Celebrity Death Match (Literally), Part One: Frances Fox Piven vs. Glenn Beck
In what proved to be the lunatic spasms of a man whose career was going down the tubes, Glenn Beck sparked a national controversy in January by attacking CUNY’s Frances Fox Piven as being the root of all evil in American politics. Beck aggressively singled out Piven on his show as “the roots of the tree of radicalism and revolution,” and warned of what he called the “Piven-Cloward strategy” (based on an article Piven wrote in 1966 for The Nation with her husband Richard Cloward) to “overwhelm the system” with “fear and intimidation.”

What should have been merely laughable turned dangerously ugly as death threats against the CUNY Distinguished Professor began piling up online and in her email box. The threats against Piven’s life attracted an FBI investigation, and led to beefed up security around the Graduate Center. Thankfully, the situation resolved itself peaceably, with the only casualty being Beck’s show on Fox. Piven’s reputation, meanwhile, has enjoyed something of a renaissance, and she continues to be an active voice in the invigorated discussions around academic freedom and Occupy-inspired social movements.

OMG, CUNY Gets TKO’d over KPO—LOL!

Kristofer Petersen-Overton hadn’t yet taught his first class at Brooklyn College when he was issued his walking papers by CUNY in January 2011. The early official word justifying KPO’s termination was that he lacked the proper credentials to teach at the graduate level. True enough: the idea that grad students should be able to teach grad level courses is ridiculous. And yet, the CUNY system is riddled with exactly this arrangement, belying the baloney Brooklyn used to justify the firing. It turns out that what really motivated the move was political pressure from state assemblyman Dov Hikind. Hikind reportedly complained to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein about what he took to be KPO’s love of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The response to KPO’s firing was immediate and overwhelming, as students and faculty across the CUNY system wasted no time in kicking Brooklyn College’s ass into submission and ultimately forcing the college to reverse its decision. Letters of outrage and dismay from prominent scholars and public figures from across the country poured into college administrators’ inboxes and were posted online at the Advocate’s website for the world to see. And indeed, the world did see, and within a week more than 1,700 signatures were collected on a petition calling for KPO’s reinstatement from people across the globe who were rightly outraged by what they saw as a clear violation of the principles of academic freedom. As one signatory from the United Kingdom put it: “Your dismissal of Kristofer Petersen-Overton is a scandal: that Brooklyn College should put obedience to power ahead of both academic freedom and intellectual integrity beggars belief. You have traduced your office and should be ashamed of yourself.” On January 31, the Brooklyn College political science department dealt the death blow to Hikind’s campaign by unanimously recommending to the college president Karen Gould that KPO be reinstated. That same evening, the school released a statement announcing the unconditional reversal of its earlier action. Peterson-Overton went on to successfully complete his instruction of the course, and CUNY enjoyed a measure of acknowledgement from around the nation as a bastion of defense for academic freedom.

Celebrity Death Match, Part Two: Tony Kushner vs. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld

CUNY Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld is kind of a dick. When he’s not picking fights with City Councilman Charles Barron or pissing on the firestorm over Kristofer Peterson-Overton, he’s busy embarrassing the City University by denying world-renown, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights the opportunity to receive honorary degrees from the institution. In early May, as the spring semester was drawing to a close, word got out that the CUNY Board of Trustees had removed Tony Kushner’s name from the list of honorary degree recipients slated for approval. Wiesenfeld was the catalyst behind the move, objecting on the grounds that Kushner held what he considered politically unacceptable views.

As in the KPO affair, students and faculty from around the country rallied in defense of Kushner. The outraged chorus of prominent voices—which included Toni Morrison, Harold Bloom, former Mayor of New York City Ed Koch, and a lengthy list of some of the country’s most prominent scholars—ultimately forced Benno Schmidt, the chairman of the board, to call an emergency meeting on May 9. At that meeting, the board voted unanimously to overturn their previous decision and honor Kushner with a degree from John Jay. Kushner graciously accepted, and in an exclusive interview with the Advocate, (that’s us, not the gay advocate magazine) offered praise for the institution, saying: “The way the students and faculty responded to this whole thing has been incredibly impressive, incredibly courageous and vigorous, and I think this speaks beautifully of the university. And so, I am really proud of the affiliation.”
PSC Members Arrested in Albany

In late march, PSC members, including many from the Graduate Center, headed to Albany to protest the deep cuts in the CUNY budget that were being planned by Governor Andrew Cuomo. The protest was organized by the PSC, and brought together hundreds of people from a host of union groups—including the AFL-CIO, teacher unions, and New York Communities for Real Change—that descended on the capital together to voice outrage at Cuomo’s refusal to stand up for students and teachers in the public education system.

After marching in the capitol building for more than a half an hour, a breakaway group of PSC members gathered and walked to the governor’s office which they briefly occupied before getting hauled off by the cops. In all, thirty-three PSC reps were arrested as the rest of the crowd chanted the now-familiar line, “This is what democracy looks like!” and “From Wisconsin to New York the struggle is the same!” The occupation action marked a serious shift in PSC strategy towards a greater militancy to fight austerity and defend CUNY. Immediately after the Albany protests, a group of Grad Center students issued a statement that in many ways foreshadowed what was to come some months later. The letter, in part read: “We must continue and expand this campaign of direct action, taking it into the streets, offices, classrooms and workplaces of New York City.” Many of those same graduate students have done just that.

