Prezbo Vs. the Prof.(The Talk of the Town)(Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Lee Bollinger)

When Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, announced that the school would host a forum featuring President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, the brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha decided to make a sign. "So we pitched around some ideas," one of them said last week, sitting on the stoop of the fraternity house, across the street from Alfred Lerner Hall, where Ahmadinejad had just appeared. A few suggestions seemed off-key: "Come have a beer," "Heidi and Spencer are the real issue," "Bollinger, you really screwed the pooch on this one." The result of their brainstorming session was a bedsheet, draped between two third-story windows and emblazoned with the words "Ahmadinejad is NOT a baller."

Joshua Banker, the fraternity's secretary, was skeptical about Ahmadinejad's performance in the debate. "He emphasized intellectual ideals, but he didn't answer the questions at all," he said. "He kept trying to connect with the university." Banker had a point. A strange facet of the encounter was the way that both participants insisted they were merely humble scholars, shying away, in their rhetoric, from the reaches of geopolitical statecraft in favor of the campus-bound particulars of academe.

Outside, in the Indian-summer brightness, students prepared to watch the proceedings on a Jumbotron. "Need a student to talk to?" Rocky Fishman, in his first year at the business school, asked a reporter. Sheena Shirakhon, a senior, wore a silver bikini top on which she'd written "No" (left breast) "War" (other side). As she was explaining a potential thesis topic, one of her friends interrupted: "They're taking pictures of your butt." (The remainder of Shirakhon's message--"on Iran"--was printed on her gym shorts.)

Skipping class to attend the forum wasn't a problem. Anne Prescott, who teaches Shakespeare I at Barnard, wrote in an e-mail to her students, "Do your best to come but also follow your conscience. Remember, I was here in 1968 and can go with the flow, although I'm not sure that flower power, as we then called it, would mean much to the President of Iran."

As the auditorium filled, Austin Lawrence sat near the stage, reading Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics." He introduced Armin Rosen, an editor of Bwog.net, the online arm of an undergraduate magazine. "This morning, I saw a phalanx of Secret Service agents eating breakfast in Cafe 212," Rosen said.

Jessica Cohen, Bwog's publisher, jumped in: "The College Republicans, probably knowing that they'd be targeted for TV time, are ...