Freshpeople, when you sit down at your first Lit Hum class next week, refrain from assessing trivial details such as your professor's teaching ability, knowledge of the Great Books, and general attractiveness as you attempt to determine his or her competence. Rather, aim your curious freshperson gaze at your subject and ask yourself: Does this seem like a person who can use $200 effectively? And by "effectively," think, "without causing profound and utter embarrassment or disaster."
All Core professors receive a stipend to sponsor a class-related activity. Some spend prudently, on museum visits and Core-related movies. Others spend a little too carefully. One current senior said her CC professor donated the whole kit and caboodle to the Rare Books Library in Butler. Another senior accompanied her professor and class to an idyllic picnic in the northwest corner of Central Park -- only to be rudely interrupted by a couple making an amateur pornographic movie under a nearby willow tree. And still another traveled all the way toher professor's house in Greenwich, Connecticut to attend a Sunday afternoon luncheon, only to find upon disembarking from the Metro-North platform that she was the only pupil who had accepted the professor's invitation. He wept; she got an A.
While an unpopular professor's efforts almost always end in tragedy, professors' offers of friendship to students can be equally embarrassing. Jacob Brunner, C'09, remembers going to a performance of Oedipus with his attractive Lit Hum professor: "She was young, I mean like 30. She asked if anyone wanted to go and I volunteered. I kind of had a crush on her too." After an edgy performance in a small, dark theater, complete with shocking full frontal nudity, Brunner recalls entering a bar with the professor, where she bought him a beer, ordered herself whiskey, "got kind of loopy," and walked him all the way back into his dorm, at which point she said that beautiful phrase, "We should do this again sometime."
Of course, this is not to say that all of your professors' sincere attempts will end in complete failure or romantic innuendos -- just most of them. Jia Ahmad, C'11, recounted the night her Lit Hum teacher took her class to Pisticci, excitedly remembering how "he served personal cupcakes (with each person's name) that he made from scratch! They were pretty good."
—Tony Gong
It's 8:30 a.m. and there's been an outbreak of the plague in Pakistan. Soon you learn that it's not the plague, it's something else, and in the meantime, there's been a riot over food prices. And it's only Monday.
To premature policy wonks, this sounds like a Model U.N. scenario. To Pakistanis, it's nightmarish, and to Marc Levy — deputy director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) — it's another day at his highly unconventional office.
Commissioned by the Department of Defense-funded Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies to design a simulation that would expose military and political leaders to the environmental threats their countries may eventually face, CIESIN went looking for lab rats.
Emails to various student groups stated that volunteers would be paid $200 to sit in a room from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. for one day—especially volunteers with "regional expertise in the Middle East, Mediterranean, or South Asia." During the simulation, participants would be presented with theoretical crises and are then invited to suggest solutions.
The request was vague but the payoff huge, and eleven Columbia students—most of them graduate students from the desired regions—signed on. Levy said their workday began with a mock newscast warning that "in the near future" the weather would become "very unusual." There were food security problems in several cities and refugee camps that had descended from baseline chaos into mayhem. As the hours went by, "the sense of crisis became sharper," Levy said. And if the subjects weren't sufficiently terrified, facilitators intervened to add more bad news.
Regrouping after the latest announcement of disaster—the day's specials included floods, droughts, food shortages, and infectious disease—the students suggested ways of handling the inferno their countries were frying or freezing in.
Though the program doesn't adapt itself to its subjects' responses, "If one group just says, 'Our response is that we want some rich country to come in and fix it,' then we'll say, 'They're not going to, so you have to do something internally within the region,'" Levy said.
With the trial run now complete and successful, the simulation will be turned over to NESA for them to use on trainable world leaders. "It'll be their baby," Levy said. Their disease addled, refugee-plagued baby.
—Anna Phillips
Many generations ago, before college students were put on probation for just about anything worth doing, Columbians were a naughty bunch even by antiquated standards. Their collegiate misdeeds did not go unnoticed or unpunished; they were chronicled in The Black Book of King's College, a record of "misdemeanours" committed between 1771 and 1775 by students of King's College.
The Black Book's foreword, written for the typed and bound edition of 1931, insists that the book "has great value...which historians will eagerly pounce upon." But this heady promise appears to be the error of an excitable archivist: The book has had little publicity beyond a 1900 feature in the New York Times and the occasional stop on a group tour of Butler's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
After all, the Black Book is hardly a police blotter. Rapalje is guilty of "stealing a pair of Cotton Stockings belonging to Moncrieffe." Cornelius Bogert, a "most frequent offender," plays hooky and, after the investigators contact his mother, is found "skulking behind the College."
The Black Book logs "Acts of Contumaciousness," not crimes. The boys of King's College respect the rules that today's university students casually disregard—alcohol never so much as makes an appearance. One might infer that the drinking was done off campus, as smuggling in booze would have been an unnecessary risk to students frequently caught sneaking through holes in "the College Fence" at the wrong hour. Fittingly, their punishment was often a spell of confinement.
These are the exploits of the obstinate and disobedient, not the perverse or antisocial. Another common punishment was the completion of tedious "Exercises," such as the translation of "the second half of the eighth Aeneid," or more fearsome still, of the Columbia Spectator into Latin.
It was also of paramount importance that the President—who appears personally involved in each of his students' lives—obtained each culprit's confession.
To every act of petty rebellion committed by the students, the administrators answered with similarly petty forms of repression. Still, most of the young men remained defiant. Nicoll, who had been punished with the translation of a chapter of the German philosopher Pufendorf, "when desired to do it, told the President to his Face he would not."
—Alexandra Muhler