NYPD Spying

The New York Police Department has thankfully been receiving a fairly sustained spotlight on its less honorable actions taken in the name of fulfilling its mission to protect and serve. At the end of last summer, the bombshell revelation that the NYPD had been spying on Muslim students across the CUNY system dropped. Leonard Levitt, a veteran investigative reporter was the first to break the story, noting that the police department had spied on mosques, Islamic civic organizations, businesses, and student clubs on CUNY campuses.

In response, faculty at Brooklyn College, one of the focal points of police concern, passed a resolution condemning the surveillance, arguing that the snooping violated student and faculty rights and academic freedom more broadly. As it turned out, police spying may have also been against the law—further revelations suggested that the NYPD operations were part of a CIA-sponsored endeavor to collect domestic intelligence on potential threats to national security. The CIA, of course, is barred by law from spying in the United States.

Police Crackdown on Protest at Baruch College
In the heat of what seemed an endless string of OWS-inspired actions during the fall, CUNY students and faculty organized for a day of university-wide protest on Monday, November 21. In the morning and afternoon, undergrad students walked out of classes, many of whom marched to Madison Square Park where they were met with hundreds of other students from schools across the city. From there, a huge group marched to Baruch College to protest the Board of Trustees meeting slated to vote that evening on proposed tuition hikes.

Campus security warned the protesters to clear the premises at 5:00pm, when the meeting was scheduled to begin. The group refused to obey the orders, and instead began pushing forward into the Baruch lobby where they were met with police coercion. Security used their batons as battering rams, pushing students and faculty to the ground. By the time the police-inspired chaos had settled, five students and faculty were in cuffs, including the Grad Center’s own Conor Tomas Reed. The events caught national attention, and served to catalyze later actions that continued throughout the fall and early winter. As this issue goes to press a student-faculty planning committee on police abuse at CUNY has called for an open meeting to be convened on Wednesday, February 8 at 5pm in the eighth floor cafeteria to discuss further steps to insure that a thorough investigation of the police actions on November 21 and 28 are held. Stay tuned for more on this story as it develops.

Occupy Wall Street

Looking back at the first half of 2011, there is a clear and direct lineage connecting the building militancy and direct action campaigns embraced by CUNY activists and the explosion of Occupy Wall Street in the American imagination. To be sure, CUNY students have and continue to play important roles in the evolution and operation of the Occupy movement. From managing the People’s Library, to leading various working groups, to carrying out research and archival projects documenting the history and growth of the thing, CUNY students have been at the heart of the action. The Advocate reported on much of this action in 2011, and offered a platform that CUNY/OWS activists could use to share their experiences and ideas.

One of the remarkable features of CUNY activism in 2011 was the positive feedback loop that developed between CUNY and OWS. In many respects, the actions taken in the name of equity within CUNY built momentum towards and informed what later played out in downtown Manhattan—first in Bloombergville (the nearly forgotten forerunner to OWS and the first occupation of downtown Manhattan) and then much more dramatically in Zuccotti Park—which, in turn, further fueled momentum within CUNY activist ranks to continue bringing the fight to the administration and the state. Looking back over the events of 2011, it is simply astounding at how many tactical victories were achieved. Hopefully the enthusiasm and string of successes will carry through to the entirety of 2012.

CUNY Compact

Early in the spring semester, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein introduced a new initiative to help offset the austere conditions imposed by the economic recession on CUNY students. The CUNY Compact supposedly will offset the nearly $200 million in federal cuts to the CUNY budget. Predictably, the chancellor’s plan takes the form of trickle-down austerity, placing a significant burden on an already hard-pressed CUNY student body. The initiative calls for a rolling series of tuition hikes for students attending the system’s senior colleges, and a marriage of the university’s public holdings with private interests as part of a new entrepreneurial scheme. As the Advocate reported in March, the CUNY Compact calls for the university’s various real estate holdings to be leased out to private corporations and other actors for a whole menu of purposes—from research to privatized student housing. The catch? All of it would be tax free. As Lord Vader himself excitedly noted, “In this way, CUNY would advance the goal of affordable housing, develop faculty housing, and build some revenue to add to our endowment.”

The compact was introduced amidst a flurry of public-private partnership endeavors on the part of the university. In addition to leasing out property to private groups, CUNY also announced a new high school/college hybrid that will receive modest sponsorship from IBM. Students at CUNY High will graduate with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, and a guaranteed entry-level job with IBM at their North Carolina headquarters. Not only that, the 80th Street Sith also announced that CUNY would create a new community college within John Jay. The building chosen to house the new junior college would be converted for dual-use—half would be used for the college’s purposes, and the other half would be leased to a private developer to convert into commercial and residential units. Meanwhile the Graduate Center is paying homage to its original incarnation as the B Altman department store, and the public space that is normally reserved for student and cultural events, has been increasingly utilized for profit, resulting in the recent embarrassing decision to rent the C Level out as space for, that’s right, a sample sale! The long lines of eager shoppers outside the Graduate Center and the crowds of bargain hunters picking through piles of deeply discounted designer clothing might have been appropriate at FIT, but at the sole Ph.D. granting institution of CUNY it just looks desperate.

