Photo via CU Athletics

Everyone has been very pleasantly surprised by this year’s football team–even The New York Times is jumping on the Lions’ bandwagon.  A recent article heaps praise on “unflappable” senior quarterback M. A. Olawale, crediting him with propelling Columbia to its recent victory over Fordham.  Olawale, a neuroscience major planning to head to medical school after graduation, did all sorts of exciting football things during the game–he threw 38- and 32- yard passes, set up touchdowns, and even withstood an unsportsmanlike onslaught from a “frustrated” Fordham team.  Check out Olawale and the rest of the delightfully successful Lions next Saturday at 12.30pm when they kick off their home opener against the Central Connecticut State Blue Devils.

Mark Taylor, Chair of the CC Religion Department, published an Op-Ed in the Times today urging us to, “End the University As We Know It.” He focuses on the problem of the graduate school system, calling graduate education the “Detroit of higher education.” Oof.

He also condemns the trends of early specialization in the university system and cites the Religion Department as emblematic of the problem of “narrow scholarship”: there are 10 religion faculty working in 8 subfields with relatively little overlap. Taylor calls for a complete restructuring of the graduate system and then immediately moving to a reconstruction of undergraduate programs. 

Stemming from his frustration with departmental structure and politics, Taylor suggests eliminating all permanent departments and creating in their place “program-based” departments that focus on issues and draw in academics from multiple fields. He lists off a few such departments: Water, Space, and Time (!) among them.

Taylor finally proposes that we expand professional opportunities for grad students and – gasp! – abolish tenure. He finishes with a quote that he often shares with his students with hopes of stirring up even the loftiest fake elbow-patched professors: “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” 

Photo via nytimes.com 

The Gray Lady‘s Freakonomics blog included a post this morning about our very own beloved Sarah Dooley. The poster, Ian Ayres predicted: “she is going to make it big. I’m not sure how, but remember you heard it here first.”

False. We actually started praising Dooley’s hilarious YouTube series, AndSarah, about a year ago. Dooley made it to the Freakonomics blog because of her brief mention of the book Freakonomics in her newest episode, now available on YouTube, in which she winks at the camera and dubs it “summer reading”. Making jokes about books is what Columbians were put on this earth to do. Thank you, Sarah.

Rats, garbage, and the yells of Take Back the Night–they’ve heard about it all.

Last year, the city surveyed 25,000 households and asked them to ponder what makes them happy.  These poetic responses were boiled down into a series of categories about city services and quality of life in various neighborhoods.

Using The New York Times’ handy animated chart, Bwog found that sweet Morningside is in the middle of the pack for many categories, most of which are irrelevant to your average Columbian (students were not included in the survey, as they don’t count as a “household,”). This area rated daytime subway safety and parks highly, as well as a variety of senior citizens’, educational, and public health services.

On the other hand, we had a huge problem with everything college-y: rat control, street noise, air quality, and crime, and we’d have to agree: rat control is just one of those things you can’t do too well.

Photo via nytimes.com

At the beginning of the semester, we posted a link about a missing schoolteacher from Hamilton Heights. The teacher, Hannah Emily Upp, was rescued in New York Harbor a few weeks later, but was profiled in the Times’ City Section yesterday due to the unusual circumstances of her disappearance.

Upp has a form of amnesia called dissociative fugue which causes people to forget their identities. As the Times article points out, most are familiar with dissociative fugue only because it is the condition that afflicted Matt Damon in “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

Upp cannot piece together the three weeks of her life when she was missing, but has declined to discuss her situation with the media thus far other than the Times. In Upp’s words, “Maybe people I’ve never met and never will meet will think I’m crazy, but maybe it’s better than going on Oprah, you know?”

Want to know more about how Morningside managed to trade a DVD store for a makeup establishment? While the Columbia location of Kim’s may have closed at the start of the school year, the East Village location closed up shop January 17th, and on Thursday, The New York Times ran an article about that location’s rise and fall.  

By 2008, according to the article, Kim’s had 55,000 films in its collections, many of them were quite rare. But without the benefit of Netflix or other rental facilities, the DVDs went without customers. At its peak in the nineties, 200,000 people were in the Kim’s database.  In 2008, roughly 1,500 were still active members.

What will happen to the East Village’s location’s collection? Last year, Mr. Kim promised to donate his entire collection to anyone who would maintain and make available the entire collection. However, he failed to find anyone in the United States who would do so. Instead, collectors in Salemi, Italy offered to take the collection, where it will arrive later this month.

As we’re stuck with Netflix now, check out our post on good things to watch instead of doing homework.

Two pieces of (somewhat) Obama-related media: first, one of his first college roommates writes about their time together in the fall of 1981. Phil Boerner ’84, who transferred with Obama from Occidental, remembers Obama that, “as a host and roommate, he sometimes did the shopping and cooked the chicken curry.” Oh, and Obama may have spent so much time in the library because “our apartment had irregular heat, and we didn’t enjoy hanging out there once the weather got cold.” The pair also hit up establishments that Columbia students still haunt, including Tom’s (“for breakfast”), the Met, and the Central Park jogging loop.

Meanwhile, in the New York Times, author Kevin Baker ’80 decides that, because he “came to New York, and to Columbia University, just a few years before Barack Obama arrived in 1981,” he should remind us what New York was like in the early 80s. “It was a dirtier city then, more violent, more interesting,” he writes, “more accessible to poor, eager young people.” Still, “everything seemed like a revelation, right from the first day at Columbia, when my art humanities professor took us to St. John the Divine and explained what a Gothic cathedral was.” Some things never change.

Several readers have tipped Bwog off that the cover story for this week’s New York Times Magazine discusses transgender students, and centers specifically around Rey, a transgender student who enrolled at Barnard last year. The article takes a look at the treatment of transgender students at different universities–for instance, Wesleyan uses gender-neutral pronouns like “ze” and “hir”–as well as what it means to be transgender at a women’s college. 

Rey discusses his first week at Barnard, during which his room mate felt uncomfortable that she was “being asked to live with a man,” after enrolling at a women’s college. Rey and his parents met with Dean of the College Dorothy Denburg about the situation, and it was eventually decided that enrolling in the School of General Studies might be a better fit. Rey now describes himself as very happy after an awful first semester. The long-ish but incredibly interesting article can be read online in its entirety.

Also in the New York Times of Columbia-related interest is an article about everyone’s favorite little-controversy-that-could Juicy Campus. The piece focuses on the aftermath of scandalous Juicy Campus posts regarding one student at Yale (who participated in an amateur pornographic film) and one at Baylor University (who was called a slut).

The recent attempts to “outlaw” the site at Pepperdine University were also mentioned, but ultimately the student leading the crusade against Juicy Campus expressed regret about drawing attention to it in the first place.

“Looking back, it was a mistake,” said Austin Maness, a senior who wrote the resolution but now feels that it only increased students’ awareness of Juicy Campus. “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said, “and everyone started going to the site.”

– JNW

Bwog noted in February that iPods, newly present in Lerner vending machines, had apparently become as necessary to our daily lives as chips and condoms. In today’s edition of Education Life, the New York Times makes the same observation, and discloses that the same number of iPods have been stolen (four) as have been bought. Instead of students, Dining Services director Larry Levitas lay the blame squarely at the feet of the proletariat.

Money quote: “Isn’t the first thing they teach in vending-machine school supposed to be locking the door?”

Also, Bwog doesn’t know what the Times is talking about with its “Cyber Cafe.” “Blue Java” sounds sort of similar; we’re sure it’s an honest mistake.

Thanks to Shira Burton for the tip.