The New York Post is reporting that Laura Williams, a student in the School of Social Work, has filed a lawsuit claiming Professor Joseph Paul Martin from SIPA ”constantly pressured her for sex,” and used her grade in the class as leverage. Martin is also Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights. Allegedly, when Williams refused, Martin accused her of “cheating” in the class—which was an independent-study in human trafficking.

The article, posted early this morning, is brief and vague. Besides the allegations, there does not seem to be verifiable evidence available. We know by now to be cautious when it comes to the Post, but we’ve reached out to the University for official comment, and will keep you updated as we learn more.

Open (read: gender-neutral) housing at CU–it could happen! (Spec)

This is a bed bug.

Columbia Professor Marc Lamont Hill is suing a Philadelphia police officer in a civil rights lawsuit. Though the police have yet to comment, Bwog suspects that, like Bill O’Reilly, the police officer may have thought Professor Hill looked a bit like a cocaine dealer. (ABC News)

The bed bugs’ newest target? The Met Opera House. Is nothing sacred anymore?! (Gothamist)

Some people never learn. A man botches a bank robbery one day after finishing a 22-year sentence in federal prison. (Gawker)

Young voters giver President Obama a piece of their mind. (NYPost)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A proposed secret international treaty would greatly heighten penalties for copyright infringement, some threatening civil liberties. SocketHop, the technology decoder for the literature-minded, takes a look.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced one year ago that the music industry would stop its broad lawsuits against alleged file sharers. Since about 2003, the movie and music industry associations (the MPAA and the RIAA, respectively) have been suing consumers accused of sharing copyrighted files over the Internet. At one point, the RIAA was even targeting students like us directly with threatening letters with the help of (unwilling) universities. The music industry finally learned how to adapt its business model to changing times and consumers hailed the arrival of DRM-free online music stores and new RIAA lawsuits have ended for now.

None of this means that content producers are giving up the fight against copyright infringement. A new treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), is currently being negotiated in various countries around the world. The cause for alarm is that everything is happening entirely in secret, with many of the key players denying involvement and others claiming that it is a purely “economic” treaty. Very few drafts have surfaced but many industry “advisory committees” have access to confidential documents. No one knows all of the details of the negotiations, but enough has leaked that many consumer advocate groups are concerned. The reason for all this secrecy? You could probably guess: “national security.”

Read more…

Columbia Medical Center has been firmly scolded, says the Huffington Post, for unethical and unsafe practices employed by a study the Medical Center has been running for over a decade. After three internal reviews, a lawsuit or two, and an extensive federal review of the study, federal overseers “have taken the rare action of demanding that Columbia track down the patients and their families, and acknowledge that they never were informed about the ‘true nature’ of the drug study,” writes HuffPo.

The study was set up to test a new blood-thinner called Hextend, a new version of “a commonly used intravenous surgical fluid that previous studies had shown could cause hemorrhaging at high doses.” Columbia’s internal reviews of the study conclude that no one did anything wrong, but federal reviews conclude that Hextend in doses “up to three times the level recommended” may have contributed to the deaths of several patients following open-heart surgery.

To add injury to injury, the study has been running off of a large “unrestricted grant” (commonly used for their flexible structure) from the pharmaceutical company Abbot Laboratories, the manufacturer of Hextend.  HuffPo also reports that “some of the subjects were Spanish-speaking patients who lived in low-income neighborhoods near the hospital and were admitted through the emergency room.” Given the stress of the situation and the language barrier, these patients may have been even less informed of the risks than their English speaking counterparts in non-emergency conditions.  Piling onto the scandal are two anesthesiologists from the Medical Center who say they recommended to that the Internal Review Board suspend the study due to the apparent risks. The board did not.

Not surprisingly, no comment yet from the Medical Center or the university administration.

 - Photo by “mecurialn” via Flickr.

For those who were actually thinking of going to Ricky’s soon, hold off. Please. Tomorrow, thanks to a class action lawsuit, department stores including Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue will be giving away $175 million worth of free cosmetics – one item per person on a first-come, first-served basis.

Technically, the giveaway is only for anyone who bought cosmetics at these stores between 1994 and 2003, but word is that there’s no actual way of authenticating that. The only problem: you can’t choose your free item – they’re drawn from a list.

