Tis a dreary day in academia as professors from all around decide how to end their time with students. Some opt for wit, others tears. Here is our first installment of Closing Remarks to what will be a continually updating post. Send your own anecdotes to bwgossip@coumbia.edu.

Latin American Literature professor Alfred Mac Adam:

"If anyone needs me before your papers are due on Monday, I'll be in my office, gathering cobwebs as usual. It'll be a race between you and the janitor -- who empties the trash once every six months -- to see who finds my decrepit, decaying body there first, covered in dust in a spider web cocoon"

Calc professor Elliott Stein

"Okay, that's it. Party's over."
One person applauds, while the other 10 who were still coming to lecture at that point leave immediately.
"No, really, you don't have to do that."

Perpetual Bwog favorite Richard Bulliet has once again treated the students of Islamo-Christian Civilization to a semester of quotable quotations. Read and learn: this is the wit that lured Ahmadinejad to campus.

Too Much Information

It's like getting a contact high when everyone around you is smoking dope but you don't do that--you're still sharing a bit of the blessing.

But let's not mention Lyndon LaRouche because he's kind of crazy. I wouldn't have brought him up at all if my brother-in-law hadn't devoted half his life to his cause.

Life Advice

I'm a dentist. If you want to lose weight, drink Raspberry Zinger tea. I'm a pharmacist. When I play baseball, I use Spalding balls.

Vladivostok: the southernmost city in Russia. There's a little factoid for your next television appearance.

You'll find the most beautiful tilework in the world there. And you should definitely think of visiting it...the next time you're in Uzbekistan.

Check back throughout the day for a continually updated list.

Post-Modernism, Prof. Vandenberg

In post-modernism yesterday, fifty or so tightly packed, Derrida-hungry
kids waited for Prof. Vandenburg to arrive. When she still hadn't
shown up after 25 minutes, a few witty comments started to fly about
how "post-modern" it would be for Vandenberg to let the class teach
itself. Vandenburg walked in unhurriedly a few minutes later, only to
announce, "I'm sorry...it was very post-modern: I was using my
computer clock, which I shouldn't have done.

Of note: As of the first class, no one had yet used the abbreviation "po-mo."

"You need to attend a concert. A classical concert. No..." [strokes chin] "No Spice Girls. I know, they're coming here next week, but it's all sold out—but they added another show, but that's sold out too. Anyway, you're all too old for that stuff."

OK, not forever, but for the semester at least, and Professor Jackson's concluding session contained a bonanza of "editorials" for the gathered masses in 417 IAB.

On why people aren't moving to the suburbs to get away from Jews, Italians, and black people any more because of 9/11: "I think Americans are simpleminded. We can only hate one people at a time."

On why a later average age of marriage draws people to the cities: "When I was your age, you got married. Partly for sex, but partly to play house...Once you've gotten gotten married and had sex, you've got a baby, and the suburbs are starting to look a lot better."

"If you're not married, you don't want to stay home and take care of the stuff, you want to be like Carrie or Samantha."

The class clapped for a long time after he finished the lecture. What a charmer!

Overheard in Latin American Civilization 1:

Professor Caterina Pizzigoni, who is adorable and Italian and sometimes has trouble with English words and concepts, shows a slide of a man holding a rooster.

Caterina: "What do you think the man is doing with the cock?"
[Scattered laughter]
Smartass in the front: "He appears to be stroking it."
[More laughter. Pause]
Caterina: "Do you know why he is stroking the cock?"
[Class explodes]

This guy was really overdue for his own edition of Profs Say, seeing that Bruce Robbins loves offsetting his typically grave delivery with the occasional zinger--some of them completely over the heads of their intended recipients. This is by turns uncomfortable and hilarious to watch, espcially when said zingers crop up in bizarrely theoretical places. From today's lecture:

"(Psychoanalyst) Jacques Lacan didn't have much time for therapy. That's actually quite funny, but you wouldn't know why."

Ouch. But on second thought, ha! Good one, Bruce!

From earlier this afternoon:

Julia Hirschberg: "Linguistics example sentences are invariably about murder or sex."

It's the first day of classes, and Bwog wants to know some of the ridiculous things professors have said to commence the school year. Email bwgossip@columbia.edu if you hear anything good.

The second installment of Bwog's ongoing documentation of Professor Richard Bulliet's best lecture quips is here! Below, the venerable Middle East history don's most amusing offhand remarks from the second half of this semester's trial run of Islamo-Christian Civilization. The first part can be found here.

On course requirements:

"For the record, no one in this class is required to watch an al-Qaeda recruitment video, or go off and pursue jihad."

"Graduate students might want to write something substantially longer [than undergrads] - that is to say, doorstop size. I don't want to be able to lift three of them."

On the International Islamic University in Pakistan:

"They had 740 acres...enough to make Lee Bollinger drool with envy. Of course, they had to level several villages."

"It was not a great big giant madrassa. No one was doing calisthenics with kalashnikovs. It was kinda disappointing."