Pathways

This past summer, CUNY introduced yet another new initiative designed to maximize the efficiency with which it conducts the business of education, education be damned. On June 27, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution that outlined the university’s “Pathways to Degree Completion Initiative” which the chancellor promises will “streamline” the transfer process for students making the jump from junior to senior colleges, while at the same time “enhancing” instruction across the system.
At the heart of the Pathways scheme is a controversial thirty-credit “common core” to be equally imposed on all CUNY campuses. The details of what this will look like when implemented can be found in this issue’s “News in Brief” section. More broadly, the “common core,” a sense of the controversy generated by CUNY’s Pathways plan is best summed up by Sandi Cooper, president of the CUNY University Faculty Senate. “Carefully constructed general education programs in the senior and community colleges are overturned. In the seniors, credits range from 45-60 depending on student competencies and most have at least a year of lab science, a history requirement, one to two years of foreign languages and classes in literature. Choices in other fields are not scattered over eight to ten disciplines and interdisciplinary ideas…This includes Brooklyn’s famous core which probably will survive by dropping languages. We all fear for languages and philosophy.” Cooper goes on to point out that “It is political when you realize that most CUNY students arrive with sever deficits (two-thirds of NYC high school grads need remediation) and for most of us, this new core represents little more than an effort to insure more students get degrees by a far less challenging curricula.”

Despite ferocious opposition to the initiative, CUNY has gone ahead with the plan, recently distributing guidelines for implementation of Pathways. The guidelines pretty much confirm the fear of critics that the university is steering the system to punch out as many graduates as possible, as quickly and painlessly as possible. And they are choosing to do so without consulting faculty planning committees charged with curricular development. Again, Sandi Cooper: “The process by which this core was developed did not reflect any…involvement of faculty with experience in general education. Our General Education committee which was wrestling with a proposal to improve transfer and preserve much of what was good in general education was ignored in the process of developing this common core. The process was driven entirely by a Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.”

Advocate Cans Senior Satirist, Replaces with Cheap Adjunct Labor—New Writer Greener than You Think

After nearly half a decade of publicly smearing Mark Schiebe (and his twin sister Kram) on the back pages of the GC Advocate, Matt Lau was finally canned by editorial fiat in 2011. Editor in Chief James “Jimmy” Hoff(a) announced the decision to send Lau packing at a special meeting of the DSC Committee on Media Oversight and General Dickishness. “Our current economic environment has forced the paper to make some painful decisions these past several months. And given the choice between keeping writers who drain the budget of precious resources or slashing funding for the office kegerator, the way forward was clear.” Hoff(a) assured the DSC CoMOaGD that the back page would remain strong, and that Lau’s writing load would be assigned to cheaper, part-time workers. The following day, Hoff(a) announced that the Advocate had hired Adjunct Hulk to write the monthly back page column. Said Adjunct Hulk, when asked for comment on the news,” HULK ACHIEVE HAT TRICK!! TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY ADMINISTRATORS, FACULTY, AND NOW, GRAD STUDENTS!!!” Welcome aboard, big guy.

Share on Facebook

GC President Bill Kelly kicks back at the dinner honoring new Distinguished Professor Tommy Chomg

It’s the first thing CUNY administrators think about in the morning and the last thing they recollect as they shut their eyes at night. It’s the metaphorical sugar in their coffee, the salt in their soup, the ganja in their splif. It’s called money, and there’s about to be a lot less of it next year.

But with New York State warning of yet another dire budget situation for next year, the Graduate Center’s long history of innovative fundraising strategies—from faculty bikini carwashes to presidential swimsuit calendars—looks poised for a new chapter. Call it chapter four-hundred and twenty. That’s because officials are planning not only to charter the new Cannabis Center for Research and Consumption, but also plan to decriminalize possession and then legalize the sale and consumption of the products of the new center, which will become New York City’s first fully operational medical marijuana distributor.

“This is about more than securing the salaries of all our employees from administrative staff to distinguished professors by selling some of the kindest bud in the tri-state area,” said the Graduate Center’s own Van Wilder, Advocate editor-in-chief James Hoff.

“This is about more than the peace of mind that comes from knowing those fellowships that students have worked so hard to obtain will be there for them as promised,” Hoff continued while searching his mini-fridge for something to alleviate his cotton-mouth. “This is about helping the proud graduate students of the country’s largest urban public university get the medical treatment they deserve.”

“Graduate students typically suffer from a variety of maladies that marijuana has alleviated for millennia in traditional cultures,” said the GC’s NORML chapter president, Mark Schiebe.

“My years of marijuana ‘research’ have proved that cannabinoids, the active ingredient in nature’s greenest painkiller, are the best medicine for all the daily pains of graduate study,” Schiebe continued. “Whether it’s the severe appetite suppression associated with trying to live in NYC on $3,000 dollars a course as an adjunct, the chronic pain that comes from typing up lecture notes night after night, or the nausea from reading the latest news about the academic job market, there are almost too many ways in which reality can harsh on a scholar’s mellow.”

Schiebe also touted the benefits of marijuana use for the most fatal disease in academia, writer’s block. “Baudelaire once said something to the effect like ‘on Hash we are prose beings to the highest power.’ And he was right. Nothing cured my inability to write my dissertation prospectus like a glass of wine and a few deeps inhales from the vaporizer that I checked out from GC’s new
Cannabis Center.”

