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…

Big changes are afoot following tonight’s SGB Town Hall meeting. Here are some bulletpoints because we know your eyes are sore from all the end-of-semester “re”-reading you’ve been doing lately. 

• SDS was denied recognition. Again. (Last year, you’ll recall the group failed to turn up for their recognition meeting with the SGB board.) They’ve unofficially been on campus since Spring 2007, but are not officially sponsored. 
  

• Other groups denied recognition include: Alliance of Students Against Poverty, Edmund Burke Society, ICARE, Weave a Dream
  

• Among the newly recognized were: Columbia Right to Life, Columbia University Dance Marathon, Delta GDP, GlobeMed, Interfaith Collective, Students for International Indigenous Rights
  
  Read more…

Late-night news in “Giant Inflatable Penis-gate,” as the queer community has moved quickly to respond to the controversial editorial published in Wednesday’s Spectator. In addition to the factual errors, the editorial is also attracting controversy for alleging that Queer Awareness Month “must be sure to focus on awareness and education before revelry.” The “revelry” in question was Genderfuck, the underwear-only party held this past Saturday night.

Word of the editorial spread quickly through queer organizations on campus. About 20 students (including several leaders of the queer community) commented on the original editorial, and the Spectator uploaded Thursday’s letters to the editor before the rest of the site was updated. In addition, seven student groups have sent a letter to the Spec editorial board, calling the editorial “inaccurate, sensationalized, misinformed, and malicious” and demanding “sufficient space be given in the immediate future to concerned groups and individuals to offer editorial responses.” Finally, plans are already in place for a “kiss-in”/protest at the Spec‘s offices tomorrow at 12:15 PM.

In addition to publishing Thursday’s letters early, the Spec is considering a meeting with queer groups on campus, and a source tells Bwog that editor-in-chief Tom Faure will be penning an explanation of the editorial process in the same issue. The letter from the student groups to the Spec editorial board is posted after the jump.

UPDATE 3:26 AM: Faure’s aforementioned letter is also posted after the jump.

Read more…

This April marks the 40th anniversary of the 1968 student protests at Columbia. (For a brief re-cap, you can read about Barnard’s Town Hall on ’68 here.) In order to commemorate the protests, the administration, along with several activist groups and student organizations, is organizing a three-day conference about the events. Channel all your false nostalgia into a weekend of lectures, tree-planting, and concerts. 

The event boasts some pretty big names including activist and former Jane Fonda paramour Tom Hayden,  British historian and New York Review of Books contributor Tony Judt, ’68 protest leader/SDSer Mark Rudd, and hometown favorite and former SDS president Todd Gitlin.

The weekend will also feature such events as a Druids of Stonehenge concert at no one’s favorite bar Havana Central, an investigatory, “large scale, multimedia narrative” fittingly entitled “What Happened?”, and a closing ceremony/picnic lunch. Tickets are not available yet, but Bwog will alert you of when they are. Until then, once again, we’d like to direct your attention to a video of the Grateful Dead playing on campus. It’s a lot like that time Vampire Weekend played on the steps of Low during Orientation Week, except you know, completely different.

Want extraneous ephemera? We’ve got extraneous ephemera!

• Bwog missed it while QuickSpecking, since the classic headline ”Penn to Teach at Penn” ran under today’s College Briefs in the print edition only. “Sean Penn?” one student was overheard wondering. Not quite, and if seniors here are upset about Matthew Fox speaking on Class Day, we wonder what they’d think if Columbia signed the star of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Van Wilder: Rise of Taj as an adjunct professor (okay, okay, he was in The Namesake too…and we’re still waiting for Fox to take on a similarly respectable role…)

• We’re not going to go beyond providing the link: Radar‘s…saucy interview with Matt Sanchez

• Dean Quigley, overheard leaving Low around 6PM yesterday: “One of my favourite* things in life is that time in between jobs.” Following in Zvi’s footsteps? Say it ain’t so, Austin…

• Are the SDS, progenitors of the 1968 protests, on the rise again? We guess we won’t know for sure until attending tomorrow night’s meeting. Until then, we offer a synopsis of their logo from Bwog’s very own semiotician, reporting from the Hamilton stairs: “They appear to be lacking a sense of irony. The flyers have George Bush doing a clenched fist and ‘Is this what democracy looks like?’ — but then two inches away, the SDS fist logo, in almost exactly the same position.”

*We like to imagine he both thinks and speaks aloud in the spelling of the Queen’s English. -CJS