Columbia Daily Spectator

Inaugural Hindu Awareness Week starts Monday

news — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 08:34:27 +0000

The inaugural Hindu Awareness Week, organized by the Hindu Students Organization to share information about the tenets of Hinduism on campus, starts Monday.

“For the past 20 years, HSO has been able to provide a forum for Hindus to practice their faith,” Shambavi Sadayappan, SEAS ’14 and co-coordinator of Hindu Awareness Week, said. “So we thought it would be a really good and new initiative for us to provide a more intimate setting for people to either explore their faith or to explore new faith.”

The week will include yoga and meditation sessions, a discussion circle on Hinduism, a movie screening, a lecture by a Hindu Pandit, and a trip to a temple in Queens.

“The goal of this week is not just to be a space for Hindu students to explore their faith—the idea is to have dialogue with other people,” Nita Ponnaganti, CC ’14 and another co-coordinator, said.

Mihir Awati, CC ’15 and HSO’s public relations director, said that the week is intended as much for non-Hindus as for Hindus, and that the ultimate goal is spreading the word and discussing about what Hinduism is.

“We want students to know that there are no barriers to coming and having an interesting discussion with us this week,” he said.

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, the Hindu chaplain at Columbia, will lecture about how to incorporate Hindu tenets into everyday life on Thursday.

“We thought it would be a good way to give people a chance to interact with him and know that he’s there,” Ponnaganti said. “Everything that we do is related to awareness, and this week we think that it’s a good idea to have a closer-knit setting in which people can actually have discussion and dialogue.”

At the end of the week, HSO will lead a trip to Ganesh Temple, a large Hindu temple in Flushing.

“We thought it would be a great opportunity for students, who are either Hindu or not Hindu, to go to a place where Hindus actually worship,” Ponnaganti said. “Those who actually want to go and pray can do so, and those who are just there to look at it can see what other Hindus do ... that’ll be an opportunity for them to do so.”

Upper West Side restaurant Shahi Biryani & Grill will provide food for the events throughout the week.

Awati said that the biggest challenge for the week was probably having Engineering Week—which kicked off with a commemorative lighting display illuminating Low Library Saturday night—fall on the same days.

Ponnaganti also said she had concerns about how well the week will turn out, even with HSO’s experience with large events in the past.

“We don’t know how people will be receptive to it ... it’s very new, so obviously this year there is going to be filled with a bit of uncertainty,” Ponnaganti said. It makes it exciting in some ways.”

rana.hilal@columbiaspectator.com | @ra_hilal

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Student Life

2014-02-17

Yue Ben / Senior Staff Photographer

New Beginnings | (From left) HSO coordinators Nita Ponnaganti, CC ’14, Shambavi Sadayappan, SEAS ’14, and Mihir Awati, CC ’15, want Hindu Awareness Week to promote discussion about Hindu religion and culture.

CC senior wins Gates Cambridge Scholarship

news — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 08:30:26 +0000

Evelyn Jagoda, CC ’14, will head to the University of Cambridge in the U.K. this fall as the only Columbia student to win the Gates Cambridge Scholarship this year.

There, she will pursue a masters in Biological Anthropological Sciences, focusing on the genetic links between modern humans and Denisovans, a recently discovered hominid closely related to Neanderthals.

“I’m interested in studying human evolution, but from a specifically genetic perspective,” Jagoda, who is majoring in Evolutionary Biology of the Human Species, said.

The Gates Cambridge scholarship gives 40 American and 55 international students full-ride scholarships to study at the University of Cambridge each year. It was established in 2000 by a $210 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the University of Cambridge.

“The point of the scholarship is to fund people that are motivated and excellent in research but also have a commitment to bettering society,” Jagoda said. ”It’s just really exciting to be part of that group, and I’m so thankful to them for including me in it.”

Instead of attending classes, Jagoda will spend the next year working closely with a research mentor to find connections between modern humans and the Denisovans that their ancestors interbred with in order to better understand modern diseases. Past research has revealed that certain human autoimmune disorders may have been caused by genes from Denisovans.

