In the interest of keeping tabs: we missed the news from last Tuesday, but because most of you have been in holes for the whole week anyway, it's worth re-mentioning that Minutemen founder and Columbia bogeyman Jim Gilchrist (who is now being gender-neutral!) has endorsed GOP golden boy Mike Huckabee for president. Apparently, Gilchrist's support shows that Huckabee won't be soft on immigration.

Just like people with AIDS.

- LBD

And raising the drawbridge.

...which obviates this post, in which College Republicans Director of Operations Lauren Steinberg admits: "Personally, I really hope he's not coming. I mean, it was a fun time last year, but I don't need it to happen again."

Agreed!

The 2006-07 school year has contained multitudes. In fact, it may just be the most eventful year Columbia's had since... well, the year before. Remember Matthew Fox? The Chung-Diamond "scandal"? "Don't Be a Pussy"? "Epilogue to Our Crime & Punishment: A Petition"? Bwog certainly does, so step into the Wayback machine - you're about to relive nine months of Columbia in a single post.

August

First-years move in. Orientation yields a legendary (to Bwog's mind, at least) week-long burst of posting. Addison Anderson went to a bunch of bars in the name of "journalism." Most literary post: "And now for some disorientation," which reads like early Bret Easton Ellis, if he knew about Koronet's. Orientation week was the best.

September

Facebook went literally insane. Then calmed down somewhat. Harvard abandoned ED; Columbia did not. Columbia Football had as-yet uncrushed high hopes, later crushed. Seth Flaxman declared victory. Best villains: Zuckerberg! Murphy! Ahmadinejad! You know, one of those.

October

Everything was coming up roses for Mark Modesitt. 1968 spirit was invoked by Jim Gilchrist. The fallout was immense - shady disciplinary letters, "news" coverage of all sorts (Jon Stewart, Fox News). Even Bwog had an opinion. But October wasn't all about relevant television coverage of Columbia issues with high production values - we also had "The Gates"!
Best correspondence to Bwog: "Subject: terrorists. your worse then the mooselums who flew the planes into the buildings"

The Chicano Caucus has just issued a statement regarding the verdicts on the seven stage rushers (will this story never end?), endorsed by four other cultural groups plus SPEaK, declaring that the group "must conclude that bias affected the decisions." It's considerably more diplomatic than Karina & Co.'s hit piece, but makes no bones about what it means to censure two Chicano students and let the white kids off easy.

Also in cultural group news: United Students of Color Council elections are tonight (Tuesday). So are CPU elections. And Student Organization of Latinos, and Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters. Guess you're not supposed to hold positions in any of those at the same time...

UPDATE, Tuesday, 1:45 PM - Elections have been shifted around to not conflict. BOSS elections will take place tonight at 9:00 PM, SOL on Friday at 6:00, and USCC next Monday at 7:00. CPU elections took place last night.

Check newsstands tomorrow, and you'll see something familiar: a shiny New York Magazine cover story digesting the last 40 years of crazy activism at Columbia, featuring glamour shots of David Judd, Chris Kulawik, Karina Garcia and a smattering of other rabblerousers. Take a seat, because it's a doozy, reaching back to the SDS protests of the 60s, racing through Minutemen, and parsing every protest and meeting since then for a larger point about College and the Left (it is New York Mag, after all).

Here are the takeaway points, in case you're too mired in papers to read the whole thing: Radical kids today don't have the energy of Mark Rudd & Co. Career-oriented Democrats don't have the energy of the radicals. Kulawik doesn't need energy, because he's got skillz. Columbia has historically been riven by identity politics--mostly around Israel-Palestine--but now the lines are starting to blur.

Well, now everyone else knows.

- LBD

Charlow's loathsome acts, subsequent "eyebrow raising"

Numbers for your ego

Teetotalers at Columbia are people too

Read this: Minutemen protesters rebuff charges against them

Staff beats around the big ol' bush

More on Charlowheist:

The New York Times' coverage

What's going on at UT, And at USC

And the clincher: "Lenders also paid for trips for financial aid officers and their spouses to resorts including Pebble Beach in California, Cuomo said."

