On Thursday, September 22, Deputy News Editor Paulina Rodriguez and Staff Writer Frankie DeGiorgio attended a discussion with authors Elif Batuman and Mina Seçkin, hosted by the Sakip Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies at Columbia.

For today’s Actual Wisdom, we have Bruce Robbins, of previous and expansive Bwog fame. You know it’s a good sign when they already have a Bwog tag to their name. Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer: Justify my existence? Can’t be done. When people all around me are getting stonewalled or downsized, why […]

Office hours: they’re the best! For the latest in our ongoing series of professor interviews, Sam Schube spoke with old Bwog favorite Bruce Robbins. While you might know him from that one essay you skimmed for University Writing (that’d be “The Sweatshop Sublime”), Robbins is a man of many interests—chief among them plumbing and the […]

The Columbia Palestine Forum, a group of Columbians supporting “the rights of Palestinians to education and self-determination,” launched today. The Forum is joining the ranks of similar organizations at University of Rochester, NYU (we know all about that one), Hampshire and various universities across the United Kingdom in demanding, among other things, that Columbia release […]

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 […]

While student groups may still be in the planning stages of any events about the Gaza conflict, some more Columbia professors have voiced their opposition to Israel’s actions, signing an open letter to Barack Obama written by USC English professor David Lloyd. Among the approximately 800 signatories are 14 Columbia faculty members, including: Anthro professor […]

Oriflammes are gleaming! The rabble is roused! T-shirts are free for the taking! Five Years of War, Five Days of Action has reached its apex out on Low Plaza. A devoted cadre of protesters walked out of class at noon. Though the crowd has dwindled, there’s no reason to think any of the 236 people […]

Bwogger Armin Rosen admits that this brief survey of people with the same name as other people who happen to be Columbia professors is random as hell, but bear with him. I’ve never read Dostoevsky’s The Double, but I assume the story goes a little something like this: a successful English professor is wrongfully accused […]

Of 70 Columbia professors, expressed to the New York Sun! Some of them rather prominent! A faculty action committee statement of concern  accuses PrezBo of failing “to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom.” Particularly rankling to signatories–which include such luminaries as Akeel Bilgrami, Bruce […]

And by The Boss we mean Bwog-fave Bruce Robbins, whose ruminations on Columbia’s dearth of academic freedom made it into this week’s edition of The Nation. Esther Kaplan’s penetrating investigation of Fair Alma revealed a brewing crisis in contemporary academia: fringe right-wing groups holding controversial events on campuses. And dear God does the future look bleak. Elsewhere, […]

This guy was really overdue for his own edition of Profs Say, seeing that Bruce Robbins loves offsetting his typically grave delivery with the occasional zinger–some of them completely over the heads of their intended recipients. This is by turns uncomfortable and hilarious to watch, espcially when said zingers crop up in bizarrely theoretical places. From today’s lecture: “(Psychoanalyst) […]