McBain had a rough weekend.

A lot of rhetorical questions about the practicality of a Columbia education.

"You don't often hear the words "erotic" and "Columbia" in the same sentence."

Who wants to work for the Committee on the Core? ...Anyone?

First Columbia, then ex-Queen members? Even America?!

Columbia's favorite non-partisan political periodical is on news stands but not online, so we're giving you the low down on this month's issue by the page.

Rwanda's President: Westernizer or War Criminal? (Page 4)

Wall Street and Main Street: Vast oversimplifications of the credit crunch or is it just homeowners' faults? (Page 6)

LitHum, CC and Major Cultures: The West and The Rest. CESR's "Common Core": Colonization/Decolonization. (Page 13)

Obama vs. McCain: They have different policies on health care, outsourcing, net neutrality and abortion! (Page 15)

Can you miss the good old days of something you never actually experienced?

Everything I know about politics I learned from Stuyvesant High School

Why can't Broadway be just like it used to

Wherefore art thou, print media!

Catwalk it back to Venus de Milo, she says

Bwog enlisted freshman correspondent Peter Thompson to report back with all the exciting details of the semester's first Lit Hum class.

Notebooks and laptops in hand, the thousand or so 2012s filed in to Roone Arledge Auditorium this afternoon for their very first Columbia class. Professor Gareth Williams, chair of Lit Hum, started speaking at 12:35 PM, but it took almost a full minute for the 12s to quiet down.

Williams began by talking about how wonderful the Core, and specifically Lit Hum, is. Then he spent several eloquent minutes waxing poetic about the marvels of the Iliad, calling it a "human document" and saying it exists in a "timeless vacuum." He also declared it a "miracle of advanced technology." Just like an iPod.

The highlight of his lecture came when he asked the members of the audience whether they were on Agamemnon's or Achilles' side. The first girl who ventured to the mike was wearing a pink bandana, and at first had trouble getting the mike to work, but she told everyone not to worry, she could project.

Bwog's received a copy of the list of courses that will count toward the Global Core requirement.

The class list still isn't on the Core website, but thanks to one anxious senior/Bwog staffer, we're able to reproduce it after the jump for you.

Remember: the 12s must complete two courses from this list, while for everyone else, you have the option of taking two courses from this list or fulfilling the Major Cultures requirement like such:

• Students must begin the Major Cultures requirement with a course chosen from List A in one of the major non-western civilizations on this list.
• The second course, which completes the requirement, may be chosen from List A again or from Lists B or C.
  • If the second course is from List A, it may be drawn from any of the civilizations.
  • If the second course is from Lists B or C, it must be drawn from the same civilization as the List A course.
    

"The immediate change to the 'Major Cultures' requirement, besides the change in name, is the revised mission statement -- which reflects more accurately the educational goals of the requirement -- and the elimination of the A, B, and C course lists in favor of one single list of approved Global Core courses. These changes, which the Committee on Major Cultures and the Committee on the Core instituted in the spring, are preliminary steps to a more comprehensive review of the requirement. That review will begin this fall, and will involve extensive consultations with departments, faculty, and students. For the moment, however, what we have achieved is the elimination of some clumsy bureaucracy and the laying out in broad outline where we want to go with the requirement -- namely, towards a more cogent offering of seminars that parallel the depth and rigor of Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. The existing courses in Latin American Humanities and African Civilizations provide useful models of the direction in which we want to proceed."

Could that mean that no Global Core class will have prerequisites?

Remember all that yelling last fall about changing the Major Cultures requirement? About how it was going to change into a seminar using $50 million from the endowment? Well, the requirement has changed for the class of 2012, according to a bulletin from the Core office -- but Bwog isn't actually sure how different it is from the old one. The new "Global Core" seems to involve a new list of classes that can be either focused on one culture or look comparatively at several, but the link to the list is broken, so we'll have to get back to you with more details.

The blurb on the changes (misspellings and all) is pasted after the jump.

Well Teacher's College, maybe November will see better days.

CU wants u 2 b safe.

What does "wadding up" mean?

Columbia Spectator is one-sided, ignores "kill whitey."

The core is useful beyond just cocktail parties.

Columbia's own CNN - or perhaps MSNBC - presents its latest episode, and we dissect it for you.

Core schmore, what about the part when he made fun of "300"?!

CTV presents: Beating a Dead Horse 101.