Protesting sure has taken an interesting turn at American colleges recently. Let's start here at Columbia. As of 6 pm, there were five protestors outside the main gates, protesting about the Minuteman protest which occured six months ago today. What about it? Three prim women, from New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement, are upset that the students haven't been punished more severely. Interestingly, their flyer claims "only three of nine students investigated
have been charged with simple violations." In reality, three were charged with simple violations and three more were censured, a harsher punishment. Also, their sign reading "Bollinger Stop Columbia Cover-Up," is puzzling, as covered-up stories generally don't have an inordinate amount of news coverage on major networks.

Factual inaccuracies aside, NYICE are an interesting bunch. They told Bwog Editor Lydia DePillis that they estimate their numbers around 100, and that some of them were present at Ground Zero over the weekend protesting the illegal presence of some of the hijackers in the U.S.. They also had a few colorful quotes, protesting both the mortality of socialist thinkers ("that's Marxist talk...Marx died!") and the nationality of those near them ("You're French, oh my God, I'm dealing with French people"). They did, however, draw more press than people--ISO President David Judd, who tipped Bwog off to the story, remarked "I wish my 5-person 'rallies' could get coverage like this" and says to watch tomorrow's Spec for statements from the Columbia protestors on their punishment.

Protests elsewhere in the country after the jump!

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).

Let the spin-doctoring begin: "It's a victory for free speech and anti-racism."

Kind farewell to Lisa Anderson: "Being in SIPA next to the law school is like living in Mexico on the border of the U.S."

JTS decides to admit gays and lesbians. In other news, sky does not fall.

SGB "combats social injustice" by...recognizing groups that will do it for them

Inside the university's rules procedure: where's Kafka when you need him?

Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, has been brought down, not by protestors rushing the stage but by internal strife in his own organization, and is now fighting to regain his power. According to current Minuteman leadership, Gilchrist improperly used the organization's funds for his own purposes, illegally sent mail at nonprofit rates without filing for nonprofit status, and has not accounted for up to $400,000 in Minuteman funds. According to Gilchrist, bitches set him up. The LA Times reports that Gilchrist accused his accusers of being motivated by "a greed for power and a false perception of an endless stream of money." Meanwhile, they are upset with their former leader using Minuteman funds to pay his court fees in his case against them. Gilchrist's replacement? Marvin Stewart, his opening speaker at Columbia. Minutemen: we know they hate themselves, or at least each other. - DHI

Columbia-sponsored high school, created as Manhattanville quid pro quo, evicted, now homeless: ironic?

CU formally apologizes to Minutemen: reactions predictable

Barnard career services better than Columbia's...unless you want to be a bartender

Speaking of which: bars crack down on legal IDs, but hire illegal bouncers

Revelation of the day: "in certain cases drug use destroys lives, but in a lot of cases they help out a whole bunch"

Columbia's alphabet soup of schools: doomed to "sad and paradoxical reality" of awkward coexistence - forever. Which, according to this, is a good thing. We think.

A digest of activisty news we missed from the last week.

Copycats! Over at UCLA--which showed up on our "WTF" radar last year because of that taser business--protesters actually shut down a talk by some Minutemen-affiliated speakers. (note: This is not the Minuteman Project, but the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.) Or, rather, according to the site above (the media coverage of this has been rather sparse, we might add...) admins pulled the plug on the event because of "security concerns."

Speaking loudly: The Dems, determined to "take a strong stance on Iraq," met on Wednesday to endorse a withdrawal plan. They didn't, but will be meeting again on Tuesday to decide on a position. Sophomore president George Krebs sez they need to consider- "What the clearest vision for us is, and then take that vision and go to the next level with it. If you don't do that, then you find yourself in a place where you're concerned about how it's going to be viewed rather than the substance of it." Aw, the circumlocutions of budding politicos.

