A huge piece in the today’s Times examined our most powerful and least proud alumnus’ deliberative process when ordering drone strikes,  in which he weighs the benefit of killing a suspected terrorist against the risk of killing innocents.

The piece included an oblique shout-out to CC. Obama, who in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech mused on just war, has apparently “reserved to himself the final moral calculation” when chancing collateral damage.

Obama applies “the ‘just war’ theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.” Without “a ‘near certainty’ that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama want[s] to decide personally whether to go ahead.” The coolest part:

A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, [Obama] believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff.

Hard choices…you should think about them critically!

Update (11:00 pm, Oct. 10): The petition has been officially released. The online petition now has over 300 signatures.

Update (11:16 am, Oct. 8): The petition now lists 292 signatures, which can be read here. As expected, the largest departmental representations are from FAS humanities, Sociology, History and Anthropology, but the list also includes professors from the JSchool, Public Health, GSAPP and the Law School, among others. NB: watch out for a few duplicates! We’ve let them know. A press release with a definitive list of names should come out this Monday.

Political Science Professor Jean Cohen (she’s also the Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum) confirmed to Bwog that 200 Barnard and Columbia professors have signed the following petition in support of the Wall Street Protests. The petition has not officially been posted yet, and therefore signatures have not yet been released. The bolded emphasis is our own:

We, Columbia and Barnard faculty, write in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere. Many observers claim that the movement has no specific goals; this is not our understanding. The movement aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few. The demonstrators are demanding substantive change that redresses the many inequitable features of our society, which have been exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession. Among these are: the lack of accountability on the part of the bankers and Wall Street firms that drove the economy to disaster; rising economic inequality in the United States; the intimate relationship between corporate power and government at all levels, which has made genuine change impossible; the need for dramatic action to provide employment for the jobless, and to protect programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in part by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes; the disastrous effects of the costly wars that the United States has been conducting overseas since 2001. Only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe. It is this identification that we applaud, and we call on all members of the Columbia community to lend their support to this peaceful and potentially transformative movement.

With midterms approaching, seats in Butler come at a premium.  The number of alternative options is growing, but whether it’s the pleasing symmetry, or its world class ranking we can’t help coming back for more. So for dedicated Butler-ites, and also for those who are just trying to cram a half semester’s worth of reading in one week, Bwog presents a Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Butler Morals.

Only counting waking hours, I wonder if I have spent more time in Butler or in my dorm room.

1. Leaving Your Shit
   • Need to go pee? Universal sentiment drives you to it, so Hume says it’s A-Okay.
   • Need to make a food run? Hobbes recognizes that it mutually benefits everyone if we allow each other to get some food every now and then. But apparently life isn’t the only thing that is nasty and brutish (looking at you Butler Cafe coffee…) It’s okay to make a Starbucks, Oren’s, or Joe’s run. Food is allowable as well, but please don’t bring back overly fragrant Indian food, and save those loud crackly Sun Chip bags for the hallway.
   • Need to leave for 3 hours so that you can watch Lord of the Rings? Machiavelli sez we should ruthlessly jack your shit.  If you notice that someone has been gone for over an hour, then feel free to wave over that distraught freshperson who just wandered into the room, and reassure him or her that the MIA person’s spot is now free.  Now he or she owes you…
2. Moving Peoples’ Shit
   • Apparently there is an official policy about kicking out campers.  We can treat that like Eastern philosophy and ignore it.
   • Only a few books? Kant rambled incoherently for 30 pages about this problem.  Not really sure what he meant, but let’s say that I have a duty to not waste my life trying to figure it out, and I’ll just satisfy my inclination to move aside those books.
   • A few open books and notebooks?Ask the people who were around when the person left.  Use your judgement. But what is judgment? Can we trust reason?  What if the books don’t really exist? What if I don’t exist?
     

     "Be inhuman out of pity and love of humanity!"

   • Laptop chained to a chair/lamp messy papers all around? This is one is tricky because people most often chain their laptop if they plan on being gone for an extended period of time.  Again, ask neighbors.  If it has definitely been over an hour, arrogantly push aside everything and assert your natural right to ass-chair association.  Then murder everyone who you suspect disagrees with you.  At least that’s what the French would do…

The bottom line is that we have limited space to work with, and so we need to use it efficiently and morally.  What would we do without the Core?

On this last crisp autumn Monday, a CC class was proceeding lazily in a Carman classroom situated directly across from Frat Row. Somebody else was presumably having a less than studious morning, because unexpectedly and suddenly the room reeked of weed.