What is a Mimzy? If it doesn't have any connection to the Core or Modesitt, we don't care.

Yogurt that doesn't taste like dirty snow? Watch yo' back, Tasti!

Bwog was impressed with this weekend's Core conference, which got a lot of important professors to put their convictions and opinions on the line. No panel was more emotionally invested than the last, however, where sly references could be ego-bruising digs. For instance, Philip Kitcher called a panelist a "Platonic form" after the panelist had railed against his perceived stodginess. SNAP! Correspondent John Shekitka breaks it down:

This last session of the day-long symposium reexamining the Core Curriculum was moderated by Comparative Literature professor Andreas Huyssen, who set the tone for much of the discussion when he asked: "why can't there be courses bringing together material from Major Cultures and Lit Hum?" In some ways, the debate is binary (traditionalists vs. globalists), and Huyssen falls into the latter camp. In his opinion, there's no need to pit Europe against the world, and cultural combinations would expand, not diminish, our imagination. A panoply of opinions followed from a range of well-known and influential professors, who delivered their speeches with unusually heightened emotion.

First History Professor Janaki Bakhle, with characteristic frankness, asked what we're trying to accomplish with the Core. "Teaching the fundamentals of your culture"? "General Education"? "Finding oneself, if you are black or brown or gay"? No, she argued; the Core-- and liberal education in general-- is about pushing students to think in non-insular ways. Bakhle lamented that she'll never teach Lit Hum, because the entire first semester is Greek texts—no Scandinavian epics, no Gilgamesh, no selections from the Vedas. CC has done a better job in this regard, she said, as it represents a relatively diverse array of sources. Finally, she noted that evaluating the history of how and why one set of texts become canonical and others don't should be an important part of the conversation.

Former CC chair and Classics professor James Zetzel began by giving a concise definition of the courses in the Core: "Art Hum teaches one to see, Music Hum to hear, Lit Hum to read and CC to think." Those missions don't require a specific set of texts: internal coherence is the important part of the exercise, not the content. This seemed odd, considering how strongly he argued for the traditional syllabus. Professor Zetzel argued against a comparative approach, suggesting that comparing Socrates with Confucius was a patronizing exercise, and rejecting recent inclusions of Rawls, MacKinnon and Foucault, whom he deemed "unreadable." We need to teach Western Civilization, but we must do more than to just celebrate it, he said.

Dave Denby kicked off the core conference yesterday evening, but today there have been- and will be- a series of panels and talks to cover issues ranging from student opinions to the Core's place in the world. Here's the first report, from Rachel Lindsay:

At 9 a.m. this morning, before last night's mixers had been cleared off public windowsills to make way for babies and hired caregivers, Roone Arledge was already abuzz with the spirit of the Core. The crowd rumbled with academic excitement as the mics and podium light dimmed. "Oh technology!" the old academics chortled, wiping powdered sugar from the corners of their mouths. It was the opening of today's "Core Curricula in the 21st Century: Challenges and Prospects," and people were unexpectedly cheerful.

This first panel, entitled "The History and Evolution of Core Curricula," featured Eva Brann, a former dean of St. John's College (Annapolis); Robert Bird, of University of Chicago's Slavic Language Department; Douglas Chalmers, a CC teacher from our PoliSci department; Ellen Woods, Assistant Director of the Intro to the Humanities Program at Stanford, and J. Scott Lee, Executive Director of ACTC Liberal Arts Institute at the University of Dallas.

The group exhibited a degree of thoughtfulness about upholding the methodology of the Core, and a sensitivity towards the difficulty of being a student in the modern world--while, of course, still speaking highly of cohesive academic communities that "exude optimism." But considering how much my friend at Stanford gets stoned, and how many people here hate their CC teachers--or go to class drunk occasionally--I personally hope that this "optimism" becomes practice before inane theory destroys any intellectual vitality that students retain.

If you've read selections from David Denby's journey back to his college days in Lit Hum or U Writing, you'd have some idea of what he was going to talk about at his keynote address this evening in the faculty room of Low, speaking underneath the peaceful gaze of a Buddha head mounted on a tall plinth. The talk spanned the ages: he applied books written almost 3,000 years ago to wars that may happen in the future, in front of an audience that probably averaged 50 years in age.

