After a year-plus long investigation, Columbia Teachers College has sanctioned a professor for plagiarism. And the professor happens to be Madonna Constantine, the professor who found a noose on her office door last fall. The Columbia Spectator got confirmation that the Teachers' College “found numerous instances in which she [Constantine] used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years: "Prompted by complaints from students and one former......

The professor at Columbia University's Teacher College whose office door was found with a noose on it spoke out for the first time yesterday. Madonna Constantine told students that gathered for a rally, "This is a heinous and highly upsetting incident. I am upset that our community has been exposed to a blatantly vile incident like this. It is an act of cowardice. I would like the perpetrator to know that I will not be......

The police are investigating a hate crime at Columbia University's Teachers College after a noose was found on the door of a black professor. Teachers College president Susan Fuhrman issued a statement:The police were here this morning because a hangman's noose was discovered on the office door of one of our African American faculty members. The incident has been reported to the New York City Police Department (Detectives Bureau of Manhattan) and is under active......

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York is sure going to be a doozey. He may have decided not to visit Ground Zero anymore, but his appearance at Columbia University, to participate in a World Leaders Forum, has many people upset. The Daily News takes on the story on the front cover again ("Access of Evil") and has an excoriating editorial: "By extending an invitation to Ahmadinejad, the leaders of Columbia's School of......

Just a day after it was announced that Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, could be returning to speak at Columbia University, the Columbia Political Union voted against having him back when it learned that there would be no counter-point speaker. Gilchrist's 2006 appearance at Columbia sparked protests that got out of hand as demonstrators rushed the stage where he was speaking and participants got physical. Eight students were disciplined following the......

Almost six months after a group of Columbia students rushed the stage when Minutemen Project leader Jim Gilchrist was speaking, the university has imposed sentences against the protesting students. The Columbia Spectator reports the students received "disciplinary warnings" which will be on their transcripts until the end of 2008. Monique Dols, a General Studies student who spoke to the media last fall, said, "It's a light punishment, it's a slap on the wrist. It's a......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: car vs. building on 39th and Madison, pedestrian struck by car on 7th and W17th, and a jumper down on 14th Street. There was a crazy police shootout this morning in Park Slope-- an officer was shot in the neck, but is expected to recover. In a strange twist, the husband of another officer was detained as a suspect-- stay tuned for more info. In the last week, there......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: "loose horses" in Queens, a stabbing in Soho, and a fatal person struck by train at 86th on the 4/5/6. No surprise: the richer a neighborhood is, the more landmarks get designated within it. Here's a pretty video of a Williamsburg Brooklyn Sunrise, from Youtube. Joseph Guzman, the survivor of the Sean Bell shooting in Queens, was released from the hospital today, nearly two months after the attack. Birds......

Columbia-Minutemen fracas from a few weeks ago continues to simmer, as the Minutemen now want to sue the university and members of the Chicano Caucus. The Columbia Spectator reports (on what the Bwog mentioned last week) that the group wants to sue "for discrimination and defamation of character during the Minuteman events and protests at the beginning of this month and in subsequent public interviews." While the suit hasn't been filed just yet, the......

+ Mayor Bloomberg hate cigs, but he doesn't want to raise the legal smoking age. + The feds have decided not to retry Junior Gotti-- apparently after losing three times, they've had enough. + Volunteers are collecting foliage from the High Line for replanting once the park is built. + The alleged child molestor killed by an angry Fairfield lawyer turns out to have been innocent-- apparently the child wasn't right. + NSFW Friday......

The Columbia Spectator reports that a person is clearly seen kicking a protester from last week's chaotic Minutemen even at Columbia. Video shown on Univision - and later posted on YouTube - shows a Minuteman supporter wearing a dark baseball cap kicking a protester, who was bleeding. And the Spectator points out that he looks a lot like the man seen in this Village Voice picture from a Minutemen protest in the city in......

Protest is alive and well at Columbia, though it's still a far cry from 1968. Yesterday evening, Jim Gilchrist, head of the Minutemen, the "citizens' vigilance operation" that patrols the Mexican border in California, was invited to speak at Columbia University. But pretty much as soon as he got on stage, a group of student got on stage and protested - and then all hell broke loose. The Bwog liveblogged the event, and here's......

