Update (11:00 pm, Oct. 10): The petition has been officially released. The online petition now has over 300 signatures.

Update (11:16 am, Oct. 8): The petition now lists 292 signatures, which can be read here. As expected, the largest departmental representations are from FAS humanities, Sociology, History and Anthropology, but the list also includes professors from the JSchool, Public Health, GSAPP and the Law School, among others. NB: watch out for a few duplicates! We’ve let them know. A press release with a definitive list of names should come out this Monday.

Political Science Professor Jean Cohen (she’s also the Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum) confirmed to Bwog that 200 Barnard and Columbia professors have signed the following petition in support of the Wall Street Protests. The petition has not officially been posted yet, and therefore signatures have not yet been released. The bolded emphasis is our own:

We, Columbia and Barnard faculty, write in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere. Many observers claim that the movement has no specific goals; this is not our understanding. The movement aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few. The demonstrators are demanding substantive change that redresses the many inequitable features of our society, which have been exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession. Among these are: the lack of accountability on the part of the bankers and Wall Street firms that drove the economy to disaster; rising economic inequality in the United States; the intimate relationship between corporate power and government at all levels, which has made genuine change impossible; the need for dramatic action to provide employment for the jobless, and to protect programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in part by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes; the disastrous effects of the costly wars that the United States has been conducting overseas since 2001. Only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe. It is this identification that we applaud, and we call on all members of the Columbia community to lend their support to this peaceful and potentially transformative movement.