A short while ago, a tall, well-dressed, middle-aged man strolled into Butler and started handing out candy canes to disheveled students. Grinning and making polite conversation, he proceeded confidently from the café to the third floor. Bemused bookworms naturally sent a flurry of tips, having cottoned on to the fact that this was not another beneficent alumnus, but rather our very own Deantini (aided by CCSC Prez Aki Terasaki). Why on this night does the Dean dole out delights? Because he can.

Saint Tini

Caught red-and-white handed by FILO

The dog days are over, but here’s photographic proof of yesterday’s merriment. We’ve never seen so many smiley (sober) Columbians—community has been unleashed! “It sounds like you guys really needed this,” one puppy owner told us. Furrealz.

You can send in your own pics of puppy lovin’ and pooch smoochin’ to tips@bwog.com.

 Photos by Yanyi Luo

And now for something a wee bit different. In today’s Actual Wisdom, English professor Edward Mendelson teaches us a lesson about breaking the rules. And about the perils of questionnaires. It’s all below, in his personally requested format. It’s kinda like when you take major liberties with an unappealing essay prompt and end up writing something that only tangentially answers the question—professors, they’re just like us!

The questions:

Edward Mendelson

1. Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer.
2. Your claim to fame.
3. What’s your most valuable or unexpected college experience?
4. What’s the craziest student excuse/extension story you’ve heard?
5. Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese?
6. Back in my day…
7. Three things you learned at Columbia.
8. What’s your advice to students/academics/the human race in general?

 The answers:

(a) W. H. Auden wrote in a poem: “Thou shalt not answer questionnaires.”

(b) Never give personal answers to impersonal questions. A questionnaire isn’t like a conversation where anything you say can have an effect on the next thing someone else says. A questionnaire is like a machine that keeps talking but never listens. Other question-asking machines that you should avoid answering include evaluation forms, marketing and political surveys, and anything else that reduces you to a statistic when you answer it. An assigned paper topic is essentially a single-question questionnaire; avoid courses with assigned paper topics, or find a way to make the topic your own instead of the instructor’s.

(c) It’s impossible to give a meaningful answer to any question in the form, “What’s your most valuable experience of this or that?” Every interesting experience is interesting in itself. You can’t measure it or rank it or compare it to any other experience without trivializing it.

(d) Questionnaires simply start and stop. Unlike personal conversations, they don’t have a beginning, middle, or end. Avoid any kind of speech or writing where you can’t choose the shape and structure of what you want to say.

Began his career as a daily editor

Bwog literally runs on the human spirit. If you have lots of human spirit that you’d like to earmark for Bwog’s consumption, you should be a Daily Editor.

Dailies get to ask people probing questions, get into events for free, have their words on the Internet, and consume lots of Westside cookies at meetings!*

If this appeals to you, type up a response to the form below and send it to editors@bwog.com. You don’t need to include a headshot, but are welcome to if you’re into that sort of thing. Apply by 11:59 pm tonight! Yes, it’s finals. You’re on Bwog, aren’t you?

Ready to apply? Click here for the app!

Illustration by Eloise Owens

Be on the lookout for the December issue of The Blue & White, which will be arriving on campus this week. In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting features from the upcoming issue. Such treats include a breakdown of Barnard’s budget woes, a look at Columbia’s proposal for a new engineering campus, and the politics of space in Lerner. Below, find the transcript of our interview with Todd Gitlin.

Columbia Journalism School Professor Todd Gitlin first immersed himself in protest culture when he got involved with New Left political activism in the 1960s. After a stint in the underground intellectual and writing culture, Gitlin turned to academia, becoming a prominent public intellectual and prolific author. He has recently asserted himself as a prominent and informed voice in the debates about the Occupy Wall Street movement, upon which he is currently writing a book. Gitlin recently found the time to sit down with Blue & White contributor Anna Bahr to discuss the trajectory, politics, and core values of the movement.

The Blue & White: In the last month the majority of media attention on the movement has been more focused on police brutality than what Occupy Wall Street has actually been accomplishing. Do you think the shift in focus has negatively affected the purpose of OWS? Can you comment on the vilification of the police force?

Todd Gitlin: Right after the eviction [from Zuccotti Park], I was hearing a lot of indignation and outrage about the police tactics and [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg. That was about two and a half weeks ago and it seems to have faded. In the conversations I’ve had since them with people since then, with people who had been deeply involved, there wasn’t that much about the police. They rolled up their sleeves and started to address other issues.

