These bandz are seriously silly.

With a vote on Columbia’s Baker Field building plans in Inwood coming next week, community members have posted an online petition calling for more concessions from the university. (Manhattan Times)

Manning Marable, SIPA professor of history and public affairs and founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, passed away yesterday. Marable was a passionate critic of economic, social, and racial issues; his long-awaited biography of Malcolm X is due to be published on Monday. (NYT)

Yale students have filed a Title IX suit against the university in response to Yale’s failure to adequately address issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, specifically citing the October 2010 incident where Yale fraternity pledges chanted the words “No means yes, yes means anal!” throughout Yale’s Old Campus. (Yale Herald, Salon)

As guests of honor at Spec’s annual awards dinner, Arianna Huffington and Joan Didion helped the publication to raise nearly $100K. Though the funds are slated for new “technology and much-needed digitization projects,” we hope that at least a bit of it translates into free food! (NYObserver)

Post-subway ride users of hand sanitizer, meet the MetroMitt—a disposable mitt designed to protect your hands from all sorts of unsavory subway germs. (Gawker)

Silly Bandz via Wikimedia Commons

Freud doesn't wanna do this stuff, either

Orientation can be fun, provided you’re drunk or Kenneth the page. Columbia is very nice to you during NSOP (relish it!) and rents out the Met and everyone smiles and tells you where Pupin is when you ask them. There is, however, the underlying problem that you don’t know any of these people, and there’s only so many times you can ask someone where they’re from. While NSOP at Columbia has its rough moments (never-ending ice-breakers, your first John Jay breakfast), it could be much worse. Feel better about everything as you discover what people at other schools are forced to do.

At Wesleyan, the delights are endless: there’s a play called Booze and Lose: “find out what happens when a group of students get together for a party. See how quickly common sense, good judgment, and emotional control evaporate when mixed with alcohol.” The program promises to provide impressionable young-things with a sense of “how to make better choices or face the consequences.” Zoinks!

There’s also a square dance, and a “Bend It At Beckham Dance”– “come prepared to bend the gender binary in fun and fashion.” A change of pace from the same-old, same-old Orientation activities at Beck University, certainly.

Brown has a truly baffling pre-Orientation program called The Third World Transition Program. Brown says we can call it TWTP for short. Thanks, guy. Heaven knows why we’re surprised to find out about the existence of a Third World Center at Brown, but surprised we are all the same. TWTP will help people who have, presumably, lived in a wolf pack, or perhaps a far-off ring of Saturn for their first 18 years, make sense of all the big bag “-isms” out there. Under1Roof is looking better everyday, right?

Yale clearly doesn’t have time for this shit: the first day of their “Opening Days of College” (that’s we’re-better-than-everyone-else slang for “Orientation”) program contains little besides a $10 “Express Lunch”, a $20 dinner in the Dining Hall, and a 4.5 hour immunization program for everything from measles to German measles. There is also a performance showcases Yale’s diversity called “Kaleidoscope,” a title we could not have anticipated.

UPenn also shuns subtlety with an event titled “Laws Related to Alcohol In the United States.” There’s also a toga dance party at the Archaeology Museum. Best toga gets a $50 giftcard to the bookstore!

Johns Hopkins had a “Beer Goggle Challenge” obstacle course last year. This time around, they’ve decided to be a little more obtuse: all we know about the “Playfair” is that it’ll be a night of “insane fun,” but “we can’t give you any more details.” There’s also a “Pimp Your T-Shirt” event, and a play called Sexcapades about a boy who travels into the future from the 1950′s and learns about “STIs and the best places to have sex on campus.” Those attending HorrorFest are asked to come in costume. Later, Tom DeLuca, the Corporate Hypnotist, will do a Hypnosis show.

Being asked to dance with a thousand strangers who you will eventually become friends with and have sex with seems to be the theme this Orientation season. Cornell will host its first-ever (!) Hoe Down, with music from a local bluegrass band. Bizarrest of all: the Class of 2014′s Official Ice Cream Flavor (!!) will be unveiled at the event.

IT IS COLUMBIA. Roar, Lion, roar!

Today on Daily Intel, we learned that there is a new website that makes the last 3,981 wedding announcements in the Times and made them into a database. Columbia has been mentioned 615 times. Browse and see if your TA married your other TA! Harvard had only 466 and Yale- Yale!- only 278! MIT is mentioned 663 times (shhh).

That means that a huge chunk of the important/rich/highly-aggressive people who get their wedding announcements in the Sunday Times are your fellow Columbians. Perhaps we spoke too soon against Floorcest.

Update: A commenter points out that “Columbia” also overlaps with British Columbia, and probably some other things mentioned in wedding announcements that aren’t actually about Columbia the school. Bwog remains certain that we beat Harvard, however.

