NYU Students: We're Not Going Anywhere [WCBS]
Student protesters refuse to leave NYU cafeteria [NYDN]
Live on the Web, the N.Y.U. Occupation [NYT]

What leads kids from urban-suburban/indie music settings to get their SDS on and "take over" a cafeteria with a list of demands? Should we mock them, or pity them? Well, we should mock them, yes.

We are closely following the breaking news at the student-occupied NYU food court, where protesters are fighting for Palestinian solidarity. The most important issues so far: vegan lunches and cigarette breaks. Things are getting tense!

Not to alarm you sheep out there as you go about your bourgeois activities this morning, but you should be aware that that the NYU student center food court has been occupied by revolutionaries!!

The list of Ponzi ponce Bernie Madoff's victims grows ever longer, and ever famouser. Kevin Bacon and his beautiful wife Kyra Sedgwick! And poor, impoverished New York University.

When NYU Ph.D. student Hubert (Hung-Hsien) Chang wasn't busy inventing Google or visiting Disneyland and signing up for Google-related groups on Facebook, he was coming up with lots of crazy ideas. Cross-platform programming language Java? Chang. Open-source office productivity software OpenOffice? Chang. The semantic Web? DHTML? Tim Berners-Lee Chang. All this and more he tossed away to finish his Ph.D. at NYU, which he finally accomplished in late 2002, as he explained in the video. Or 2003, as he explained on his archived homepage, below.

Facebook is going on a 20 university, 5 business school tour of the nation looking for fresh meat. Yesterday's stop was NYU, says a Valleywag spy. "Of course I grabbed some free sandwiches and the best part: FACEBOOK GUM!" Interested? The spy says it "seems like they are extremely interested in programmers that speak multiple languages." Since Facebook gets its users to translate the site for free, we're betting the Facebook recruiter actually meant programmers should know the following languages:

Above, Jay Rosen, former NYU journalism department chair and current faculty member, leaves a mean comment on some story at the Columbia Journalism Review. Hah. Very professional, Jay. Let the J-School War Commence! Our money's on Jay and his merry band of new-media rebels. Those CJR kids are too earnest and "concerned." Click to see the comment! [CJR, hat tip Hunter]

"The city's Economic Development Corporation had been 'pushing' N.Y.U. to look at expanding in Long Island City... However, she said, the university doesn't feel Long Island City is developed enough residentially as of now to be a fitting expansion area for N.Y.U." As of now. Queens residents, lock your doors. [The Villager via Curbed]

Woof! Our plagiarism dog is on the case, sniffing out copying. Journalism students at NYU are launching NYU Local, a "24-hour" campus news blog, and are plagiarism trouble already. An article from the official campus newspaper, Washington Square News, was on their site as a placeholder before pre-launch. But they put one of their writer's bylines onto the article, which has since been removed but is cached here. We hear that the advisor for this rowdy group is NYU Journalism Chairwoman Brooke Kroeger. We'd suggest a shorter leash! Update: the editors of Washington Square News say, "We were in contact with NYULocal's editors about this issue over the weekend. They promptly reassured us that this was a mistake — a leftover placeholder article from when they were designing their site, which has not yet launched. They apologized, [and] removed the article in question... we see no reason to doubt them on this matter and are satisfied with that response."

New York University announced a plan last Friday to save $25 through an administrative hiring freeze and restructuring. While the school announced the plan in the name of efficiency and passing the savings onto the students, a memo from NYU President John Sexton placed the blame squarely on NYU's "high ratio of dreams to resources," also calling out "a world where financial markets are in turmoil, the US economy and currency are weakening, and our elected officials are raising serious questions about higher education." Not to mention that today's generation of high school students has never even heard of Felicity, and the Olsens have been gone for years. Details of the hiring freeze at NYUNews, Sexton's full memo after the jump.

Star talking something Julia Allison recently shared that it wasn't until she was 24 that she first enjoyed the pleasures of a vibrator &mdash "huge mistake, btw." The prompt for this admission: Julia Allison's recent speaking engagement at the NYU "Sextravaganza!" (There is no audience on Earth to whom she will not overshare.) A tipster writes in to say she repeatedly asked the presenter to whip her. After Julia's past brushes and bruises with Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko, we predict she'll be showing her prized welts to any group of six or more by week's end. Full tip after the jump.

NYU GUY: "Hey guys, STA Travel. That's the travel agency they use in 'The Real World.'" NYU GIRL: "This is the real world."

Caroline is an NYU film student currently working on her final project. Her movie is called Phantom Vibrations and Caroline refers to it as "a freestyle mumblecore piece." It seems to be mostly about her roommate drinking beer. All shot on expensive, precious 35mm. Roving videographer Alex Goldberg went over to meet the future of independent film/food service.

(Full disclosure: I actually dropped out of NYU's Tisch School of the Performing Arts, where I was studying playwriting and screenwriting until I realized no one paid for the former and, as pictured above, no one thought they needed the latter. If I'd followed my dreams, though, I might be on strike right now. Sigh...)

ABC7, our favorite source for ridiculously overblown breaking stories, actually did wait until The View ended today before reporting that MANHOLE FIRES had KNOCKED OUT POWER in Greenwich Village, INCLUDING NYU. Which means like one law school dorm and a bodega on 3rd Street. PANIC! Is it terrorism? Sabotage from underpaid Indian foundry workers? Too soon to know but we say YES!

Vegan temple of soy mediocrity Zen Palate on Union Square is being replaced by a Jeffrey Chodorow backed Fatty Crab offshoot. NYU kids living in Carlyle, U-Hall and the Palladium will have to find some other place to get gooey overly sweet chunks of seitan to quench their munchies after smoking copious amounts of pot even though what they really want is a cheeseburger from Veselka but this cute hippie girl from Bethesda, MD who they're trying to get with and who is the whole reason they're smoking pot in the first place—though it makes them horribly paranoid and they have a ConWest paper due tomorrow—is, duh, also a vegan. [NYT]

The good news is that N.Y.U. students know what they're supposed to say to a pollster when discussing the importance of their civic duty to vote. The bad news is they don't give an actual Hootie McHooters about, you know, voting. In a J-school poll of 3,000 N.Y.U. students, two-thirds of them said they'd trade their say in the nation's electoral process for a year's tuition ($45K); 20% of them would hand in their representation for an iPod touch ($299) and half would give up their vote permanently for $1 million.

N.Y.U. has more students studying abroad than any other U.S. college or university, says the Institute of International Education in a new study. Well, sure. Seems like a far more sensible option than the alternative.

Yet another student at N.Y.U. has killed himself, this time in a Water Street dorm. The school has abided by the family's request not to send out a notification email to the entire university in order to protect their privacy, but apparently, such sensitivity does not apply to speaking to the school's newspaper, which university spokesperson John Beckman, who may or may not be paid some sort of suicide-and-pot-princess overtime, did quite readily.