It’s that time of the year again. We whip out our handkerchiefs, and pen some prose in honor of the changing Managing Board of the Columbia Daily Spectator. Congratulations to departing Editor Sam Roth, Managing Editor Michele Cleary, and Publisher Aditya Mukerjee, and a hearty welcome to the new fearless leaders. Pinkberry all round!

Editor in Chief: Sarah Darville

Managing Editor: Maggie Alden

Publisher: Alex Smyk

Campus News Editor: Sammy Roth

City News Editor: Finn Vigeland

Editorial Page Editors: Andrea García-Vargas and Lanbo Zhang

Arts & Entertainment Editor: Abby Mitchell

Sports Editors: Jeremiah Sharf and Rebeka Cohan

Design Editors: Maya Fegan and Isaac White

Head Copy Editor: Abigail Fisch

Photo Editor: Zara Castany

Multimedia Editor: Justine Hope

Spectrum Editor: Stephen Snowder

Editor in Chief of The Eye: Ashton Cooper

Art Director of The Eye: Cathi Choi

Managing Editor of The Eye for Features: Anneliese Cooper

Managing Editor of The Eye for Optics: Meredith Foster

Staff Director: Tala Akhavan

Technology Director: Jake Davidson

Alumni Director: Rob Frech

Finance Director: Daniela Quintanilla

Sales Director: Rex Macaylo

Our dear university, hit hard by the recession, has been searching for ways to cut expenses.

With assistance from consulting firm McKinsey, they’ve been weighing their options, some of which so upset Michele Moody-Adams that (have you heard?) she resigned as Dean of the Columbia College. While these recommendations have not been made public—and perhaps shall never see the light of day—the University has enacted other policies aimed at saving money, including cutting back on payments for professors’ health insurance and their children’s college tuition.

Back in April, the Task Force on Fringe Benefits (advised by McKinsey, which compared Columbia’s benefits program to those of 16 other universities) released a 38-page report. The report recommended sharply curtailing so-called “fringe benefits” for “Officers of the University” (which mostly means faculty, researchers, and librarians).

These are the specific recommendations the report made:

• Only pay 80% (instead of 100%) of tuition costs for professors’ children who attend Columbia, and 40% (instead of 50%) of tuition cost for professors’ children who attend other schools. This one is self-explanatory, but extremely costly: professors would have to pay over $40,000 more for their kids to attend Columbia for four years! …Which is less than a “normal” parent pays for one year. But still.
• Only allow faculty and staff members who are enrolled in a degree program to take one Columbia course (instead of 15 course credits) per semester for free.
• Replace the generous POS 90 and POS 100 health insurance plans with a High-Deductible Health Plan and Health Savings Account. In English: In exchange for a monthly fee, the POS 90 and POS 100 plans cover 90% or 100% of all your health expenses once you’ve spent around $200 (known as the deductible) on health expenses each year. It’s a pretty sweet deal, so sweet that these plans are actually considered “Cadillac plans” and subject to high taxes under Obamacare. The HDHP, on the other hand, has lower monthly fees but a much higher deductible. The idea is that you put the money you would have spent on the monthly payments into a tax-free “health savings account,” instead of paying high monthly fees and relying on the University to pay for most of your medical expenses.
• Stop giving contributions to retired professors and instead encourage them to open retirement accounts when they’re young. The University is basically taking the same strategy they took with health insurance: transition from a system in which the University makes payments to employees to one in which the University only provides accounts for professors to fill with a portion of their annual salary. Read more…

We continue to respect our heritage/amorous affair with our mother-magazine, The Blue & White by posting each issue of the magazine online. The latest issue, available this week around campus, is a cornucopia of delights: an interview with Dean Peter Awn; the quixotic quest for a Quidditch team; and a reflection on Columbia’s recent media malaise. In Campus Characters, the Blue & White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org. From the current issue, Senior Editor Carolyn Ruvkun profiles Ben Cotton, CC ’11.