Alumni tipster and Bwog loyalist Ed Hoffman informs us that James Franco has confirmed his exodus from 209 once and for all. After one student accused him of only frequenting the library to check out all the hot young things, poor Franco was forced to study in Dodge, where he had “to sit alone in the dark.”  Hence his move to the inestimably better lit coffeeshops around NYU.

Franco hasn’t been scarred for life by collegiate antics, though — our young scholar also reports that he’s considering heading to New Haven in the near future.  Yale girls are already counting down the minutes.

Image via Antiqbook.com

The best of times:

Kittens need to move out of their 72nd Street apartment and into your heart (Gothamist).

Freakonomics thinks your professors should pay you (NYT Freakonomics blog)!

Coming soon:  more room to stand in line waiting for a friendly Labyrinth BookCulture employee to glance your way (Spec).

The worst of times:

Our Hero Stiglitz thinks we’re worse off now than we were before “Lehman Weekend” (Bloomberg).

Body found in the building where Yale grad student Annie Le was last seen (Yale Daily News).

Someone’s making a profit off the 9/11 tragedy, and they didn’t even bother to spellcheck (NYT City Room blog).

Even though Blair from Gossip Girl considers them her “holy trinity,” 2/3 of HYP are officially Big Losers now! (WSJ) (Bloomberg)

Columbia, on the other hand, reports smaller losses. (Reuters)

Morgan Stanley’s new CEO made it through the B-School. (WSJ)

New York Fashion Week keeps on strutting its stuff, despite the recession. (NYT)

And in somber swine news: a Cornell student dies of H1N1. (NYT)

Photo via selfhelpdaily.com

Two years ago, we at Bwog lost the U.S. News and World Report‘s “Paper Trail” blog’s Best [Campus] Alternative Media Outlet poll to Wesleyan after some crotchety commenters lampooned their granola-eating ways and they retaliated en masse. We lost last year, too.

This year, we have another foe: Yale. That’s right, now you have the chance to reject them.

What makes this battle even more worth fighting is that the Yale blog is based out of one single residential college. That’s like a blog for Wien (albeit a beautiful, wonderful Wien with its own library and cafeteria) winning this whole contest. Egregious. And while we lower our lances at Yale, we also set our sights at Penn State. You may have an undergrad population of six million, but we have the fervor to best you.

Vote now, vote on multiple computers, whatever it takes. You have until midnight on February 17th. Do it for Bwog, because we’d do it for you.

Three pieces of Columbia-related real-world news: first, some dude named Barack Obama has been chosen as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. The most interesting part of the feature are “previously unpublished photos” of a very cool lookin’ Obama, taken while he was at Occidental, a year before arriving at Columbia. One of the photos (at right) has a cigarette that looks enough like a blunt that Matt Drudge has it up on his front page already.

In endowment news, Yale estimates that its endowment has fallen 25% since the end of June, further adding that it expects no growth until fiscal 2011. As a result, Yale will be cutting expenses by slowing salary growth and delaying construction of several new buildings.

Finally, a Columbia University tech start-up has won a national award. Hey, if this is a good time to found a bank, maybe tech start-ups can work as well.

Bwog has pretty much used up our Gossip Girl references and cliches at this point, but we were nowhere near GG-ed out enough to miss tonight’s Big Episode: “The One in Which Those Kids Pretend Columbia is Yale” aka “New Haven Can Wait.”

We spent an enjoyable hour squealing with our friends every time we saw a glimpse of a Columbia landmark. The camera angles were tight, to be sure, but the GG crew covered much of our beloved campus: they fought, lied, hooked up and backstabbed from International Affairs to Furnald.

The CW seems to have also hired somewhere in the realm of 10,000 extras all clad in plaid sweaters and horn-rimmed glasses, which we would never find in Morningside Heights, obvi, to stroll around campus. Some favorite moments from the episode after the jump.

Read more…

Columbians, ready yourselves: only 7 short days until the very campus you call home is featured on the greatest television show in the history of the world. Next Monday’s episode promises to be full of grand, sweeping shots of Earl and what looks like the Math Lawn, the only catch being that Columbia isn’t Columbia at all in Gossip Girl world: it’s Yale! 

The kids head up to “New Haven” (hey, Cecily von Ziegesar, if that is your real name, what’s wrong with Morningside Heights?) for a college weekend that the seizure-inducing preview touts is “worth the price of admission.” This seems a fair approximation— there will be a Skull & Bones kidnapping of some sort, bitchy glares galore, girls throwing things at each other, and a make out scene! Bwog thanks the CW for providing all obligatory snark in this post by actually naming the episode “New Haven Can Wait.” Here’s to hoping we can too.  

