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.”

Write your own column! Chas Carey skewers this whole election nonsense. Worth reading for a particularly apt bit of Ron Paul-related innuendo–looks like I wasn’t the only one who read this after all!

This is just pathetic. Don’t read this. Repeat: DON’T READ THIS. It was a waste of my time, and you’re one click away from making it a waste of yours. Moving on.

What’s this?! A Maureen Dowd column that isn’t a hysterical rant? Do tell! Well…Dowd argues that Clinton is basing her campaign on the accusation that Obama will buckle as soon as the right-wing hate-machine takes aim. She believes this is a cynical attempt at undermining Obama’s message of hope, and that it’s a throwback to old, Clinton-era “pathologies”–in other words, it’s now politics as usual (i.e., “Cheneyesque paranoia”) versus the messianic “hope” of Obama’s presidential bid. Clinton supporters beware. This one’s pretty blistering.

ZEN! (this is one you’re gonna wanna actually click on. Trust me.): “Full details on the award and a full explanation of the so-called ‘Curse of Ahmadinejad’ can be found on the Bnai Haman web sites, including: www.leebollinger-bnaihaman.com”

Not! Behold, an extra-special edition of CMMECotD:

“David Rothman, a professor at Columbia University who has led the movement to distance medical schools from pharma, as the drug industry is called, compared serving on speakers bureaus to commercial sex work.

‘You’re their boy,’ he said. ‘If you work for the drug companies, you’re not working for the school.’”

I seem to recall a fireside chat in which Bollinger was pressured on the school’s ties to big drug companies, and on whether the university was as committed to developing low-cost generics as it was to cashing in on potentially-lucrative drug patents. Bollinger intelligently dodged the question, as the pharma vs. generics debate becomes pretty complicated when major universities are factored in–there’s a reason Professor Delbanco marks the determination of a university’s legal right to profit off of its own technological breakthroughs as a turning point in the history of American higher ed.

So what kind of connections does Columbia have? It’s hard to say, and there seems to be very little media interest–searches for “generic drugs” in the Spec archives yields disappointingly few hits. But at least someone at Mailman is pushing for a vigorous and hopefully well-informed debate on generics and large drug companies. It’s one we should definitely be paying attention to…

Elsewhere, Suharto is dead. He was one of the most brutal and most successful dictators in modern history, and a man who had the very good luck of living in a time when the international rule of law typically didn’t extend to heads of state. It does now, and with an international community that’s increasingly oriented towards human rights, I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of him again. And good riddance to it.