Chomsky Commotion in IAB
Generative grammar devotees, be warned! The 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, featuring Noam Chomsky, is packed to the brim in IAB’s Altschul Auditorium. Bwog’s Webmaster and Official Chomskyan Political Correspondent Hans Hyttinen reports that, as of 6:30 PM, students are being asked to leave IAB and no one else is being allowed in. Hyttinen still managed a shot of the huddled masses, some of whom were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Chomsky’s hair.

Tags: chomsky, famous people, hysteria, IAB, lecturehop, panic, politics, us foreign policy
3 December 2009 @ 6:39 PM · 10 comments

on 






by like 5:50
i’m so happy to see people interested. hopefully this generation can actually mobilize to create the world chomsky helps us envision.
power to the people
They should have ticketed the event
way more crusty hippie types than I’ve ever seen on campus.
columbia doesn’t give a shit about its students. the event was advertised in the village voice and open to the public. the organizers should have made sure to give tickets to a certain percentage to CU students; from what i saw, mostly non-CU folks (aka old people) were able to secure seats while the rest of us were angrily dispersed by public safety. complete bullshit.
they should also have held it in a bigger space given that it was Noam Chomsky. 417 IAB holds only 375 students but a place like Roone could easily have incorporated double that size.
has happened before. I remember when Stiglitz and Easterly debated a few years ago and it was a complete mess. Agree with the above, stupid not to use a bigger space for Chomsky and even worse that they didn’t reserve at least half the tickets for Columbians.
\Columbia doesn’t give a shit about its students\ is a stupid conclusion to draw, rather than this was a poorly organized event that should have been advertised differently. There are many other gripes with the administration but this isn’t a reasonble one.
Does anyone else see an irony in there being such a cult following for a man that so strongly seems to espouse the need to question everything and the need to think for oneself?
just because a lot of people want to hear him speak doesnt mean that every person is a cult-like follower. he’s well known in a lot of academic fields (linguistics, politics, etc). people want to hear well-known academics speak. DURR ZOMG THAT MEANS THEY ARE A NEW CULT LOL CHOMSKY=XENU U GUYZZZZZ
my intro to linguistics class was cancelled because someone told Professor Timberlake that Noam Chomsky was coming to campus. Of course, he was talking about politics, not linguistics, and none of us could get in.