“It’s looking at diseases that affect us in the modern era, and looking way, way back for answers,” Jagoda said.

During her time at Columbia, she has worked in labs and archeological sites from Arizona to Germany—an indication of her commitment and passion to her field of study.

“I’m always just really impressed with how passionate and clear-minded she is about her interests and her goals, and how eloquently she can talk about the things she’s interested in,” Misha Solomon, CC ’14 and fellow EBHS major, said. “She is one of the most genuine people that I know at Columbia, or at all.”

While she said she enjoyed her time at Columbia, Jagoda said that there isn’t a particularly strong push for independent research.

“Columbia is an amazing academic community, but I haven’t personally found here the super-motivated drive for independent research for like I’m doing,” she said.

Nevertheless, Jagoda said her years in Morningside Heights were extremely influential both academically and socially. Jagoda was on the executive board of the Columbia University Democrats for two years.

“Not only did it give me the motivation to do this [my research] on a societal basis, it also gave me a lot of the leadership tools,” she said. “That was a community that I can’t be more thankful for.”

Current CU Dems President Sejal Singh, CC ’15, said that Jagoda left a positive impact on the club.

“This [scholarship] was no surprise—she’s fantastic,” Singh said. “Everyone expected her to do amazing things and I look forward to watching what she does in the future.”

Jagoda was also on the board of the Columbia University Marching Band, which she said was formative in a different way.

“Band reminds me that it’s important to help people in specific direct ways, but something that also helps people is providing a fun, spirited community,” Jagoda said.

Difficult as it may be to leave these things and people behind, Jagoda said she is ready to cross the pond.

“Honestly it’s a little overwhelming. The generosity of the Gates Foundation to have this scholarship is amazing. It’s very empowering,” she said.

maia.bix@columbiaspectator.com | @MaiaClay4

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Student Life

2014-02-17

Yue Ben / Senior Staff Photographer

GENETASTIC | Gates Cambridge scholarship recipient Evelyn Jagoda, CC ’14, will be studying the genetic links between Denisovans, a prehistoric hominid, and humans.

Class of 2016 CCSC Representative Benjamin Kornick resigns

news — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 02:47:14 +0000

Updated 2:38 a.m.

Columbia College Student Council Class of 2016 Representative Benjamin Kornick resigned for “personal reasons,” CCSC President Daphne Chen announced at Sunday’s meeting.

Kornick notified the CCSC executive board over the weekend about his resignation. Kornick, who was elected in largely uncontested elections last spring, was not present at Sunday’s meeting.

“All the work I’m still doing for CCSC will be done. I’m just not going to meetings. I won’t be sitting at meetings for three and a half hours each weekend,” Kornick said in a phone call after the meeting.

Ramis Wadood, the 2016 class council president, said that the class council will decide within a week whether to hold direct or indirect elections, but that it was “leaning towards” indirect elections because of timing issues.

“Given the time and the elections board’s lack of resources, we would have this direct election in three weeks, and in another week and a half there’d be the election, which brings that person out of power,” he said.

Several CCSC representatives who asked to remain anonymous said that Kornick’s resignation has to do with internal conflicts between council members. At last week’s CCSC meeting, members gathered for a closed-door meeting to discuss what was referred to as the “elephant in the room”—individual complaints regarding how CCSC has operated.

“What is very admirable is that he has chosen to continue working on student council, but not as an elected official,” an anonymous member of CCSC said. “There’s an element of protest in this decision. He’s lost faith in the leadership structure.”

In a resignation email sent internally to the executive board of CCSC after Sunday’s meeting, Kornick said he was concerned with member accountability and the direction of the Campus Life Committee.

“It seems that we are throwing money at giveaways and events other groups are planning, rather than stepping up and planning our own,” Kornick said in the email.