“It’s the economy for shizzle,” said the Graduate Center’s newest Distinguished Professor and the first head of the Cannabis Center, Snoop Dogg. “My fellow 213 member Warren G once said, ‘If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.’ Well, the Grad Cizzle’s new Cannabis Center for the Research and Consumption makes a whole lot of both.”

When asked if there was any danger of graduate student’s potentially becoming addicted to the Snoop-approved “chronic” being developed by world-class growers, Snoop replied, “No, we’ll be looking to find most of our customers on the corners around here rather than in the building. The way I see it, you’ve got a solid customer-base in all those West-Indian brothers selling bus rides to tourists across the street.“

“And when Mayor Mike B makes the block here pedestrian only,” Dogg added, “we’ll be poised to turn it into the largest marijuana research center in world.”

Share on Facebook

One of the first Herstory students, CUNY GC Womyn's Feminist Studies Caucus Co-Chairperson Tammy Meir Clinton-Albright, takes a moment to ponder the centuries of phallocentric oppression experienced by her gender.

Her committee said it couldn’t be done.  There was no way history graduate student Kram Ebeihcs would be able to write her proposed thesis, “The Penis Dialogue: Personal Reflections on Phallic Imagery in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues,” within the Graduate Center’s conservative History Department, which is better known for its biographical work on reactionary idols like Andrew Carnegie and Ronald Reagan and for its reliance on facts. 

“I was crestfallen when my proposal was rejected,” said Kram, whose male to female “transition” surgery is almost complete.  “When they asked me to articulate my methodology more clearly, my response was to write a personal reflection on how this request had violated my soul.  When they refused to even read that response, I put an interpretive dance of my anger on youtube.  Finally they kicked me out of the program. So I reverted to my backup plan and found a professor in the English department who would sign off on my project.”

But thankfully the English Department will now be relieved of its duty as the repository for victimized scholars and their “projects.”  The Grad Center has recently created the first Ph.D. program in Herstory.

“If you feel about it,” said Kram, who is serving as the program’s first spokeswomyn, “you intuit that since womyn are often taking notes at high level meetings in government and the private sector, they really have written the first drafts of history, at least since men made the mistake of teaching them how to write.” 

The details of the program are still quite unknown, but that hasn’t stopped many women’s dreams about the program from being interpreted as if they have actually occurred.  Although most other Grad Center programs are housed at 365 5^th Avenue, many dreams have said that the Herstory program will hold classes at “CREATINGSPACE for Women” in Park Slope, where according to its website “the sacred is felt, the spiritual explored, and sisterhood unfolds.”   “By jointly holding courses with CREATINGSPACE on neglected subjects like “Visioning,” “Women in Nature,” “Illuminating the Shadow” and “Listening in to the Guidance,” the Herstory program will be able to hit the ground running, or should I say, connect with the oneness of the ground in the process of rediscovering our ability to run,” said spokeswomyn Ebeihcs. 

But the Herstory program’s curriculum could also be one of the most wide-ranging and demanding at the Grad Center, with courses that explore “the dark part of the self known as the Shadow,” being balanced by grueling yoga and Pilates classes, longitudinal social experiments in lesbian separatism, and actual attempts to live according to “The Rules” and the guidance of “The Skinny Bitch” books.  Videos of the lesbian separatism colony could also generate significant revenue for cash-strapped CUNY. 

Some in the Grad Center hierarchy have voiced concern that the courses in the department will not be welcoming enough to male grad students.  “I’m sure our classes in how men use pornography to possess women will be a draw for male students,” said Ebeihcs in response.  In a further plug for the class, she said, “Students will be expected to thoroughly analyze video evidence.”    

Another skeptical view of the new Herstory program worries that it is essentially a Trojan horse.  “First they want to join some harmless sharing circle, the next thing you know they expect you to go with them too!” said Ebeihcs’s exasperated live-in boyfriend, Erik Nilsson.  Academically the belief is that Herstory could supplant History as it is practiced in a variety of other disciplines.  “There’s really nothing to worry about,” said a reassuring Ebeihcs.  “Look at Art History at the Grad Center.  It already effectively is Art Herstory and no one is worse off.

“At the end of the day, all this negativity will dissolve like ice cream on my tongue when I eat my feelings,” Ebeihcs continued.  “The Herstory program really has very modest ambitions.  We are more Susan Faludi than Andrea Dworkin for sure.  There is an undeclared war on women in America, we would just like to see that war officially declared.  Then we will simply deny men sex until they agree to end it.”

Share on Facebook

In response both to the weak job market inside and outside academia and to strong interest among the unemployed in drowning their sorrows in perfectly mixed alcoholic spirits, CUNY is developing a new school of bartending. Officially called the “O’Reilly’s Graduate School of Mixological Science,” this new initiative will combine traditional training in pouring alcoholic spirits into cups and glasses with an unprecedented curriculum in the history of alcoholism and a bold new job-training and internship program that will allow students to adjunct at local-area bars while they finish their degrees.

“This is a win-win situation for CUNY and its graduate students,” which will house the new school in the space formerly known as the dining commons, said bartending school spokes-model Mark Schiebe. “The CUNY brand will lend some much needed prestige to the subject of mixology, which many academics view with suspicion. On the other hand, many of our current students will be able to diversify and enhance their skill sets for the job market. Believe me I know, you can’t work at Hooters forever!”

