Where are the 99 percent?
Occupy Wall Street has moved from public parks that doubled as al fresco toilets and taverns, and has set up shop in some of the finest colleges and universities.
Courses in the art of anarchy taught by ’60s throwbacks emboldened by personal gripes, Ph.D.’s and tenure, are popping up like magic mushrooms in institutions of higher education from New York to Seattle. Some offer course credit toward graduation, though it’s unclear if a student can declare a major in kvetching.
Be afraid.
Columbia University, New York’s Ivy palace where parents shell out more than 40 grand a year to turn precious scions into 1 percenters, posted a spring class that’s bound to turn young Muffie and Ash into homeless squatters — “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.”
The course, heavy on actual protest and light on reading, will go on. But days after The Post reported on it, Columbia’s red-faced anthropology chair rescinded plans to offer credit.
Not so at NYU, whose extortionate tuition was a favorite target of bored Occupiers who rallied around the Greenwich Village campus for months. Two classes were announced for next semester, a graduate seminar and an undergrad course not so subtly titled “Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance.”
In San Diego and New Mexico, academics lecture on the art of making a nuisance. At Seattle Central Community College, professors and the local teachers-union president offered a free course this fall called “Why We Support Occupy.”
But at NYU, the Occupy movement is turning from giddy to dirty to downright ugly.
Senior Sara Ackerman, just a few credits shy of graduation, was assigned by her professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Caitlin Zaloom, to visit Zuccotti Park. Without a police escort. She went with two girlfriends.
“We were instructed to interview only those people who were participating in the OWS movement — that means anyone, including criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people and, of course, the few competent, mentally stable people that stationed themselves in Zuccotti Park,” Ackerman wrote in a 2,800-word open letter to university President John Sexton that’s gone viral on the Internet.
“Note: I didn’t meet any of the supposedly mentally sound, non-delusional people at Zuccotti Park . . . Each person I interviewed — and believe me, for my own safety, I tried to interview the most seemingly normal people there — was either mentally disturbed or dangerous, scary or masked, or misogynistic and rude.
“I was cat-called at, gawked at, ogled, and called derogatory names.” Tell me about it. I’ve been there.
The university sicced its mental-health people on Ackerman, who says she has no history of mental illness. Now Ackerman has been suspended by NYU. Her lengthy and increasingly angry e-mails to students and faculty demanding Zaloom’s resignation or termination were deemed a threat by the prof who sent undergrad girls to Zuccotti.
A secretary said Zaloom was out of the country, and she did not respond to an e-mail.
NYU spokesman John Beckman declined to discuss a student’s “academic or disciplinary record,” but he defended the university.
“When a student raises a complaint, we look into it, and we take it very seriously. With all complaints, we try to come to some sort of common-sense resolution, but that does not involve offering ‘A’s or credit for work not done by the student.
“The extreme accusations that have been surfaced concerning a particular fall class in the College of Arts and Science are unwarranted and untrue.”
Is Sara Ackerman a young gal who refused to fall in line? Or a nutter who refused to fall in line?
Look forward to a lot more action on the Occupy College front.
All kids are stars at birth
She’s 5 days old. Already, Blue Ivy Carter has mastered VIP treatment, taking her first breaths amid velvet-rope-level security in an exclusive, bulletproof suite in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital.
Blue Ivy has also taken a crash course in celeb crisis management. Her fabulous folks, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, worked to dull a fury that erupted after private security guards kept parents of preemies outside the hospital’s neonatal intensive-care unit for hours and papered over security cameras.
The child’s fiercely private dad, Jay-Z (real name Shawn Carter) took the unprecedented step of revealing, via a rap tune posted on his Web site, the pain he and Beyoncé suffered with a previous miscarriage. He also raps about the joy of meeting “magic’’ Blue, who makes her first cameo appearance as a hip-hop artist by wailing with Dad in the song.
Stars have forgotten that all children are miracles, Even the nobodies.
White House masquerade charade
President Obama threw a lavish Halloween ball at the White House in 2009, designed by director Tim Burton and featuring special guest Johnny Depp dressed as The Mad Hatter, it’s reported in the new book “The Obamas,’’ by journalist Jodi Kantor. The author claims the event, enjoyed by the first daughters and military kids, was kept super secret so as not to infuriate Americans who can’t afford elaborate costumes or the company of A-listers, whose names don’t appear on White House visitors’ log.
Obama’s camp went cuckoo after the story broke in The Post, insisting that the media attended the fete and that it was featured on the White House Web site. Well, not exactly.
The site shows the president and first lady, dressed as Cat Woman, doling out candy, with no mention of Depp or crazy hats. But a damning press pool report also fails to mention the madness.
A coverup — by the prez’s media fanatics?
Elin’s woes ‘build’ up
She needs a hobby. Or a man.
Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ humiliated ex-wife, plunked down $12.2 million for a 17,000-square-foot Florida oceanfront mansion so she could demolish the shack and put an even bigger pad in its place. At 18,984 square feet, the monstrosity can easily swallow Tiger’s 9,727-square-foot place.
I’m not a shrink or a Tiger fan. But all that lavish, wasted space will still feel gapingly empty.
Teaching a ‘crass’
City schools now teach kids about the joy of oral and anal sex. So it makes sense that education brass refuse to dump Bronxdale HS Principal John Chase Jr. for repeatedly joking about things such as a copy machine that “even has a hole in it where you can stick your d— and get a blow job.’’ Maybe Chase was conducting a lesson?