Is it just me, or does this sound awfully similar to Yale’s financial aid plan? And is it just me, or does this seem to have more to do with keeping up with the rest of the Ivy League than making Fair Alma a utopia of affordability and economic justice? Find out tomorrow, when these and other sundry topics will be treated in full analysis/breakdown form.

Meanwhile, not much love for one Columbia alum at the must-read National Journal. 

Curse World of the Week, 2/18-2/24 Edition:

MOTHERFUCKER!  (Which, incidentally, does not attract the red squiggly lines of Word spell-check.) 

The literal meaning of this word is “one who engages in sexual intercourse with his mother,” but please, don’t let this definition limit you in all your mother-fucking endeavors.  Feel free to have sexual intercourse with anyone and everyone’s mother whom you might encounter.

Personally, my favorite time to yell “motherfucker” or simply engage in motherfucking, is when I trip (on a daily basis) on all those damn bricks on this campus and wipe out in front of a pack of elementary school children being herded along a giant leash singing “The Wheels on the Bus.” 

But apparently there is a long and fascinating history of the phrase, beginning in the Roman Empire under Caesar Mel Brooks, when Josephus meets Oedipus and warmly greets him with, “What’s up, Motherfucker?” Since its ancient inception, people have been throwing this thing around all over the place, from movies like Pulp Fiction (ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER!  Do you speak it?!), to Die Hard’s catchphrase (Yippie-kai-yay, motherfucker!”) which was censored in the third sequel in order to obtain a PG-13 rating. (I prefer the Unrated DVD, personally.) 

Urban Dictionary contains a plethora of abbreviations for motherfucker, most of which were evidently written by drunk freshmen who most likely were drinking an Adios Motherfucker or a Mongolian Motherfucker (CU Bartending will teach you that one and if you can make it in under two minutes you don’t have to take the practical test.  Incidentally it has like every liquor invented in one glass and will, appropriately, fuck you up.)  These shortenings include: Mofo, Mofofo (mother fucker AND father fucker, a flexible feat involving a twister board and very limber participants), a Magic Mofo (don’t ask), and the Little Italy version, Mofiglio.  (Personally I think this refers to Famiglia’s Pizza, because that shit tastes motherfucking nasty!)

And that, my friends, concludes an even bigger waste of time than reading Pop Smut, which, incidentally, will be wrapping up this weekend’s stupid crap that celebrities did while we were all working our asses off in Butler later today.  Stay tuned…

Holy shit! It’s everything I hate about academia in a single article! Quite an accomplishment, professor Mercer! While we here at the Comm. believe that higher education is wracked by administrative malfeasance at both the national and institutional level, an article like this one proves that the problems run far deeper than that–indeed, that academe is stalked by juvenile salon intellectuals who employ a reductive kind of determinism in the name of a specific intellectual agendas.

But never fear, for Fair Alma’s students are much more reasonable than the people who are being paid to teach them. Eliav Bitan cuts the jargon and talks about his personal relationship with feminist thought and practice, while Jessica Lin assesses the situation of women in the workforce.

And from the world of religion. OK, John O Sullivan, the Archbishop’s no great believer in equal rights under the law, or secularism or pluralism or women’s rights or western civilization or what have you. Can we agree he has a really cool beard?

Mitt Romney no longer America’s top waste of time. Congrats, Mike.

HERE IT IS YOUR MOMENT OF ZEN: No quote today, but happy news!: Former Columbia (and JTS) professor David Halivni has won the Israel Prize, the Jewish state’s highest honor. My guess is that he’s the first Columbian to do so, but prove me wrong…

Its amazing how much moral exculpation you can pack into 600 words. The Spectator editorial board does a decent job of explaining just how arcane the bowels of academia can be. There’s more than a passing similarity between the College of Cardinals and whichever conspicuously-hidden “academic” review board determines the fate of every junior faculty member on campus–the only difference is that we don’t get puffs of white smoke to tell us whether or not an actual debate is taking place. Spectator takes the problem at face value, and assumes that we’ll have to live with it. As I’ll explain, this is ham-fisted apologetics at its very worst.

There are basically three categories of faculty on campus. There are lecturers, like the immensely popular (and immensely talented) David Eisenbach, who have no prayer of getting tenure. They’re adjuncts or visitors, here because individual departments want to expand their course offerings without giving away limited permanent faculty positions. Sorry, American Presidency fans–the arcane machinary of higher ed will probably find Dr. Eisenbach a cushy and well-deserved professorship. But it won’t be at Columbia.

Then there are assistant professors, who are ostensibly on the tenure track, but whose future is potentially out of their hands. An assistant can be doing cutting-edge work in an increasingly important field of study and still get screwed by institutional politics–screwed if a department can’t (or doesn’t want to) accommodate another full professor, screwed if the larger institution feels another department needs or deserves more funding or valuable Manhattan office space, screwed if a major donor is endowing another department and wants to see a certain return on investment. Resources are finite, and seemingly inexplicable tenure decisions are a reflection of that.