Carrying a big stick? In case you hadn't seen the flyers, this Thursday there will be a mass walk-out at noon and a teach-in at 2 PM in Lerner against, well, the War. It was organized in conjunction with a national strike by an ad hoc group called the Columbia Coalition Against the War, who also set up an online petition, which has been signed by such illustrious presences as Prof. Robert Thurman, SGB prez Sakib Khan, and SAMER THE JUMBALAYA DESTROYER (?).

As the months drag on, the Minuteman saga continues to unfold. A few weeks ago, we told you that eight students had been sent discipilnary letters by University Rules Administrator Steve Rittenberg. That was coming from Provost Brinkley, who said that eleven total letters had been sent, three of which went to non-students, noting that it had been "difficult" to identify the students involved. Spec reported a few days ago that the students have been charged with "simple" violations under the Rules of University Conduct, which means they got off easy--the last guy to go through this process, in 1996, was nailed with "serious" charges, chose the hearing process, and got suspended. From here, they'll go through Dean's Discipline, which means the worst they can get is a censure (hey, Clinton survived). But something doesn't make sense: protest organizers knew about five letters that were sent out before October 18, learned of a sixth on December 5 and a seventh a month later. So who's the missing eighth transgressor?

Also, for your reading pleasure, we have recieved permission to reprint (after the jump, natch) the letter sent to defendants by the Rules Administrator. You know, in case you were planning on storming a stage anytime soon.

Because a few interesting tidbits have been coming over the alias, and we're tired of talking about grades too.

- We may have forgotten about the Minuteman dust-up, but the members of New York Immigration Control and Enforcement (a few of whom were in Roone on the fateful night) couldn't let it go. According to CNN, "several" protested outside Lerner on Thursday, demanding that the offending students be expelled. Bwog has learned that eight students have been sent disciplinary letters and decisions are pending, but we'll go out on a limb to say that they'll be able to finish out their time at Columbia.

Meanwhile, protester-in-chief Karina Garcia will be back at school this semester after having taken the rest of 2006 off to go on a speaking tour of high schools, colleges, and radio stations, including a keynote address at the Socialism Conference in LA hosted by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The College Republicans haven't got anything on their docket--could 2007 be the year of chill at Columbia?

- Not weatherwise, anyway. It was 68 degrees today in the city, and 2006 marked the first time that New York had a snowless November and December since 1877. But really, it's all just hype...

- Carrie Bradshaws of the world, take note! The Spectator is looking for editorial board members and columnists. Yes, including a sex columnist.

- Twenty-one blocks north, a much nicer subway story than those involving chainsaw-wielding goons.

- It seems that Macintosh is closed for asbestos removal. That explains some things.

- The Columbia crown has been turning up in some strange places recently. But considering Public Affairs still hasn't decided whether the logo should be secular chic or trendily theist (in Bwog's estimation, crosses and spades have aboout an equal presence on campus these days), Duke Nukem is the least of their worries.

Thanks to Julia Kite, Dan Gant, Jessica Cohen, Addison Anderson, and Miguel Lopez for the tips.

- LBD

With great power comes...great attention. Even from the most unlikely of sources:

Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has written of his support for the Minuteman protesters on his website. The organization's inspiring press release can be read here. More interesting, however, is an article submitted by a reader of RCP's site, entitled Some Thoughts on Freedom of Speech, Academic Freedom, Fascist Suppression...and the Minutemen At Columbia.

The reader explains: "...And in actual fact, these thugs [The Minutemen] were NOT suppressed at Columbia. They came on campus and found themselves confronted by people who went on stage to hold banners to oppose them. This was not the state suppressing the Minutemen; these were masses challenging them."

Hello, masses. It is nice to be referred as members of the majority for just one time, no?

P.S. A search of the RCP archives for "Columbia" yields some either pretty cool or crazy stuff, depending on who you ask.