Listen up, prospective Art History PhDs: if you’re not out of here by mid-century, you could be in for a disaster of near-Biblical proporations. From the Voice’s doomsaying coverstory, re: the Manhattanville “bathtub:”

Imagine this scenario, based on Jacob’s research: It’s the year 2065, and Columbia University’s 17-acre West Harlem expansion is abuzz with activity. Students hurry through rainfall along a tree-lined promenade overlooking the Hudson. In a biotechnology lab nearby, scientists are engineering lethal pathogens to respond to the next generation of infectious diseases and bioterrorist threats. Deep down below, engineering majors use the future version of Facebook to instant-message their friends.

Warnings, meanwhile, are steadily being broadcast about an oncoming storm. A Category 2 hurricane with 110-mile-an-hour winds is barreling down on the city—a more frequent occurrence than in decades past. New Yorkers have become familiar with the drill: They evacuate to local shelters set up by the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Over several hours, the Hudson rises 10 feet, flooding the waterfront promenade and the rest of the campus. Many, but perhaps not all, have heeded warnings to leave the deep basement. Damage will be extensive and exorbitantly expensive. And some of the sprawling labs that contain biohazardous material may become another kind of floating threat to the city.

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Ah yes. The madness begins, the tradition continues. The madness is that which unfolds when nearly 10,000 generally intelligent and insufferably motivated people are crammed into a six-block postage stamp of a college campus; the tradition is the Commentariat’s creepily accurate SEMESTER IN (P)REVIEW. Not to say I told you so on like, almost everything in the spring edition. But shit, I told you so. And am about to do so again. This semester’s top stories, in no particular order:

-SPRAYREGEN V. BOLLINGER: Our buddy Lee C is once again the defendant in a precedent-setting case, although his will be a pyrrhic victory indeed. Irate Manhattanville landowner NIck Sprayregen will deliver on his threat to sue the state over its decision to declare the area blighted; as a stalling tactic, he’ll also start beating the eminent domain/property rights war drum as soon as it’s clear that his various legal challenges aren’t going anywhere. Columbia will artfully tiptoe around the ED issue (heh), but not without mayoral hopeful Tony Avella repeatedly–and publicly–crying foul.

-WORLD LEADERS’ FORUM: THE SEQUEL: Last year’s WLF was a veritable rouge’s gallery–and that was before a certain Iranian president copped an invite. Nothing could match last year’s cavalcade of tinpot dictators (Gurbanguly Burdymuhamedov) and democracy-weary technocrats (Fakrudin Ahmed, Mikail Sakashashshsviillli), and  this year won’t come close: speakers will be non-controversial, although scattered dissenters will question the wisdom of inviting Kazakh leader Nurusultan Nazarbayev. Yeah, just you wait and see…

-FRAT ROW BLOWS: As the fascist heel of Housing and Dining presses ever harder on the necks of our Greek brothers and sisters, the frats will be sure to be on their very best behavior. Parties will either be small-ish and exclusive or small-ish and at bars; if any fun does occur in a frat house, it will occur under paranoid layers of secrecy. That pool behind AEPi will seem a symbolic threshold for what the local Gestapo will tolerate.

-THE VILLAGE POUR HOUSE DOES NOT: The Pour House will seem a godsend to the ‘hood’s ailing bar scene, siphoning off 1020 patrons while keeping complacent up n’ comers like the Underground on their toes. A positive development over all.

-OBAMA ELECTED, CAMPUS ELATED: Sure Obama’s election will seem like a watershed in American history on November 5th, but Russian bellicosity, Iranian intransigence, the market’s horror at practically all of his policies and a Democratic Congress with approval ratings in the high teens will make for a rough first hundred days, which will be described in excruciating detail in this blog’s Spring in (P)review.

or:

-MCCAIN ELECTED, CAMPUS EVEN MORE DEPRESSING THAN USUAL: I don’t even want to think about this one–not because I am a fan of Obama, but because I am a fan of happiness in general. What a depressing slog this autumn will be if, against all possible logic, the American people wind up electing McCain: because if dazzling political talent, near-messianic appeal and eight years of George W. Bush isn’t enough to get an orthodox liberal elected president, then liberalism is, to put it mildly, in trouble. The academy’s almost permanent sense of denial (remember: there hasn’t been a true liberal ideologue as president since Johnson, arguably) will probably turn into something much uglier. November 5th could be a very bad day to be Eric Foner. Or anyone going to his school, come to think of it.