But first—he is a film critic—Denby talked about 300, a "porno-military fantasia," an Orientalist text, even, that's been used to illustrate a misunderstanding of history having to do with heroism and barbarism. Denby, a rotund little man with New Yorker-esque glasses and neatly trimmed beard, used it as a jumping off point to talk about the relevance of the Core in our warlike era. The way he told it, we're in pretty bad shape: both politicians and the public blithely ignore reality, we see culture as a national competition, and the Bush administration writ large has turned morality into moralization.

"The notion of civil society feels a little wan; one regards it with a sigh," Denby lamented.

The Core Curriculum, then, exists to help the younger generation deal with their consciousness and interrogate their culture, which may avert such blunders in the future. And as much as he inveighed against the current conservative regime, Denby is very much a conservative when it comes to the Core. While writing Great Books, he tired of the "extravagant critiques of the left," regarding such terms as "dead white men" and "hegemonic discourse" as polemical and stale. He opposes the inclusion of, for example, religious texts from Babylonia and India, arguing for the preservation of the cohesive conversation between authors responding to each other in a linear progression.

Students download music, get passively nasty letters

Young SEAS professors get money to change the world, could give MIT "a run for its money!"

Spec explores its inner snob, writes a wine review

Also, Op-Ed goes all out on the core, including:

Why Lit Hum is going stale (written by professor Karl Kroeber),

why Major Cultures just doesn't do the trick, and

...wait, you mean they actually care what we think about Frontiers of Science!?

If you're looking for something to do in the upcoming days before spring break or are simply wanting a break from midterm studies, check out these upcoming events sponsored by the Center for the Core Curriculum and CU Arts Initiative:

• Members of the Classic Stage Company are doing a reading of Hamlet in Miller Theater today and tomorrow. Pick up your tickets at the Miller Box Office before 5:30 (now!) for tonight's 6 PM showing or tomorrow after 6 PM for Saturday's 7:15 show. You get 2 tickets per CUID -- plus, if you're fretting over Shakespeare in Lit Hum, it might be a good idea to check it out. There's no Kenneth Branagh, but the New York Times claims it "pulls you into the drama by the lapels," so it must be good -- right?
  

• The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is offering all Columbia students and faculty members free tickets to the premiere presentation of Pullitzer Prize-winning composer Leon Kirchner's complete string quartets, performed by the Orion String Quartet on Wednesday, March 7, 7:30 PM in Alice Tully Hall. Kirchner will give a pre-concert discussion to ticket holders at 6:30 PM. There's an email you're supposed to print out and present with your CUID at Lincoln Center before 6:30 PM on the night of the concert -- perhaps they'll let that slide? Otherwise, find a friend in Music Hum to take care of it for you. A great opportunity to check out Carnegie Hall if you haven't had the chance yet.
  

Meanwhile, take advantage of the nice weather outside (if you can stand the wetness) and do some reading on the steps -- it's abnormally pleasant given the forecast for this upcoming week.

- MIP

This evening, twelve lucky EC residents— and some prisoners of Wien —were invited to supper with the chipper, quick-witted dean of Columbia College himself, the venerable Austin E. Quigley. Bwog editor Chris Szabla was there and recounts what he learned about the origins of the major system, the progression of globalization, and British playwright Harold Pinter.

The family Harrist has, to this day, been living in the Faculty-in-Residence apartment of East Campus for thirteen months. Surprisingly, they claim, the location is not nearly as noisy as their old apartment's, perched near that veritable magnet of late-night decorum, Pinnacle. "It can even get too quiet here," Prof. Robert Harrist told me. The arrival, however, of the firey-haired Dean Quigley and his wife, Barnard prof. Patricia Denison, ensured the evening would be an active one indeed. While the invitees were still tearing into their Kitchenette-catered feast, Quigley launched a seminar-like discussion of the College curriculum and how participants felt it could be improved.

The first item of business was the major. Quigley asked whether, in an age of dual or treble-majors and interdisciplinary emphases, the traditional major made any sense. It had been designed, he said, for those who needed sufficient depth to go into graduate school, with the presumption many graduates would become highly specialized academics. In recent years, however, with a proliferation of CC students interested in finance and other business fields, students have become more concerned with their degrees' marketability. One recounted his experience in consultancy interviews as a philosophy major, being continually asked to justify his major choice and to demonstrate some quantitative ability. "Did you ask them to spell that?" Quigley returned in his characteristically clipped, dry jest.