On the Down Low The Daily News reports that 10% of New York men who claim to be straight are having sex with other men in what has been dubbed the down-low phenomenon. These findings (from a 2003 survey) were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (please, no snickering) which also relayed that 70% of this subgroup consisted of married men. An assistant health commissioner also suggested that these men are less likely to......

Ooh, we love a good street con story. A bunch of people are reporting that they've been swindled by a couple around Columbia's neighborhood. The Columbia Spectator reports that the con artists are a "homeless looking couple":Their modus operandi is simple. Walking into unsuspecting passers-by, the couple—a young man and woman—drop a plastic bag containing a glass bottle. The bottle shatters. The man angrily demands to be repaid for the contents, while the woman insults......

The publishing world is in a tizzy over rising novelist's Kaavya Viswanathan's admission that she unintentionally copied passages from books by Megan McCafferty in order to write, How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, about an ambitious NJ teen who wants to get into Harvard. Viswanathan, just featured earlier in a rather glowing NY Times article about being a Harvard student with a $500,000 two-book deal at Little, Brown, was exposed by......

It's midterms week and you've broken out into a rash. But it's not because you're worried about your GPA - you've got bedbugs! Some poor freshmen at Columbia University are being evacuated from their rooms in John Jay Hall in order for housing services to fumigate the rooms. And not only do they have to evcuate, they need to "completely empty their rooms." The Columbia Spectator notes the craziness of the fumigation scheme, given that......

Miriam Datskovsky, Sex Columnist, The Columbia Spectator...

Gothamist loves our readers. Check out this email we received, subject titled "The Rats are Real," in response to our post yesterday about the Upper West Side rat situation:Dear Gothamist, If you haven't walked down 108th street between Broadway and Amsterdam after nightfall, then you can't understand how bad the Rat situation really is. I am a statistics masters student at Columbia, and over the past 4 months I have seen a mean 10.2 and......

Gothamist doesn't know whether or cry, so we'll settle with rolling our eyes. Some Columbia students created an online contest, Ms. Columbia, to judge who was the most attractive female Columbia student, and of course they had to shut it down due to a "hostile and inappropriate response from the Columbia community." The thing is, the two students - from the Schools of Engineering - who created mscolumbia.com, Ang Cui and Alan Severin, also had......

The NY Times has a long Education > Mideast Tensions Are Getting Personal on Campus at Columbia" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/education/18columbia.html">feature on the student-professor tensions in the Middle East studies department at Columbia University, namely around allegations that certain professors created an "inhospitable" environment for Jewish students. There are a number of different opinions out there from professors inside and outside the MEALAC department, that begs the question, "Can professors have controversial opinions students might be uncomfortable......

Yesterday's Daily News cover story was a feature about how Columbia University was turning into a "Poison Ivy", what with some professors questioning Israel's right to be in the Middle East. This stems from student claims that certain professors are especially harsh in classrooms, humiliating them and intimidating them. Now, while there definitely may be something behind how much a professor's or student's views can be protected under the First Amendment (let alone respected), Gothamist......

Aaron Percival, a Columbia University sophomore, was arrested for sexual abuse yesterday. Prosecutors say he sneaked into a female classmate's room while she was sleeping and licked her feet and tried to kiss her; when she woke up and told him to get away, he allegedly held her down and molested her. The female student didn't press charges until another attack was reported, although she did go to the health clinic for treatment. The first......

The Fed, the edgier campus paper at Columbia University, is under fire for running a controversial cartoon. NY1 reports: The cartoon, which claims to be in honor of Black History Month, shows a slave being whipped, and says, “Black people were invented in the 1700’s as a form of cheap labor.” The next box shows a black basketball player. The next mocks funk music. Next, two rappers. Lastly, it says, “Black people do even......

I've just discovered that all the Brooklyn Papers, including my favorite, the Park Slope Paper, are available online as PDFs. Finally! Now I don't have to trudge all the way back into Brooklyn just to read the 78th Precinct's Police Blotter. BrooklynPapers.com. Other small circulation papers I try to read every week? The Columbia Spectator and The Stuyvesant Spectator (best article this week: Students Burnt by Bakesale Rules). Any one have any newspapers to add?......