CornellWatch

Everyone knows that the Ivy League is the secret gathering place of the Coastal Elite, where we drink organic champagne, eat free-range caviar, and laugh snidely at the fact that Sarah Palin has managed to trainwreck softball interviews with Katie Couric. She reads a “vast variety” of newspapers and magazines! She hates those pesky reporters perpetrating “gotcha journalism” (but was a journalism major herself, go figure)! Ha.

Still, precious few people know what actually actually goes on behind the scenes in these Ivy Towers of ours, well out of sight of the meddling riffraff from landlocked states.Here are a couple things we’ve enjoyed this past week, mostly to hold over the heads of landlubbers:

1) Hosting Superpretentious Symposia!

ShakesQueer promotional image, courtesy of the English Department.

Ellis Hanson, newly crowned Chair of the English Department (and tantalizingly sexually ambiguous instructor of a sex course called “Desire”), said the symposium aims to “convince us that the Bard is queerer than we thought, ‘queer’ meaning not only gay or lesbian, but the erotic in all its rhetorical strangeness and surprise.” Rhetorical strangeness most certainly occurred… in the best way possible. A few quotes from speakers follow, but we missed Eve Sedgwick (boo). First, Stephen Guy-Bray explains himself on why the title of his lecture on 2 Henry 6 was called “The Gayest Play Ever”:

Ellis Hanson emailed me and asked the title of my talk. I wrote back and said I never thought about a title, I was just going to call it Henry the 6th Part 2, but I guess you could call it the gayest play ever. Poor dear literal Ellis chose that as the title, but I was concerned that you would rush to your copies hoping to find five acts full of hot girl-on-girl action.

Next, Lynne Huffer presenting a paper entitled “In Praise of Error” on Willy’s Comedy of Errors. Be warned, it’s dense stuff:

And if Foucault gave us the stuff that became Queer Theory, we now use that Theory to make Shakespeare queer, precisely because of Shakespeare’s canonical status. We don’t queer the creations of unknown scribblers, it’s the sacred texts of Authors with a capital A that we’re after…Indeed, all these characters seem to enact not only mental but bodily forms of error. Living in a world that, as Antipholus of Syracuse puts it, “sorcerers inhabit,” they all wander in illusions. Possessed. Lunatic. Consumed by mad jealousy… But Foucault’s histories, especially the History of Madness, refract the clear through the prism of time. Foucault’s mad split subjects, from what Foucault calls in the History of Madness the “Narrenschiff” of the Renaissance ship of fools,” the convulsing hysterics of 19th century stage are both doubled and divided not by that atemporal other scene of the psychoanalytic unconscious but by the temporal force we call history.

No idea what she’s talking about? Me neither, but it sounds like it would be awesome if we did. Here’s something of hers that we can all understand, though… File it under “Obligatory Academic Sarah Palin Bashing”:

Each culture, after all, has the madness it deserves. And I can’t help but add that ours is Sarah Palin. [Everyone laughs.]

Toldja we hated her.

2) Organizing Faculty Panels!

The Cornell International Affairs Review brought over three speakers to talk about the current financial crisis on Wednesday. In essence, George Bush wasn’t so off when he said that Wall St. got drunk. Except not off bottle service at tony clubs or even off the fumes of their ridiculously overinflated egos, but “exotic financial instruments” that nobody really understands in the first place.

Former former Lehman Brothers exec and Visiting Senior Lecturer of Finance, Johnson School (we enjoy ridiculously long titles, dontcha know) Robert C. Andolina explained the history of the crisis that was probably sort of his fault: after the tech bubble of early 2000, Wall St. douchebankers needed to “seek new profits,” so they created financial instruments which basically enabled the subprime mortgage. I think? Oh hell, it’s better explained by a webcomic created in Paint with Comic Sans captions.

Next was David Easley, who has an even more ridiculous title: Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Sciences, Department of Economics. He tried to convince us that the Wall St. problem is also a Main St. problem: “Expectations of failure feeds failure itself.” But don’t we want bullshit financial instruments to pay for their own failure? Apparently not: Congress kinda agreed with him later that night when they passed the bailout bill.

Finally, Government Professor Elizabeth Sanders gave a brief history of financial sector regulation (New Deal) and deregulation (Alan Greenspan, Community Future Modernization Act). What to do now? Take a little of that “free” out of the free market: “The free market can thrive when there is transparency, confidence, and a regulatory framework.”

And then, in the spirit of democracy, there was a Q&A. Fave question: One old guy got up and read an anti-Federal Reserve jeremiad off a paper, citing casually the widely accepted fact that, since its inception in 1913, it has caused the Great Depression, the oil crisis of the 70s, and Rachael Ray. After being prodded repeatedly by the moderator to ask the effing question, he shot: “Should we get rid of it?” All of them said: “No.”

3) Penning Dog-Positive Journalism!

Ever notice that people, like, have dogs in college? What a crazy bunch, those college kids! You’ve probably been dying for a really in-depth, investigative piece plumbing the depths of just what particular rules and challenges dog-lovers face. And today the Daily Sun gave us just that, in an article titled (go figure) “Students Live With Their Dogs, Despite Rules, Challenges.

Rules?

But dogs and some other pets are forbidden in Cornell’s dormitories, sororities and other on-campus apartments. Katie Baumann ’11 lives in a sorority house this year and has trouble coping without a dog. “It’s a little unfair that boys can have dogs in their houses but girls can’t,” she said. “I guess dogs can be messy animals sometimes but if they’re well taken care of, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to have one in my house.”

:’( … Challenges?

After college, however, Hudson is not sure what he will do with his dog. One option he has considered is keeping the dog in his fraternity for new members of the house to take care of. “I don’t know where I’m going to be in three years, I may end up living somewhere where I just can’t keep Meeko. If that’s the case I’ll have to be sure people can still be there to take care of him,” Hudson said.

D: !!! Not to worry, though, dear reader — you’re probably worried, aren’t you? You’re worried whether having a dog is worth surmounting these rules, challenges. Lucky for you, dear reader, this story has a happy ending.

But is having a dog on campus worth the trouble presented by University housing policies? “Definitely,” Hudson said. “People are always willing to help walk him, and dogs are great for stress too. Everybody seems to get happy when they see a dog running around.”

!!!

Tags: coastal elite, dog-positive, gay, LGBT, wall st

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:21 am by D. Evan Mulvihill and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.