In CCSC’s fall 2013 report released last December, the Campus Life Committee had a budget of $11,456, dwarfing all of the individual class council budgets. With the exception of Bagelpalooza, the top five events organized—the tree-lighting ceremony, homecoming activities, passport to Columbia, and basketball mania—were organized with other councils.

“I think he has for a while been becoming disenchanted with CCSC as a whole, and it was his personal decision,” another anonymous CCSC member said.

“Some members of the CCSC Campus Life Committee (CLC) expressed disapproval of the committee’s direction,” the CCSC executive board said in an email early Monday. “It is important to note that the consensus expressed by members of the CLC was that issues within the committee had been addressed internally, that they were already seeing improved progress this semester, and that they wanted to focus on moving forward.”

The first anonymous CCSC member said that Kornick didn’t appear interested or excited about the council’s work at last week’s closed-door meeting.

“At the elephant conversation he was not expressing excitement at working on future projects,” the anonymous member said.

Kornick also said that all CCSC members didn’t necessarily do the same amount of work.

“There are certain groups of people who do a lot of work and others that don’t,” he said.

Kornick’s email came immediately after CCSC failed to pass a resolution at Sunday’s meeting that would decrease the number of class council representatives from three to two. The text of the resolution said the proposal was in response to “a disinterest in council programming and initiatives and a lack of substantial contribution to their committee meetings and general body meetings.”

Chen said that while the executive board holds the power to decide whether direct or indirect elections will be held following resignations, it would delegate that responsibility to the Class of 2016 council.

“According to our constitution, the E-board decides,” she said. “Because it’s a sophomore rep, we’re giving the sophomore class a say.”

“The CCSC E-Board will continue working to improve the CLC and empowering its members to plan great events. CLC meetings continue to be public and take place every Sunday at 5 p.m. in Lerner 501,” the executive board said. “The E-Board thanks Ben sincerely for the work he contributed in his time on council, and wishes him the very best in the rest of his endeavors.”

Last fall, University Senator Cleo Abram, CC ’15, stepped down and prompted the remaining Columbia College senators to hold indirect elections. After an email from the CCSC class of 2014 council questioning the decision, however, the senators held direct elections.

“Ben was one of the best council members I’ve worked with,” Wadood said. “He’s been a great member and I’m really really sad to see him go.”

elizabeth.sedran@columbiaspectator.com | @ezactron

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Student Life

2014-02-17

Guoqiang Pang for Spectator

VOTING | Columbia College Student Council voted against a resolution that would reduce the number of class council representatives. CCSC President Daphne Chen, CC ’14, also announced that Class of 2016 Representative Benjamin Kornick resigned for “personal reasons” Sunday.

Students’ Coalition Against Sexual Violence to present recommendations to administrators

news — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 01:20:21 +0000

A new student group called the Coalition Against Sexual Violence will present to administrators on Monday morning a list of policy recommendations intended to improve the way the University handles sexual misconduct, after holding an open forum on Sunday.

Representatives of the coalition will meet with a number of senior administrators, including Executive Vice President of Facilities and Operations Joseph Ienuso, to present a set of proposals that will be updated as discussions over policy continue over future months. Ienuso recently replaced Jeff Scott as co-chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Sexual Assault after Scott’s position as executive vice president for student and administrative services ended this semester.

The coalition’s proposals include hiring a permanent clinician to staff the Rape Crisis/Anti-Violence Support Center 24 hours a day and seven days a week, reorganizing PACSA to involve wider and more diverse student representation as well as more frequent meetings, and restructuring the sexual misconduct adjudication process to ensure that complainants are made fully aware of how proceedings work and what resources are available to them in the interim period.

Many of the proposals are in line with an earlier senate Student Affairs Committee statement on reforming the adjudication process and come after immediate changes to the adjudication process were announced at a Columbia College Student Council meeting last week.

Representatives from the coalition, the Columbia University Democrats, and the University Senate have been meeting regularly with administrators, who asked them at the beginning of the semester to create a list of proposals.

