Armin Rosen reports on the big semi-annual, semi-mandatory sophomore class lecture.

The title of this post is actually a wee bit inaccurate. This wasn't just the biggest walkout of the year--it was also the biggest walkout of last year, and was probably bigger than any walkouts that were held the year before that one, too. About seven hundred students were at Roone for Friday's Contemporary Civilization course-wide lecture. By the time Berkley Talmud professor Daniel Boyarin had finished dissecting the seventh chapter of Daniel, a mere handful were left in the audience, proving that while Iraq might convince 400 or so people not to go to class, intellectual passivity is one cause around which practically everyone can rally. Even at Columbia.

If only John Erskine could have lived to have seen so spectacular a "fuck you"� to the Core Curriculum and everything it represents. Granted, it was a Friday afternoon. And granted, I've heard some people complain that Boyarin's central thesis--that the all-time mindblower that is Daniel 7 represents an attempt at suppressing certain polytheistic ideas within ancient Judaism, and that its formulation of an "older"� and "younger"� God provided a theological basis for the emergence of Christianity as a protestant movement within Judaism itself--has nothing to do with what we've been reading and studying in CC. I've heard others say that his brilliant synthesis of linguistics, history, literature and religion was off-topic and irrelevant; that his meticulous application of comp-lit methods both on a practical and theoretical level were limited to ideas and concepts uninteresting to people without a strong background in Judaism.