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In This Issue

• My Fireside Chat with El Presidente
• Jesus is Found
• Students Exported to China, Along with Most Jobs
• Facial Hair Suspected
• The Top Five Top Ten Lists of All Time
• Procrastinating Superhero Lets Gothamville Children Die Last Thursday
• The Fed's Slightly Outdated Guide to the 2008 Presidential Primaries
• Go Down Low, Lick Her Kent, and Fayherweather
• Journalistic Integrity is for Weak-Minded Women and Syphilis-Ridden Spaniards, Says William Randolph Hearst
• Get Your Artistic Freak On
• A Pictorial Representation of the Night of the Fed Bash
• Subway Seat Sacrifices: How to Prioritize?
• Still from “George Orwell’s 1984 (2008 Movie Adaptation)”
• "Female Sexuality" - A Research Report by Brian Greenberg, 6th Grade
• Ne-Yo Colonialism: A Foray into the Celebrity Psyche
• Crisis Hits Campus, Students Respond in Reasoned and Rational Manner, Fair and Balanced Dialogue Follows
• Three Millennia Later: Yo' Mama Jokes Still Fresh!
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 23.5

President Lee C. Bollinger announced yesterday that Columbia would be introducing several new overseas exchange programs, among them Columbia University in Chinatown. As written in the manifesto, this groundbreaking program will “allow students with an intermediate to advanced background in ordering take-out to experience the culture and language of Chinatown without having to take the N, R, Q, W line an hour uptown for film class later.”

Finnegan Teasdale, a Scottish expatriate and patron of Ollies, spearheaded the Chinatown Initiative, overcoming considerable bureaucratic difficulties. In order to pledge the necessary funding for such an expensive overseas program, the administration insisted that the location be overseas. The project really took off when Teasdale discovered a project-saving technicality: Chinatown is officially part of China. Neither New York legislature nor the American legal system has any authority south of Canal, east of Bowery, north of Worth, and west of Baxter streets. Americans in trouble can retreat to the United States Embassy in Chinatown, located somewhere in Confucius Plaza.

Students will live with a local family chosen from among those that didn’t say no in a citywide referendum. There, they can expect to prosper in the wealth of cultural experience that only full immersion can afford.

Because Columbia University in Chinatown is not located in or near an institute of higher education, per se, participants, now limited only to undergraduates, will have the choice of two major subdivisions within the program: street peddling or table peddling. While both programs are technically conducted in the street, they enjoy different benefits and cater to different styles of learning. Street peddling will attract those with some former experience shouting, and allows a real one-on-two-hundred-thousand kind of feel, as the students interact with their host population. Table peddling involves peddling from more of a table setting, and will be enjoyed by students who have a desire to know what it is that they are peddling.

Another challenge for the program organizers was to answer the Board of Trustees’ concerns that it did not coincide with any language program currently offered by the university; the official language of Chinatown is Slow, Incomprehensible English. While there is no existing Slow English program at Columbia, Teasdale and others believe students will be able to communicate with relative ease upon their arrival, as Slow English shares almost 100% of its vocabulary with English.

A similar initiative, CU Little Italy, was discontinued years ago for undisclosed reasons. Mysteriously, sizable portions of the Columbia College budget continue to be allocated to the program. In an official statement, Study Abroad Office accountant Vinny “Pocketbook” Constigliani advised, “It might not be so good to keep diggin’ into this. Maybe not so good.”

Another program introduced yesterday is the Consortium for Study in Your Friend’s Apartment. For students with an apartment-owning friend, CONSYFA allows students to experience luxurious views of whatever his window looks out on, and taste the oft-documented cuisine of what he’s reheating for dinner.

Bollinger claimed that the addition of these unique programs would put Columbia on par with those schools with the leading foreign exchange programs.

Last week, newspapers reported the inauguration of Middlebury at Atlantis, Harvard at Pangea, and Tufts University Mars.