"Columbians" miscredited, discredited, and, well, just plain credited, worldwide:

• Spike Lee has certainly stalked our campus before. First, it was to use Hamilton Hall in a scene of Malcom X (to serve as Harvard, of all places). Later, Bwog discovered he was ducking into the same building for evening Lit Hum sessions. Now, a Chicago TV station claims the director is teaching here. A gross exaggeration - or will some classes at Alma Mater soon carry the tagline "a Spike Lee Joint"?

• Danisa Baloyi, Columbia alum and 2003 South African Businesswoman of the Year, has some explaining to do. She was fired from one major bank and resigned from the boards of several others after allegations she was linked to theft and fraud. Disgracing the Columbia degree? Well, not entirely. In the course of an investigating her activities, news services discovered she had definitely lied about one thing: although she had indeed earned two other degrees here, the university had no record of her completing an Ed. D. (doctorate), as "Doctor" Danisa had long claimed.

• There is news to celebrate among real alums, however. Both of the senior trade represenatives involved in negotiations between the US and South Korea are Columbia graduates. Hey, that factoid is headline news over there.

-CJS

In the wake of last night's CTV News scoop on this story, Barnard officials emailed students this afternoon with an update on the stabbing of Oscar Sevilla, the superintendant of the college's antipodean Cathedral Gardens dorm. Sevilla, it turns out, faked his police report, claiming the incident took place on 110th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave., when in fact it occurred in a more northerly part of Manhattan. He has now been charged with falsifying his report as well as suspended from his Barnard job.

We're guessing that Spec's Roving Reporter will now have to reverse last week's claim that Sevilla ought to be armed with a medieval battle weapon... perhaps supplanting it with the question of which archaic torture device would best help determine why Sevilla was intent on concealing his whereabouts- and bringing crime-related pandemonium to Morningside Heights.

See the full Barnard email below the jump...

-CJS

Today at about 9:15 AM, the fire alarm in Hamilton went off for the second time in as many days. Students who had just arrived at class left their lessons, filed out the doors, waited around sleepily for about 5 minutes, and then went back inside when they realized the coast was clear.

Apparently, the building was not actually on fire. Which, while good news for the university overall, seems hard to believe when put in the context of Columbia's new policy of no false alarms. Ever.

Bwog cannot help but feel that the University Administration has lied to us with this new ad campaign. Still, for the record, we have no problem with false fire alarms in academic buildings during pleasant Spring days. It's those early Friday morning bell tests in residence halls that really need to be done away with.