Office hours: they’re the best! For the latest in our ongoing series of professor interviews, Sam Schube spoke with old Bwog favorite Bruce Robbins. While you might know him from that one essay you skimmed for University Writing (that’d be “The Sweatshop Sublime”), Robbins is a man of many interests—chief among them plumbing and the plight of the New York Knickerbockers.

Just to settle a personal bugaboo, you’re not the Bruce Robbins who pitched for the Detroit Tigers in the late ’70s, are you?

I’m not. I actually threw four no-hitters in my last year of Little League, and if that had gone further, I would not be here today. I would have much preferred it, frankly, but everyone else kinda grew a lot faster than I did. I threw my best fastball and just watched it disappear. End of career.

I remember you made a subtle basketball reference in class early this year—likening an authorial choice to a “non-call” by the referee. Are you a basketball fan?

Yeah, I’m a Knicks fan. It’s a hard time to be a Knicks fan. But the future…

You think so?

Well, the tricky thing is, does LeBron James want to come to a team that looks as feeble as the Knicks? Anyway, they need somebody with serious low-post moves. Read more…

The Columbia Palestine Forum, a group of Columbians supporting “the rights of Palestinians to education and self-determination,” launched today. The Forum is joining the ranks of similar organizations at University of Rochester, NYU (we know all about that one), Hampshire and various universities across the United Kingdom in demanding, among other things, that Columbia release a statement defending the “academic freedoms of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.” 

In its mission of intent, the Forum also demands that the University disclose its budget, have an open forum for dealing with its corporations and investments, partner with a Palestinian university in order to provide academic aid, grant a certain number of scholarships to allow Palestinian students to attend Columbia, and explicitly support the right for the self-determination and education of Palestinians. If these sound similar to the Take Back NYU! demands, that’s because they are.

The forum is holding a teach-in on Wednesday evening at 7 in Hamilton 516, featuring some of your favorite outspoken professors: Bruce Robbins, Mahmood Mamdani, Gil Anidjar, Brinkley Messick, speaking about the University’s responsibility in terms of Palestinian support and academic freedom.

- ECS

Today, a group of faculty members sent a letter with 120 professor signatures regarding PrezBo’s “silence regarding academic freedom in Palestine.” While the last Israel/Palestine student rally may not have exactly been of 1968-proportions (ah, but what is these days), the faculty list has many well-known professors, including Lila Abu-Lughod, Gil Anidjar, Richard Bulliet, Yinon Cohen, Victoria de Grazia, Rashid Khalidi, Philip Kitcher, Mark Mazower, Bruce Robbins, Gayatri Spivak, and Michael Taussig. 

Several campus groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, have also been forwarding the email to several political and activist groups on campus with the hope that they can accumulate a “sizable list of student signatures” to add to their 107-person-and-growing Student, Alumni and Community Support list. The student list will not, however, be presented to Bollinger.

The full letter and faculty list can be found after the jump. UPDATE: Our post originally reported that the letter had been made public by SDS. In fact, according to SDS members, the letter was created by “faculty have passed it on to students, who have forwarded it around.” (Photo by LPM) Read more…

While student groups may still be in the planning stages of any events about the Gaza conflict, some more Columbia professors have voiced their opposition to Israel’s actions, signing an open letter to Barack Obama written by USC English professor David Lloyd.

Among the approximately 800 signatories are 14 Columbia faculty members, including:

• Anthro professor Lila Abu-Lughod (at right) and MEALAC professor Gil Andijar, who both supported the academic boycott of Israel that PrezBo opposed.
  
• Three other full professors – English professor/walk-outer Bruce Robbins, renowned scholar/payphone adherent Gayatri Spivak, and Anthro professor/man of impeccable style Michael Taussig, all of whom joined Abu-Lughod and Andijar in signing an anti-Bollinger “Statement of Concern” in the wake of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia.
  
• The rest are a mix of assistant professors, postdoc fellows, and graduate students, including six in the anthropology department. With a majority of the signatures (so far) from anthropology, at least we know which department David Horowitz can choose if he gets tired of saying “MEALAC.”
  

Oriflammes are gleaming! The rabble is roused! T-shirts are free for the taking! Five Years of War, Five Days of Action has reached its apex out on Low Plaza. A devoted cadre of protesters walked out of class at noon. Though the crowd has dwindled, there’s no reason to think any of the 236 people who confirmed their attendance via Facebook flaked out. Since then, they’ve encircled the sundial, which has been recomissioned as a podium. The professors invited (Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, Zainab Bahrani, and Bruce Robbins) wrapped up their speeches earlier. Three veterans (one a Columbia grad student) have told their war stories. But as the speeches end, hijinks await. The group has promised protestacular mischief at 2 o’clock. An anonymous tipster informs Bwog that Butler, Alma Mater, a banner, and some unfurling may be involved. Stay tuned for live(ish) updates.

Update, 1:52 pm: Much of the crowd is now sitting. One speaker, a postdoc student, asked the crowd whether it wanted to engage in any chants–response was unenthusiastic. Bwog is stroking sweat away from its brow, and regretting having bought a black, heat-absorbing laptop. Talk has turned to divesting Columbia from business with Iraq war contractors (some $5M invested!), and to demanding that Columbia introduce scholarships for Iraqi students. This has raised audience engagement to a low whooping level.

Update, 2:14 pm: The event reached a monumental finale when a banner was flung from Butler (Bwog was mighty impressed) and Alma Mater was veiled and surrounded by a militant bunch of arm-linkers. Bwog remains a bit confused about why the banner looks like a pink dress, and about why the veil looks like it was made of some sort of do-rag material. Sunbathers seemed befuddled but engaged. The clanging of the bell has recommenced.

