed the other to fight back, the culmination of the whole affair was entertainingly unreal.

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 »

• Brown: "Our language isn't equipped to deal with people who do not fit into the so-called 'gender binary.'"
• Columbia: Goddamn Spec website! Bwog 1, Ahmadineblog 0
• Cornell: Hmm... what's the best stock phrase for this... presto: "We may not agree with what you have to say, Mahmoud, but we'll defend to the death your right to say it."
• Harvard: Let's Go travel guides escape Harvard tyranny, might actually be good now
• Penn: "I'm scared of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad"
• Princeton: All we can learn from Ahmadinejad is that he sucks
• Yale: Something about journalistic ethics... blah blah blah ignore

• Brown: "Cameron Crazies" inspire the new "BrowNation," a democratic republic of unibrow fetishists.
• Cornell: "Breaking Bread" program makes white and black people eat together, because white and black people hate each other
• Harvard: The Western canon: pedestrian, at best
• Penn: Third time's the charm for murder trials! 
• Yale: Humanities are for pussies, students discover

You're probably wondering why our favorite news source, the Spectator, is missing. No, their website hasn't died again. We--OK, just me--wanted to devote some extra space for Spec's September 14 RagTime entry.

After the jump, some fascinating quotes from J.D. Porter's "Legacy Admissions are Stupid" column. I'm not picking on you, Spec. I really haven't enjoyed reading an article this much since "Tread Softly, For You Tread on My Dreams."

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sep. 7, the Columbia Spectator published an op/ed so awful it became popular on the internet, garnering 160 comments (at last count) and smashing what we assume to be the previous record of 6 comments.

"The Truth About the Academies," by Idris Leppla, declares itself the "first part of a four-part series." The author, a Barnard student writes:

I know why I chose Columbia: the campus is magnificent, the education is top-tier, and my peers are intelligent. I could look at a stranger, tell him or her that I went to Columbia, and hear the predictable, "Wow, you must be smart."

And it's all downhilll from there. Here's Leppla on her quixotic quest to disenroll her brother against his will from the U.S. Naval Academy:

...the lieutenant reminded me that my brother had signed an oath legally binding him to the Navy. When I reminded the lieutenant that he had signed that oath after he had been yelled at all day and that his hair had just been shaven off during his first day there, he comforted me that John was not at all forced to sign the oath.

They shaved his hair? Why that's just like Abu Ghraib. The Spec has since taken down the article, which is a shame because it was really, really bad -- the kind of wretched awfulness that transcends politics and -- maybe, just maybe -- unites a divided country in a time of momentuous decision.

UPDATE: The Spec says that the article is unavailable for technological, not editorial, reasons. It has been re-posted elsewhere on their site.

After the jump: the article in full

Read the rest of this entry »

• Brown: Please give us money 
• Columbia: It has been several days. Don't patronize us with your "PDF"
• Cornell: A cologne review: "Imagine James Bond wearing this cologne. Not these new imposter Bonds--I'm talking about the old school, masculine and undeniably sexy Bond of the 1960s."
• Penn: Oh come on, everyone had Sha Sha
• Princeton: Whitman College "is the flagship of the new four-year residential college system." Whitman College is also "the flagship for our new four-year residential college system." Whitman College is also the subject of this terrible column.
• Yale: "Self-policing sounds like a good and fair policy, but I do not know if it is so realistic in the YouTube age." ...I'm scared

UPDATE 11:14 a.m. Thursday: They Lord, columbiaspectator.com finally works again. Here's some feel good news to celebrate! 

We've already brought you some of the Class of 2011's incredible exploits. Yet there's something infinitely worse than pre-frosh acting dumb: upperclassmen who deign to give freshmen advice in campus newspapers. Year after year, we are subjected to the selfsame verbal diarrhea as semi-nostalgic upperclass columnists blow smoke up their own asses.

These advices employ a time-old formula of mixing general banalities with college-specific banalities, i.e., "you have such wonderful opportunities at [school] and should totally take advantage of [local record shop or bar in town]."

After the jump, a round-up of the inane "wisdom" to which the Class of 2011 is being so cruelly subjected.

Read the rest of this entry »