On European perceptions of Islamic conversion in Indonesia:

"You might have thought that Indonesia was a less sophisticated society and that Islam represented a kind of Windows Upgrade complete with all the patches and things that still don't work right."

Peter Gordon probably isn't travelling to West Virginia any time soon. While being interviewed about his research on the Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon, for The New Yorker, the Teachers College Speech and Pathology prof made an unfortunate reference to one of America's most persistent regional stereotypes. "If there is some kind of Appalachian inbreeding or retardation going on," he said, defending the tribe from such charges, "you'd see it in hairlines, facial features, motor ability. It bleeds all over. They [the Piraha] don't show any of that."

Now, Gordon is under fire, and Columbia has been targeted as well. "The quote splattered against academic computer screens in Appalachia this week like a large cud of chewing tobacco," wrote the Lexington Herald-Leader (we're not quite sure if they were trying to be ironic or not). A professor at Daemen College had this to say to Gordon: "Shame on you and on the institution you represent for perpetuating such ugly and untrue stereotypes". Ohio University prof Jack Wright compared the gaffe to "cultural strip-mining".

For his part, Gordon has apologized, and called the experience "humbling". After receiving complaints, Provost Brinkley said that he disagreed with Gordon's sentiments, but that the prof would not be censored.

-CJS

Professor Thomas Bernstein (Life Cycles of Communist Regimes) is wise in his old years. Earlier today, he explained a fashion phenomenon with a silver tongue:

"I don't understand why it is that people wear baggy pants. Soviet leaders used to wear them in the 1950s, but then they wised up, got Italian suits and looked pretty spiffy. Today, young men wear baggy pants all the time. I think that they must have a disease, perhaps testicular elephantiasis."

Thanks to Rachael McMillan for the e-mail.

UPDATE 01/03 at 6:00PM: Bwog regrets that it accidentally misquoted Professor Bulliet by confusing Muslim and Jewish regulations concerning pigs. The correction has been made, and we note that, as Prof. Bulliet put it, neither religion includes ritual pig-kissing. Professor, thank you for reading Bwog. We love you.

His lectures might include elaborate graphs one day, a cavalcade of Arabic vocabulary the next. Occasionally, he'll admit they were thought up only fifteen minutes before class. Yet Professor Richard Bulliet manages to synthesize so much disparate information into his Islamo-Christian Civilization course that, however many of his own books are on the syllabus, few could say students aren't learning anything. As the first half of the semester comes to a close, however, Bwog realizes that it has taken far fewer notes on Sufism or the Crusades as on Bulliet's more amusing anecdotes and witticisms...

On Religion

"People with individual spiritual philosophies are so strange, I think it's better not to have one at all."

"I've never been visited by the Holy Spirit, and I tend to ridicule it, partly because my cousin Martha is frequently visited by it."

After reading a religion scholar's exegesis on Jewish and Muslim meat regulations: "He said that if a pig drank from some water, Muslim couldn't drink from it. But an orthodox Jew could french-kiss the pig. I think that's the first and only time french-kissing pigs will come up in a scholarly dissertation."

On heresy: "Once someone is burned at the stake, it's sort of a buzzkill for everyone else."

Paraphrasing some ascetics: "Tell you what, let's have a constipation-in! We'll sit and eat and see who will be the last to go to the bathroom."

On Sufi chanting: "Pretty soon everyone is pretty stoned...um, on God."

After the jump: on Writing, Scholarship, and Leaving Class Early to be on TV...

Professor Peter DeMenocal, Frontiers lecture, Monday morning, in response to a student asking why dinosaurs survived in warmer temperatures but humans can't:

"That's our world, like it or not. We're not dinosaurs."

Spanish professor in Milbank, Monday afternoon:

"Spanish is spoken in 19 countries... i mean, depending on whether there's a revolution, right?"

Thanks to Hillary Busis and Ashley Nin for the tips.

Everybody is talking about animals now, according to three separate things that three separate people said. IT IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE THAT THREE OF ANYTHING MAKES A TREND!

First, a pair of professors:

"Sex with animals...it doesn't seem like something we might do today. But in a rural world, it does happen!"

- Professor Alfred MacAdam, Latin American Literature in Translation, on One Hundred Years of Solitude

"Everyone here loves camels. They are beastly, beastly mean animals."

- Professor George Saliba, Contemporary Islamic Civilization, on the Safavid Empire

...and then, a student continues the trend:

"... and that would be fine, except that I'm allergic to scorpion blood."
- Girl in McIntosh in between bites of (hopefully scorpion-free) sushi

Overheard by Juli Weiner

- DHI

Live from Weapons of Mass Destruction, where Professor Paul Richards, wearing a moss-green jacket and flowered tie, cracked the following joke:

A sodium atom walks into a bar, looking dejected.

Barkeep: What's wrong?

Sodium atom: I've lost an electron.

Barkeep: Are you sure?

Sodium atom: Yes, I'm positive!

OK, maybe you had to be there.