Photos after the jump

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Bwogger Armin Rosen admits that this brief survey of people with the same name as other people who happen to be Columbia professors is random as hell, but bear with him.

I’ve never read Dostoevsky’s The Double, but I assume the story goes a little something like this: a successful English professor is wrongfully accused of his wife’s murder, only to wake up in the body of a mid-decade, D-list sitcom actor, who finishes his PhD in English only to be wrongfully accused of his wife‘s murder and wake up in the body of a mid-decade, D-list movie actor. What’s that, commenter: what I’m actually describing is a thinly-veiled cross between Lost Highway and Groundhog Day? Read a book, my friend: with this whole “postmodernism” thing, anybody can be anything, ever. Everything is relative! The author is dead! And Columbia professors lead strange double-lives within the bodies of other people! Sound like a Spike Jonze movie? Well maybe it should be–“Being Jeffrey Sachs” sounds like the surprise hit of 2008.

David Helfand

The man who introduced a generation of Columbia undergrads to the wonders of science (and a PhD student to the horrors of…well, the horrors of err, dancing with the man who introduced a generation of Columbia undergrads to the wonders of science) might not believe in God, but he sure believes in making great television. Proud owner of Columbia’s most accomplished doppelganger, Helfand went from producing overrated network garbage (sorry, “Friends” fans), to editing underrated, subscription-only works of television genius. Were his two sides merged, Helfand would be the only untenured senior faculty member ever to win a CableACE award.

Bruce Robbins

Back in the early 90s, when everyone thought the hot-shot Rutgers professor was writing catchily-titled theoretical harangues like “From Epistemology to Society” and “Death and Vocation: Narrativizing Narrative Theory,” Brucie was up to a little narrativizing of his own—remember Darnell from “The Hat Squad?” Y’know, the character that kept on…well, I actually have no idea what that character kept on doing, only that this apparently bifurcated identity operating on multiple levels of physicality and temporality in a trans-historical socio-cultural sphere, is proof that Robbins knows how to get down with his bad, postmodern self.

Read more…

Of 70 Columbia professors, expressed to the New York Sun! Some of them rather prominent! A faculty action committee statement of concern  accuses PrezBo of failing “to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom.” Particularly rankling to signatories–which include such luminaries as Akeel Bilgrami, Bruce Robbins, Mahmood Mamdani, Gayatri Spivak, Eric Foner, and former Provost Jonathan Cole, as well as predictable lightning rods like Nadia Abu al-Haj and Nick DeGenova–is the impact of outside groups on tenure and other “academic freedom” issues. The New York Sun suggests (albeit very implicitly) that this could be the early stages of the kind of faculty ouster that cost Lawrence Summers his job; meanwhile, the professors plan on presenting their grievances tomorrow at a meeting of the Arts and Sciences faculty.

Conspiracy theorists will note a number of carefully worded references to recent events in the professors’ statement: “Tenure, “the hosting of controversial speakers,” “villifying members of faculty,” “partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East”…this thing could be read as the culmination of faculty discontent with Low Library’s handling of the MEALAC controversy, the al-Haj tenure debate, the Ahmadinejad introduction, and Islamofascism awareness week.

But one conspiracy theorist has gone a step further: according to the mysterious “Emmett Trueman,” who has been flooding publicaton inboxes with “inside information” about this year’s tenure battles, an ad hoc committee has recommended that Professor Joseph Massad be denied tenure (which New Republic resident codger Marty Peretz called a few weeks ago), and the letter is an attempt by the MEALAC faculty to persuade the administration to overturn the recommendation. Also worth noting: at a panel tonight lauding Massad’s Desiring Arabs, hosted by the Heyman Institute, the professor noted that he was “personally grateful for this intervention.”

And by The Boss we mean Bwog-fave Bruce Robbins, whose ruminations on Columbia’s dearth of academic freedom made it into this week’s edition of The Nation. Esther Kaplan’s penetrating investigation of Fair Alma revealed a brewing crisis in contemporary academia: fringe right-wing groups holding controversial events on campuses. And dear God does the future look bleak.

Elsewhere, David Horowitz wrapped up this week’s anti-Islamofascist carnival by offering America’s complacent masses one final, terrifying anecdote:

“The Vice President of the Muslim Students Association at Columbia protested my use of the word ‘jihad’ during my speech, which she said meant spiritual ‘struggle’ rather than ‘holy war’ The only problem was that I hadn’t used the word ‘jihad’ in my speech at all. It was just one of the talking points she had been given in advance of the event. When I asked her whether she would denounce the terrorist group Hamas, which along with the Muslim Brotherhood created her organization, she evaded the question.”

UPDATE, 2:06 AM: Amreen Vora, Vice President of Columbia MSA, wrote to Bwog to say that she never made such a comment, and in fact was not present at the Horowitz event at all. 

Also in unholy league with the Islamists is the Columbia Coalition Against the War, a group so dangerous that Horowitz surrounds its name with quotation marks, as if to suggest that they only kinda-sorta exist, but not really, because if they actually existed they wouldn’t have quotation marks around their name, right?

Next controversy, please.

This guy was really overdue for his own edition of Profs Say, seeing that Bruce Robbins loves offsetting his typically grave delivery with the occasional zinger–some of them completely over the heads of their intended recipients. This is by turns uncomfortable and hilarious to watch, espcially when said zingers crop up in bizarrely theoretical places. From today’s lecture:

“(Psychoanalyst) Jacques Lacan didn’t have much time for therapy. That’s actually quite funny, but you wouldn’t know why.”

Ouch. But on second thought, ha! Good one, Bruce!