Donning a fake moustache and an eye-patch (okay, not really), I ventured out to see the way tours were conducted by both Barnard and Columbia.

I was pretty well-acquainted with the Columbia tour, having overheard loud tour guides praising the academic hallmarks of Columbia University, its diverse student body, and its intimidating admission rate. However, what was interesting were the kinds of innocent questions asked of the tour guides:

“Excuse me, why are there big tarpaulins stretched across the lawns? And what do the flags mean?”
“How would you describe the typical Columbia student?”
“What’s the Core like?”
“Is it safe here?”

And the biggie: “What’s the relationship between Barnard and Columbia?”

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The ethnic studies controversy bandwagon, that is. Last semester, the exceptionalism of ethnic studies was reinforced when a student committee was given a certain amount of hiring power in the search for new comparative ethnic studies faculty. Although the students will have little power of their own, the decision–which had been discussed for months but had the appearance of being coerced by the ongoing hunger strike–sends the unmistakable message that ethnic studies is a more urgent curricular concern than linguistics, urban studies, Yiddish or any of the other small departments whose existence is precarious or even questionable (like, do we really have an Israel studies institute? Somebody asked me this last night, and I honestly couldn’t tell them).

The hunger strikers’ line on ethnic studies was more basic than they let on: while they liberally invoked Foucault or Fanon, their protest was rooted in a desire to swing Columbia’s academic politics in a personally advantageous direction. This was arguably the motive behind the MEALAC row of ‘04-’05, in which an intellectually alienated group of students tried forcing the issue in a way in which the issue had never been forced. But the MEALAC students weren’t quite the exceptionalists that the current ethnic studies crowd is: while the MEALACers brought forward some legitimate concerns about some truly despicable faculty behavior, proponents of ethnic studies see their field as the one of the most important in all of academia.

From the article:

“Barnard needs a major that interrogates power, power dynamics, and equality, including race, gender, and class,” SGA Representative for Diversity Svati Lelyveld, BC ’08, said.

Not an objectionable statement, but I wonder where Lelyveld gets off suggesting that 1) Barnard doesn’t already have classes that synthesize these issues or that 2) these issues constitute a single, coherent academic field. I’m sure she would have answers to both of these questions, but that’s really besides the point–I have no idea whether Barnard “needs” an ethnic studies major, or whether the movementarian spirit of the hunger strike is co-opting level-headed curricular thinking. With the Columbia linguistics department suffering a slow, sad death, and with students demanding that the school accommodate their individual academic and political itineraries, I’m gonna go with the latter.

Bureaucratic overreach versus a successful and infinitely reasonable policy. Hmmm, which one do you think Columbia went with?

The old EC smoking policy was simple: if your suitemates let you smoke, you could smoke. And if they didn’t, you couldn’t. It’s a brilliant arrangement–it assumes that students in housing should be able to democratically handle student housing issues, it separates domineering public policy from incipient private habits, it makes it so that RAs don’t have to be on the prowl for illegal smokers and it allows nicotine fiends to reach some kind of an informal understanding with their non-smoking suitmates.

The new EC policy is grade-A Columbian fascism. The administration decided that students in housing are not in fact qualified in determining what kind of legal activity should go on in their own living quarters, and has dropped a ten-ton sack of overweening public policy on a crucial, remaining shard of student privacy. The smoking ban is hugely unnecessary; an unwanted, and unneeded bureaucratic whim that goes against years of successful precedent. On a more philosophical level, it formalizes a once-informal matter, bringing to the public disciplinary sphere something that used to be handled among friends and suitemates.

Sadly but perhaps not surprisingly, the Spectator editorial board is in full support.

Here’s a modest proposal: rather than celebrating a saint who may not have even existed, let’s use Valentine’s Day to celebrate a certain sainted quartet who not only exist, but fuckin’ rock, albeit in an tuneless and mostly atonal kind of way. Not that Saint Valentine and My Bloody Valentine are really all that different: both were of their time and timeless, both produced some of the most sublime guitar tracks ever recorded, and both of them single-handedly ruined Coachella. Except wait, that really only describes My Bloody Valentine…I guess what I’m saying is less love, more Loveless.

Leading off:

Isn’t anything. As in, isn’t anything more ridiculous than Barnard’s once-medieval housing regulations? No is the answer to that question. Another brilliant Columbiana mining expedition from Bob Ast.

By the way, wouldn’t now be the time of acid flashbacks, as opposed to 40 years ago when the acid was actually first consumed? Just sayin’…

Only shallow. This article actually says nothing. At all. But it’s another opportunity for me to gush about Barnard’s new president, and to congratulate the presidential search committee on a job spectacularly well done.

OK, that’s extremely premature, and no more insightful than the first-year president’s superficial bonding moment. In fact, we should be asking ourselves just what Spar’s presidency is going to mean for Barnard–whether it’s a vote for continuity, or an acknowledgement that Barnard could have some unique challenges ahead. Or both. Dunno yet. Stay tuned.

Come in alone. Expect much much more about the Harriman Institute’s upcoming visit to Turkmenistan. While I generally don’t like to see my university cooperating with one of the worst regimes on Earth, Turkmenistan will only liberalize if institutions like Columbia reach out to it. At the same time, a visit from Columbia could help further legitimize a brutal, single-party government, and could set a precedent for American universities working with Turkmenistan’s government rather than aroundit, perhaps through NGOs or what few civil society institutions are actually allowed to exist in the Central Asian Stalinist holdout.