Finally, there are full professors, who are typically farther from their PhD theses than lecturers or assistants, but who have, through a combination of merit and dumb luck, been allowed to stay on faculty for their rest of their lives. These resilient few have the ability to grant or deny tenure to the lucky, resilient few who clawed their way to the tenure track in the first place, but even this sliver of equanimity has a couple major, structural caveats: the system allows professors to reject candidates whose basic academic philosophy is out of step with theirs (this is a big problem in the humanities, where cliques of post-colonial or post-modernist literary scholars have commandeered entire departments), and it defers absolute authority to administrative ad hoc committees and review boards, depriving faculty of whatever illusory autonomy the system affords them.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I was sitting in my Frontiers discussion section today, I started copying the (slightly altered) lyrics of the Lamb Chop song along the margins of my notebook.

This, as it turns out, was a mistake – the song wasn’t kidding when it said that it never ends! I didn’t mind at the time – I was kind of bored and found it amusing (this probably says something about my mental prowess, but we’ll gloss over that). In retrospect, however, I realize what a shame it was. I wasted two hours of priceless instruction time. I realized as I glanced through my notes that this class is extremely valuable. Why should I complain? I need to be paying attention! Frontiers is as good as it gets! Read the rest of this entry »

Not to beat this into the ground, but tomorrow’s vote is huge. But is it huge for you?

The issue most directly impacting college students is college affordability, hands down. I’ve been disappointed with the lack of national mobilization on this–you’d think that a decaying private credit system and a young n’ hip presidential candidate like Barack Obama would produce a broad-based college affordability bloc; one that could rally a strategically significant constituency and extract some specific promises from the candidates themselves. A sagging economy and the first truly open election in decades provided students with an unmissable opportunity to force affordability into the national spotlight. We didn’t, and the result is a Super Tuesday that will have comparatively little impact on higher education’s defining public policy issue.

As for the candidates and their stances: Obama has laudably recommended the simplification of the FAFSA process, but his tax credit recommendation stops short of the major structural changes to student aid he discussed earlier in his campaign. Clinton’s Student Borrower Bill of Rights cleverly hides the fact that she supports a single-lender federal student loan system, and while I’m fond of her proposed aid package for non-traditional students her promise to “eliminate the guaranteed student loan system” is disconcertingly veiled. Two possible reasons for this: either she has no idea how she would fund a single-lender system (whereby loan companies lose the federal subsidies they currently receive through the guaranteed loan system and compete directly with the government for customers), or she has no idea how such a system would work.

If students had mobilized around the one issue that matters to them most, we could have gotten a straight answer or two. Instead, we’ll see the loan system turn into a subject of potentially irresponsible left-wing experimentation or rot away because of Republican-supported subsidies to the corrupt student loan industry. I’m not sure which is worse.

Neither does John McCain, whose only stance that could be construed as higher-ed related has to do with his promises to cut spending. A huge rollback of earmarks and pork-barrel spending would probably mean an end to some federal projects for higher ed. But out of fairness to the gentleman from Massachusetts…Mitt Romeny has convened a veritable blue-ribbon panel of education experts. I’m not sure what they’ve been cooking up, but something (and by something I mean the latest RCP poll averages) makes me think we aren’t gonna get the chance to find out.

As for other nagging higher-ed issues that should perhaps matter to us more than they do:

ROTC: Spectator did an alright job of explaining the candidates stances on the Solomon Amendment. It doesn’t really matter where you stand on ROTC–coercing private universities into taking any political stance is wrong, no matter your politics. In a perfect world, Obama and Clinton would have defended the constitutional rights of private institutions without arguing against ROTC, although in the real one Americans are frustratingly deaf to such rhetorical and intellectual nuance. Too bad, since even an alleged progressive like Obama has basically argued for sucking Columbia dry.

This is a huge problem. No more speculation as to why we’re not treating it like one. Last issue!

ACADEMIC FREEDOM: Academic freedom issues get pretty confusing at the federal level, where the university’s dependence on government money could conflict with its institutional independence. The Freedom to Read Act cited in this excellent op/ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education is one attempt at negotiating government and academic interests; one idea O’Neil doesn’t mention is increased federal legal protection for the university and a promise not to significantly cut federal funding for university-based scientific research.

I’m pretty sure I know where the Democrats stand on these issues, but McCain’s silence on higher education is revealing even if it isn’t particularly surprising. He hasn’t had to talk about academic freedom or educational equity (or the Solomon amendment, I don’t think)–but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t. McCain will likely have a 6-week grace period before the Democratic race wraps up. And if he doesn’t use it to start talking about higher ed, students should make sure the omission comes at his campaign’s expense.