The first thing that CUNY had to do in founding such an unprecedented academic institution was find distinguished faculty to tend to the place. “We are really fortunate that New York City has so many great bartenders,” said Schiebe, who looked fetching in his O’Reilly’s Graduate School of Mixological Science bar-back tank-top.

Reporters were so bewitched by the spokes-model that they failed to ask about the controversy surrounding one of the bartending school’s main appointments.

After supposedly conducting a national search that was never in fact advertised in typical venues like the Chronicle of Higher Education, the search committee appointed Johnny, the longtime O’Reilly’s “Off Fifth” bartender as the first dean of the Bartending School. “I know some people are crying foul because of Johnny’s close ties to GC President Bill Kelly and pretty much every senior professor with an alcohol problem, but he really was one of the most interesting and experienced candidates,” said spokes-model Schiebe.

“Johnny comes to the Graduate School of Mixological Science as a noted practitioner and historian of the ‘buy back,’ the unwritten law whereby mixologists reward diligent customers with free drinks for every one to seven they actually purchase” reads the search committee’s announcement of his appointment. “Indeed,” it continues, “Johnny has used the art of the ‘buy back’ to keep many customers in the bar until closing who were only going to have one beer before their daughter’s dance recital. His value-added technique of simply refilling empty glasses at will has made O’Reilly’s one of the happiest places on earth (for this committee).”

But opponents of the decision are crying foul for a number of reasons. First they point to the fact that Johnny’s “interview” began around happy hour at the questionable location of O’Reilly’s “Off Fifth” and did not end until sometime around four o’clock the next morning when committee members were seen stumbling out of Rick’s Cabaret on 33rd Street to find the nearest ATM.

Second, the Sociology Department has published a study showing that Johnny tends to “buy back” more for attractive heterosexual women than he does even for loyal customers. Third, the Women’s Studies Certificate Program is scoffing at the fact that Johnny insisted he be appointed to its faculty as a condition for accepting the Dean’s position.

When asked what qualifies him for this position, Johnny is reported to have said, “They say ‘a woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon.’ Well, I’ve heard more than my fair share of sighs at O’Reilly’s over the years. I’d say that alone qualifies me as an expert on the single, middle-aged women of midtown. I always tell them, ‘Look honey, a man’s face is his autobiography, a women’s is her work of fiction. And right now you’re in the bargain bin outside of the used bookstore.’

“Look people, at the end of the day the committee is standing by its new dean and CUNY is looking forward rather than back at who may or may not have received a private dance at the interview,” said spokesmodel Schiebe. “We are offering hands-on mixology training with high-quality instructors in modern upscale facilities at an unbelievable price. If you think you can get training in ‘flair bartending’ while simultaneously attending Distinguished Professor of Film Studies Noel Carroll’s lecture series on Tom Cruise’s Cocktail anywhere else, you’re just plain wrong!” 

Share on Facebook

Provost Robinson's real hair

Is it a perfect Southern California wave frozen in time, its crest forever feathered by the late autumn offshore breeze; or, the living form of a jagged alpine peak, hiding sublime mysteries and wonders both natural and supernatural; or a cornice, that historic building’s last ineluctable detail of anointed perfection; or a rare bird in full plumage sighted deep in the dark heart of the Amazon jungle, with only Herzog and Kinski there to help document; or, closer to home, the happy love-child of Susan Sontag and Conan O’Brien’s signature hairstyles? Whatever your metaphor may be to describe it—there’s no denying the undeniable. The Graduate Center’s new Provost, Chase Robinson, has amazing hair.

“It was really the hair that distinguished him from the other candidates” said Grad Center human resources spokesperson Mark Schiebe, who was speaking on condition of anonymity. “We knew we wanted an Islamic Studies person because we needed to fill that need in the History department, but we didn’t want to go with someone too controversial or who would appear too ethnic to our Jewish donors.”

He continued, “On the other hand, we didn’t want someone who was too vanilla. You know, like one of Spivak’s white students, who can’t say a complete sentence without some variation of the word spectral in it. Which is why Robinson is so perfect, he is an expert in a nonthreatening subsection of a topic Americans find threatening, and his outward appearance perfectly embodies this. He is a handsome, professorial type, but that wisp of grey in his pompadour says, “I’m a little bit of a bad boy.”

“We had a saying around here when Chase was a PhD student,” said Harvard Professor of History Roy Mottahedeh. “If Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, then Chase has the hair that launched a thousand scholarships! I came up with that one myself during a committee meeting when we awarded him our heftiest graduate student stipend. The drinks were on him if you know what I mean! But fair warning about having him over for dinner, his hair might stain your couch cushions.”

The Provost’s office had no comment on the possible favoritism that has been shown the Provost throughout his career because of his fabulous hair. They did, however, reveal that the Provost recently switched from Herbal Essences hair products to Aveda, perhaps in part thanks to his new pay raise as a Provost and Distinguished Professor of History. In addition to daily shampooing, the Provost conditions almost every day during the drier months but as little as once a week during humid months. In something of a surprise, the Provost abjures the current fashion for pomades in favor of big hair mainstays like mousses and gels.

If this detailed information weren’t telling enough of how crucial his hair has been to his success, consider that Provost Robinson was recently named the first recipient of Islamic Society of North America’s lifetime achievement award in the category of personal grooming.