“The content of this document has been in the works since last semester,” Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, CC ’15 and a coalition member, said. “But we’re really making an effort to get more voices into this conversation.”

The coalition, organized in part by CU Dems President Sejal Singh, CC ’15, and University Senator Marc Heinrich, CC ’16, has been meeting regularly since the start of the semester.

“We want to recognize that issues of sexual violence are very personal experiences, but at the same time we want to encourage sharing. We’re working on ways to facilitate a culture of conversation,” Ridolfi-Starr said. “We want to make space for more and more students to join in this—everybody is welcome.”

One area on which the group has begun to focus specifically is the mandatory consent education all incoming students receive during the New Student Orientation Program—an aspect addressed in the second part of a widely-read Blue and White series examining University policies on sexual misconduct.

“As a [Consent 101] facilitator, I have a lot of concerns about the tone of the discussion in the workshops,” Sarah Weinstein, CC ’16 and a coalition member, said.

“It’s also just the fact that a lot of students didn’t show up. I was supposed to facilitate two workshops but nobody showed up to the second one. I know a lot of other Consent educators had similar problems, and based on that, I would guess that between one-third to one-half of the freshman class didn’t get consent education,” Weinstein said.

Singh said the coalition has been communicating regularly with the administrators in charge of NSOP.

“The administration has been very receptive to student concerns,” Singh said. “They’re particularly interested in reforming the consent education process, and we’re very confident that we’ll see changes implemented in time for next year.”

Abby Porter, CC ’17 and the CCSC liaison to the coalition, said reforming Consent 101 is just part of the plan for a safer campus.

“Ideally, we really want to be educating continually about sexual violence,” she said. “This shouldn’t just be limited to NSOP—we really want to keep the conversation going.”

emma.bogler@columbiaspectator.com | @ebbogz

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Administration

2014-02-17

File Photo

NEW COALITION | University Senator Marc Heinrich, CC ’16, is part of a new student coalition that will present a set of policy recommendations to administrators Monday to improve the way the school handles sexual misconduct.

WEEKEND RECAP: Women's basketball, men's tennis, men's squash, wrestling

sports — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:48:47 +0000

Women's basketball—Kyle Perrotti / Spectator Senior Staff Writer

The women’s basketball team (5-17, 2-6 Ivy) traveled north this weekend and split a pair of games... (Read more)

Men's tennis—Kyle Perrotti / Spectator Senior Staff Writer

The men's tennis team will play in the finals of the ECAC Championships on in Hanover, N.H., after it took down... (Read more)

Men's Squash—Eli Schultz / Spectator Senior Staff Writer

The men's squash team (8-7, 2-5 Ivy) got off to a hot start in the B Division of the CSA National Championships, dispatching... (Read more)

Wrestling—Ben Sheng / Spectator Staff Writer

It was a sobering weekend for the wrestling team (6-6, 3-5 EIWA), which dropped a pair of Ivy League dual meets at...(Read more)

sports@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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Sports

2014-02-17

Youjin Jenny Jang / Senior Staff Photographer

Lin-ser Focus | Junior Winston Lin pulled out a hard fought win in three sets over Dartmouth to secure the Lions place in the ECAC Championships.

Men's squash finishes season ranked 10th in nation

sports — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:45:27 +0000

The men's squash team (8-7, 2-5 Ivy) got off to a hot start in the B Division of the CSA National Championships, dispatching Drexel, 8-1, on Friday and edging Western Ontario, 5-4, the next day. But Columbia couldn't get it done in the finals, falling to Princeton on Sunday, 5-4. The Light Blue will finish the season ranked No. 10 in the nation. Junior Ramit Tandon was one of three Lions to go 3-0 at the tournament, and will close out the year ranked No. 5 in the nation individually.

eli.schultz@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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Men's Squash

Squash

2014-02-17

File Photo

Terrific Tandon | Junior Ramit Tandon was undefeated in the B Division of the CSA National Championships and finished the year ranked fifth nationally.

