Yesterday, Daily Editor Pierce Stanley decided to sacrifice a day's work on a ten page paper in order to bring you this report on yesterday's academic affairs. He hopes you, and a sympathetic professor, will appreciate his efforts.

While most Columbia students were holed up all day in Butler yesterday in preparation for exams, academic life carried on in the outside world yesterday. Thankfully, outside Butler, these affairs carried on with a less perfunctory (and to be honest, less smelly) air than that which has pervaded among the poor and huddle masses of the library in recent days.

Hey, did you know that some stuff happened at Columbia in 1968? Bwog daily editor Pierce Stanley braved two of this week's numerous '68-centric lectures; here's what he thought about them.

That tangible sense of nostalgia gripping campus has not waned this weekend as the commemoration of the Columbia 1968 Protests hits full stride. After its tame opening on Thursday evening in Casa Italiana hosted by PrezBo and Nancy Biberman B '69, the gaggle of aged (and surprisingly boisterous) anti-war and anti-discrimination activists continue to mill around campus, reminiscing about their hours spent hunkered down in Hamilton, Fayerweather, and Low in the spring of 1968.

The commemoration, however, has been heavy on reminiscing. Aged protesters have spent much of their time back-patting, reminding themselves that they were the greatest generation of activists, catching up on years spent away from one another and bickering about current day social justice issues. At the end of the day, much of the audience, including this Bwogger, was left frustrated by the single-mindedness of the activists who graced Columbia's campus forty years ago and wondering if they might be still looking for a fight but are just a bit out of touch.

Bwog Lecture Hop Editor Pierce Stanley sends a dispatch with notes on last night's teach-in about the Iraqi refugee crisis and his new understanding of this week's series of Iraq War protests.

The distinct sound of a bell has been ringing in my head for the last three days, and it's starting to affect my all too precious sleep cycle. Every time I have tried to sleep this week, I have not been able to help but hear the intermittent chime of the bell commemorating the victims of the Iraq War ringing endlessly in my head. Fortunately for the Iraq War protesters who have been demonstrating against five years of American involvement in Iraq by ringing a bell for every casualty in the American occupation of that nation, they seem to be succeeding in raising awareness to their cause with such an unconventional method.

Lecture Hop editor Pierce Stanley reports on a strange visitor in the hallowed halls of American history.

(Hi Daily Intelligencer!)

Recent semesters at Columbia have seen the arrival of some of the world's brightest and most eloquent speakers at fair Alma, broadening academic discourse on campus in a very fruitful way. Unfortunately, for all of the good speakers that come to Columbia, some bad ones happen to slip through the cracks. Indeed, these years have also been witness to some of the most controversial, questionable, and even disgraceful speakers on campus in recent years.

The appearance this afternoon of Obama Girl (a.k.a. actress Amber Lee Ettinger) in Professor David Eisenbach's American Presidency history course likely falls into the latter category, with Eisenbach's choice of speaker being questionable at best. Amber's visit this evening to Mike Gravel's Communications Director's course (just in case you missed her live-chat on YouTube last night) sparked both interest in the topic at hand--the role of viral videos and the YouTube generation in determining the eventual outcome of the 2008 Presidential election--and it sparked much controversy as to whether a minor actress (who doesn't even do her own singing, failed to vote in the last election, and claims that she does not even really have a crush on one of Columbia's favorite alums) should receive such a reception in the hallowed halls of the classroom. Many Columbia students left the classroom in IAB befuddled by Amber's appearance and by Professor Eisenbach's impromptu decision to hold such an event. Some left not knowing quite what to make of Obama Girl's appearance on campus. Overheard: "Are we really paying $40,000 plus a year to line up and take pictures with her like shes Santa? I feel like a five year old kid again."

Bwog daily editor Mariela Quintana peers into the insular, feminine world of insular, feminine authors on a Thursday night at Barnard.

Yesterday evening, I crossed over to the other side of Broadway and made my way to across the Barnard quad to attend a reading hosted by Great Writers at Barnard Series featuring authors Myla Goldberg and Elizabeth Benedict. With the help of some emphatic arrows, I was guided to the event in Milbank's Ella Weed Hall. Given the abundant signage, I expected to find a crowd at the reading. But when I arrived in Ella Weed, the audience was small and seemed to be predominately comprised friends and colleagues of the authors. Ella Weed's den-like atmosphere, complete with a fireplace, warmly painted walls and soft lighting, however, made a lovely setting for this intimate reading.

"There are about 1100 billionaires in the world," David Rothkopf CC'77 said, "and their wealth is equal to that of the bottom 2.5 billion people." He was the focal point of "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making," a panel discussion packed with high powered folks, including PrezBo himself, who delivered some perfunctory introductory remarks.

