NYU Alumni Magazine: Heard on Campus

heard on campus

“You can have all the good intentions in the world, you can even liberate a people, and they’re still going to feel violated if they’re not in control of their own destiny.”

—Harvard professor Samantha Power during a lecture for the SCPS Center for Global Affairs

“These [paparazzi clips] are just indie films made by run–and–gun shooters, and the stars are giving away their performances for free. The best have a total plot arc: Britney shaving her head. John Cassavetes couldn’t have come up with a better climactic scene than that.”

—Virginia Heffernan, New York Times Magazine columnist and panelist for “The Britney Show: The Rise of the 24/7 Celebrity News Cycle,” a forum co–sponsored by The Atlantic and the Department of Journalism

“Sir, you realize with your first hair–raising e–mail you gave me more material for my speeches. And if giving those speeches makes me a prostitute, then doesn’t giving me material for them make you my pimp?”

—author Irshad Manji, in an NYU Women’s Initiative address, lambasting a critic who called her a “whore” for giving speeches in what he considered inappropriate dress for a muslim woman. manji is director of the Moral Courage Project at Wagner’s Research Center for Leadership in Action.

“The window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind, and it’s time it be fully opened and lead to a peace based on multinational order.”

—Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix delivering the lecture “Time for a Revival of Disarmament?” sponsored by the Center on International Cooperation