Results tagged “thecolumbiaspectator”

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 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 silenced."

investigation by the Hate Crimes Task Force.

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.

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 altercation.

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 victory for free-speech and anti-racism."

Statue of Liberty 2.0, by Mr Kinloch on Flickr. Tag yours "gothamist" if you want us to use them.

Light Criticism, from the Graffiti Research Lab and Anti-Advertising Agency.

Yesterday, the NY Times looked at Columbia President - and First Amendement scholar - Lee Bollinger's free speech stance given this incident as well as many other instances at the the school were speech seems to have been shut down. And did you see Jim Gilchrist on The Colbert Report? Stephen Colbert didn't run across the stage from his desk to the interview area - it was probably in Gilchrist's rider that no one approach him suddenly before speaking.

+ The floor-space of all the Walmarts in America would cover almost all of the island of Manhattan.

), as questions about the level of security and motives of chosing certain speakers remained.

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 an excerpt:

Finally the Minuteman himself enters. "Now who're you calling racist?" he shouts, putting his arm around [Minutemen boardmember Marvin] Stewart, who is black. "I love the First Amendment. As soon as you graduate, you'll all be investment bankers. I've been where you at. I know you hate yourselves."

Continue reading "Minutemen Insanity at Columbia"

On the Down Low

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 stunned fall guy. If the “bottle job” is successful, the couple runs off with cash.

A Spectator photographer, who was a victim/mark of the scheme, was told the bottle held vitamins for the pregnant woman; he decided to pay the couple $40, and he wasn't the only one to fall for it. The police say this a common scheme, and the Spectator has seen it before, but in the form of "You Broke My Glasses." That's tough - there are scams all the time. We almost fell for the "Help me, I'm trapped here in NYC" scam at Grand Central last year ("I'm a professor visiting from Korea but I was robbed and need money to get to NJ"), but then the guy became disgusted with us when we tried to convince him to go the information desk or a consulate. And then we saw him Times Square two months later, when he asked us for money again.

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 the Harvard Crimson over the weekend, and has now had to 'fess up. (Hats off to Harvard Crimson writer David Zhou for reading all three books over the weekend - check out examples of the similar passages, but really, hats off to the reader's tip-off started this.) McCafferty, a Columbia alum, whose two books about a smart NJ teen named Jessica Darling "inspired" Viswanathan to "internalize" prose, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, Gothamist has read and enjoyed, just hopes that that an agreement can be reached; no word on whether Viswanathan's admission and the fact that Little, Brown will not only remove/edit the similar passages but also acknowledge McCafferty is good enough (we're thinking there may have to be a payday). The Columbia Spectator weighs in and while it doesn't break any news, it has definitely found a great quote:

“I have read the McCafferty books and they are in that vein of unavoidable, awesomely bad, Y.A. chick lit that one usually ends up burning through on an idle Sunday evening or ten. They are good. But they are not worth plagiarizing,” Jennifer Bernstein, CC ’09, said. “Thank you, Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, for this moment of pure schadenfreude.”

Exactly - everyone needs a bit of schadenfreude to get through the day, but if we find out that Dr. Seuss didn't write and illustrate his books, we're going to be very, very angry.

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 it is in the middle of exams, with one victim asking, "Couldn’t they fumigate over spring break, when, even if people are staying at Columbia, they won’t have academic schedules to be disrupted?” Not at Columbia - they are serious about bedbugs, for fear they might travel to other parts of John Jay and perhaps require housing services to buy new mattresses for the entire dorm! Okay, we're just guessing that, but now that we think about the mattress situation that we all go through during college-housing days, it's disgusting. Perhaps getting a vinyl zippered 16" deep mattress cover (just $12.99) from Bed Bath and Beyond would be helpful.

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,

Continue reading ""The Rats are Real""

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 a sister site, mscusiteb.com, which had "photos of eight of the women, some of them in lingerie or wet tank tops." What? The Columbia Spectator has the details:

About 65 women applied for the contest in January and February, after Cui and Severin flyered dorms. Applicants’ headshots and cover letters helped the organizers narrow the field to about 30, then they recruited three female students to help them with the in-person interviews in February and March. After meeting all the applicants, they chose 15 finalists. Those finalists each got a free photo session during April under the understanding that they would be part of an online beauty contest and did not own the rights to their photos. On the original site, one could click a woman’s headshot to read her bio and see more pictures, and if they voted, they were given a link to siteb.

Of course the sites got bombarded with critical comments, such as "ewwww you guys are pervs." And by bombarded, that's 15 negative comments. Ha! Walk a mile in any other blog's shoes, babies, and you'll see what negative comments are! Oh, and one cultural group threatened to kick out a student who was on the site - must have been one of the more religious ones. Cui told the Spec, "We didn’t make siteb as a place to look at smutty pictures," and Gothamist laughs laughs laughs - if it wasn't, then why was the access to the "naughty" pictures a perk it turns out the mscusiteb.com was public - you can read the statement here. Anyway, clearly anyone could have seem a negative reaction coming, except, it seems, Columbia engineering students. Go back to designing bridges or something! And if you want to rate your fellow students, just use the freaking facebook!

The last time Gothamist can remember an incident with NYC professor and claims of anti-Semitism was in 1991, when City College professor Leonard Jeffries gave a speech saying Jews were central to the slave trade and called a fellow professor "the head Jew at City College." And Gothamist must admit - our issues with Columbia being inhospitable had more to do with the dorms than the professors.

The Daily News reports that the female student's dorm room door was unlocked because her roommate lost the key. Columbia is cooperating with the investigation, stating, "Columbia University is committed to ensuring the safety of its students and requires that students adhere to standards of appropriate sexual and other conduct on campus. Our highest priority is the safety and well-being of our students." Columbia does have a rape crisi and anti-violence support center for its students.

Updated: Above is the cartoon, for you to read and determine how you feel about it. (Click to enlarge.) [Via reader Andrew - thanks]

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? [Jen, 11:00AM]: My old hometown of Basking Ridge has its news reported in The Bernardsville News...there is also a police blotter. I was sad to hear that my old middle school principal, Joan Tonarelli, was retiring. She was a former nun who ruled Willam Annin Middle School with an iron fist.