Men's tennis advances to ECAC Championships

sports — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:44:40 +0000

The men's tennis team will play in the finals of the ECAC Championships on in Hanover, N.H., after it took down a pair of Ivy League foes this weekend. The second-seed Lions opened the weekend with a strong 4-2 victory over seventh-seed Princeton. Following its win over the Tigers, Columbia took to the court against host team Dartmouth and pulled off a 4-3 victory. Columbia returns to the court against Harvard in the championship match today at 2 p.m.

kyle.perrotti@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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Men's Tennis

Tennis

2014-02-17

Youjin Jenny Jang / Senior Staff Photographer

King of the court | Junior Max Schnur beat his Princeton opponent in a singles match and partnered with classmate Ashok Narayana to hand the Tigers another defeat in a doubles match.

Wrestling falls to Princeton, Penn

sports — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:40:05 +0000

It was a sobering weekend for the wrestling team (6-6, 3-5 EIWA), which dropped a pair of Ivy League dual meets at Princeton (9-2, 9-2 EIWA) and Penn (6-6, 5-4 EIWA).

On Friday night, the Lions leapt out to a 16-7 lead, but couldn’t survive a strong Princeton finish. The Tigers won two major decisions and a decision in the last three bouts to eke out an 18-16 win.

If the Lions had won one more bout at Princeton, they could have put the meet away. But first-year Markus Scheidel, who leads the team with 21 wins, gave up a pivotal victory when he lost a 5-3 decision at 157 pounds to Princeton’s Kevin Moylan, and sophomore Zach Hernandez, a stalwart this season at 184 pounds, was dominated in a 11-2 major decision.

Head coach Carl Fronhofer said Hernandez’s bout had been uncharacteristically sloppy, ruining a matchup that might have been much closer.

“It’s a toss-up at 84 [184 pounds], and we just wrestled really, really silly,” Fronhofer said. “We just made three huge errors in the match that you normally don’t make. It just was a bad match.”

Scheidel and Hernandez were two of three Columbia wrestlers who came into the weekend having won seven consecutive bouts. Along with No. 16 junior Shane Hughes, whose hot streak continued this weekend, the two had been the foundation of the Light Blue’s recent five-meet winning streak. But the foundation fell away this weekend.

Less than a day after narrowly losing to Princeton, the Light Blue was blown out, 24-10, in Philadelphia.

Against the Quakers, Scheidel and Hernandez lost again, along with every other Lion except Hughes and sophomore Angelo Amenta.

Hughes delivered a fall at 174, and Amenta came up with an 11-2 major decision at 133, but the bonus points were of little use to the Lions after they lost the other eight bouts. Seven of the eight Columbia losses were within two points, adding up to a frustrating defeat for a Light Blue team that had put a scare into No. 4 Cornell in Ithaca a week before.

Columbia will try to salvage a winning season next weekend, when Ivy League rivals Harvard and Brown come to New York.

sports@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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wrestling

Wrestling

2014-02-17

David Brann / Senior Staff Photographer

Holding steady | While junior Shane Hughes won his eighth and ninth straight matches against Penn and Princeton, the Lions were not as successful as a unit.

Men's basketball splits weekend against Harvard, Dartmouth

sports — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:37:38 +0000

In many people’s books, the men’s basketball team should be two games out of the Ivy lead.

The Lions (15-10, 4-4 Ivy) were a controversial charging call away from upsetting Harvard (20-4, 7-1 Ivy) on Friday night, which, after Saturday’s 69-59 win against Dartmouth, would have lifted Columbia into third in the conference standings behind the Crimson and Yale. Instead, the Light Blue sits in fourth place eight games into its Ancient Eight slate.

“Like I told the team, it’ll be posted that we’re 4-4,” Columbia head coach Kyle Smith said. “But I got us at 5-3.”

