Freud doesn't wanna do this stuff, either

Orientation can be fun, provided you’re drunk or Kenneth the page. Columbia is very nice to you during NSOP (relish it!) and rents out the Met and everyone smiles and tells you where Pupin is when you ask them. There is, however, the underlying problem that you don’t know any of these people, and there’s only so many times you can ask someone where they’re from. While NSOP at Columbia has its rough moments (never-ending ice-breakers, your first John Jay breakfast), it could be much worse. Feel better about everything as you discover what people at other schools are forced to do.

At Wesleyan, the delights are endless: there’s a play called Booze and Lose: “find out what happens when a group of students get together for a party. See how quickly common sense, good judgment, and emotional control evaporate when mixed with alcohol.” The program promises to provide impressionable young-things with a sense of “how to make better choices or face the consequences.” Zoinks!

There’s also a square dance, and a “Bend It At Beckham Dance”– “come prepared to bend the gender binary in fun and fashion.” A change of pace from the same-old, same-old Orientation activities at Beck University, certainly.

Brown has a truly baffling pre-Orientation program called The Third World Transition Program. Brown says we can call it TWTP for short. Thanks, guy. Heaven knows why we’re surprised to find out about the existence of a Third World Center at Brown, but surprised we are all the same. TWTP will help people who have, presumably, lived in a wolf pack, or perhaps a far-off ring of Saturn for their first 18 years, make sense of all the big bag “-isms” out there. Under1Roof is looking better everyday, right?

Yale clearly doesn’t have time for this shit: the first day of their “Opening Days of College” (that’s we’re-better-than-everyone-else slang for “Orientation”) program contains little besides a $10 “Express Lunch”, a $20 dinner in the Dining Hall, and a 4.5 hour immunization program for everything from measles to German measles. There is also a performance showcases Yale’s diversity called “Kaleidoscope,” a title we could not have anticipated.

UPenn also shuns subtlety with an event titled “Laws Related to Alcohol In the United States.” There’s also a toga dance party at the Archaeology Museum. Best toga gets a $50 giftcard to the bookstore!

Johns Hopkins had a “Beer Goggle Challenge” obstacle course last year. This time around, they’ve decided to be a little more obtuse: all we know about the “Playfair” is that it’ll be a night of “insane fun,” but “we can’t give you any more details.” There’s also a “Pimp Your T-Shirt” event, and a play called Sexcapades about a boy who travels into the future from the 1950′s and learns about “STIs and the best places to have sex on campus.” Those attending HorrorFest are asked to come in costume. Later, Tom DeLuca, the Corporate Hypnotist, will do a Hypnosis show.

Being asked to dance with a thousand strangers who you will eventually become friends with and have sex with seems to be the theme this Orientation season. Cornell will host its first-ever (!) Hoe Down, with music from a local bluegrass band. Bizarrest of all: the Class of 2014′s Official Ice Cream Flavor (!!) will be unveiled at the event.

2013, you’ve just arrived on campus, and we know it’s rough out there. Orientation is awkward. You don’t know these people. You have to play Two Truths and A Lie and decide what color M&M you would be. “Wait, blue?! ZOMG, me too!”

So while you desperately try to settle in, consider what your comrades at other colleges are being forced to do for their orientations. You are not alone.

• The kids at Brown, who are probably engaging in their daily nude roll in the mud right about now, are grouped into tables for certain meals according to interests. There’s a ‘Would You Rather?’ table, one for Computer Science & Gaming, and worse still, one for Philosophy. Brown also hosts a First-Year (hey, that’s what we call them!) Festival, where 2013-ers will have the chance to “speed meet” their classmates and then sing karaoke in front of them.  Plus, the “stalk Emma Watson” game might grow stale around Wednesday.

• Freshmen at Wesleyan can but pray that this year’s Orientation will include a few highlights from 2012: a square dance and group skit performances, complete with multiple rounds of rehearsals.

• NYU’s Tisch started off Orientation with a bang: on their first night in the big city, Tisch students were treated to an activity they will soon find as natural as breathing: attending a loft party! Instead of a deserted warehouse in Bushwick, however, NYU is holding its Freshman ‘Loft Party’ in the slightly more upscale Rosenthal Pavilion on Washington Square South.

• Carleton College introduces new students to the library with a Clue-inspired murder mystery. Actually, who are we kidding, that sounds kinda awesome.
  

