Oswaldo Payá

Columbia University, at its 2006 Commencement held yesterday, awarded an honorary doctorate degree to Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, organiser of the Varela Project, a Christian non-violent movement seeking the liberation of Cuba.

Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger mentioned Castro’s refusal to allow Osvaldo Payá to travel to New York to receive the award, and read the citation:

I am supposed to have the duty of presenting Oswaldo Payá, to whom the Trustees have awarded an honorary doctor of laws. Unfortunately, his chair here is empty. Mr. Payá could not join us on this occasion because the Government of Cuba has not granted him an exit visa to be here. We were prepared to confer the degree, but Mr. Payá has written us to ask that Columbia’s leadership allow him to receive the degree in person when he is free to travel. We all look forward to that day. For the present, this is what we would have read to you about him:

Engineer, journalist, activist, tireless campaigner for human rights and advocate for the people of Cuba, you represent the aspirations of millions around the world yearning for freedom and democracy. Based on the Cuban constitution itself, your Varela Project—a peaceful civic initiative to gather signatures across Cuba for the establishment of a free and democratic citizenry — is a model of civic activism. At great personal sacrifice and despite nearly constant surveillance and harassment, you have remained committed to nonviolent dissidence and political change. You embody a life of principle in practice and we are proud to celebrate your extraordinary dedication to peaceful, democratic values by conferring on you the degree of doctor of laws, honoris causa.

The New York Sun has discovered a recent undergraduate fad spreading from Yale (& Brown?) to Columbia: Naked Parties.

Columbia undergraduates are staging parties with one basic ground rule – all guests must part with their clothes upon arrival. The invitation circulating around Morningside Heights bans three additional items: cameras, masks, and “spikey things.”.. A student who attended the party in the spring, Richard Lipkin, said about 80 to 100 naked people – including a fair number of law and business school students – were concentrated in one apartment. Clothes were dumped near the entrance. Women slightly outnumbered men, and people were generally – if not exclusively – good looking, the type who are often more willing to flout culture’s restrictions on nudity.

Mr. Lipkin said he had no recollection of the music that was played.

“It was surprisingly comfortable,” he said. “Most of the people were quite comfortable. Everyone was pretty mature about it. I don’t think anything inappropriate went on. … People were definitely networking, but there wasn’t anything bad going on.”

A novel published last March by recent Yale graduate Natalie Krinsky (Timothy Dwight, 2004) features an account of her fictionalized heroine attending one.