In terms of the outer impression, it probably looks to people who have not been paying such close attention that the big story is this collision, the confrontation. That always happens whenever there’s violence—that’s what happens.

B&W: Has the public and media attention on instances of violence detracted from the effectiveness of the movement’s other efforts?
Read more…

Update, 5:11: Director of Communications, Kat Cutler, told us Jacob has been found and is now with his family. Another university official also confirmed he is at home and well.

According to Spec, Columbia College senior Jacob Inwood has been reported missing after last being seen December 14th at the Milburn, New Jersey train station. Posters produced by Public Safety have been spotted around campus since late yesterday. Bwog is in the process of speaking to Student Affairs and Public Safety, and we will update this post if we learn more.

People with information concerning Jacob’s whereabouts are directed to contact the 26th Precinct Detective Squad at 212-678-1351, or Public Safety at 212-854-5555.

We send our best to Jacob’s family and hope for his safe return.

Yesterday night, a tipster sent in this photo. We’ve seen Hamiltonian notes before, but the openness of the denizens behind door number 401 to babes made us curious.

TAKEN ---> cept for babes

So a babe of a Bwogger was dispatched to investigate…

From us to you: a Limited Edition Louise McCune Original poster of all of our Butler Archetype friends. We’ve left a stack on the shelves in the back of Butler Café, and a few around 209. If you don’t nab one today, don’t worry, we’ll be sprinkling them around the library over the coming week.

Love, Bwog

Overseen in Carman, hanging in the balance:

“Bodies are not the same as Coca-Cola cans.” -Arthur Caplan

Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair

Remember this thing?

Last Thursday, Army General Ray Odierno appeared on the Colbert Report to announce the end of the War in Iraq, and over the weekend, the last U.S. troops rolled across the border from Iraq to Kuwait. Most troops will be home for Christmas, but some 4,000 will remain in Kuwait as a quick reaction force. (Hulu, Mother Jones, AP)

It’s the rule of threes! On Thursday, British journalist and intellectual Christopher Hitchens passed away at the age of 62. The Nation, New Yorker, and Atlantic have put together collections of his best work and tributes. The next day, Václav Havel, President of the Czech Republic until 2003 and former Columbia artist-in-residence, passed away at the age of 75. Finally, North Korean authorities announced late last night that Kim Jong-Il had died, only 10 hours after the country agreed to suspend its nuclear weapons program. (Hulu, NYT, AP)

The West Harlem Local Development Corporation, an organization that’s supposed to distribute $76 million of Columbia’s money to the West Harlem community as consolation for the Manhattanville expansion, is in hot water after it was discovered that one of its board members tried to spend $85,000 without telling anyone. Now Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer has added his voice to the chorus calling on the group to disband. (NYPost, DNAinfo)

California public schools may be broke (and about to get more broke), but that’s not stopping UC-Berkeley from greatly expanding financial aid for middle-class families. All students whose families make between $80,000 and $140,000/year will only have to pay 15% of their income, plus an $8,000 student contribution. It’s not as generous as Columbia’s financial aid policy, but it’s unprecedented for a state school. (LAT, NYT)

This reddit-famous GS grad isn’t the only anonymous Santa’s helper this holiday season. Across the Heartland, poor families that have put Christmas purchases on layaway at Kmart (meaning they agree to pay for them in installments and get their money back if they can’t make all the payments) have discovered that generous strangers have anonymously paid off most of their balances. (Reddit, AP)

The mayor of Troy, Michigan may want to throw out her “I <3 NY” tote bag now that marriage equality is legal in New York, but for most people, the fact that Columbia alum John Spofford Morgan can finally marry his life-long love, Lou Halsey, is just another reason to love New York! According to Columbia researchers, marriage equality also makes gay men healthier. (Detroit Free-Press, NY Mag, BBC)

Speaking of Christmas romance, why not let Columbia alum Chris Beam explain why we kiss under mistletoe? (Slate)

Blues clues via Wikimedia

Call us old-fashioned*, but Bwog likes sticking to traditions. That’s why we dared enter the dark abyss of terror and neurosis that is Butler without so much as a Virgil-figure to protect us (or at the very least warn us to avert our gaze from one of those 209-couples who seem to feed on creepy eye contact—do they even go here?). Plus, we threw a little Lerner in there to spice things up this year. Without further ado:

A young warrior bows his head in prayer to those who've fought before him.

