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In This Issue

• The Many Temptations of Jesus Christ, CC 20 AD
• Slackers Take a Stand on Work
• Letters to the FEDitor
• From the Archives: Volume 14, Number 1 - February 1999
• David Foster Wallace, 46, Found Dead in Apartment
• Found: Lost Diary of a Sensitive Frat Boy
• ‘Roo 08: The Fed Reports
• Last Nightʼs Study Break on Hartley 5
• Confessions from a Member of God’s Flock
• The McCain/Obama Liveblog From Hell
• The Rime of a SEAS student
• Bra Burning is sooo passé
• Stephan Vincenzo: The Man, The Legend
• Orientation Activities: The Horror, The Horror
• Straight from the White Board of my NSOP Hookup
• The start of a new year...
• And now, two freshmen getting it on.
• Columbia Court
• Secret Oval Office Tapes Exposed! George W. Bush: “Fuck the Economy. And Fuck You.”
• THE FED Presents: A Political Cartoon
• A Public Service Announcement
• THE FED has this to say
• The Staff of 24.1
• THEY Watch

Rachel Katz

Rachel Katz

The collapsed Slacker Octopus lives out its second life as a piñata.

Last November saw our recent campus hunger strike, in which several undergraduates abstained from all food in order to force Columbia to make the Core Curriculum more multicultural. Now, inspired by that protest, several slacker undergraduates, calling themselves the Columbia Slackers United for Slacking, have formed a new protest in order to force Columbia to make the Core Curriculum easier. "If we had known that it was this easy to make Columbia change their 89-year-old Core Curriculum, we would have done it a long time ago," explained lead protester Ted Hooveman, CC '11. "I mean, we were totally gonna do it anyway, but we just, you know, never got around to it."

The protesters released a statement of their demands, which include lowering the minimum credit load to "I dunno, maybe 5" and a complete Columbia withdrawal from Manhattanville, explaining, "You kidding me? No way am I gonna walk that far." They named several slacker courses they would like to see added to the Core Curriculum, including a Science Requirement class called "Biodiversity: I Mean, What's the Deal With That?", a Physical Education section in Advanced Kvetching, and a Global Core course entitled, "You Know, Asia and Crap."

After several procrastination-fueled delays, the protesters erected a cheap nylon tent on South Lawn, vowing to camp out "until the Columbia menace agrees to institute university-wide grade inflation and to please not make us do midterms anymore." Soon after, the protesters announced their intention to go on a hunger strike, forcing themselves to survive on only beer and various alcoholic ciders. Within hours, the strikers' tent had turned into a makeshift frat, with discarded Solo cups fighting the protest flyers strewn around the tent for dominance. Fortunately, drunken protester Kim Stevens, BC '10, was on hand to make sense of the quickly degrading spectacle: "Yeah, we're totally protesting, man!" she informed our Fed reporter. "Yeah! Protest! Whoo!"

The protesters originally planned to construct a giant paper octopus outside their tent to serve as a mascot for their struggle against Columbia. This octopus was to be known as the Columbioctopus or, alternatively, as the Columbia Octopussy, a name that originated with protester Chris Fubrow, SEAS '09, who explained, "Heh heh, pussy." It was meant to represent, in the words of Fubrow, "all the ways Columbia is putting its filthy hands in my Godgiven YouTube and general screwin' around time." However, the protesters' lead slacker engineers decided to scale back their planned mascot and rechristen it the Quadrapus after it became apparent that the protesters were "too friggin' lazy" to give the octopus all eight arms. To date, only one duct-taped arm has been attached to the Quadrapus. [Editor's Note: As of printing time, this sole arm has been blown off by the wind and has not been re-attached.]

In response to the slacker protesters, several members of the Columbia Workaholics for the Advancement of the Studying and Over-Achieving Arts quickly formed a counterprotest. They constructed their own elaborate tent complex right next to the slackers' tent, complete with a windmill to power their desk lamps and pencil sharpeners, a twentyneedle IV drip for around-the-clock Adderall injection, and a massive computer network custom-rigged to refresh counter-protesters' Course- Works pages every five minutes. A reporter from The Fed interviewed one of the counter-protesters, Blake Schnedly, CC '11, who had the following to say about the slackers: "Honestly, I don't see why those silly layabout types want to decrease their workload. Why, I take 26 credits and maintain a GPA in the high 4.20s, and I still manage to scrape together time for weekly Quiz Bowl tournaments at prestigious overseas universities! Ha ha ha ha ha!" Schnedly then bent down to pick up the teeth that had fallen out of his mouth after our Fed reporter punched him in the face.

So far, Columbia administrators have failed to take the protesters' demands seriously, but Hooveman isn't fazed. He's already planning his next slacker protest: standing next to the Sundial and ringing a bell for every time Contemporary Civilization Professor Phil Shydeburg has made him write "one of those damn reader responses". When asked about his motivations for holding so many protests, Hooveman replied, "At the core of it, it's all about upholding our reputation as a generation. They say that college students today lack the protesting zeal of, say, the '68 protesters, but I'm out to show them that our generation can strike, walk out, and boycott along with the best of them, and we do it with more lethargic cynicism and apathetic malaise than any of those geezers ever had. I guess it all comes down to the fundamental right of every American to stand up and say, ‘No, thank you, I really don't feel like doing work today.'" He then turned to walk toward Butler Library. "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to slam my hand in a door so I can get a medical extension for my Anthro paper. You know, it really takes a lot of work to slack this hard."