• Johns Hopkins may well take the cake on excruciating orientation activities. For starters, there’s a ‘Pajama Jam Dance Party.’ Next up, the most insanely awful Orientation activity we found: an obstacle course titled ‘Stay the Course: The Beer Goggles Challenge.’ Let the description speak for itself: Don’t think alcohol can impair your abilities? Take the beer goggles challenge and navigate an obstacle course wearing the infamous “drunk goggles”. Can you find your way B.A.C home?

As if AlcoholEdu wasn’t punishment enough. Say goodbye to your parents, and be happy you’re not in Baltimore.

- ECS

Put down the wands – a wizard will not be joining the Columbia community in the fall. Multiple tipsters alerted us (with startling quickness) to Emma Watson finally going on the record about her Ivy destination. And yes, as predicted, Brown won this battle. Guess we’ll have to settle for the White House.

- Columbia University Athletics

Looking better each weekend, the Columbia men’s basketball team won its third game in a row (and sixth in seven), holding off Brown 70-57. Junior guard Pat Foley scored a career-high 21 points, and freshman guard Noruwa Agho added 17 more, including 14 in the second half, to lead the team to an important victory at the start of a four-game, two-weekend road trip.

Even more impressively, the Lions remain in strong contention for the Ivy League title. Tonight’s win, combined with Cornell’s loss at Yale, puts the Lions (6-3) only one game behind Cornell (7-2)  in the standings, with five games left in the season. Although Cornell holds the tiebreaker by virtue of having beaten Columbia twice to start the year, the Big Red have lost two of their last three away games, and could easily stumble down the stretch.  

For the Lions, tomorrow night’s game at Yale (5-4) will be critical; last time, at home, Columbia won 53-42 behind strong 2nd half defense and a double-double from forward Jason Miller. You can watch (yes, watch!) the action on the YES network tomorrow night at 7.

- JCD

If ever there were a “hot seat” upon which a major university president could sit, it would undoubtedly be between Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and NAACP legal defense fund head Ted Shaw. As two of the country’s top civil right’s scholars, and as two people profoundly troubled by, and conversant in, the state of diversity and affirmative action, it would take a slick legal-type with civil rights cred of his own to emerge unscathed–especially from at panel entitled “The Future of Diversity: A Discussion on Affirmative Action,” which was held last night at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

PrezBo fits the description, but he still found himself having to strike a very fragile balance. The man wasn’t named the #24 person who’s screwing up America for nothing–he’s the precedent-setting public face of affirmative action, even if he rejected the idea that race is any better an indicator of “diversity” than class or even geography during his opening speech. But he presides over the same kind of monolithic, exclusive institution his co-panelists so vehemently criticized. Shaw, for instance, argued that true diversity was limited by the white establishment’s inability to see race from the perspective of minorities. Guinier spent most of her presentation explaining how institutions have to be diverse at their “core,” and how peripheral diversity (e.g., the superficial “differences in phenotype” achieved through affirmative action) helps insulate and protect higher education’s exclusionary center. Both identified the basic misunderstanding of race on the part of entrenched whites as a crucial social and institutional hurdle. Read more…

In which CML recapitulates this weekend’s football game, and shares the lesson of promising mediocrity.

Early this Saturday morning, the Columbia football team arrived in scenic Providence, Rhode Island for their final game of the season. They were greeted by a jolly bear reminiscent of the old Smoky ad campaigns, a large cadre of stoners bedecked in outdoorsy brown-and-red uniforms that called themselves the Brown Band, and a small, slightly dilapidated stadium that exuded a bucolic and woodsy charm. In short, it felt like summer camp.

Two hours later, the beginning of the contest was consummated, the parents drove off, and the Lions found themselves in terra incognita, with hardly a friend or familiar soul around (besides a few hundred fans).

Homesickness. The natural response to the Lions’ loneliness was for them to withdraw further into themselves, and withdraw they did. While the offense participated in camp activities unenthusiastically, cobbling together an uninspired string of three-and-outs, the defense didn’t show up at all, instead languishing inside the cabin as Brown marched to two quick and uncontested touchdowns.

Read more…

Overheard after Columbia’s ten-point victory over Brown in Friday’s basketball game: “Too bad for them you can’t pass/fail in basketball.”

–Gautam Hans–

A writer at the Brown Daily Herald has alerted the Columbia College Student Council that, for a year between 2003-2004, CUIT sold our emails to Columbia panopticists, er, sociologists, Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts for this Science article. The study, which discusses the formation and evolution of social networks, did not name the “large university” whose electronic communications were analyzed. Two weeks later, tech gazette eWEEK.com decided to state the obvious in a January 20th post. ‘Twas us who was snooped!
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