Dorothy Ko

A cool sculpture and an even cooler professor

Professor Dorothy Ko (of Barnard’s History and Women’s Studies departments) is a woman of great wit and wisdom – and stories of East Asian cuisine that will make your mouth water. Her actual wisdom brings together all three.

Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer: I try to make the people around me happy, and sometimes it actually works.

Claim to fame: Came up with the stunning insight that men are the first victims of patriarchy.

What’s your most valuable or unexpected college experience? Not having yet taken a vacation in my life, that there are students who could afford to go skiing in Tahoe every winter weekend.

Back in my day… we wrote letters in long hand on beautiful paper and dispatched them with a pressed leaf or a drawing, even if our friends lived down the street.

What’s the craziest student excuse/extension story you’ve heard? Never. They just tell me that they need more time. Only the good students have ever asked.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? What kind of Eurocentric question is this? Evidently you have never tasted a bowl of fresh, silky bean curd, steaming hot and quivering in the spoon.

What are three things you learned at Columbia? Never underestimate the ambition, idealism, and fragility of young people.

What’s your advice to students/academics/the human race in general? Learn Chinese.

Those glasses are fire though via Dorothy Ko