Eric Foner’s “Civil War and Reconstruction” and Kenneth Jackson’s “History of the City of New York” are some of the most well-known classes at Columbia, and every year, it seems half of Columbia tries to register for them. But there may be a better way. While stumbling around Columbia’s web site, Bwog discovered a cache of “e-seminars” from Foner and Jackson, along with other Columbia luminaries like Richard Bulliet and Alan Brinkley.

Watching a couple e-seminars obviously provides a different experience from attending class, for better (no final!) or worse (no midnight bike ride). The topics of the e-seminars also appear to vary slightly from the topics the professors cover in class. But even though these lectures are free and offer no credit, Columbia refuses to give them away to the public. Before watching each e-seminar, you have to log in with your UNI and password, which means your mother, brother, and second cousin can’t take Foner’s e-seminar (unless you give them your UNI and password).

Which e-seminar series should you check out first? Here are our recommendations:

• Eric Foner, “Slavery and Emancipation“
• Kenneth Jackson, “History of the City of New York“
• Alan Brinkley, “America Since 1945“
• Richard Bulliet, “America and the Muslim World“
• Randall Balmer, “Religion in Modern America“
• Casey Blake, “Intellectual History of the United States, 1890–1945“

Blame Canada

Almost as famous for the epic proportions of his beard as for his pedagogy, the chair of the Astronomy department and Frontiers of Science mastermind Professor David Helfand will be relocating to Canada. It was reported Monday in a local newspaper in a remarkably hand-wavey way that “Helfand is now on a long term leave of absence from Columbia, with zero responsibilities for the foreseeable future.” He’s given up the Big Apple for the town of Squamish, just north of Vancouver, home of the newly-founded Quest University. Helfand was one of the University’s Founding Tutors and has been acting as interim president since 2008.

Helfand will now be acting as the full-time head of Quest, which graduated its first class this April. According to The Chief, Squamish’s news website, Helfand feels more at home there then he ever did during his 33 years at Columbia. “I have been lecturing at Columbia for a third of a century,” said Helfand. “But I feel I only began truly teaching when I came to Quest.”

We’ll especially miss his killer moves.

Homecoming via Quest

An incoming 2013er whose father is incarcerated writes about her path to Columbia.

James Franco drops out of speaking at UCLA’s commencement.

Jeff Sachs wants the US to send water, not money.

Will cities of the future need “vertical farming?” Two Columbia professors say “yes.”

David Helfand has said that a meteor could bring down a plane. Did it bring down Air France 447?

Hamid Dabashi: “The first 100 days over, Obama is looking more and more like Bush”

Frontiers of Science mastermind David Helfand has gotten a promotion! After embarking on a bold experiment last year at Squamish, Canada’s Quest University, he has been named  “acting president”. According to the National Post, “he will take a paid leave of absence from Columbia and move to Squamish in January, where he will work, gratis, for the full calendar year, trying to get Quest back on track, attracting more students, and finding his replacement.”

According to the Post, Quest university has seen four university presidents in the past year and continually suffers from “administrative blunders, low enrollment numbers, and negative articles in the press.” The school is just one of the latest attempts to establish respectable small private universities in Canada, whose most famous universities are generally large and public–but at this point, the article says, “Quest is on the brink.”

Bwog would like to remind Professor Helfand to write all his graffiti in both languages.

UPDATE 6:00 PM: As a commenter has suggested, for posterity’s sake, Bwog also asks Professor Helfand’s students to send us pictures of him “getting freaky” on the dance floor.

Astronomy department chair, Varsity Show character and Bwog birthday party guest David Helfand will be giving a guided tour “to the edge of space and time” at the Guggenheim tonight. 

Explains the museum’s website:

“Light particles from the depths of space tell us how the history of the universe began, and most likely how it ends. Columbia University professor David Helfand provides a visual journey through the galaxies, revealing both our knowledge and our ignorance.”

