Alan Brinkley is the most popular Columbia professor on Facebook.

Columbia is trying to "ameliorate" tensions with the community.

Columbia gets amazing athletic recruits, who eat McDonald's every day, wear jeans so tight that their legs atrophy and smoke clove cigarettes.

Statisticians: Here are all the sexy details about the rigorous lottery.

Pity the first-year who did not witness the hunger strike and thus cannot fully understand the ramifications of the Global Core.

Last November, Columbia was beset with a number of students, dissatisfied with the response to bias incidents, formed an "anti-racist coalition" and wrote a list of demands to improve campus. Eventually this coalition began a hunger strike to push the administration into action. Now, nearly a year later, the effects of the strike are still being felt. Bwog takes a nostalgic step back to look at both the events of the strike and its aftermath.

• Diluted Gatorade and bathroom scale in hand, the strikers set out on a chilly November evening. Supporters formed a negotiating committee to talk with administration.

• Later, Gandhi expert and political science professor Dennis Dalton agreed to join the strike despite worries about age.

• One student was CAVA'd and two quit after eight days, Community Board 9 told the strikers not to starve for Manhattanville.

• Then, it ended, tents were torn down and strikers answered questions posed by their adversaries.

After the jump, Bwog has collected the main changes that have occurred since the strike.

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.