Another certain gossipy website was the focus of last night's CCSC meeting. Satow Room bureau chief Martha Turewicz reports.

From the first few minutes of last night's CCSC meeting, there some early indications of the intensity to come. Proceedings started a few minutes past 8, and while the next hour was lost to constitutional review, VP of Campus Life Lindsey Lazopoulos (who is always good for a quote) noted, "This is going to get heated."

CCSC President Michelle Diamond, coming straight from a bridal shower, explained that she was going on 2 hours of sleep and had a thesis draft due the next day. If she became snappy, she warned: "It's not personal."

But around 9 PM the room suddenly filled with people eager to discuss the night's pressing topic: juicycampus.com.

Neda Navab and Diamond opened the discussion with unbiased terms, and asked that audience members' comments go off the record, an attempt to establish a calm forum swiftly undermined by John Davisson (former Spec Editor-in-Chief), who retorted that since this was a public forum, it couldn't be treated as a closed discussion. Diamond rather tersely responded matter-of-factly that you could keep things off the record. Eventually, some sort of nebulous compromise was reached on the matter.

Topic: A Discussion on Academic Freedom

Speakers: Professors Eric Foner (History), Todd Gitlin (Journalism), and David Eisenbach (History), Ph.D Student Alex Gourevitch (Political Science), moderated by Ph.D Student Ian Zuckerman (Political Theory)

Drinks of Choice: Poland Spring Water (Foner, Gitlin, Eisenbach), Canada Dry Club Soda (Eisenbach), Jana Artesian Water (Gourevitch) Vitamin Shoppe Iceland Spring Water (Zuckerman).

While students arrived for Tuesday's CPU-sponsored discussion in IAB, the professors stood chatting in the hallway. One look inside the Lindsay Rogers room indicated why: even with a half-dozen tables folded down and laid against the wall, there just isn't much space. But audience members stood, or sat on the floor, the windowsills, or whatever they could find, and many stayed for the full two hours.

What CPU lacked in room acquisition, they made up for with the actual event, which lived up to its name as a "discussion." Each participant discussed the multidimensional topic of academic freedom from a different perspective, and opening remarks were fairly short. That left a lot of time and room for audience questions, which were taken three at a time with a short discussion to follow each volley.

In the last installment of the Friendly Fire series—which earlier brought in the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff, the New York Post's Bob McManus, and Columbia's own Karina Garcia—moderator David Eisenbach talked Monday evening with pundit and failed gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington about speech, the press, and that mysterious attack ad.

There are few things more charming than Arianna Huffington, at first. The coiffed but swingy hairdo. The round tones of her accent (Greek). Her pronouncement that she and her 17-year old daughter "absolutely loved" their campus tour. "The stories, you have so many stories," she rhapsodized. "The Eisenhower story, the dollar bill story...I'm sure some of them are apocryphal."

But if there's anything more well known about Huffington than her graceful wit, it's her biting brand of liberalism, on display in her popular blog, the Huffington Post. Eisenbach had his hands full this evening with the former Cambridge debate captain, who took on Hillary, Ann, and the mainstream media during her hourlong stint in the Faculty House's elegant auditorium.

The conversation began with the premise of the speech series: who was right on Ahmedinejad and the Minutemen? Huffington came down in the center, saying she would neither have invited said speakers nor attended the events, but also would not have protested their invitation. As better form of protest, she cited the New School student speaker who revised her remarks to preempt John McCain's cookie-cutter commencement speech (she didn't have to say it: the art kids kicked our butts on that one).

Yesterday's panel on Academic Free Speech brought in three guests who found they didn't have too much to disagree about.

Greg Lukanoff, the president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, spoke first. He is, predictably, a fan of free speech. He gave a brief history of FIRE, founded, he told the audience, in 1999, in response to the infamous "Water Buffalo Incident," which happened in '93.

In Lukanoff's eyes, Columbia's got an awful free speech record. Besides arguing that storming the stage at the Minuteman event showed a lack of faith in the power of your own case, he also took a swipe at the University's "Victorian" censorship in response to incidents like the hockey team's recruiting posters, and brought up FIRE's case against the social justice requirement at Teacher's College, saying it confines all students' personal definitions of social justice. He told us he'd seen just about everything in his years at FIRE, and if he writes a book, he'll be calling it "Orphan of the Culture Wars."