The dankest and darkest, after the jump. Leer away.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mayor Bloomberg plans to announce that Cornell’s won the competition for an applied-science campus in NYC. They beat out the rest of the “shortlist,” which was down to Carnegie-Mellon, NYU, Cornell, and us, after Stanford dropped out on Friday.

Not all hope is lost; even if Bloomberg awards Roosevelt Island to Cornell, we could still score some cush government funds for M’ville. Since our proposal didn’t include any of the three locations Bloomberg suggested, if we get funding, we’d still receive more or less what we wanted to gain in the first place.

Seems like all New York is gettin’ gobbled up by universities these days.

It’s finals week and you know what that means. We’ve lampooned the inanity of Butler before, but this year we’ve adapted Butler Bingo around those closest (literally) to you: Butler Archetypes.

Here’s how to play: sit in Butler. Look at the game board. Scroll over each square to read its description. Look around you. When you spot an archetypal individual, click that square to fill it in. When you get four in a row, stand up, shout “BINGO!” and do a little dance. Then pat yourself on the back and feel accomplished that you actually did something while in Butler.

Double-clicking on a square will take you to the Archetype page, and just like at Pleasant Oaks Community Center, each time you play is a whole new experience. Every time you refresh this page, the board randomizes and the positions of the squares change. So play a new game every time you’re in Butler, and good luck with finals!

If you’ve been cooped up in Butler for the past week like we have, you’ve probably forgotten how to use your voice/form words/engage with others. That’s okay. For your sake, and for that of the 2015ers, we’ll repost our comprehensive guide to Columbia’s loudest and most transient school tradition.

"O-face" optional.

Finals got you down? Then you can verbally vent your frustrations by participating in the Primal Scream. The guide for new students:

• If your clock or watch is not auto-synced to the NIST’s Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock (i.e. the Internet), make sure you’ve set it correctly. When in doubt, Bwog recommends a cell phone for superior accuracy.
• At midnight, open your window or go outside.
• Scream. Loudly. It should sound like this. Morningside Heights residents will wonder if you’ve been “skewered,” apparently.
• Keep it short. Some of you will be tempted to scream for more than three minutes. Ignore this temptation.

Marcus Folch

Take a moment on your last Sunday at Columbia this semester to soak up some knowledge. In this edition of Actual Wisdom, classy Classicist Marcus Folch warns us not to be classist, among other things.

Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer: Existence, least of all my own, needs no justification. We are, after all, ends in ourselves.

Your claim to fame: I am, to my knowledge, the only Latino Classicist on a tenure or tenure-track position in the US. I’ve met one Latino classical archaeologist grad student and a single Cuban-American Latinist who’s in a temporary adjunct position somewhere. But I think that’s it. Shouldn’t that make me famous? Or is it merely a very solid claim to obscurity?

What’s your most valuable or unexpected college experience? It’s either that I learned ancient Greek and Latin or lived in a cooperative as an undergraduate.

What’s the craziest student excuse/extension story you’ve heard?
Student: “I’m so sorry I missed class last week. On Monday I had an interview with Harvard medical school. On Wednesday I had to fly all the way to Chicago for another interview.”
Me: “On Monday I saw you making out with your boyfriend on the grass below my office window. On Wednesday I was standing behind you at the coffee shop fifteen minutes before class; once again, it seems, you had bits of dried grass stuck to the back of your sweater.”

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? I’m vegan and a Classicist. Both of which would seem to preclude either option. That said, there’s no fire without oxygen.

Back in my day… I was an anarchist and I taught CC. Now, alas, such ways set aside.

Three things you learned at Columbia:
1. Students do not have the luxury of choosing the economy they are born into; or, in other words, the middle class is a historical anomaly.

2. The Social Sciences are to the Humanities as the Renaissance is to the Middle Ages.

3. The ceiling will collapse at every NYC apartment I move into.

What’s your advice to students/academics/the human race in general? Make friends with your classmates. I know it’s hard. I know they’re weird. Some of them may seem unjustifiably elitist or beneath you or otherwise contemptible. They’re not, by the way, even though they may seem so. More importantly, in ten years, no matter where you go or what you have done, you will have more in common with any random person from any random course you took at Columbia than with anyone else you will ever meet.

Pensive gaze via Flickr.