“One thing is for sure,” reads the conclusion of the citation, “when he walks into a lecture hall with his perfectly coiffed hair slightly tousled by the wind, the terror alert level is elevated in every pretty girl’s heart. If any Islamic Studies scholar deserves to be monitored by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Broken-Hearted Undergraduates it is Professor Robinson. Here’s to you Dr. Robinson.

Share on Facebook

Whether it’s because they never thought his “Back Page” “articles” were funny in the first place, or because they gradually began to discern the formulaic and insipid nature of most of his jokes and premises, or because he has cast aspersions on too many members of the fragile Graduate Center community, or because his articles have now reached a new low of self-referential aggrandizement—one thing is clear. According to a recent poll, satire columnist Matt Lau is persona non-grata at the Grad Center these days.

The poll was conducted by a group of students concerned about the diminishing levels of humor and wit in the official satire column of the university. The poll asked students whether they approved of Lau’s column, disapproved of it, or had no opinion. 90 percent of respondents had no opinion, while the other person who participated expressed vituperative disapproval.

Poll spokesperson, Mark Schiebe, who was coincidentally also the one person to disapprove of Lau in the anonymous poll, had this to say, “It would be is easy to tolerate the disreputable imagination of Lau if the offensive scenarios he came up with were at all funny.

“But what, may I ask, is funny about faculty freezing to death during a bikini car wash fundraiser in February or starving students once again eating the free computer paper in the library for their Thanksgiving meal or the History Department’s softball team medaling at the Special Olympics or the University President spooning with another professor for a promotional “Men of the GC” wall calendar or suggesting that the GC would be taken over by Interboro Technical College because it has superior job placement support?

“Generously speaking, perhaps these sordid and outrageous ideas could in themselves have made for useful satire premises, but again and again Lau has resorted to cheap bits, gags, puns, and when all else fails, the photoshop skills of the Advocate’s layout editor. Over and over he has relied for his premises on puns,” said a visibly angry Schiebe, who looked tired from a long day of polling himself again. “The Graduate Center and the Guitar Center, President Kelly and R&B singer R Kelly, Oral Examinations and the Freudian Oral Stage; respected Professor Jerry Watts and the Diogenes of Midtown Jerry Watts. These puns are about as funny as jokes about persons with no arms and legs or babies with spears in their heads. Sure, at first you laugh, but then you feel guilty and dirty, even after you’ve taken a few cold showers.”

When asked whether he had burned out or faded away, in a typical example of his lack of literary discipline, Lau attempted to quote both Peter Tosh and Bon Jovi at the same time in what he thought was a hilarious joke. “I’m a cowboy on a steel horse I ride, and I’m wanted dread or alive. Look I was just trying to make a little money to pay down my tab at O’Reilly’s. And yeah, it is kind of fun to slander good honest people; it makes me feel like a right-wing media commentator. But I can’t stop now, after all the shaming I did of how our boss, Advocate ‘editor at-large’ James Hoff, only paid us with his unused food stamps for writing for the paper, we’ve finally gotten a raise! In addition to our $50 dollars a month, I now get a Papa John’s pizza coupon book that James only made me pay $25 for! I can’t tell you how many half-eaten extra-large meat-lovers there are at Mark Schiebe’s apartment right now. And I’m not even talking about the pizzas!”

Share on Facebook

Late last week, “The Diogenes of Midtown,” GC Professor Jerry Watts, made a citizen’s arrest of an NYPD patrol officer outside the Graduate Center. Many are calling it the astonishing and unlikely sequel to America’s most famous racial-profiling incident, the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates in his Cambridge home earlier this summer.

After receiving a few complaints from his students that an officer had been out in front of the Grad Center building in excess of thirty minutes on Wednesday afternoon, Professor Watts arrived on the scene to investigate.

“I WAS SUSPICIOUS BECAUSE I REMEMBERED THERE WAS AN AFRICANA STUDIES GROUP MEETING ABOUT TO START, BROTHER,” said Professor Watts.  “WAS HE GOING TO CHECK TO SEE IF THEY HAD A PERMIT FOR ALL THOSE DRUMS?  WAS HE LOOKING TO TRY OUT HIS NEW FIREARM ON ANYONE WHO TURNED THEIR BACK ON HIM?  BOTH SEEMED PRETTY LIKELY, BROTHER.”

When Professor Watts approached the officer and began questioning him, Officer Leycrow became enraged and indignant.  “Do you know who I am?” witnesses reportedly heard him rhetorically asking Professor Watts.  “I am an NYPD officer!  You have no right to question me.”

“SHIT, BROTHER,” said Professor Watts, whose aura of negritude was like kryptonite to the befuddled officer, “YOU MIGHT AS WELL HAVE INSULTED MY MOMMA AS TOLD ME THAT.  I’M FROM A LITTLE TOWN CALLED FRESHOFFACOPSASS AND YOU MAKING ME HOMESICK.”

Like many a haughty academic before him, Officer Leycrow was paralyzed with fear from even a short exchange of words with Professor Watts. Unfortunately, Professor Watts mistook Leycrow’s immobility for defiance and felt he had no choice but to arrest him.