Illustration by Chloe Eichler

On just another sleepless night at the Columbia Spectator office, former Editor-in-Chief Ben Cotton, CC’11, was holding a meeting in his office with his staff. He suddenly dropped to the floor and started vigorously performing push-ups. Unlike many of his notoriously caffeine addled Speccies, Cotton crusades against java, proud to rely solely on will power and bad pop music. “If I have to stay up, I’ll stay up,” Cotton insists, sometimes devoting as many as eighty hours a week to the Spectator. His suitemate since freshman year, Dhruv Vasishtha, CC’11, and former Spectator Managing Editor, Thomas Rhiel, CC’11, both credit this stance to his “boyish“ impulses. He injects an almost juvenile energy and authenticity into his two passions, Spec and baseball.

Vasishtha sums up Cotton in five words: “Ben loves the Red Sox.” That almost unconditional and inexplicable fervor the Newton, MA native dedicates to his home team carries over to Spec. “I have a hard time relaxing in general, I always get stressed about something and want to find a problem to attack.” Spec, he explains while gesticulating emphatically, provided a productive outlet. The paper quickly became all-consuming, as its new online presence, Spectrum, which Cotton helped create, required constant attention and almost incomprehensible sacrifice. Following the uneasy editorship of Melissa Repko, CC ‘10, Cotton emerged as a decisive director and charismatic coach. Read more…

These bandz are seriously silly.

With a vote on Columbia’s Baker Field building plans in Inwood coming next week, community members have posted an online petition calling for more concessions from the university. (Manhattan Times)

Manning Marable, SIPA professor of history and public affairs and founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, passed away yesterday. Marable was a passionate critic of economic, social, and racial issues; his long-awaited biography of Malcolm X is due to be published on Monday. (NYT)

Yale students have filed a Title IX suit against the university in response to Yale’s failure to adequately address issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, specifically citing the October 2010 incident where Yale fraternity pledges chanted the words “No means yes, yes means anal!” throughout Yale’s Old Campus. (Yale Herald, Salon)

As guests of honor at Spec’s annual awards dinner, Arianna Huffington and Joan Didion helped the publication to raise nearly $100K. Though the funds are slated for new “technology and much-needed digitization projects,” we hope that at least a bit of it translates into free food! (NYObserver)

Post-subway ride users of hand sanitizer, meet the MetroMitt—a disposable mitt designed to protect your hands from all sorts of unsavory subway germs. (Gawker)

Silly Bandz via Wikimedia Commons

Print journalism enthusiasts Claire Sabel and Carolyn Ruvkun scored invites to CSAAD, Columbia Spectator’s Annual Awards Dinner, held this year at the Columbia Club in midtown. Speccies schmoozed, Arianna Huffington charmed, and hobnobbing ensued.

“Journalism is not a spectator sport,” declared Arianna Huffington. It was an unfortunate choice of words, since the media mogul was presenting the keynote address at the Columbia Spectator fundraising dinner. Former Republican political wife and failed independent gubernatorial candidate turned ubiquitous liberal commentator and networker extraordinaire, Huffington is a little zany, to say the least.

But Spec snagged her just at the right time. Three weeks ago, AOL bought Huffington’s wildly popular news blog, the Huffington Post, for a cool $315 million. Once just another lefty startup, HuffPo now attracts 26 million visitors a month. “I’m in recruitment mode,” Huffington announced in her trademark Greek accent. She jokes that she was born in Fresno but “cultivates an accent to give the air of an ethnic minority.” It “makes me more popular—except in Arizona.” People chuckled.

Things got serious when Huffington fielded questions. Attendees took their best shots: you don’t pay your bloggers, you just aggregate information without producing original content, you take leftist stances in your books but claim that the site is politically netural, and you post trashy stories— “if you can call them that.” Zing! But Huffington had heard it all before. She deftly responded to their questions and dismantled their accusations with a touch of sass. Read more…

Inner city pressures

A mixed bag of news graces this morning’s bwoglines, but except for the announcement that Arianna Huffington will present the keynote address at the Columbia Spectator’s Annual Awards Dinner, it’s pretty much the worst of times.

A winter storm warning is in effect till Wednesday evening. University weather related updates say, as we’d expect, school’s pretty much open, it’s just going to be a lot more difficult getting in. How this will bear on Groundhog Day tomorrow is to be seen, although we’d need it to actually get out of his hole to even try to see its own shadow.

