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In This Issue

• Columbia Expands, Gentrifies Outer Space
• Spectator Artist Plagiarizes Fed's Ben Schwartz
• Farewell from Feditrix Kate
• Media Decency Campaign Attacks Stern
• EC Fire Alarms Pester, Endanger Students
• Don't Get Impregnated By Young Republicans
• Letters to the Feditor
• Sci-Fi Poo Theory
• Sports Beer: Not Good For Sports
• Butler: The Engineering Frontier
• Unarians Help You Go To Space Life
• Totally Fab New Planet Suggestions
• Bush and Cheney's Excellent Adventure
• Fed Student's Guide To Meningitis
• Columbia Girls LOVE Barnard Prez Schapiro
• Funny Comic #543: Adventures of Ice Bitch
• Able & Baker: Monkeys in Space
• Honoring Jesse Strouth- A Highly Derivative Cartoon
• They Watch

Columbia University's planned expansion into West Harlem has drawn much ire recently from neighborhood groups, individual residents, local businesses, and concerned students. Many tenants worry that the expansion will damage the character of their community, while business owners fear evictions or loss of profitability. Rats and the homeless are concerned that increased university involvement in the community will lead to better garbage pickup, depriving them of their main source of nutrition and shelter.

Despite these complaints, Columbia has shown little inclination to back down from its proposals. Instead they have merely attempted to show good will by sending well-groomed middle-aged men in expensive suits to community board meetings, encouraging concerned parties to ask questions, voice objections and, if absolutely necessary, take out their anger on the representatives with tar and feathers. You'd be surprised how many suits you can pay to be tarred and feathered with a multi-billion dollar endowment, as long as you use it only sparingly for other expenses like education and athletics.

Since neither side seems likely to assent to the other's wishes, it is obvious that a nuclear war will soon erupt on the already tense border demarcated by Morningside Avenue and 120th Street. Columbia will almost certainly defeat West Harlem, since the university has a seemingly insurmountable advantage in funds, a large supply of expendable human lives (that's you!), and a much stronger program in particle physics. The decision to nuke West Harlem, however, will begin to appear rather shortsighted once the Environmental Engineering department determines that the once coveted real estate is now uninhabitable for at least 65,000 years. After the job security of several untenured professors is covertly threatened, a calculation error is announced, and the estimate is downgraded to 9 years and 6 months. But for ever-greedy Columbia, this will likely still not suffice.

President Bollinger will be forced to resort to Plan B, expansion into outer space. This may initially seem like a bad idea, because new facilities won't be protected against rogue nations by Bush's awesomely effective new missile defense system. And because there's no oxygen in space. But research indicates that there will be a lot fewer angry locals to please. Sure, many scientists believe that there is water on Mars, and some believe that there are ugly little lichen things there too, but no one has ever proposed that they form angry neighborhood associations when their territorial integrity is compromised. Another convenient factor: most legal experts agree that it's perfectly okay to clone humans and transform them into legions of murderous cyborgs, as long as you do so at least one billion kilometers above any country's territorial airspace.

While the new buildings are under construction, the university could compensate for temporary space problems by sending sophomores with poor lottery numbers to Jupiter, where their heads would instantly implode and disintegrate into a sulfuric cloud, providing some very humorous photos for the Housing and Dining newsletter. Then your Core classes could be held in empty Wein rooms. Those nice spacious rooms in Hamilton with attractive campus views could finally be used properly, as administrative offices.

Someday, though, outer space could get all used up too. This will take a while, since the universe is millions of light years wide, and continually expanding. Remember, though, that some people thought there would always be enough land in America, too. And that got them screwed over real bad. So let's try to avoid the fate of our red-skinned forebears. Don't sell your official Star-Named-After-You certificate for $24 in beads and trinkets anytime soon; that could be worth something someday. At least worth a lot more than a case of smallpox and a field full of dead buffalo. (The space equivalent would be worse than that -- you'd probably get one of those diseases where a slimy black thing with huge eye stalks comes flying out of your head and then devours your limbs and torso to overcome his savage post-hibernation hunger. And then someone takes a picture of the weird look on your face while your head is exploding, and your body gets ripped to shreds, and the picture gets posted on gruesome.com, next to a picture of a really fat woman shaving her legs on the toilet, and then, even though you're dead and should finally be getting some goddamned peace, people still won't have stopped making fun of the way you look. ) That would totally suck.

So, rather than being victimized by the inevitable land shortage that will ultimately ruin outer space, the obvious choice for the university (Plan C) is to expand into the fourth spatial dimension. As explained in Flatland by Edwin Abbott, in the fourth dimension, there are infinitely many three-dimensional universes like ours, just as in a two-dimensional plane there are infinitely many lines. Abbott also makes absolutely no mention of any sort of tenants' groups or neighborhood associations concerned with the fate of this infinitude of three-dimensional planes. Plus, if your university taught you to be four-dimensional, you could walk through walls and into boxes and shit. Back-home friends would be so much more impressed by that than by your current substitute, an extensive learning in classical literature and philosophies. Back-home enemies, on the other hand, still might think you were a loser. That feeling will fade quickly, however, once you enter their heads through the fourth-dimension and cause a large and grotesque explosion in a crowded nightclub, subjecting them to indescribable pain, instant loss of life, and, of course, massive social embarrassment. Space is the place, man.