“WHAT ELSE WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO?”  Watts asked me the next day. “THERE I WAS LOOKING AT THE SCARIEST, WHITEST COP I’D EVER SEEN.  YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF I’D TURNED AROUND AND WALKED AWAY?  HE PROBABLY WOULD HAVE FIRED FIFTY ROUNDS, BROTHER.  AND MAYBE ONE OF THEM WOULD HAVE HIT SOMETHING.  I COULDN’T RUN THAT RISK, BROTHER.”

The New York State Fraternal Order of Police has accused Professor Watts of brutality for holding the officer in the IRIDAC office on the 7^th floor for hours before dropping the people’s charges against him.

But Watts feels he was doing the officer a favor.  “HE URINATED ON HIMSELF OUT OF FEAR, BROTHER.  I FELT KIND OF BAD ABOUT THAT.  I WAS ONLY JOKING WHEN I TOLD HIM I WAS GOING TO GO GET A PLUNGER. THEN I DIDN’T WANT TO RELEASE HIM UNTIL HIS PANTS HAD DRIED, BROTHER.”

At a news conference on Friday, President Obama weighed in on the controversy. “I believe Professor Watts, by arresting a patrol officer for patrolling, in other words, for doing his job, acted stupidly. I mean, what would happen if all my fellow African-Americans went around preemptively arresting every police officer they thought was about to brutalize someone?” Obama, suddenly reflective, paused to consider the answer to what he’d just asked.

“I TELL YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN, BROTHER,” said Professor Watts, who emerged miraculously on stage next to the President. “BROTHERS AND SISTERS EVERYWHERE WOULD BE A HELL OF A LOT SAFER.”

When I asked Professor Watts whether he would participate in Beer Summit II, he had this to say, “I DON’T THINK SO, BROTHER. THE WAY OBAMA’S HANDLING HEALTHCARE, HE’D PROBABLY MANDATE THAT I HAVE SOME WATERY BEER I DON’T LIKE AND THEN MANDATE I PAY HIM TEN DOLLARS FOR IT. MEDICARE FOR ALL! IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.”

Share on Facebook

Once in a while they are on public radio, even more rarely are they on public television, and none dare dream of becoming a media pariah, a la Ralph Nader. The thought of it is tantalizing, the possibility too slim. As a recent report from the Graduate Center’s Center for the Promotion of the Graduate Center puts it, "many of our professors are almost considered public intellectuals."

The most surprising finding in the report is not that none of them are actually as boring as Noam Chomsky, as smug as Stanley Fish, or as swarthy as Slavoj Zizek, but that so many of them almost are.

Indeed, the report details a plan to bring GC professors tantalizingly close to actual public intellectuals, at least in terms of their physical proximity. "The 2008-09 Public Events series on Power, in addition to attracting many extremely articulate and not-at-all insane people to the microphone during the question-and-answer period, had the happy side effect of creating photo-ops of GC professors alongside famous people, even if Photoshop enhancement was sometimes required."

Although it ended up featuring a mind-numbing number of variations on the theme of Power, the Great Issues Forum started off reasonably enough with "Economic Power," "Political Power," "Cultural Power," and "Power and Science" last fall. But since then, it has begun to generate a kind of "Great Issues Forum Bubble" with events of significantly less value being given the same publicity.

There was "Fashion and Power," which our sources tell us President Kelly required all GC Professors to attend. More recently, there was "420 and Power," which featured a group claiming to be GC students extolling the virtues of solar powered carbon-free drug use, by taking the entire audience at Proshansky Auditorium up to the roof of the Graduate Center to demonstrate the lighting of a "water-pipe" with a magnifying glass.

Against the advice of many, the program is being extended into next year, with a series of new events. "Summer Vacation and Power": a 40-hour slideshow featuring photos from the exciting lives of GC Professors; "Somnambulism and Power": featuring GC security staff discussing the dreams they have while dozing off near the entrance to the library; and "Coffee and Power": featuring a debate on the wisdom of pegging the price of Grad Center coffee to that of a subway ride.

But, proponents argue, thanks to the Great Issues Forum, certain Professors have been given once in a lifetime opportunities. For example, Neil Smith and David Harvey, the Hall and Oates of Marxist Geography, were both given the chance to sit on stage with Naomi Klein, a journalist of half their intelligence, but twice their sex appeal.

Critics argue, however, that some Professors have stumbled when given the opportunity to address audiences larger than their seminars or the readership for their books, roughly 20 people in either case.

Only one GC scholar who is ready for his close-up has shunned the media spotlight, Professor Jerry Watts. When he won the Nobel Prize for Blackness, Professor Watts did the only thing he could to keep it real: he declined the award, even though it would in all likelihood have bumped his books on Ellison and Barak up the sales ranks on Amazon.com, from 2,112,847th and 2,026,641st to probably somewhere in the top 1 million. But Professor Watts is already a public intellectual in another since. As the unofficial Diogenes of Midtown, he can often be seen trading lectures on "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual" for cigarettes in front of the Grad Center. 

Share on Facebook

With the Humanities facing existential budget cuts and the industrialized world melting down in the greatest credit crisis since the last scene of Fight Club, Stanley Fish may be “the last professor,” but the Florida International University Law Professor is certainly not the hottest. Or at least that’s the verdict of his students on ratemyprofessors.com, regarding the sexiness of the somewhat famous, 170 year-old Milton scholar whose New York Times blog probably annoys you.

