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In This Issue

• The Colombia Daily Spectador Front Page
• Spec: Cabinet Secretaries Disappointed With Their Careers
• Spec: Hugs for the Homeless Hopes To Be A Success
• Spec: Unrecommended Student Requests Letters of Recommendation
• Grilled Cheese Honored
• Elliot Spitzer = Sex Machine
• Here's a Fairy Tale That Cracks Us Up
• The Colombia Spec Op-Ed Section
• Spec Op-Ed: Juicy Campus is seriously the Best Thing Ev-ar!
• Spec Op-Ed: I Don't Care About Manhattanville
• Spec Op-Ed: Staff Editorial -- We Have Opinions
• Spec Op-Ed: Letters to the Editor
• They Watch
• The Staff of 23.6

It is imperative that we do not block Juicy Campus here at Columbia. To do that would be a repugnant violation of our first amendment rights, which gurantees certain freedoms that I read about in high school. Does this school fancy itself a totalitarian dictator, in the vein of Stalin? Where did the democracy for which our forefathers worked so hard go? Does absolute power not corrupt absolutely? It is thought that it does, indeed! I believe it was Machiavelli who made this insight and history has borne out his insightfulness.

Juicy Campus is an exceptionally important tool for the students at Columbia. After 8th grade, it became socially unacceptable for us to be cruel to one another over Instant Messenger, on fake screen names. And what a loss this was! Akin to the humanity of Gregor Sampsa, which was also lost as one of the themes reflected by the imagry of Kafka’s Metamorphoses, denoted by his profound choices in tone and diction! This tool was very important for us to learn how to have early successes in the adult real world, like doing well on the SAT (and I did really, really well!), as well as an important device to release anger in a manner that was non-destructive (except for that one time in ninth grade when everyone—except me—went around telling everyone that Hillary was pregnant just because she had gotten kinda fat over the summer, and then Hillary hanged herself). If we were without this tool, our anger could be channeled into dangerous venues, and we would be ennacting a tragedy in the Hegelian, not Aristotlean, sense, like ripping up other people’s lab reports to save our own grades or forcing us to fall victim to Freud’s notions of hysteria (which, fortunately, does not occur as frequently, thanks to the Internet).

Whose mother did not tell them as a child, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all?” With Juicy Campus you aren’t saying anything. You are typing it. It is a completely different forum, so it is totally okay. You also get the added bonus of anonymity – you can say the most awful things about anyone and they won’t ever know you said it (unless you forget to turn off your automatic signature. I am so, so sorry Amanda. I totally didn’t mean it, and I hope we can be best friends again. No one can even tell you’ve got herpes, I swear.)

If I cannot produce libel about how small Tommy Wu’s penis is, or how bitchy Jenny Spitzer was at the party last weekend I will become a prisoner to my rage. I refuse to wind up like Ophelia, or any of the crazies locked in the attics of 19th century British literature.

The author is that hyper-verbose, annoying, pseudo-intellectual, bitchy girl in your English seminar who writes poems about her ex-boyfriend and has never actually read a word of Faulkner, but that doesn’t stop her from referring to everything you read as “Faulkneresque,” and also a Columbia College first-year.