Letter From the Editor
Following the Daily News’ “exposé” on Columbia’s “playpen for sexual hijinks,” Ann Coulter told Fox News in late November that the students whose privacy was invaded were “probably not lookers.”
I am an avowed supporter of Coulter—not that she’d ever accept my crypto-Jewish sympathy. When she declares that Columbia, as a microcosm of liberal culture, is “coarsening the culture and trying to make all of us like, you know, one step above the heifers,” I listen.
In a June editorial, the LA Times scribe Meghan Daum defended Ann Coulter as a satirist in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. It was in 1729 that Swift prescribed eating impoverished babies to combat overpopulation, only to be attacked with the voracity of a bereaved Jersey widow. Though, to my knowledge, no babies were eaten to this effect, Swift has since been vindicated.
I get Ann. When The Eye ran its holiday supplement last semester, Bwog readers accused the magazine of “chutzpah”—and outright snobbery. One anonymous post dribbled, too faint for punctuation, “like students can really afford a $1300 scarf from Bergdorfs.”
In anticipation of animated online debate, we’ve programmed this inaugural Eye with an interview with video artist Laurel Nakadate (page 3), noted for her playful, fetishistic visions of sexuality. Yet in the same issue, we feature a poignant portrait of a Columbia alumnus serving deep in the trenches of Baghdad (page 5).
An extreme subscriber to the “satirist” hypothesis might assume that Coulter lampoons the Christian right. That’s not right-—she admires no-nonsense rhetoricians far too much. A loyal Swiftian, Coulter takes issue with political correctness and the hypocrisy it engenders. As a charismatic, lunatic cartoon, she nullifies the pandering inaction of PC politics.
No institution is excepted, and for Coulter, Columbia is yet another monolith, an idol to topple. What guidebook doesn’t dutifully mention New York sociability and work ethic, or remind you that your hand will not be held?
No one sent me the Wall Street memo as I was applying. Yet each year we send scores of juniors to the howling winds of the finance district. Senior writer Dan Haley investigates the culture of Gordon Gekko (page 7) beyond the lurid details (though lurid they are, in detail—as photographed by Dani Zalcman) and discovers a set of self-conscious students in search of independence. One Columbia professor might call the process “hyperopia” (page 4).
For those of you unaware, this issue inaugurates an entirely new Eye staff. With it comes a Robin Yang-designed re-launch, at http://eye.columbiaspectator.com. Lest I forget, The Eye’s managing editor, Sadia Latifi, has been essential to the re-conceptualization, and even Coulter has anointed her a “looker.”
If to this point my Coulter theme has proven forced, allow me to conclude. It is our duty to eschew politesse and provide you with a no-holds-barred portrait of student life at Columbia. The staff, Sadia, and I welcome you to our lifestyles and to a new year of The Eye.