Most of the world's wealth is in the hands of the few--we all know this. But Rothkopf, the president and CEO of his own international advisory firm, has written a new book called Superclass (whence the title of the panel) that strives to answer whether the wealthy are unjustly wealthy (he seems to think yes), and, if so, what can the planet do about it? The newly globalized world is creating a tiny group of very powerful people--both super-rich Carlos Slims and super-influential Bonos (and Jeffrey Sachses?)--whose power transcends national boundaries, and who seem to identify more with each other than with the middle (or lower) classes in their countries of origin.

Recent days have shown that Pakistan finds itself at a very crucial turning point. The assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and increased dissatisfaction with the performance of President Pervez Musharraf, have upset stability in what was already a volatile region. And Monday's parliamentary elections, in which Bhutto's opposition party took the majority of seats in the parliamentary throws further uncertainty into the mix.

A number of key decisions, with both internal and external consequences, need to be made in a quick and decisive fashion in order to ensure Paktistani stability and, in turn, the stability of South Asia at large. A key player not to be overlooked in all of the recent changes in Pakistani politics is Pakistan's Ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, a thirty-eight year old stalwart of diplomacy, who at such an uncertain time in Pakistani politics happened to grace Columbia's Lerner Cinema last night to sort out for students and professors alike his view of the future of Pakistan.

Bwog correspondent Christopher Morris-Lent attends a Friendly Fire-Columbia Political Union-sponsored event and encounters a man who savors the taste of defeat .

On Friday afternoon, a ragtag group of people streamed into the hallowed space at the top of Earl Hall to see Mike Gravel, once a senator from Alaska and now running a quixotic campaign for president, speak on a variety of issues ranging from why he dislikes all politicians to what you can do about it. The audience, which ultimately numbered about 70 people and consisted of about ninety percent males and at least fifty percent policy wonks, grew steadily in size until Gravel arrived, accompanied by his speechwriter and History department lecturer, Dave Eisenbach.

Eisenbach is perhaps best known around campus as the founder of Friendly Fire, ostensibly a series of discussions targeted at deconstructing what he sees as Columbia's "problem" with free speech and featuring vocal critics of the University (Jim Gilchrist, Karina Garcia, Bob Podhoretz) squaring off against one another in a debate-style format. Yesterday, however, he eschewed his typical role as the impartial moderator and assumed that of a salesman, delivering a rousing introduction on behalf of the man whom he once called "an American hero."

Bwog Lecture Hop editor Pierce Stanley observes as religion is reconciled with just about everything, for once.

Coming on the heels of a Super Duper Tuesday that saw former Arkansas governor turned evangelical preacher Mike Huckabee decisively win five Republican primaries in the South and the recent dropping out of Republican contender Mitt Romney—a figure previously under the heavy scrutiny of the public eye for his devout Mormonism—the intersection of religion and politics has never been more apparent than in the current election cycle.

Yesterday's nationwide Veritas Forum proved to be a well-timed and informative event for the throngs that showed up in Roone to flesh out the tensions between religion and politics. Washington Post columnist Dale Hanson Bourke led Columbia professors Andrew Delbanco (director of the American Studies program) and Religion and Humanities professor Mark Lilla, as well as the Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church Timothy Keller in a discussion about the tensions between religion and pluralism.

In which Bwog lecture hopper Phil Crone reports back from the Heyman Center's discussion on climate change

Altschul Auditorium was host last night to a panel discussion featuring PrezBo, Joseph Stiglitz, and various experts on the ever more apocalyptic science of climate change. What exactly PrezBo, a freedom of speech scholar-cum-university president, was doing heading a discussion on climate change was anyone's guess, but by the end of the evening it was clear that he had taken on the position of moderator mainly to provide comic relief for an audience presented with the grim scientific and political realities surrounding the topic.

Comedy, however, was not the first item on the agenda. The main event began shortly after eight with PrezBo introducing the four members of the panel: James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; R.K. Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); Cynthia Rosenzweig, an adjunct professor at Barnard who also works on the IPCC; and Columbia's favorite Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz.

In which Bwog staffer Armin Rosen sits in on a peaceful disagreement over peace.

If you thought Ahmadinemania offered Columbians the best oratorical fireworks of the year, then you, dear reader, clearly weren't at the Satow room for today's Peace in Darfur conference. A mid-afternoon speech by anthro professor Mahmood Mamdani (whose Major Debates in the Study of Africa is building a well-deserved reputation as one of the best undergraduate classes out there--even though it's only been offered twice) managed to overshadow an early-morning showdown between UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Econ professor-to-the-stars Jeffery Sachs. Disagreeing over whether to put $2.6 billion into peacekeepers or sustainable development projects is one thing. Inflicting a disbelieving sense of shock upon a room of Save Darfur activists, Darfuri expats and human rights scholars...well that's why you come to Columbia, right?

Of the many provocative claims the African studies czar made during a 20-minute, almost totally extemporaneous speech, two would prove particularly contentious. Firstly, he argued that the security situation had stabilized in Darfur and that advocacy groups like Save Darfur were spreading a "fiction" of an increasingly intense genocide. "Why was this fiction continuing?" he asked. "Did these groups want more donations...was it part of a political agenda? I don't know."