In summary, tomorrow includes free caffeine, free cosmetics, and a new, Columbia-minted President. Almost makes one forget the end of break…

Entrenched in finals, begging for mercy.  Outside the reading rooms, the real world keeps working.

Sex

Starting with the good stuff:  CollegeOTR may have been correct in saying Columbians are “oversexed“:  A Columbia sex ed professor (oh yes, we have those) is worried about the rise of what a popular television show termed “What What in the Butt” among teens.  Yikes.  But another Columbia professor has shown that using protection is actually sexy.  Alice! is pleased, since hookups are totally replacing dates.

Conflict

The best way to communicate with extremists is to do it in their own language.  And hope that they read what you give them.  Unfortunately, some of them will still hate PrezBo.

The Internet

Columbians in charge of the Pulitzer in journalism have decided that the Internet is real.  And an exciting proposition: the music industry is considering blanket licensing for universities, and Columbia witnessed the presentation.

Thirteen Alert!

Two of the winners of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology have applied early decision to Columbia, but Bwog can’t ascertain whether they got in.  One has a perfect GPA, a perfect SAT score, and seven AP classes under her belt.  Under the gaze of Alma Mater, however, everyone slides down the totem pole a little bit.

Spec is off for break, but we want to make believe that they’re still here!  This is some of the best of the other Ivy dailies.

Yale loses at football.  Sound familiar?

Hugo: not such a big deal!

There were elections on November 4.  And not just for Obama!

People are sad at Princeton too!  At Columbia, we just complain.

Useless knowledge at elite institutions?  Never.

Crazy alumni launch baseless lawsuits.  Heard that one before?

It looks like both of Columbia’s most media-hungry legal opponents are stepping up their plans. On one side, we have Graciela Chichilnisky, who, after settling for $200,000 over her own gender bias claims, is apparently pressing other female faculty to sue on grounds of gender bias, all to form a “trust” of aggrieved faculty members. One of her lawyers, Jan Schlictmann, is apparently famous for this approach.

On the flip side, we have Roy Den Hollander, anti-feminist crusader, who has been contacting individual students in the hopes of finding plaintiffs for his class action lawsuit against Columbia University for its Women’s Studies program. Strangely, Hollander seems to be contacting both male and female students for prospective plaintiffs. Bwog wonders what the university thinks of Hollander directly contacting its students.

UPDATE (4:45 PM): The AP reports that Columbia has filed its own briefs requesting that the judge throw out the case.

A sample e-mail from Hollander after the jump.  Read more…

According to the New York Times, the long-running civil case between Saigon Grill and its workers ended on Tuesday in a $4.6 million verdict in favor of the workers. “Judge Michael H. Dolinger of United States District Court in Manhattan found violations of federal and state wage laws in awarding up to $328,000 to some of the deliverymen.”

Juniors and seniors with particularly sharp minds will remember spring of 2007, when protests against local restaurant Saigon Grill were the activist item du jour. In March of that year, the restaurant locked out its workers rather than raise pay and labor standards (among other abuses, the workers were only being paid $1.60 an hour for more than 70 hours a week). Columbia students quickly joined the cause, culminating in a large sit-in/protest in May (which was later uploaded to YouTube).

The deliverymen, at least, are obviously happy. “‘It was worth the fight because we were treated badly for so long,’ [one deliveryman] added. ‘I never imagined we would receive so much money.’”

It’s time for another chapter in the sorry tale of Madonna Constantine, the TC psychology professor who found a noose on her door and later found herself the subject of a plagiarism investigation.

Anyway, she’s back, and she’s suing Columbia for wrongful termination. She had planned to appeal her termination, but that having apparently not turned out in her favor, she’s now looking to the State Supreme Court to reverse her firing. She’s arguing that her being let-go was “arbitrary, irrational and unauthorized.”

Columbia’s not commenting. 

You’ll recall Bwog reporting last week that Business School Alum and self-proclaimed “anti-feminist” Roy Hollander was suing Columbia for offering women’s studies courses. Apparently, these courses are discriminatory against men.

Now, according to Bwog tipster Stephanie Quan, some Columbia women are interested in hearing his views. More specifically, the group Women in Science at Columbia have invited him to speak at the school, where he will “give a short talk briefing us on the case against Columbia and then answer any questions from the audience.”