The school year has ended and next fall many professors will be packing their bags and leaving behind their Metrocards for the greener pastures of other universities — Yale, in particular, seems to be popular among Columbia’s professorial population. (Another way professors are just like us!) Bwog’s rounded up some arrivals and departures of your beloved faculty, but let us know who we missed and we’ll update the post. 

David Kastan, the chair of the English Department and Edward Said Professor of English and Comparative Literature is heading to New Haven. 

Noam Elcott will be joining the Art History Department as an assistant professor. Bonus fun fact: Elcott was The Blue and White’s first moder editor (in 1998), following its 100 year hiatus. 

Also heading to Yale is the Music Department’s Brian Kane, who was at CU for a post-doctorate teaching fellowship.

Owen Gutfreund, responding to the University’s decision not to grant him tenure, announced in January that he was uncertain whether he would remain at Columbia (as an associate professor of urban studies and director of BC/CU Urban Studies Programs) after this spring. A quick glance at the course directory reveals that Gutfreund will not be teaching any Fall 2008 classes.

Lit Hum lecturer Jill Muller did not receive a contract renewal

Say goodbye to Annalies Wouters of Classics

Another loss for the Music Department as Ruth Rosenberg heads to the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Professor of Political Science Thomas Pogge is headed to Yale’s Philosophy Department (if you’re keeping score, that’s three for Yale).

Philosophy professor and YouTube user Christia Mercer is taking a sabbatical, as is Bwog’s inamorato, the Abelard to our Heloise, the Antony to our Cleopatra, English and Comp. Lit professor Bruce Robbins. 

Next school year marks the beginning of Barnard’s hunger-striking Professor of Political Science Dennis Dalton‘s retirement.

Philosophy professors/married persons Patricia and Philip Kitcher return from sabbatical, the later of whom will be teaching Michael Seidel’s Joyce course in the fall.

Welcome to Columbia—let the self-recrimination begin!

Seriously, if we can posit one common thread throughout a student body that is diverse in just about every conceivable dimension, it is that we all overthink things. Debates between eating dinner at Deluxe or the Heights will take half an hour; whether to major in History or Poli Sci (or Comp Sci or Applied Math) will take up the other half of your time here. And you’ll still wonder if you made the right decision to begin with—the decision to come to Columbia.

We could tell you all the reasons why you chose correctly, but we’re confident enough to believe these to be implicit. You’ll get it; you’ll know you did well by yourself. So, in the interest of paving your road to eternal regret, Bwog staffers Marc Tracy and Avi Zenilman present arguments in favor of elsewhere: six schools that may have given you a better college experience. Or not.

Stanford University

Best of several worlds: you get to be Bay Area without living in a city, you get great weather that is nonetheless seasonal, and you get Ivy-caliber academics without Ivy-caliber winters and Ivy-caliber classmates without Ivy-caliber pretension. Plus, redwoods.

What they have that we don’t: Major league hook-up to Silicon Valley. Berkeley and San Francisco are not far off, and Yosemite’s only a few hours’ drive. Also, we really get the feeling that everyone there has great skin. And their quarter system allows for greater personalization of your studies. Plus, redwoods.

What we have that they don’t: Palo Alto plays SoHo to Berkeley’s Village. All that Silicon Valley stuff still has to go through Wall Street. And at the end of the day, you still can’t get a decent knish. See our point?

Hook-up factor: If nothing else, the better weather means that you don’t pass through the winter months forgetting that the opposite sex exists. Plus, redwoods. Read more…

A few days ago Google introduced a new feature called “Trends” that allows users to view statistics about the search queries that Google fields by the millions every day. And finally, we have proof that Columbia actually is more important than its ivied brethren.

A comparison by volume of the search term “columbia university” versus “harvard university” et al., and “columbia” versus “harvard,” etc., reveals that Columbia is well ahead on both counts (and it’s assigned us a fitting color).

Columbia 1, all other Ivies 0.

Update: Also, check out “columbia college” versus “harvard college.”

The score: 2-0.

Columbia divested from Sudan on Friday by pledging to not invest in 18 oil and gas companies with business ties to the country. This comes after a Wednesday New York Times article pointing out that Yale, Harvard, Brown and other universities had already cleaned their hands of that dirty genocide business. Even our social justice is unoriginal!

Those looking for genocide information instead of genocide jokes, should check out www.sudanreeves.org.

And the award for best lede ever in a college newspaper article goes to Tyler Hill, Yale Daily News Staff Reporter. Sometimes, simplicity rings truest:

“After a 10-year struggle, the Yale College Council can now claim victory: the council has convinced administrators to put soap dispensers in dormitory bathrooms.”

And suddenly, the protracted fight over the sexual misconduct policy became either a lot more or a lot less disturbing.