So if you’re lucky enough not to have locked yourself in Butler tonight, Bwog recommends a self-revealing look at your own ignorance, narrated by Professor Helfand.

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…

Wish you were in Paris right now? Bwog foreign correspondent Sumaiya Ahmed reports on Columbia’s big weekend in the City of Lights.

This weekend, Columbia students in Paris were treated to another sort of World Leaders Forum organized by the Columbia Alumni Association. The three day affair included Nobel laureate and 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan as the keynote speaker, as well as Columbia professors Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, David J. Helfand, and President Lee C. Bollinger.

Saturday featured a full day of panels on globalization, arts, and the media at La Bourse, the historic site of the Paris Stock Exchange. The first panel, “A Critical Look at Today’s Media” touched on a number of issues, such as how journalism has changed under the Bush administration. The moderator, Graduate School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann described the current administration as “post-modernists of the right” who refuse to trust journalists, and recalled that Karl Rove had once written to a colleague that “the press is just another interest group.” Read more…

Acclaimed Columbia professor and partigoer David Helfand will be spending this fall north of the border, at Quest University in Canada.  Helfand will be a “visiting tutor” at the newly-founded university, and his faculty profile includes a link to apply to Quest in case you want to follow your favorite astrophysicist / core course founder / Varsity Show character.  For even more serious Helfand-stalkers, the website supplies his new e-mail address and a number to call him at – but the number is actually just the main QuestU line, where he probably won’t be answering phones (but with only ten professors listed, maybe he will be.)

The profile’s not a bad read: Helfand reveals his mission, “The goal is to obtain a complete picture of birth and death (for stars) in the Milky Way,” and Dave reveals himself to be a jokestar, as well as a chef, with this gem: “David believes he is a better cook than astronomer and, ambiguously, most of his colleagues who have sampled his gastronomical undertakings agree.” Unfortunately, it looks like he hasn’t come up with new material recently, since those lines have already been used in his profiles here and here.

In the spirit of Frontiers jams and the Varsity Show, a tipster sent us the following image. We leave the rest to your imagination.

Because there’s nothing Bwog likes more than teasing its viewers, we bring you another taste of the upcoming Orientation issue of The Blue and White — it hits your doorstep or dorm lobby tomorrow!

Helfand’s Index

By David J. Helfand 

The June Harper’s Index, that essential compendium of facts masquerading as social commentary, cited the “ratio of negative portrayals of teachers on U.S. children’s television programs to positive portrayals” as 3:1.  I will refrain from speculating on the ratio with which you will portray your professors after four years at Columbia. I also won’t reveal how your professors will rate you. But I was asked by the editors to provide a “Helfand’s Index” of highly pertinent facts to get you started in Frontiers of Science. All them pass Stephen Colbert’s truthiness test. 

Percentage of the greenhouse gas emissions for the entire country of New Zealand that are produce by the burps and farts of cows and sheep: 40% 

End-to-end length of all the DNA in all the viruses on Earth: 275 million light years (one light year is 6 trillion miles). 

End-to-end length of all human DNA: 18 million km (or 0.000002 light years)—so who’s in charge here? 

Read more…

Conscious of spring’s glorious birth today, David Helfand, resident nutty professor of Astronomy, posed a curious question at the beginning of his Beyond the Solar System class: “Would you rather hear my prepared lecture or take a walk?” One hundred sorrowful humanities majors awoke, and Helfand led them on an impromptu adventure in Riverside Park to show “how a scientist looks at the world.” Bwog is still unsure of that, but we did gain other wisdom while tripping over fallen tree branches:

-The Hudson River isn’t actually a river… it’s a fjord! Hot!

-Move to northern Alberta (it’s a Canadian province!) in anticipation of huge shifts in the Global Climate! “It’s going to be really balmy.”

-The Day After Tomorrow’s “time scale is wrong by a factor of 1000.”

-Don’t eat eels out of the Hudson! They’re full of PCBs!

-300 million years ago, it was a 45 minute walk from here to Africa!