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In This Issue

• A Sneak Peek at Barnard’s New Vag
• Teacher's Pet Joins Elite Rank of CC Assignments
• Take a Ride on a Fiction Plane with Rachel Katz
• The Letters to the Feditor Strike Back
• What What (In The Butt): A Debate For The Ages
• Celebrity Beer Pong New To Network TV
• The Room-mate Chronicles
• C.J. Parker vs. Wolverine: Dispatches from the White House Correspondents Dinner 2008
• Columbia and the Perception of Self: A List of Stuff
• If I Were Graduating, I Would Be Thanking the Following People Whom I've Never Met
• Graduate Reflects: “Da faaaackkk???”
• A Message from the Next Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit
• Don’t Forget to Bring a Towel, Experts Warn
• Therapist’s ADD Cured By Hourly Wage
• A Red Letter Day For the Green-Thumbed
• A Public Service Announcement from the Ad Council
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 23.7

Sarah Levin

Veteran Contemporary Civilizations teacher Eunice Cornblatt-who has been teaching the course since the fall of 1965-has been having difficulties lately in fulfilling her duties as teacher. Her students first noticed Cornblatt's decline when she began to send out a number of bizarre and scatological e-mails to the class. The strangest e-mails include links to the U.S. Army's official recruiting website, photos of her dead pets, and ccing the entire class on e-mails to her doctor about her latest colonoscopies. But on Wednesday night, Cornblatt sent out what most in the class agree to be the strangest e-mail of all. The message was in regards to the topic of the class's final paper. The e-mail included a photo of Cornblatt's beloved tabby cat, "Persephone," and simply stated: "Write an essay about my cat."

Here are the best excerpts from the students' subsequent essays:

Ricky Thompson: "In short, the cat represents the animalist urges that society requires us to repress. In a way, it's very much in lien with Locke: we enter into a social contract with society, requiring us to not be cats, yet cats still exist. And if cats don't exist, who will eat our houseplants and puke them up on the rug? Society, that who."

Devandra Rice: "This is the venn diagram. The circle on the left reads "cat," the circle on the right reads "no cat," the area in between reads "the Self."

Ming-Ming Mu: "More important to the message, though, is the cat's pink collar. The pink establishes the cat as a female, or at least, it establishes the cat's gender role as being of a female essence. Virginia Woolf says in the opening of Three Guineas, ‘Let us have one guinea for women's education, one guinea for art, and one guinea for gender neutral animal collars.'"

Larry Schermerhorn: "Your cat fucking sucks and you're a fat slut with Alzheimers. I don't care if you fail me, look at my last name. Besides, you only have to maintain a 0.1 to be on the rowing team, anyway."

Dina Marie Collinder: [This is clearly plagiarized] "The cat is the symbolic representation of everything that we are and everything that we, conversely, are not. But it's not about the cat, it's about our inability to SUMMARY: THE GENEOLOGY OF MORALS - one can not read Nietzsche without understanding the goals behind his works."

Emily Millor: "Dear Professor Cornblatt, I have been diagnosed with an eating disorder so I can't write the paper about your cat. Don't worry, I have a note from my Dean."

Basil Bataglia: "However, in the Koran's version of this famous story, God says to Abraham, " ‘I have appointed you a leader of mankind.' ‘And what of my descendents' asked Abraham. ‘My covenant' He said ‘does not apply to the evil doers'" [Sura 2:122]. The Koran argues that direct genealogical or philosophical lineage does not imply a covenant; adherence to the word of God implies a covenant."