Soon after IvyGate published the extraordinary email exchange between Margherita Viggiano, a Yale graduate student and teaching fellow in Alexander Nemerov’s art history lecture, and Edward Barnaby, the Graduate School dean who dismissed her, Viggiano posted (on the same blog we found her correspondence with Barnaby) what appears to be her entire, 53,000-word doctoral thesis, entitled “Shakespeare and Dante: Demonic Agency as Literary Theory”.

Much like the conspiracy-laden handout she distributed to undergraduates on Tuesday, Viggiano’s thesis faults the Freemasons—the fraternal organization and subject of several airport thrillers—for various corruptions of power. This time is a little different, though. Viggiano, a dramatically devout Catholic, forcefully argues that something called “Satanic Freemasonry” has infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church and contrives to ruin its reputation by arranging for priests to sexually abuse children.

It’s unclear whether Yale has yet accepted Viggiano’s thesis; we’ve emailed Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature for comment, and will update if we hear back.

Referring to an Italian woman who had been “demonically possessed” and the Church’s efforts to save her, Viggiano writes:

Her case is so exceptional, and the reasons of her continuing sufferings so disturbing, that one wonders why the Church hierarchy in Rome did not publicly intervene to denounce the phenomenon of Satanism in the Catholic Church. The crime of her cursing happened in Italy, performed by Italian fallen priests: therefore, it would have been logical for the Vatican, in Rome, to start a formal investigation into Satanism, looking for the causes that drive ordained priests to renegade God, renounce eternal life, and embrace the cult of Satan instead. If the hierarchy had done so, other scandalous events such as the repeated cases of pedophilia would have been better understood – and perhaps avoided – in light of the infiltration of Freemasonic elements in the Church, with an aim to discrediting the Church in the eyes of the world. As we will see in the section Freemasonry and Satanism, the abuse of children is completely in line with the ‘requirements’ of the church of Satan for its adepts. The defilement and, possibly, the ultimate sacrifice of an innocent – and children of course represent The Innocent, par excellence – is Satan’s attempt to ape the Passion of Jesus, to repeat it for his own glory and the damnation of the priests performing it. [clxxiv]

The endnote to which “[clxxiv]” refers is, well, you’ll have to see for yourself, after the jump. (Warning: it’s disturbing.) Also: a PDF file of Viggiano’s thesis, in case she deletes it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Harvard: we get it. You hate Harvard. But, at this point, it feels a tad bit old when professional illusionist Mitt Romney complains about Harvard’s “faculty lounge”, or aggrieved alumna Kaya Williams bleats about having to discuss Plato, or Canadian performance artist Misha Glouberman whines about living in a dorm. Because, come on.

Can we move on? Maybe let others complain about Harvard, or other things? (Like Yale professors, about not being able to talk to plumbers?)

We ask because the latest barrel of Harvard haterade, supplied this time by Nation intern and Harvard sophomore Sandra Y.L. Korn (pictured), isn’t another screed against Harvard’s elitism or intellectualism or insularity. It’s complaining about Harvard being Harvard, or something:

Why do so many Harvard graduates work in finance? Most students contend that they need the assured income of a finance job to justify their expensive Ivy League degrees or support their families. For some, this may be true. However, in reality, finance may often simply be an easy career choice for undecided students. Ivy League universities have institutionalized the culture that makes finance jobs so ubiquitous among graduates.

In a nut shell: Korn’s beef with Harvard is that she goes to college with future inhabitants of Greenwich, Connecticut.  Read the rest of this entry »

Last fall the national press fell in love with Patrick Witt, a Yale quarterback, and NFL hopeful, who gave up his finalist interview for a Rhodes scholarship so he could play in the Harvard-Yale game.

Now the New York Times reports that, in fact, Witt didn’t turn down the interview of his own accord: the Rhodes committee suspended his candidacy and cancelled his interview after someone (who was not a Yale official) informed it that Witt had been accused of sexual assault in September.

It’s not clear whether the Yale official who initially approved Witt to apply for the Rhodes knew about the sexual assault incident, for which Witt went through an informal disciplinary process (and seemingly faced no consequences?) — but it’s likely he did. Interesting factoid: Witt was a member of DKE, the Yale frat that made really horrible headlines for sexual harrassment a few years ago. So this is very ugly for Yale.

Witt is reportedly no longer enrolled at Yale (?) but is still finishing his thesis? Unclear.

But, wait. That the story was broken by the Times probably strikes you as odd; the Yale Daily News — second best collegiate paper in the land – is normally all over these types of scandals like white on rice. In fact, that might be the most amazing angle of this sorry story: Former YDN opinion editor (and IG editor emeritus) Alex Klein reports that the News had known about Witt’s Rhodes woes since as early as November, but the paper’s editor in chief, Max de La Bruyere, elected to sit on the story. We reached out to the News — asking “WTF???” — but haven’t yet heard back.

And, one last quick and relevant reminder: Witt’s football coach resigned in December after it was exposed that he lied about having been a Rhodes scholar finalist.

