Andrew Delbanco, Columbia's favorite English professor and just about everybody's favorite social critic, has put down his more customary meditations on Melville, Lincoln and the like and instead pens his reflections on this year's election in the current issue of The New York Review of Books.

Although he focuses on what he calls the "race card," Delbanco touches on everything from the Dixiecrats and de Tocqueville to both his daughter's and his own career in education. If you're in one of his classes you're probably familiar with Delbanco's political credo already. If not, this piece offers insight from one of Alma's finest.

Bwogger Armin Rosen admits that this brief survey of people with the same name as other people who happen to be Columbia professors is random as hell, but bear with him.

I've never read Dostoevsky's The Double, but I assume the story goes a little something like this: a successful English professor is wrongfully accused of his wife's murder, only to wake up in the body of a mid-decade, D-list sitcom actor, who finishes his PhD in English only to be wrongfully accused of his wife's murder and wake up in the body of a mid-decade, D-list movie actor. What's that, commenter: what I'm actually describing is a thinly-veiled cross between Lost Highway and Groundhog Day? Read a book, my friend: with this whole "postmodernism" thing, anybody can be anything, ever. Everything is relative! The author is dead! And Columbia professors lead strange double-lives within the bodies of other people! Sound like a Spike Jonze movie? Well maybe it should be--"Being Jeffrey Sachs" sounds like the surprise hit of 2008.

David Helfand

The man who introduced a generation of Columbia undergrads to the wonders of science (and a PhD student to the horrors of...well, the horrors of err, dancing with the man who introduced a generation of Columbia undergrads to the wonders of science) might not believe in God, but he sure believes in making great television. Proud owner of Columbia's most accomplished doppelganger, Helfand went from producing overrated network garbage (sorry, "Friends" fans), to editing underrated, subscription-only works of television genius. Were his two sides merged, Helfand would be the only untenured senior faculty member ever to win a CableACE award.

Bruce Robbins

Back in the early 90s, when everyone thought the hot-shot Rutgers professor was writing catchily-titled theoretical harangues like "From Epistemology to Society" and "Death and Vocation: Narrativizing Narrative Theory," Brucie was up to a little narrativizing of his own—remember Darnell from "The Hat Squad?" Y'know, the character that kept on...well, I actually have no idea what that character kept on doing, only that this apparently bifurcated identity operating on multiple levels of physicality and temporality in a trans-historical socio-cultural sphere, is proof that Robbins knows how to get down with his bad, postmodern self.

Cantor argued that universities are meant to fulfill the Deweyan creed of democracy as a "mode of associative living." She explained that racial and social cleavages--as well as our failure to address them with a program of "restorative justice"--make it imperative that higher education "prepare people for participation in Democracy." Cultivating citizenship is the highest purpose that colleges and universities can have

According to Cantor, most universities are bad at doing this, but not Syracuse. Let the orgy of self-congratulation and sanctimonious self-reflection begin!. A "culture of individualism" and the profit motive (she bemoaned the fact that families now look at colleges "in terms of a return on investment") are eroding the institutional responsibility to connect students to humanity. And after taking a few obligatory cracks at popular targets like journalists and Samuel Huntington, she explained the many admirable steps her institution has taken towards engendering the "empathy of mind" in its students.