Though the game turned into a double-overtime thriller, things were not looking good for Columbia at Levien midway through the second half, as the Lions trailed the two-time defending Ivy champion Crimson by 12 with 10:52 to go.

But behind junior forward Alex Rosenberg—who finished with 34 points, three shy of Columbia’s Levien record—and sophomore guard Maodo Lo, the Lions clawed their way back.

Lo made a couple of big plays and then with 3:31 to go, Rosenberg drilled a three to make it 62-60 as the crowd exploded.

The Light Blue managed to tie the game and even got ahead briefly, but after a tense final stretch, Lo couldn’t get the game-winner to go, and the score stood at 68-68 at the end of regulation.

“He’s a good one-on-one player,” Smith said of Lo, who scored 20 points, after the game. “I thought it was a good chance—he actually said he got hit, I haven’t seen it, we’ll see—but you know, they got a kind whistle the next ending, so it would have been nice if we got that chance to win it.”

The game went into overtime following Lo’s miss, and Rosenberg was a central figure in the extra period.

He nailed a critical fall-away jumper as the shot clock expired to put the Lions up 71-70, but neither team could stay ahead for long. With 18.9 seconds left and the scored tied at 73, Columbia had the ball for what could have been its last possession and turned to Rosenberg.

For a fleeting moment, it looked like he would be the hero after hitting a go-ahead leaner with 2.3 seconds left. The crowd roared—but the shot was called back following a questionable offensive-foul call.

“I just kind of tried to make a play, clock was winding down,” Rosenberg said. “I’m glad it went in. I didn’t expect a charge to be called, but at the same time I’m not the one making the calls.”

The game headed to a second overtime amid a storm of boos from Columbia fans, and this time the Lions couldn’t hold Harvard back. Guard Laurent Rivard—who drew the charge on Rosenberg at the end of the first overtime—hit a three to put the Crimson up 82-77 with 59 seconds remaining, and after a busy final minute, Harvard came away with the win, 88-84.

The following night against Dartmouth (9-13, 2-6 Ivy), things looked dicey for the Lions in the early going as Dartmouth guard Alex Mitola—who scored a combined 38 points in the Big Green’s two wins against Columbia last season—got off to a hot start. But the Lions managed to rally, taking control in the second half after a tightly contested first 20 minutes.

“Mitola’s been the Lion killer, and we let him get off to a 3-for-3 start,” Smith said. “We didn’t hang our heads and go, ‘Here we go again.’ We stayed the course—we yelled a little bit, and I broke a clipboard—and then from then on Maodo ... did a really good job on him.”

Lo managed to prevent Mitola from being a major force in the game—he had only four points the rest of the way—by taking away his primary weapon, the three-point shot.

“I was just trying to sit on him and fight through all the screens,” Lo said. “Chase him off the three-point line, make him shoot twos—and it worked out in the second half better than in the first half.”

Despite Mitola’s hot shooting from beyond the arc in the early going, neither team led by more than two until a pair of free throws by Dartmouth forward John Golden gave the Big Green a 24-20 advantage with 6:40 to play in the first half.

But the Lions quickly struck back, and after a heads-up play by first-year forward Jeff Coby—who got an easy basket after grabbing his own rebound off a missed free throw—Columbia went into the break up 31-30.

The Lions came out strong to start the second half and kept pushing, going up by 12 with less than 10 minutes to go in the game. Despite some pressure from Dartmouth, Columbia maintained a comfortable lead the rest of the way.

“I thought we executed well until about the eight-minute mark, and they brought another little whammy at us,” Smith said. “We hung in there, and made our free throws, and got the W.”

With the win over Dartmouth, the Lions matched last season’s Ivy win total.

Columbia will be back in action against Brown and Yale this weekend.

eli.schultz@columbiaspectator.com | @CUSpecSports

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Men's Basketball

Men's Basketball

2014-02-17

Kiera Wood / Senior Staff Photographer

Charging forward | Junior forward Alex Rosenberg scored a career-best 34 points against Harvard, but his game-winning shot was negated by a charging foul.