James Franco is to teach a class-on himself. At Columbia College. Before you run to the class directory to search for said class/unleash a roar of frustration, we should probably add it’s Columbia College Hollywood where he’s offering the film class—Editing James Franco…With James Franco.

Certainly not the best of times for Hosni Mubarak, not least in New York

Rounding it all up- the worst of the best? New York City is number 50 on the list of top 50 cities for hospital care.

It’s that time of the year when we post the new Spec managing board and people on Spec and their supportive suitemates write lots of comments like “Go Hallie!” and “I love you Jake, lol remember that time when we stayed at the Spec office sooo late rofl.” So here we are again. A hearty congratulations to Spec 134 (is that right Ben?) and to the new Spec 135.

• Editor in Chief: Sam Roth
• Managing Editor: Michele Cleary
• Publisher: Aditya Mukerjee
• News Editor: Sarah Darville
• News Editor: Leah Greenbaum
• Editorial Page Editor: Gabriella Porrino
• Editorial Page Editor: Rebekah Mays
• A&E Editor: Allison Malecha
• Sports Editor: Jim Pagels
• Sports Editor: Mrinal Mohanka
• Spectrum Editor: Mikey Zhong
• Eye EIC: Amanda Cormier
• Eye ME: Ashton Cooper
• Eye Art Director: Cindy Pan
• Head Copy Editor: Alex Collazo
• Photo Editor: Jasper Clyatt
• Design Editor: Ann Chou
• Design Editor: Jeremy Bleeke
• Online Editor: Jake Davidson
• Staff Director: Hannah D’Apice
• Alumni Director: Andrew Hitti
• Sales Director: Mabel McLean
• Finance Director: Spencer Duhaime

The basement of the West End. Photo via Wikimedia

Sometimes, fresh-people, in a seminar, or at a party, someone will reference something that used to exist and doesn’t anymore, and you will have to nod your head or laugh knowingly. Ah yes, Morningside is like, so gentrified, you will say.

We asked alumni of The Blue and White and Bwog for places, events, and trends that once were and are no longer. Here’s your leg up.

• When at least some people on campus wore fleeces and baggy-ish jeans
• JJ’s at 4 AM (now open until 2 AM, was a bar when your dad went here)
• McIntosh Hall and the old WBAR studio in it
• Flashing, not swiping, your CUID to get into Butler
• A respectable 1020 (was once an upperclassmen bar before the West End became Havana, now your first NSOP stop)
• Shit in the McBain showers
• Arson in the McBain shaft
• Using AIM
• AmCaf
• The Village Pourhouse used to be Mona, a bar that was better than the Village Pourhouse. Before Mona, there was SoHa. Girls used to dance on the bar. “There would be massive drunken dancing,” one alum whispered over GChat, “and then you’d just start making out with random decent-looking girls.”
• CoBag (Columbia Bagels, open 24/7. Bwog editors coined the ‘Morningside Heights Happy Meal’: a 40 and bagel at 3 AM)
• “I once saw a rat in Ferris”
• The West End basement when Lil’ Jon was popular (fabled Columbia hangout of everyone, ever, including Obama and Jack Kerouac, with fantastic burgers and lots of beer pong)
• Creepy Wein doors that had horizontal slats at the top (for oxygen, we believe)
• The yearly letter Foner would write to Spec explaining that he is not a Gyllenhaal
• The old Westside
• Good Spec reporting (MEALAC!)
• Vampire Weekend performing at ADP and St. A’s
• CUCommunity (offered a share in Facebook, but they turned it down. Bummer!)
• Manhattanville protests
• 40′s on 40 without the playpen and drink tickets

Illustration by Wendan Li

You might not know the following figure–but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue and White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org.

”After Buffalo, anything was going to be a step up,” says Melissa Repko, BC ’10, speaking of the summer she spent interning for the business section of The Buffalo News. “The work was great, but Buffalo is not a glamorous city.”