This visit has the potential to represent everything that’s right with the academy, but it could also speak to its continued moral deafness. Again, more on this later.

ZENNNNNNN:  “The relatively young tradition began at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1993. During medical graduation ceremonies, every new doctor takes the Hippocratic Oath, which outlines a doctor’s responsibility to his patients and to ‘first, do no harm.’ However, Dr. Arnold Gold, a Columbia professor, believed the oath came too late, and that student should undergo a similar ceremony before working with patients, as a student. His solution was the white coat ceremony.”

Odd Things About Smiling

I am in my bathroom at home, the one I share with my brother. Before me, spread out like an altar, lies my sink and counter space. The surfaces are white, and I think Formica, the type, which makes it so you can never quite clean off all the little beard hairs, which drives your latent OCD nuts. Beneath the sink and beside the drawers is a small cabinet, one used to keeping things we no longer use. In it, lie scattered, impractical cups from my childhood. They have holes on the side and the bottom and a spout, and they all have faces.

I am in the bath, and I am six years old. I do my best to palpate the shampoo into my improbable hair, and my father brings the cup to the side of the tub. As soon as he fills the yellow cup with slightly-too-hot water, it descends in streams through the bottom holes of the cup. They continue to descend, in rivulets down my face, carrying away the lovingly applied shampoo from my head and hair. The commercials tell you that it is ok to laugh and giggle and open your eyes wide to the miracle of cranial laundering. But they lie. Even when the “safe” shampoo gets in your eyes, it stings. My father brings the green cup to the side of the tub, the one with a hole where his mouth should be. As soon as it fills with water, the clear liquid flows in a constant, giving stream. My eyes sting and tear, but I persist in smiling nonetheless, marveling at its pure gift.

Above the sink and counters and beside my memories is the mirror. Its galvanized surface is pockmarked with age, like an unlucky teenager, but it still reflects well enough, especially when my brother and I remember to wash the enormous thing before Shabbat. To me, in this house, the bathroom mirror is not merely a tool for hygiene and general upkeep; it is a co-conspirator, an ally, a confidante. All throughout my life, it has silently supported all my poor decisions. It has been nine years since my flirtation with hair gel in the seventh grade, but the mirror has never brought up my attempt to wish my unimaginable hair into an attractive force of follicle might. I would be cool when I left the room, and the mirror let me believe most things.

I think that when we were younger, more things had faces. Girls and boys are swaddled in blankets, cocooned by their stuffed animals and dolls. I had a collection of many, many action figures. We could also see faces - partners in conversation, playmates - amidst most things we found surrounding us. Trees were always old men or young dryads; the gnarls of branches or smoothness of bark or roughness of bark could so easily be reorganized by any number of senses. (Are all children synaesthetic and then later forget?) Seeing faces everywhere, it’s no wonder kids are always smiling or crying or both.

Mirrors are a stage, a nexus with the other world. I, like most young men eagerly exploring my power before myself, frantically wailed about to songs I loved, made muscles, critiqued my self. I performed before myself, bereft of childhood’s ubiquitous audience. Often, I would simply stand and smile, my eyes shifting like sand in the hourglass. Sometimes, they would join in, but at other times my face felt like dusk, slowly fading, painfully beautiful. Tentative at best. Sometimes, I have been hit by the strange urge to have a cold sore at all times, to be forced to smile so it hurts a little. I rejoiced before myself in my childhood home, and the mirror tried to give me my face as a gift. I smiled, but I had nowhere to put it.

~jss, 1/30/08

Is a question that we might be hearing from Barnard students and alumnae over the next few days. After all, outside academia, incoming Barnard Prez Debora L Spar is best known for authoring The Baby Business, a definitive study of the infertility industry in the United States.

And that could get Barnard into some unexpected hot water. Of course if it does, it will say more about the critics than the criticized: more about the American public’s still-insufficient understanding of bioethics (and, by implication, the disgusting lengths to which pundits and politicians will go to exploit bioethical issues), less about about scholars and scholarship.But there could be controversy, and here’s why: According to this review in Business Week, Spar’s book is “somewhat unnerving in that it brings matter-of-fact business analysis to the creation of children.” A few paragraphs later, it’s pretty clear what the reviewer means by this:

Then again, the desire to have one’s own biological offspring can be insatiable. Spar quotes an infertile woman who says cloning may not be right for everyone, but “if the only way for a person to have a child of their own is to do this, and if they are willing to take a chance, then they should be able to.”

While Spar argues that the government should closely regulate trade in embryos, surrogate eggs and donated sperm, she believes that the developments offered by the “baby business” are “inevitable and not undesirable” (according to the Publisher’s Weekly review)–basically, right-wingers could be pissed that her book isn’t a hatchet job, and feminists might take exception to her belief in the strong regulation of a reproductive health-related industry. And conservative (and, come to think of it, liberal) legal scholars could argue that she glosses over the entire medical privacy issue, a controversy (or rather body of controversies) that, in their opinion, a business school professor with no formal background in constitutional law shouldn’t be discussing anyway.

I haven’t read The Baby Industry (I’ve read a few reviews, for whatever that’s worth. Admittedly, not a whole lot), but it strikes me as a courageous attempt at wading through some of the most perplexing and technologically-complicated ethical issues posed by this scary, postmodern society of ours. It confirms the wisdom of Barnard’s decision, and Spar’s research interests are both unconventional and vitally important. Just don’t be surprised if a few people in the mainstream media disagree.