As students snickered, rolled eyes and envied the bold toker, the instructor quick on his feet said: “I’m sorry, excuse me, but someone is smoking some major weed right now… We’re going to try and not get stoned back here.”

Then to a student in AEPi, “If that’s your frat house, maybe you want to have a word with them or something…”

Rejoice that intrepid men and women fight the War on Fun every day of the week, including midterms!

Image via Wikimedia

John Stuart Mill, courtesy Wikipedia

Bwog knows finals for Contemporary Civilization are approaching when she hears students asking each other in the hallway, “Do you know anything about Nee-chay?”

So, to all sophomores about to engage with the harm principle, categorical imperatives, and the social contract: exercise your will to power. The birds of prey among you will soon be separated from the lambs.

And, if you feel badly afterward about how you did on the test, just be thankful—at least you don’t look like John Stuart Mill. 

Bwogger Eliza Shapiro may be a full year away from the CC dose of Freud, but that didn’t stop her from getting up for this semester’s CC Coursewide Lecture.

Groggy CC sophomores and their balding elbow-patched professors filed into Miller Theater Friday morning for a coursewide lecture given by Jonathan Lear, a professor at our long lost cousin college, University of Chicago. Lear was introduced by Michael Stanislawski, Nathan J. Miller Professor of History and Chair of CC, who, after surveying the room, which was relatively crowded but certainly did not contain the 1,000+ sophomores that technically should have been there, remarked: “I’m glad to see that our policy of mandatory attendance has been realized.” 

Lear, who is also trained as a psychoanalyst, has written a number of books that might make for some pleasant summer reading, among them “Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation”, “Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life”, and simply, “Freud.” Lear began his talk a brief praise of the Core and assured us that he is “very committed to teaching within our Core at Chicago”. Before launching into the meat of his talk, he suggested that those especially interested in Freud consult his clinical material in addition to his theoretical works, which often are “very, very hard to connect with.” At this point, ambient jazz music began to float in from nearby rooms, startling some sleepy ’11-ers. (more…)

CCSC 2011 President Learned Foote writes to let us know that the council is celebrating the end of today’s CC exam with pizza and Red Bull (“for renewed studying”) in McBain Lounge today at 5 p.m. 

“It’s primarily for sophomores, but if happy first-years want to join us,

then that’s cool.”

Yesterday we posted a LitHum study guide in limerick form. Today, we move on to CC, where we’ve summarized some texts as text messages. Leave your own creations in the comments. 

Machiavelli’s The Prince

U wnt pwr? akwr ur state by ne meenz necesry n mak sur ur feerd n not luvd.  crush ur enmys qick n nvr use foran rmyz. ps. giv me a job, plz.

Plato’s The Republic

Socrates + ppl @ athens tlk abt jstice theory of govt. theory of philo., theory of forms (rem, cave allegory!). s’s goal is an ordered polis; in end S thinks philo.kings RULEZ (4 realz).

(more…)

No, it wasn’t our fair University Professor, but three religious scholars who gathered in Roone Arledge Auditorium today to discuss God, truth and the other. Bwog Daily Editor and Sophomore Justin Vlasits reports.

Having a coherent discussion among lay people about religion in any contemporary university is very, very difficult. In a setting that gets its defining characteristics from an unsteady mix of Enlightenment and post-colonial theory, like at Columbia, it is much more difficult. Today we saw the best attempt at it that I have ever seen—scholars from the three Abrahamic religions came together around their sacred texts and talked about how to approach them in a university setting. (more…)

Chief Course Directory tipster Jake Miller informs Bwog that this morning, for the very first time, students have access to a full list of this year’s CC professors. For the confused Elevens, we’ve asked some informed upperclassmen (all of who received passing grades in CC!) with whom they recommend taking the class.

Powerhouse celebrities Max Frankel and Dick Wald (both CC ’52) will be co-teaching a section, though some cautious Bwoggers worry that maybe this would be too great, and we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment? Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to take a class with the entire news staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator, now’s your shot.

Other favorites include Mark Mazower, Roosevelt Montas, Katja Vogt, Matthew Jones, and Anthony Corsentino. Feel free to leave your own suggestions in the comments, the Elevens will thank you. 

UPDATE: For you Terrible 12s out there, Lit Hum profs have been unmasked as well. Bwog recommends Denise Milstein, who won last year’s graduate preceptor award and is reportedly unsafe for silent students and those who would skip class, as well as law school admissions dean Harry Kavros.

