75 Comments
Lecture hall’s a stage
Professors still trying to impress? Let us know at tips@bwog.com or comment on this post. Here are some of this week’s highlights.
Hlonipha Mokoena, Africa & the Anthropologist:
“If you plagiarize, I will descend on you like a ton of bricks.”
Sunil Gulati, Principles of Economics
“Can we borrow forever? Generally the answer is no, but we have been trying to disprove that.”
Jacob Alexander, Intermediate General Chemistry
”If thermodynamics is the Absolute Bagel, then derivations are the vermin droppings on the floor.”
Caterina Musatti, Principles of Economics
“I know these graphs are trivial for some of you engineers, but there are Barnard girls who haven’t looked at a graph since they were 12.”
Daniel Rubenstein, Fundamentals of Computer Systems
“If I say something funny it should be on CULPA.”
Spotlight via Shutterstock
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75 Comments
@For what it's worth Musatti apologized in class today for her remark.
@Alum Y’all don’t know anything about comedy. Stop debating it like you can infer anything from a written comment out of context. If it’s a joke about Barnard students (really ‘girls’ is not an appropriate term, unless used reflexively with due consideration), it isn’t a very good one. Some Barnard students are good at math, some are not interested in math, some want to learn some goddamn economics. When you get into the real world, not a single person will give a single shit about anything that happened to you at college, so pull your heads out of your behinds and start standing up for the people around you like decent human beings.
@lol sorry i’m not quite sure what point you are trying to make or who this comment is even directed to – maybe you could clarify.
@Anonymous Since when do we fucking care about sports here? We suck at them!
@dang This is stupid. Musatti’s joke was in the context of explaining how there would be both mathematical and analytical concepts displayed in the class, and how many students would be confused by them since they’re used to to other things. She wasn’t referring to Barnard girls’ intelligence with the joke, she was referring to the FACT that seemingly most Barnard girls are liberal arts majors who don’t take many math courses. She next said that many SEAS kids would be totally confused by the course’s analytical concepts.
@Anonymous I think it’s hilarious that whenever there’s a SEAS joke no one gives a shit and when there’s a Barnard joke 50+ replies guaranteed.
@Anonymous What a poor mind wasted…
@Justin So getting into Barnard is just not as hard as getting into Columbia. Those are the facts, and as much as anyone would like to dispute them, you really can’t argue with numbers. You can argue that Barnard might be smaller and more intimate, or whatever you say about Barnard being better, but at the end of the day, even though Columbia and Barnard are only separated by Broadway, Columbia is Ivy League and Barnard is not. Musatti is not wrong, she was stating a fact that can be derived by tallying admissions scores. Barnard supporters, play on the artistic side and say you’re good at that, because you aren’t going to get anyone to believe you’re good at math.
@Anonymous What a poor mind wasted…
@Anonymous Fact: blacks get lower scores on the sat’s than whites.
those are the facts, and if i want to joke about it, i’m allowed to, because it’s the truth.
@Anonymous Barnard women play on Columbia’s Ivy League sports teams (after all, the Ivy League is just a sports league, not a math competition); so, if you’re using those women to win games, it’s pretty hypocritical to draw that kind of a line between the two schools
@Probably the most valdi point on this issue I’ve seen in 3 years.
@lol since when are athletics valid points? not saying they don’t have merit or that i don’t appreciate the athletics programs — i do — but saying that is like saying that just bc columbia and barnard students can take classes from each other’s schools, or that a barnard id gets you into lerner, or X Y Z about the relationship between the two schools, there’s suddenly not whatever “line” you’re referring to.
@Anonymous Since when do we fucking care about sports here? We suck at them!
@Anonymous you are one dumb motherfucker
@Anonymous Is anything he said actually incorrect?
@pizza pizza pizza Plenty. First of all, Musatti was not stating a fact–of course (i’d hazard to wager) all Barnard students understand graphs (?!? what the fuckity fuck) and it’s also weird that all of this is comparing Barnard and Columbia when yes, you do actually need fairly good credentials on the national scale to get into Barnard. Barnard students are a reasonably, if not more so, intelligent population.
@lol your argument was semi-convincing til you got to the “if not more so” part.
@bc @Justin: Hi! I’m a math major at barnard and I’m going to keep saying I’m good at math, because I am. Thanks for your input, though.
@Anonymous why would you see a graph before the age of 12 but then stop seeing them
so funny!
@Anonymous are you serious? you think this was geared to the “rigor of their program”? you must be in your own world
@Sherry J. Wolf- Intro to Communism “Check your privilege.”
@south african you pronounce it “schlo-NI-pa”
@grey-eyed athena “engineers” and “Barnard girls,” huh? Because Barnard girls are ‘girls’ before they’re scientists, historians, economists…that’s pretty appalling.
