J.D. Porter

Despite our years of political activism, from taking over buildings to sitting in tents, Columbians don’t usually matter in presidential elections.

Frank Wess has been playing jazz for over half a century. Born in 1922, he played in an Army band that accompanied Josephine Baker during World War II, performed with the Count Basie Orchestra from 1953 to 1964, and since then has worked on various side projects with some of the most prominent figures in jazz.

Here at Columbia, as at most top universities, we enjoy belittling conservative beliefs. Even the professors are in on it, and conservatives often find their beliefs directly challenged by academic trickery, like thinking about things, and facts. But shouldn’t good pedagogy incorporate all sides of an issue?

Like David Horowitz, CC ’59, I believe that we could end most of America’s problems if we simply repeated the word Islamo-fascism enough times, preferably from some sort of stage. We diverge on the exact methodology, however.

If you’ve been following the last few years of Columbia bias incidents, you’ve learned that racism is bad, and that we should do something about it. Unfortunately, even though we keep saying that, racism just doesn’t seem to be going away.

Now that reports about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have become boring and dated, according to the rule of “But I’ve read lots of stories about this,” we can finally turn our attention to the real question facing Columbia: would we have invited Hitler to speak here?

I like rich, academically incapable idiots as much as the next guy, but I’m beginning to wonder if Columbia should stop admitting so many of them. I’m speaking, obviously, of legacy students.

Like many students at Columbia, I blame all of my problems on failures of the school, and, in this year's Fail-a-Thon, the biggest donor is poor career counseling. Sure, we had that financial aid director who stole from us, and those Republicans who kicked people's heads, but those of us who struggled to find summer jobs know that we have forgotten old problems in favor of current ones.

Like many of you, I'm not entirely sure what the University Senate is. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that we should abolish it. As far as I know, for too long the senate has failed to achieve anything we students want. It's high time we took failing into our own hands.

Every so often, some furious student group will come along and demand that Columbia's Core curriculum feature more dead minority figures. They argue that the Core is oppressive and exclusive, a who's who of dead white men. This is basically correct. It's also a great argument for keeping the Core exactly as it is.

As many of you have no doubt noticed, March has finally arrived, and that means the word of the month is: Spring Break! Here at Columbia, however, our professors heartlessly schedule midterms at the exact time when we have stopped paying attention to everything they say.

Growing up during the Bush presidency is like dating a really stupid person who looks vaguely like a monkey and has lots of creepy friends, who then inexplicably gets elected to be your girlfriend a second time because the only other option was a really boring guy­-it dramatically lowers your standards.

Sometimes in life it's difficult to know what to do, like when your dog is choking to death. What's the protocol here? Kick him in the ribs and hope he coughs really hard? Mouth to mouth? But sometimes life hands you easy problems, so easy, in fact, that the solution is simply to quit doing the same wrong thing.

A wise man once told me that what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right. Actually, it was less a wise man than a poster in my seventh-grade pre-algebra class. But what Captain Math and the Homework Squad didn't say is that most people are neither popular nor right.

If we want to get serious about creating school spirit at Columbia, we'll stop wasting time on expansion and hosting foreign luminaries and start creating a rivalry with another school. All great heroes need a villain. Superman would have been profoundly disturbing if he had just flown around furiously punching jaywalkers through walls.

The similarities between Columbia football and the Iraq War don't end with mutual catastrophic failure. As "fans," we can take a page from our nation's disastrous foreign policy to determine how we should handle team spirit. Just as we support the troops and not the war-putting yellow bumper stickers on our cars but still sending them to be maimed and killed in the desert-so can we support our football players.

Voting does not make a difference, and most people shouldn't do it.

Every child knows that screaming repeatedly annoys people, with the possible exception of mute children, who see the world through silent tears. Here at Columbia, we like to be indignant, and we like to cause controversy, which offers the nectar of momentary fame and the ambrosia of a false sense of purpose. Unfortunately, many of us have forgotten the lessons of the children. Infuriating people is easy, sometimes as easy as arbitrarily picking on disabled youths. You just have to know the guidelines.

Sometimes you just want to rush a stage and kick a stranger in the head. But before you do anything rash, you should always stop to consider, how good is this riot, on a scale of one to 10? If one is ignoring an e-mail about Darfur, and 10 is burning cars in Paris, I would put the Minutemen speech fiasco at a solid six.

About a week ago I noticed that Harlem doesn't like me. Wandering around the 132nd Street area with a friend, I couldn't help but notice a sign because it was about twenty feet tall. "Stop Columbia!" it said, "We won't be pushed out!" and then repeated the message in Spanish. We stopped to look and, as I read it, I thought, "Yes, you will."

The Facebook news feed is our generation's Vietnam. We may not be dying horrendous jungle deaths, or fleeing to Canada, or producing decent music. We are protesting, though, and unlike our hippie forbears, we're not spitting on any veterans while we do it.