Ratemyprofessors.com is a website on the “internet” that allows students to rant or, conversely, rave about their college and university teachers in brief commentaries. They can also rate them, on a point scale, on their easiness, clarity, helpfulness, rater interest in the subject, and, of course, most importantly, their hotness.

Hotness, or as it is more traditionally known, fuck-ability is a nearly universally desirable attribute in human cultures and societies. And although it is to a great extent determined by the norms of a given period and culture, “it is difficult to imagine any possible context in which Stanley Fish would be considered hot,” writes one student on the site.

Or as another student extremely factual and objective student put it, “Old, white, and beady-eyed, with a whiny voice that sounds like he’s mockingly imitating himself, the last time Professor Fish got laid was the day before the concept of sexual harassment was invented, which was too late for the donkey.”

Critics might argue that he has that one author photo on the cover of The Trouble with Principle where he looks kind of okay, not “like you wanna throw up in your mouth, IMAO,” as another modest student contribution to ratemyprofessor.com has it. The photographer did a reasonable job of hiding his less-than-flattering Cindy Crawford mole, and his jowls appear to have been taped to the back of his neck. Meanwhile, his hair looks surprisingly tousled and full. As one comment on Ratemyprofessors.com reads, “Where did he get that wig?”

But if my sources, Mark and Kram Schiebe, are correct, then Professor Fish, who is an English Civil War veteran, stole it from his mother’s trunk on the slave ship his family gainfully operated to arrive in the New World. Or, as one of the reviews online reads: “When Prof. Fish went to school, they didn’t have History!”

But most of his law students, as polled by the statistical firm of Dewey, Cheetem, and Howe, think either his wife painted that photo or that it is someone else entirely. Indeed, my confidential sources for such matters, gigolos Mark and Kram Schiebe, told me she confessed to it to them. “We told her we wouldn’t make her life worth living anymore if she didn’t come clean about how she’d enhanced that photo,” said the Schiebes, who looked like they’d been violated, when they stepped off the plan from Miami.

When asked why they’d hired a blogger who’s almost as ugly as Maureen Dowd, the senior public spokesperson for The Times, Ramk Beschie, said he couldn’t talk right now because Dowd had been sitting on his face for the last several hours.

Beschie finally emailed a response later in the day. “Look, compared to Dowd, he’s completely beautiful. I mean, she makes Medusa look like Helen of Troy. Besides at least Fish is a bottom. My jaw hurts.”

Share on Facebook

It is the worst of times. It is the epoch of incredulity. It is the season of eight dollar chicken Caesar wraps and “make-a-difference” coffees from 365 Express Café. It is the winter when, as usual, the vegan students have devoured all the library printer paper. Can spring be far behind?

In such an economic climate of “belt-tightening” and “tough choices,” the Graduate Center has announced its latest and boldest plan to reorganize.

“We figured we’d get a head start on the era of ‘new media literacy’ by making our library entirely virtual,” said unofficial public relations officer, Mark Schiebe. “Our students don’t really read anything anyway, except for the occasional article in The Voice or The Chronicle about how dumb it is to go to graduate school.”

“This move has a lot of pros,” added Mark’s twin sister Kram. “Not the least of which are the two potentially lucrative new revenue streams from our bookstore and food court. Students will find that the new dining options at the Grad Center will only enhance and complete midtown’s incredible diversity of fast food, which, studies show, is the preferred dining option of both the overeducated and the ironical consumer.”

“Our airport style bookstore is ideally suited to the life of a Grad Center student, who spends about half their life commuting in one way or another,” Kram continued. “Who can concentrate on Quine or even Derrida with all the talk of candy not being sold for no basketball team on the subway? Plus, if you display a fancy book you’re more likely to get mugged. Petty thieves figure you probably have an Iphone or some hot jacket brand that has yet to be rapped about.

“So put that copy of Queering Projectile Vomiting away, or at the very least conceal it inside the latest John Grisham novel, which is, of course, available just off the lobby. You could probably finish one of his longer novels in your trip from the Grad Center to Queens College, depending on the wait between transfers.”

“We are aware, of course, that this new plan will have its skeptics,” said Schiebe, in a tone that seemed meant to counter his sister’s sales pitch. “But those people are mostly socialists and communists with little buying power, so we think we can probably just ignore them. If they do picket our new Kentucky Taco Hut, we think a round of free tacos or boneless, sauce-less buffalo wings will probably shut them up.”

Indeed, there are likely to be a lot of taco promotion nights in coming weeks, months, and years. Already there are unsubstantiated rumors that incoming student aid packages will consist less of “actual” money and more of perks, like free Chalupas and unsold newspapers from yesterday, the perfect insulation on cold nights for students on a budget.

“We want to incentivize student productivity as much as possible. That’s why we’re already considering giving out free pizzas as prizes for graduate students with perfect attendance. Not, mind you, in the classes their taking, but in the ones they’re teaching. If, on top of that, they manage to somehow show up the whole semester without being hungover, we’re talking about doubling their compensation. But of course we know this is very unlikely.”

But it may take more than a few packets of fire sauce to cool off the Grad Center’s militant pacifists. “You wouldn’t believe how much action there’s been on the CUNY Contingents Unite listserv,” said James Hoff, one of the collective’s founders, as he bit into a ten dollar Chipotle burrito.

Share on Facebook