The Ivy League sex column is a lot like the Ivy League in general: an opportunity to brag about oneself and boss others around. Take Cornell’s newest columnist—a sex columnist—who now writes a Daily Sun column about having sex in middle school, high school, and college, with an inscrutable potpourri of late-90’s lingo and Puritan euphemism:

The choreography was becoming natural: This hand here, that hand there, this happens now, this feels good for me, that feels good for him, fun, fun, tra la la, aaaaand finish! Easy. Familiar. Repeat.

Later:

So that was it. I did lesbian sex! And while I am by no means an expert, I am proud of the progress I have made. I’ll leave the strap-on saga for a later date, as I am not sure that many other experimenters will venture that far.

Haha! Strap-on. She said strap-on! Guys, look. Strap-on. Meanwhile, at the the newly Sex Week-less Yale, Maria Yagoda (pictured) insists that all men are really bad at sex, so there.  Read the rest of this entry »

The day before Yale’s Edward Barnaby fired Margherita Viggiano—the graduate student and art-history T.A. who criticized her classmate for discussing the Virgin Mary’s “boobs”—a number of undergraduates who were enrolled in the famous art history lecture discovered that she had uploaded to the course’s server a long, bizarre PDF file about Yale’s art collection.

One of those students provided IvyGate with a copy of the PDF file. He tells us:

[The PDF] was visible to all the students. From what I’ve heard, [Viggiano] also sent out threatening emails to many of the other TAs, mostly relating to her Catholic faith and how she felt oppressed by Yale College. The “handout” contains lots of strange things about mysticism, Satanism, Freemasons, and just general insults to the University, including calling on students to sue for being taught secular lies. She also asserts that Yale has some kind of mafia connections.

He’s not joking. In a series of bracketed comments sprinkled throughout five pages of a book excerpt (taken from a history of Yale’s Art Gallery), Viggiano accuses her employer of, among other things, colluding with a clandestine network of Freemasons; arranging art with “satanic symbolism” in order to corrupt undergraduate students; organizing slander against various individuals; and being, in Viggiano’s wording, “a new Leviathan, the New-England sea-monster.”

A fifth-year graduate student in comparative literature, Viggiano openly doubts Yale’s integrity, frequently intimating that sinister forces steer decisions supposedly made by its administration. A sampling:

“Pact with the Devil”

Jarves had expected to sell the pictures individually in order to raise the necessary funds, but the day before the auction [typical Yale style] he learned that the College would only permit the sale of the collection en bloc [they had no right to do so, but they wanted to buy the collection for nothing]. Jarves was devastated [see what happens when you enter a pact with the devil].

“Freemason secret-societies”

The College bid $22, 000, and no further bids being offered, the collection was sold to Yale [that’s how they do it.] There appear to have been several reasons why no one bid against Yale for the collection [Freemasonic secret-societies have an internal system to relay information].

We’ve reached out to Viggiano for comment, re: the handout, but haven’t yet received a response. So much more (plus a copy of the original PDF file) after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Around noon on Wednesday, the Assistant Dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences removed a fifth-year comparative literature graduate student named Margherita Viggiano (pictured) from her teaching duties in Professor Alexander Nemerov’s crazy-popular art history course. Apparently Viggiano wasn’t getting along with other teaching fellows, whom Viggiano told in an email on Monday that she “[has] been mobbed and discriminated against in spite of the paradoxical fact that [she] was the only critic to share the artists’ inner frame of reference: Catholicism.”

In response, Viggiano fired off several essay-length emails in which she calls Edward Barnaby, the Assistant Dean and English professor, a “corrupted hypocrite”; “the opposite of professionalism”; “an accomplice of academic dishonesty”; and accuses Barnaby of discriminating against her for being a Catholic woman. (Among many, many other things.)

Some time after sending her last email at 3:49 PM, Viggiano posted her exchange with Barnaby on one of her blogs. Around 9:30 PM, Viggiano mysteriously deleted it—but not before IvyGate saved the whole thing.

Called “A warning to future generations of students,” Viggiano’s exchange with Barnaby reveals the professional antagonism, bitter jealousy, and religious tension—real or imagined—between a devout Catholic and the rest of Yale University. Eat your heart out, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Full text of the emails, after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

Brown alumnus and football legend Joe Paterno ’50 died on Sunday from complications related to lung cancer. Though primarily a fixture of Pennsylvania State University, Paterno started out as a bookish, isolated undergraduate at Brown, where he served as quarterback for the Bears and graduated with a degree in English. JoePa’s successful football program at Penn State bolstered his reputation as a Ivy League-educated, Virgil-quoting scholar-coach, but he never forgot his experience at Brown, and spent his career trying to catch up to the WASP society that excluded him.