ANDREWS: Referees should never decide a game

sports — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:33:38 +0000

On Friday night, Columbia and Harvard played an instant classic in Levien. The Lions played the league leaders tight through the first half, but a Crimson run put the Light Blue at a 12-point disadvantage with just under seven minutes left to play.

Many in the building had given up hope, but junior forward Alex Rosenberg and sophomore guard Maodo Lo put the team on their collective backs. The Lions came roaring back and tied the game, and the sellout crowd stayed on its feet for the final five minutes of regulation, making enough noise to rival a Big East school.

A nifty drive and shot from Lo as time expired clanged off the front and back of the rim to send it into overtime.

Overtime, too, came down to the final shot—with the stands shaking, Rosenberg drove into the lane and banked a 12-foot jumper into the hoop to give the Lions the win with two seconds left to go. The crowd erupted. The Crimson was vanquished.

Or not.

In the commotion, one of the referees began gesticulating wildly. He called an offensive foul on Rosenberg, negating the basket and handing the ball to Harvard. Light Blue head coach Kyle Smith fell from an ecstatic jump of happiness to an incredulous pose, hands on his head in shock. The crowd went nuts, raining chants of “BULL-SHIT” down on the zebras.

The second overtime was just a formality. The Crimson seized the lead and held on for an 88-84 win, and I slotted a new game into the top position of my mental index called “Worst Columbia Losses, 2010-14.” (Unfortunately, it is a very long index.)

I don’t like to blame referees for losses. It takes away from the incredible efforts of the athletes in the game, and to say that a ref was biased throughout the game is almost always false. Referees, first and foremost, are people too.

There is one huge exception, though. The No. 1 rule of refereeing is never to decide a game with a single call—and that’s exactly what happened on Friday night.

Perhaps I have not made it clear what a wretched excuse for a call this was. The replay certainly makes it look like Harvard’s Laurent Rivard is backing up and moving as Rosenberg makes contact with him, which should be enough to make this a defensive blocking foul. Even more absurdly, the officials had called exactly one offensive foul in the game prior to this pivotal moment. The rules as they are written are not always followed exactly in every game, but they should be enforced consistently within the game itself.

Making that call at that point in the game was nothing more than an official deciding to be the center of attention, and deciding that Columbia should not win.

This call affected more than just one victory. Had Rosenberg’s shot counted, Columbia would be just one game behind Harvard today. Instead, the team sits three games back. It’s the difference between Yale holding sole possession of first place in the league or having to share it with the Crimson. The final half of the Ivy League schedule could have been wildly exciting, but instead, Harvard remains the overwhelming favorite.

What I’m going to remember about this game isn’t Alex Rosenberg having the game of his life, putting up an absurd 34 points and coming up with big shot after big shot. It won’t be Maodo Lo putting up his typical 20 points on silky-smooth shooting. Nor will it be Cory Osetkowski playing a solid game in the post after a disappointing pair of games last weekend. And—as much as I want it to—it won’t be the way that the Columbia crowd, often maligned for having basically no idea what to do at a basketball game in terms of cheering or being loud, spent over half an hour on its feet, making noise and giving the Lions a home-court advantage we don’t usually see.

I’m going to remember three guys wearing black-and-white stripes who concluded, like judges in figure skating, that they should decide the winner of this incredible game. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for a Columbia team that deserves better.

Peter Andrews is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. He is a member of Spectator’s editorial board, head manager emeritus of the Columbia University Marching Band, and a sports broadcaster for WKCR. For Pete’s Sake runs biweekly.

sports@columbiaspectator.com | @pfandrews

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Sports Columns

2014-02-17

Kiera Wood / Senior Staff Photographer

Osetkowski overshadowed | The efforts of junior center Cory Osetkowski, who played two strong games for the Lions this weekend, were overshadowed by a questionable call in Friday's matchup against Harvard.