@anonymous But how many people were in this class and laughed? Right/wrong/mean/whatever, Musatti knew her audience…
@Anonymous I was in the class. Most people did not laugh, or did so quite nervously. The most common response was something resembling an “oof” and Musatti quickly tried to backpedal to not seem like such an asshole.
@Oh gosh Umurkans have become a boring, humorless lot.
@hmm and yet everyone THINKS it’s about Barnard, so if she was ‘mocking columbia students who propagate gender stereotypes in the first place’ then she was doing it waaaay too subtly.
@Anonymous humor is lost on those with low self-esteem
@Anonymous @Anonymous:
irrelevant, because its not humorous
@Anonymous and those who tell mean jokes are hiding from their own insecurity.
mustatti clearly planned the joke way in advance to win points from the class. it doesn’t even make sense. …why would you see a graph before the age of 12 but then stop seeing them.
@lol “mustatti clearly planned the joke way in advance to win points from the class. it doesn’t even make sense”
just wondering how you can “clearly” know this. have never taken a class with musatti so if it’s obvious, please explain.
@Anonymous *response to Anonymous directly above
@Anonymous mocking mockery does not absolve the mocker of accountability or make a mean joke un-mean, much less altruistic. See also: “hipster racism”
@Why do two different professors (if the Overheard Columbia professor is different from Musatti) think that Barnard students don’t do math or science? Let’s not forget that all Barnard students are required to take two semesters of a lab science and one semester of math. These are not required in CC. Sure, intro to logic and psychology fulfill the math and science requirements, respectively, but the majority of Barnard students are taking other classes to fulfill the requirement, and these courses are challenging in and of themselves. Also, at Swarthmore my mom took ‘Physics for Poets’ so almost every school has courses that are on the spectrum of math or science without being too serious, they’re a good way for people who may not be as strong in math or science to increase their knowledge and understanding of a discipline they may never have the opportunity to study in more depth.
If the nature of Musatti’s comment was meant to describe the rigor of Barnard courses, then this is something more serious. All tenured Barnard professors must also be tenured at Columbia, and the hiring of non-tenured faculty and adjuncts is also decided jointly. If she thinks the quality of teaching is worse across the street then she should bring it up with the faculty committee in charge of granting tenure and hiring nontenured professors. It’s extremely unprofessional to make sweeping statements about your colleagues to your class of undergrads on the first day.
@Anonymous it’s a JOKE. if you’d stop taking it so personally, you’d realize that musatti is probably mocking columbia students who propagate gender stereotypes in the first place.
@Hmm Are you telling me that not all comedians believe what they say? That jokes don’t necessarily represent the beliefs of the speaker? And here I thought Sacha Baron Cohen was an anti-semitic gay basher all these years.
@tl;dr shhh
@Barnard Sure, it’s not necessarily sexist, but it’s definitely mean-spirited, in poor taste and sets the asshole alarm off pretty easily. I’m not sure the maturity of anyone who likes this “joke” is above a 12-year-old’s, coincidentally.
@to be fair (re: musatti) barnard DOES enable its students (as does columbia, if i’m not mistaken) to graduate without ever having taken a math/numbers oriented class, by allowing classes such as intro to logic to fulfill the quantitative analysis requirement. while it makes sense for a liberal arts school to be more writing heavy, i do feel that to be truly well rounded, we (as barnard students) (i am one) should have to take at least one actual numbers class.
that being said, i’m pretty offended, especially considering that was said by a woman. unsure whether i’d be more or less offended if she’d just said “women” instead of “barnard students”…
@Anonymous Um… Barnard’s quantitative req is more legit than CC’s .CC accepts a science class as well as intro to logic as fulfilling the quantitative req. Do you even go to Barnard?
@to be fair (re: musatti) Yes I do… sorry I don’t know everything about the nine ways/Columbia’s gen eds?
@millie the dancing bear Musatti can suck my dick
@yo you have a dick?
@wow sexism is so hilarious, isn’t it guys?
@Robert The answer is yes
@Anonymous not every joke about barnard is sexist, dumb fuck. that’s like saying that every joke about obama is racist, or that every joke about ellen degeneres is homophobic.
@CC'14 This one is, though, because it plays into problematic stereotypes that women are not good at mathematics or science.
@Captain Obvious If he had said “I know these graphs are trivial for you male engineers…” then that would be the case, but the joke is instead playing on the quantitatively lower admission standards, and therefore the lesser rigor (in general) of Barnard girls’ high school math and science studies.
So, alienating to the school, not sexist.
And still funny.
@anon But it’s a bit appalling even if she was trying to joke about Barnard’s math and science departments. It’s going beyond the college and implying that all students who enter Barnard are uneducated in math/science and simply dilly-dallied throughout their high school careers. Which is obviously stupid because everyone takes similar workloads in math/science and painting a picture of female airheads. It’s a pretty dumb, cheap joke.
