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In This Issue

• A Modest Proposal for Iraq
• An Indie-Rocker Falls Into the Gap
• Beware of People Selling Stuff, Except Us
• Women Need to be Vulnerable and Easy Again
• Marriage is the Perfect Career
• All The Cool Kids Are Doing It...
• Girl Sells Soul to Pour Investment Bankers' Coffee
• Wendy's Sells the Fuck Out: Lame With Mayo
• I Used to Listen to Jesus Christ, Before He Went Mainstream
• The Singing Senators: Behind the "Music"
• In Gateway, I Designed a 3-D Noose
• Barnard Woman Tries to Use, Not Give, Head
• Mexico: Taco Bell Without Plumbing
• Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200
• Wacky Fun Whitey Gets a Date
• Colombia Spectador
• Columbia Bookstore's Introduces New "Ghetto-fab" Line of Clothing

Ted Holden

After recently being bombarded by Lee Bollinger's audacious public pronouncement-fight in favor of affirmative action-I felt Columbia needed a reminder of what the university's ideals were really all about. Now, I'm not condemning Lee here. He's a good middle-aged white male, who's momentarily gone astray from the herd mentality. We can even forgive his little bleeding heart phase at Michigan. It's just time he realized that while the undesirables for whom he's campaigning do have their place, it does not involve gracing our halls with their presence: the dining halls have been hideously understaffed lately, and the grounds could use some maintenance after all that winter weather. But enough about poor confused Lee-our troubles really started twenty years ago, when Columbia finally caved and decided to go coed.

Now, some of you might be tempted to write me off as a bitter and misogynistic bigot. Well, maybe I am, but if loving my university and its traditions makes me a bigot, then so be it. Back in the day, we positively nurtured our male students. We provided a veritable harem for them in the girls across the street. The great divide between men and women meant no Columbia student ever needed to worry about being embarrassed by a past one-night stand at an inopportune moment. What with the introduction of coed dorms, God only knows what kind of hell in which a virile, red-blooded womanizing student may find himself. And now that anti-male themed counseling groups, therapy sessions, and rape crisis hotlines have sprung up all over campus, there are only more hurdles for the enterprising young man. (But then again...perhaps a sexual assault counseling center is a potential goldmine: where else can a young freshman find a steady stream of emotionally vulnerable girls?)

In recent years, hordes of female students who hungered for admission for so long have corrupted our fine institution. With the competition from these deranged harpies, it's no longer enough to attend the occasional class, vaguely ponder about your major a few days prior to graduation, and then have your parents donate a statue of the dean if your GPA is a few points below the mark. Academic probation and expulsion were words that were never bandied about before-unless of course it was in regard to the one or two students on financial aid, stealing the school's money so they could spend their time working at their day job in the dining hall and their night job at Butler, which they could do just as easily without wasting valuable acceptance spots. Only a few decades ago, a diploma from Columbia was enough to make up for four years of plagiarized papers and exams you took while inebriated. No matter how little you learned, you knew you'd still be making more money than that dreadful Hispanic youth working away at a state school, or the neighborhood girl who got it into her head to go to one of those trendy all girls' schools-oh, sorry, "women's colleges." Now that a young man must actually study, just when is he to sow his wild oats? I'll tell you when. In his room, in the stolen moments when his roommate steps out, and he's remembered his lubricant. Disgraceful.

Looking back, I recall a much happier time. Women weren't ruining their figures, locking themselves in their rooms studying: they were having anxiety attacks wondering how to please us. Nostalgically, I remember a day when even the most studious girl spent the eve of her 22nd birthday weeping about her impending status of old maid if she were still not engaged. Why would anyone want such a system to change? Men are desperately insecure. The thought of a woman preferring to spend a night at home with a vibrator-or, even more chilling, with another woman-rather than waiting to get picked up at some cheap dive bar fills our hearts with fear. We simply can't compete with the liberated, self-confident women attending our school. It's unthinkable that any male student should be expected to.

College days were much more fun when we knew there was at least one group of people to whom we could consider ourselves superior. We'll grudgingly concede to the passing fad of allowing those without superior northwestern European ancestry to invade our hallowed halls, government checks clutched in their grimy fists. But equality and sex being used in the same sentence: could there be a greater threat to the fragile male psyche?