The talk is scheduled for tomorrow, August 28th, from 1-2 PM, and the room is TBA Havemeyer 209. Whether it includes free food is unknown at this time.

Roy Den Hollander (he of litigious demeanor at right), a proud business school alum (’97) and self-proclaimed “antifeminist,” is suing the University Trustees and the Institute for Research on Women & Gender for using federal aid to promote a “religionist belief system called feminism.”

Women’s Studies programs, he claims, are “spreading prejudice and fostering animosity and distrust towards men with the result of the wholesale violation of men’s rights.” And while the College Bulletin claims the major is “intended to introduce students to the long arc of feminist discourse about the cultural and historical representation of nature, power, and the social construction of difference,” the super-secret version explicitly states that the purpose is to “demonize men and exalt women in order to justify discrimination against men based on collective guilt.”

Read more…

Bwog informant “please remove my name” forwarded us an email from one litigious young graduate who slipped and fell in front of the library a few years ago. Naturally, she’s suing Columbia and currently in the midst of trying to amass other slip victims to stregnthen her case. It is, after all, the American way.

However, she’s having trouble finding and getting in touch with fellow accident veterans, but she’s positive they exist — she’s even witnessed someone else slip in front of Butler as she was waiting for her own ambulance. “In our discovery claim against Columbia, they claimed there have been no previous reported complaints, falls, or injuries in that area, which I find very difficult to believe.”

Full letter (personal information redacted) after the jump. 

Read more…

Meet Graciela Chichilnisky, an econ professor who was just awarded a $200,000 settlement from Columbia, which is roughly the amount of your tuition or any one product from Nussbaum & Wu. She has been suing Columbia on and off since 1990 (back when some of you Terrible 12s weren’t even born!), claiming gender discrimination and unequal pay, claims that were also previously settled in 1995 for $500,000. As a result of the earlier suit, Chichilnisky’s salary was raised from $60,000 to $110,000.

So then, in 2000, Chichilnisky stopped teaching math and started working exclusively in the econ. department because Columbia was terminating the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization, which she had chaired. She found that her office in the Mathemetics building was hers no longer. “It’s almost impossible to believe this is happening,” she told Spec. “The destruction and removal of one’s office space, without notice is like a violation of one’s physical space.” Columbia repsponded that the school is crunched for space and that Chichilnisky wasn’t making full use of her math office.

She filed another lawsuit claiming that her pay was less than that of her male counterparts, and that in dismantling her office, Columbia “has retaliated against her by breaching the terms of the settlement.” In turn, Columbia filed counterclaims, charging that Chichilnisky had a secret second job — she was the founder and CEO of a multimillion dollar corporation — and that she never disclosed that to anyone in Low. According to CU, this was a breach of the previous settlement agreement.

Read more…

After the RIAA initiated a series of lawsuits against Columbia students starting in February, students’ rights rose to the forefront of campus debates once again, stirring up controversy about the role of the university and privacy in the digital age. But what happened to those kids? Bwog asked Orlando Rodriguez, C’09, what it’s like when the Man sticks you.




When did the RIAA tell you they were suing you?

So in late March- it was March 25th I think- I found that my internet was shut off. I called the computer people and they told me they had shut it off because of the RIAA. The guy sounded very serious and said, “Stop or they’ll sue you.” Then a week later I got a letter from the RIAA, which told me to go a certain website and type in my ‘case number.’

And that’s when you found out how much they wanted?

Yeah, it’s $3000. If you pay the money then the charge goes away, but if they take you to court they can charge you up to $150,000. It’s $750 per song because of all the extra crap, the videos and all that.



How many songs did you have?

It was less than a thousand, which was low. I’ve heard of someone settling for $8,000,

so I’m at the lowest end of the spectrum. Most of the settlements are around $5,000.



So they got you for having these songs downloaded?

It wasn’t that I was downloading, it was that I had shared too many. I never fixed my Limewire so that they songs weren’t shared.



How are you settling this? Did you hire a lawyer?

No, no lawyer. It’s too expensive, more expensive than I’m paying. My sister works for a law firm, and they told me my best course of action would be to settle. They give you two options: settle it now- through the Internet- Read more…