@Anonymous Musatti’s comment is absolutely unacceptable.
Why did she choose to say Barnard instead of any of the other schools? She didn’t say GS, she didn’t say CC, she didn’t say Engineering. She singled out the all-women’s school. Everyone who says she was not being sexist are being very silly— the assumption you are making is that Musatti has no idea that women are stereotyped as being bad at math. If she had no notion of this stereotype, then she would not go on to say it, because she would acknowledge that it would be in poor taste. But this stereotype is known by EVERYONE, and clearly, she played to the stereotype, which is insulting.
Those of you who say that us women at Barnard should not be offended have no right to say so. The point is, MANY OF US **ARE** offended. How can you deny this fact when it’s posted all over the comments? If you think that we should not be offended, then you should say to the following minorities that they shouldn’t be offended if a professor makes the following jokes:
econ class on banks: “How many of you guys are jews? I’m surprised more of you aren’t in this class.”
gym class: You guys all seem to be fit. Fat people have no interest in health anyway.
I’m sure that most of the people commenting saying that Barnard women should “take a chill pill,” but if you have honestly nothing constructive to say, please don’t say anything. If you would like to make a logical statement, please do so accordingly. Make a case. Don’t be a douche.
And to the gay jew who says “get used to being stereotyped,”– you expressing that you’ve “gotten used” to prejudice doesn’t mean that we have to. Your word doesn’t have authority in this case. If you don’t mind being defeated, that’s fine, but others won’t stand for it.
@Anonymous @anon, 12:19:
Everyone takes similar workloads in math/science? Are you kidding me? So you really think the fact that I took two AP physics courses (B and C), AP calc BC, and multiple other science electives that my high school offered had nothing to do with the fact that I got into Columbia College and you didn’t?
@lol @ anon ( JANUARY 26, 2013 @ 12:19 AM ) and the rest of y’all who are getting all butt hurt about musatti’s comment — seriously? barnard is a liberal arts college with no engineering school, if she said the same thing about CC students i don’t think it would garner the same reaction, and if your response to that is “well she didn’t, she said barnard” then you need to look at and reevaluate the way YOU view your school (or if you’re not a bc student, then how you view barnard).
@lol to be clear — when i was making the comparison to CC the point i was trying to make was that seas kids take a harder math/science workload than most cc students, and it is the same case for seas and barnard students.
@Anonymous wrong. musatti was commenting on the rigor of barnard’s classes. if she wanted to be sexist, she would’ve said that girls IN GENERAL haven’t looked at a graph since they were 12. she singled out barnard girls for a reason — not because they’re girls (there are girls at columbia), but because they go to barnard.
but anyways, who gives a shit?? i’m so fucking tired of this faux outrage.
@anon You don’t care because it doesn’t affect you, so why don’t you go chill in your corner
@Anonymous and you can go cry in yours
@Not all Barnard jokes are sexist The joke is not sexist; saying that CC women might have trouble would be. Musatti is accusing Barnard students of being dumber than CC students. Certainly a joke in poor taste, but not sexist.
@anon someone’s jimmies are rustled
@Barnard '15 I’m gonna write about this in the Eye!
@lol hasn’t the eye done enough sexism / barnard-columbia divide / broken record stories?
@The Joke .
.
.
.
.
your head
@Mussati's awesome …it’s funny..because it’s true..
@Anonymous Pretty offensive
@bc 14 Or if you go to Barnard and know that you did better on your AP Calc test than some other CC kids you know (and took them earlier), maybe not.
@anon ap calc? WE HAVE A BADASS OVER HERE!
@Anonamoose Some CompSci class = Fundamentals of Computer Systems
@Robert Mussati 1 – Gulati 0
@You know... everyone says Gulati is a dick, but apparently Musatti is worse. It was a pretty crappy move to alienate an entire school like that.
@Robert Or brilliant if you know how to take a joke
@anon Oh haha, Barnard girls are dumb! They can’t do math! Because, Barnard!
Now that’s a TOTALLY brilliant joke. Where have I heard that one before?!
@Robert Oh honey,
As a Jew, Gay, GS student, I promise you that stereotypical jokes are something you get to hear a lot.
Making a joke about something is a positive thing. It’s the things you can’t joke about that have a kernel of truth
@cc'11 I think Mussati’s joke was inappropriate.
@Anonymous “Oh honey,
I’m a gay jew. I don’t mind being stereotyped. You should be like me, and get used to it. You can trust me, I’m a minority too!”
No. We won’t stand for it. You can feel free to have a self-defeating approach to life, or you can say something about it.
@Robert Or………
You can go to your room, watch some porn, and chill the fuck out.
As for lecturing me about the right approach to life; why won’t you try to not define yourself by the way other people characterize your gender