Bwog's Latin American Bureau Chief David Berke continued his tour of the World Leaders Forum, now not starring Shakira!

In World Leaders Forum event number two, Leonel Fernández, president of the Dominican Republic, and his first lady participated in a town hall-style colloquium this evening in Low. Fernández is currently serving his third term as the country's leader. Prezbo started the evening, explaining to the audience that when Fernández, a former New York resident, was living on 95th and Broadway in the late sixties, Prezbo was living a block away on 96th.

With Bollinger having established the neighborly connection, the official introductory speaker, former Columbia professor Ronald M. Schneider, decided it was time to share the love (and the marketing potential). Schneider called Fernández "a truly political leader," and the best current leader in the entire Western Hemisphere. Before allowing the apparently unparalleled President to speak, Schneider showed his homemade Fernández propaganda video, which ended by hawking Schneider's book on Fernández.

With the pomp and circumstance of Class Day and graduation weeks behind us, Bwog was surprised and delighted when we were contacted last night by Maxim Pinkovskiy, the Columbia College valedictorian.

Wrote Pinkovskiy: "As the valedictorian of Columbia College does not give a speech on Class Day, I did not get to make a speech. However, some students asked me to write one on my own, so I am sending you what I composed a few weeks after graduation." Read on, nostalgic recent alums hoping to relive Class Day.

As we leave Columbia today, we are likely to ask ourselves: what has been the meaning of the past four years? Does our diploma indicate that we "have satisfied the onerous and nearly insuperable requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts," or does it mean something more, even if just to ourselves? What do these medieval maces and baroque berets mean in the age of I-Pods and internships? As Plato might have said, what is the form of a university education, and might it have changed irrevocably from the days of yore? Like a good Columbian, when faced with these questions, I turn to the classics. More than two thousand years ago, in a China in the flux of social and economic transformation, Confucius, like us today, was asking himself: what are the fundamentals of a proper education in this world? His response was, as usual, an aphorism:

"To study and in due season to practice what one has learned, is this not a pleasure?"

"To have friends coming from afar, is this not a delight?"

"To remain unembittered even though one is unrecognized, is that not to be noble?"

Confucius, Analects 1:1

Admit it, you're glad you didn't have to sit out in the rain for the class days and Commencement, but you kind of want to know if anything interesting happened during the graduation festivities. As usual, Bwog's got you covered.

Precipitation: It rained, dulling the much-ballyhooed McCain protest (sez the NY Times), and giving rise to griping grandaunts and yelling matches between stressed parents and seniors. Parent quote of the day: "Well, I figure, I sometimes sit in snow for five or six hours to hunt some elk, so, I figure why not sit through a bit o' rain for the son's graduation?"

Salutation: CC Salutatorian Julia DiBenigno spoke gleefully of the joys of "familiar faces," "experimenting with who we are and who we want to be," and the "memories that will last a lifetime." Quoting Peter Parker, she reminded graduates that with great power comes great responsibility. Lukewarm applause ensued.

Pontification: The senior senator from Arizona intoned on the "fight between right and wrong" that we are apparently now facing, in a speech remarkably similar to the address he gave to Liberty University grads three days before. Hey, if it's good enough for a school that does the good work of God, why change?

Duplication: One of the Cohen twins got magna cum laude, while the other got just the laude. I mean, they're fraternal. Identical twins Paul and Phil Fileri, on the other hand, both were honored with summa cum laude. Snap!

Jubilation: You've got to hand it to PrezBo—for having given three commencement speeches already, he's still churning out zingers like eviction notices in Manhattanville, as well as ponderous pronouncements such as how the Iraq war might have been avoided if we were all a bit more educated. The word "procrastination" drew applause from across the board, but audience response typically followed State of the Union style: CC students went wild over his quotations of Montaigne, medical students screamed at the mention of 168th street, and Bwog is willing to make an assumption about who cheered when he talked about India's advances in computer engineering.

Projectilation?: All the classes threw their appropriate objects upon being called. Columbia College launched apple cores for the core curriculum (mostly aimed at SEAS). International flags for SIPA, giant toothbrushes for the School of Dentistry, mini gavels for future lawyers, paper airplanes for SEAS...you get the picture.