And secondly, he argued that the international legal framework presented an illegitimate form of prosecuting war crimes in Africa, and that the international community's concept of "justice as retribution" prioritized revenge over peace. For Paul Van Zyl, the one-time executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (a country whose justice-free model of conflict resolution Mamdani had just held up as an example for Darfur) and speaker on an earlier panel, this postulation of a peace-justice binary couldn't be allowed to slide. In the popular parlance, shit was about to escalate.

Last night, Columbia - or should I say, co-LOOM-bee-ah - hosted the Planeta Lecture: Spanish-Language Literary Voices and the United States. The event's four featured authors explored the relationship between New York City and Latin America, far beyond elucidating the pronunciation differences between our university and their continent's country. The lecture was sponsored by Grupo Planeta, a Spanish-language publishing house; by the Fundacion Jose Manuel Lara; and by the Hispanic New York Project of the Columbia American Studies Program.

The authors, though not especially different from one another in terms of race (all appeared to be of European descent) or geographical origin (all are South American), have diverse literary pursuits. Roberto Ampuero, a Chilean, writes detective stories and teaches at the University of Iowa. Jorge Franco, from Colombia, writes novels invariably described as "gritty" and "urban." The two Argentineans are Pablo de Santis, who went to film school and has written thrillers and young-adult novels, and Maria Negroni, who writes poetry and teaches it at Sarah Lawrence.

"Lecture" is not an appropriate label for the Planeta event. Each speaker gave a five-minute talk. The most English-deficient of the bunch, Mr. de Santis, relied heavily on notes while Professor Negroni spoke extemporaneously. Later, the facilitator, Professor Claudio Remeseira, head of the Hispanic New York Project, asked questions. After that, an audience dominated by Latin American amateur writers joined in. In sum, the format was muddled, and it was often difficult to see what the questions, whether asked by the audience or elicited by the lecture topic itself, and the answers had to do with each other.

In which Bwog correspondent Christopher Morris-Lent learns about the most over-referenced year ever at last night's Historical Perspectives talk.

It's 7:00 in 301 Philosophy, I'm well-fed by a catered spread, and before me sits an ensemble cast culled from the cream of the Columbia history department, each here to describe different aspects of the year 1968 that pertain to their respective fields of expertise. Given the degree to which that year is bandied about in Morningside discourse, I hoped someone would explain: what, exactly, is the big deal?

1968, as our sunny moderator informs us, was "a turbulent time marked by political protest," a year wracked by "student activism and protest, including the Columbia strike." She proceeds to catalogue all the juicy historical events that transpired in 1968: the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the overthrows of LBJ and Charles de Gaulle, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the protraction of the Vietnam War, etc. She introduces professors Charles Armstrong, a specialist on Korea and leader of a seminar on the Vietnam War; Manning Marable, professor at SIPA and civil rights struggle veteran; Victoria De Grazia, modern European history aficionado; Michael Merrill, history department adjunct and Columbia alumnus; and Provost Alan Brinkley, world-renowned American historian and author of my AP US History textbook.

It's about time the philosophical salon made a comeback: on Tuesday night, a couple dozen List College students gathered in the Mathilde Shechter music room for some laid back Judaically-focused philosophical disputation. The night's topic was the so-called "New Atheism"--the aggressive attack on religion led by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others.

JTS philosophy professor Leonard Levin began by arguing that the "new atheists" do not realize how little science and religion actually disprove one another. While science explains the particulars of the physical universe in ways that religion can't, religion provides the underlying meaning and guidance that science lacks. "Until recently," Levin said, "religious experience is all of human experience." Religion is personally and communally centering, and strives to, and occasionally succeeds in, addressing important, fundamental truths.

Dr. Austin Darcy from the atheist Center for Inquiry spoke partly in defense of the "new atheists"--while he disagreed with their assertion that "religion poisons everything," he said that Hitchens and his ilk are removing religion from its pedestal and giving it the unsparing intellectual analysis it deserves. He deployed a Kantian proof that the logical basis for theism runs similar to justifications for atheism: Kant argued that man believes in a God that will order an unordered world, but since the world is assumed to be unordered, Kant's postulate of practical reason proves that theism is little more than elaborate rationalizing.

The night's arguments were pretty standard, but never trite: Levin, for instance, rebutted the claim that Theists irrationally uphold a solipsistic view of the universe by quoting a 3^rd century Talmudic rabbi's shockingly accurate estimation of the number of stars. Of course we've heard this all before: that theism is scientifically and morally untenable, and that religion is more than just blind belief in something we can't hope to see or interact with. And the arguments had their usual weaknesses: Levin's concession that secular philosophy could provide the same kind of objective morals as religion means that religion is preferable for utilitarian, rather than qualitative reasons--if religion is superior simply because more people can understand Exodus than Locke's First Treatise on Government, how superior is it, really?