What horrors lie beneath this innocuous looking top-of-the-fold front-pager about Floridita’s ongoing dispute with Fair Alma? Looks like it’s time dust off the ol’ conspiracy theory thinking cap!

First red flag:

On Monday, Diazmet with Columbia Vice President for Real Estate Phil Silverman and Assistant Director of Commercial Leasing Jennifer Colon.

It’s not that surprising that Columbia has a “Vice President for Real Estate“–Columbia is the second largest landowner in Manhattan (or at least that’s what my tour guide told me two years ago) and it’s gratifying to know that the University has someone looking after the empire. However, it’s abundantly obvious that Silverman is a bureaucratic office hack with the unscrupulous task of umm, smoothing out the wrinkles in the school’s Manhattanville acquisition plans–for one thing, the man is a registered lobbyist, and his name appears below Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin’s in Albany’s official registry.

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More on Manhattanville from our buddies in New Haven, but the mystery persists: what the hell is this doing here? While I wouldn’t stock this latest effort alongside Zapana’s botched job from a couple days ago, the YDN’s basic philosophy when covering Manhattanville hasn’t changed, or should I say hasn’t improved–they don’t explain what a story about Columbia is doing in Yale’s newspaper. They still haven’t talked to anybody in the Yale administration. And they still haven’t given Manhattanville the sort of breadth that would justify its discussion in the Yale Daily News.

Of course the YDN can cover whatever it wants, but journalistic privilege doesn’t  exonerate them, and should never exonerate anyone. Again, the crucial unanswered question is why–why is the YDN writing about this? What do they care? And most importantly, why are they concerned enough with Manhattanville to dedicate two reporters to it, but not concerned enough to, y’know, get the story right?

I have some ideas.

-Jealousy. The Yale angle is self-evident: Columbia is about to overcome its one obstacle towards unseating Harvard, Princeton or Yale atop the Ivy League totem poll; meanwhile Yale has seen its acceptance rate go up as Harvard, Princeton and Columbia’s has declined, while New York City is on top of the world right now and isn’t lookin’ back any time soon. So coverage of Manhattanville is an implicit smear born of an almost unconscious sense of institutional insecurity–we have to keep up with the Jonses, who, PS, are overweening exploiters of the poor (see my discussion of journalist balance in my last YDN post).

-Boredom. There probably isn’t much going on at Yale right now, and the YDN has to report on other school’s scandals instead of reporting on their own. There could be some truth to this, but I think the real reason is,

-A rather unprofessional double-standard as far as rival schools are concerned. Newspapers tend to get lazy when they aren’t directly accountable to their readership–I know what’s going on at 116th and Broadway right now, but if you dropped me in the middle of Norwalk and told me I was in New Haven, I’d have no choice but to believe you. The editors of the YDN haven’t been to Manhattanville. They probably don’t know an awful lot about New York City land use procedure, and their apparent failure to contact members of CB9 suggests that they’re unaware of this body’s existence. In short, they haven’t given Manhattanville the kind of scrupulous journalistic attention that a sensitive issue like this one deserves.

The YDN’s failure both to cover the issue and to justify its interest in it means that one of the nation’s top college papers has refused to give Columbia’s defining issue anything but the most reductive and cursory of treatments. If the rest of the college and mainstream media follows suit, we could see a dialogue on expansion–both at Columbia and throughout higher education, where an increased number of students will mean major capital projects at several top-tier universities–that’s even more polarized and, if it’s possible, less informed, than the one we’re having now.