Despite her misgivings about Buffalo’s deficit in charm, Repko is not one for superficialities. After chasing news stories in Morningside Heights as a reporter for the Columbia Daily Spectator and serving as the paper’s Editor-in-Chief last year, Repko still maintains much of her Midwestern pragmatism, drawn from her roots in Ohio and tinged with an air of staid conscientiousness — she’s writing her thesis on the legislative presence of women in post-genocidal Rwanda.

With her short brown hair pulled back in an efficient, if unadorned, half ponytail, Repko refers to a trifecta of sacrifices to explain how she manages her duties at the Spectator and schoolwork simultaneously. When things get busy, which is just about always, “Eating, sleeping, showering are the first to go; for everyone else’s sake in the newsroom, I do my best with showering,” she laughs.

Pointing out a fundamental distinction between her own interests and commitment level and those of her fellow Speccies, Repko concedes “a lot of people do Spec because they think it’s fun. But I’m in the minority; I had to be serious about it because I’m serious about journalism as a career.”

Early on in her tenure as EIC, Repko, concerned that her staff was getting “so caught up in the day-in, day-out logistics that we were forgetting to have fun,” organized a joint managing board-corporate board bowling excursion to Harlem Lanes. “I hadn’t really bowled since I was eight at a birthday party; I forgot the importance of having bumpers.” Repko admits, “There were a lot of gutter balls and I am pretty sure I got the lowest score!” Although Repko was made painfully aware of her imperfect hand-eye coordination that night, “it ended up being a great way to do something together besides putting out a paper and I realized that putting out a paper was way easier for me than getting a strike!”

Read more…

The J-School steals a mixed-media mastermind away from The Guardian. (Wired)

Want to be an eminent domain holdout? The Times lists places you might consider moving to.

Gentrification is upon us! (and guilty liberals complain). (Spec)

The L Hostel in Harlem was shut down by the city. (Gothamist)

photo via flickr/paraflyer

Today is a Snow Day! (except for the Business School)!

Columbia was apparently mentioned as superior to Kenyon College off-camera on the Daily Show.

The MTA is “trying very much” not to increase fares this year. (Gothamist)

Hey, you know what’s cool? Meatpacking District nightclubs. (Spec)

The Spectator wants to know where it’s going to live next year.

Updated: Governor Paterson will not run for re-election, but will not resign (Daily News)

More Bwog, more love. Our latest eligible bachelors are Carl Majeau, CC ’13 and Ben Cotton, CC ’11. Email personals@bwog.net to get set up.

Name / Year / School / Major: Carl Majeau / 2013 / Columbia College / Physics/Music

Preference (guy for guy, etc.): Guy for girl

Hometown: Seattle

Your dream date in seven words or fewer: Listening to Mahler and talking about Garfield High School

What redeems you as a human being? I play Jazz. Enough said

Read more…

Here we go again: the Spectator is currently planning an overhaul of their website (for those curious, it’ll be the third such overhaul in four years). An email to Spec staff reveals that the new homepage will squash all of their current Splogs (check out our coverage here) into one giant mega-Splog to supplement the print edition–you know, a Voltron/Megazord kind of deal. Onward, new media!

Word has reached Bwog’s ears that our dead tree friends on the west side of Broadway have named their next managing board (#134!). According to tipsters, current Spectator design editor Ben Cotton will be the new editor-in-chief, while The Eye editor Thomas Rhiel will join him as managing editor. More to follow when more names are confirmed.

UPDATE: Full board after the jump. Read more…

After almost forty-eight hours of capital-d Drama, the Spectator‘s website is back up. No noticeable changes, and both sides are still not commenting for legal reasons. 

Oh, and hi Gothamist!

UPDATE (11:30 PM): Spec‘s editors have published an “Editor’s Note”:

The Columbia Daily Spectator Web site was down from Friday, October 16th until Sunday, October 18th because a member of the staff temporarily disabled it as a way of demonstrating his disagreement with certain Spectator management policies. He has left the staff and the Web site has been restored. We are taking steps to prevent such actions in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Melissa Repko, Editor in Chief

Elizabeth Simins, Managing Editor

Julia Feldberg, Publisher