 Let the shuffling begin.

From the deepest corner of our hearts, Bwog wishes underclassmen the best of luck on today’s Lit Hum and CC exams. We’d wrap this post up with a classical reference, but Bwog is being edited by an engineer today, so we’ll just allude to the Wretched of the Earth with a dash of übermenschen and leave it at that. Excelsior!

(Also, um, hopefully the exam stayed secret this year. Everyone hates make-ups in September.) 

 Plato is rooting for you!

It takes a certain degree of intellectual comfort to decide you’ve conceived a brilliant new direction for a century-old course. Writing it up and sending it to the entire roster of CC praeceptors, the Committee on the Core, and Deans Yatrakis and Quigley, on the other hand, takes an almost suicidal hubris. One sophomore did, and a bemused recipient passed the e-mail on to Bwog:

From: [redacted]

Date: 11 December 2007 16:17:23 EST

To: [redacted]

Subject: Columbia’s Core

To whom it may concern,

   You are receiving my email because you are on the Core Committee or are a preceptor for a Contemporary Civilization class.  In my final essay for Contemporary Civilization, the material of the essay required that I either deny my own words or take some form of action.  Attached you will find the essay that has propelled me, headlong, to this email.  I think you will find that it embodies the essence of the Core Curriculum, especially CC, and is an example of what I consider to be the true power of the Core: the push to a critical evaluation and re-evaluation of the world in which we live and to action to change that world for the better.  I hope that you will take the short amount of time necessary to read the document (and perhaps a little longer to consider the way it could affect your own reality).

Thank you for your time,

[redacted]

CC ’10

The attached 12-page paper put Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in dialogue with the Leviathan, and pronounces that “CC still maintains remnants of the authoritarian view of education found in Hobbes,” with suggestions for non-canonical texts that might be introduced to introduce an alternate perspective. The conclusion reads as follows:

“This essay is my reflection on my current situation.  However, my realization of the structure in which I reside is not enough to achieve “liberation”, which can only be the result of a collective effort.  Thus, I appeal to you to take into consideration the implications of my praxis and form your own.  The syllabus need not be discarded immediately, it is comprised of wonderful books, but perhaps the inclusion of another source, or a class decision regarding the optional choices in the syllabus would constitute a step in the right direction.”

Ah, the brash naivete of youth!

Armin Rosen reports on the big semi-annual, semi-mandatory sophomore class lecture.

The title of this post is actually a wee bit inaccurate. This wasn’t just the biggest walkout of the year–it was also the biggest walkout of last year, and was probably bigger than any walkouts that were held the year before that one, too. About seven hundred students were at Roone for Friday’s Contemporary Civilization course-wide lecture. By the time Berkley Talmud professor Daniel Boyarin had finished dissecting the seventh chapter of Daniel, a mere handful were left in the audience, proving that while Iraq might convince 400 or so people not to go to class, intellectual passivity is one cause around which practically everyone can rally. Even at Columbia.

If only John Erskine could have lived to have seen so spectacular a “fuck you” to the Core Curriculum and everything it represents. Granted, it was a Friday afternoon. And granted, I’ve heard some people complain that Boyarin’s central thesis–that the all-time mindblower that is Daniel 7 represents an attempt at suppressing certain polytheistic ideas within ancient Judaism, and that its formulation of an “older” and “younger” God provided a theological basis for the emergence of Christianity as a protestant movement within Judaism itself–has nothing to do with what we’ve been reading and studying in CC. I’ve heard others say that his brilliant synthesis of linguistics, history, literature and religion was off-topic and irrelevant; that his meticulous application of comp-lit methods both on a practical and theoretical level were limited to ideas and concepts uninteresting to people without a strong background in Judaism. (more…)

Today’s Sunday Times is chock-full of Columbia nuts. First, the lead story in the Magazine, by Mark Lilla, is regurgitated CC, and any good humanities student worth his or her weight in Enlightenment and secular/liberal theory should be able to follow his argument and add a dash of insight to boot. Then, the Lives essay is by a J-school prof who meets up with a former story subject and has a ball. Over in Arts, there’s a long article about “mumblecore,” a micro-genre of indie film in which Barnard grad Greta Gerwig (and the WBAR station) are key elements. And, finally, there’s a pretty long piece about the guys behind Indoctrinate U, which we know you all love.