Distinguished by Italian features and a thick accent, Paterno was quickly sorted out of Brown’s social scene. Some fifty years later, as Frank Fitzpatrick details in his 2005 biography of Paterno, the nationally recognized football coach still remembered the slight:

“I walked into a calm sea of blue blazers, sharkskin suits, and Harris Tweeds,” [Paterno] later wrote, “I knew I had blown something when all those cool-eyed faces turned toward me and my sweater, slowly, so as not to tip and spill their stemmed glasses that seemed to hold nothing but clear water, except for an olive in each. I heard somebody whisper, ‘How did that dago get invited?’ . . .”

His exclusion from Brown’s patrician society was apparently so wounding that Paterno almost let his residual anger steer his coaching career. An offer from owner Billy Sullivan to train the New England Patriots for 1.4 million dollars—enough to buy some WASP respectability—tempted Paterno to defect from Happy Valley:

The prospect of owning a vacation home somewhere along that sixty-five-mile-long, hook-shaped sliver of sand where the New England Brahmins had summered forever held a powerful allure . . .

That’s why Sullivan tempted him so. It wasn’t just the salary he knew he could demand. Or the piece of the team he’d been promised. It was all that being wealthy in New England implied. Paterno had grown up living in rented homes. Now he could own not just a home, but the Cape Cod retreat that ‘every rich Yankee kid I’d met at Brown assumed was coming to him, the same as inheriting his dad’s club membership.’

That was 1972. He wound up staying. After taking Penn State’s trifling salary (some 100,000 dollars), Paterno was confirmed as a hero of small-time sports. The success of his Nittany Lions would be the only match for Paterno’s celebrity.

Predictably, his newfound status assuaged his resentment toward his Brown classmates. “As his prominence grew,” Fitzpatrick writes, “old classmates began to contact him or bring their children and grandchildren to visit him in State College. The coach suddenly became an active and involved alumnus.”

By the time graduate assistant Mike McQueary reported Jerry Sandusky in 2002, Paterno had accumulated a treasure chest of recognitions from his alma mater:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, The Dartmouth leaked the preliminary draft of a column—published here by Dartblog’s Joseph Asch, whom Gawker linked to—in which former Dartmouth student and Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother Andrew Lohse ’12 alleges to have been brutally hazed during his pledgeship at SAE. According to Asch, Lohse’s column is now circulating among Dartmouth’s Greek community and the school’s administration, both of which are sharpening their letters in response. Here are the money quotes:

Among my many experiences as a fraternity pledge, I was: forced to swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen, and rotten food products;forced to eat an omelet made of vomit; forced to chug cups of vinegar until I was afraid that I would vomit blood like one of my fellow pledges did; forced to inhale nitrous oxide; degraded psychologically on a daily basis; forced to drink beers poured down a fellow pledge’s ass crack; vomited on regularly, and encouraged to vomit on others.

As a pledge, I ceased to be a human being; instead, I became a “whale shit”. In the process, I, my fellow pledges, and all pledges since, have been trained to treat Dartmouth women with about the same respect with which we treated ourselves: none.

Lohse also alleges that Dartmouth’s president has ignored Lohse’s complaints about Dartmouth’s “pervasive hazing, substance abuse, and sexual assault culture” despite his office’s informal acknowledgement of “the endemic physical and psychological abuse culture that occupies the heart of Dartmouth’s Greek-life community”:

The administration is fully aware of what goes in in our basements; I know this because I have had frank conversations with several high-level administrators. This column should not be a surprise to Dr. Kim, since it was with one of his Vice Presidents and one of his Deans with whom I initially met and shared the troubling, graphic story of my experience as a Dartmouth man, replete with pictures, text, video, and dates, times, and places of future acts of hazing. This Vice President vowed that the information I provided him would cross Dr. Kim’s desk, and assured me that something would be done about it. Either it did not, or the administration realized that to act would require a courage they lacked – courage that is required of all college administrations under New Hampshire state law.

It’s going to be a unmitigated clusterfuck in the Upper Valley until next week at least. Oh, but: “It goes without saying,” says Joe Asch, “that one of The D/administration’s tactics will be a direct ad hominem attack on Lohse.” What could Asch be suggesting?! Read the rest of this entry »

So, Mitt Romney, huh? While Mittens continues to alienate pretty much everyone with his proletarian LARPing and overall blasé demeanor, elements of the GOP are still holding out hope that there could be a late-entry candidate to replace him. (We’re going to assume that Newt bursts like an overripe pumpkin before the Florida vote.)  Who, though? Right now—indeed, at this very moment—those mysterious Establishment Republicans are probably wheedling Princeton alumnus, Governor of Indiana, and total stoner Mitch Daniels ’71.

Tonight, Daniels will deliver the GOP response to Obama’s State of the Union address. The occasion raises vital questions. Like: who is Mitch Daniels? What eating club did he eat at? Which and how many drugs was he on? Here’s your IvyGate Cheat Sheet Thing©, The Mitch Daniels Edition:

Princeton

• Woodrow Wilson ‘71, then Georgetown Law ’79 (campaign website)
• Member of Charter Club, which uses sign-in (Daily Prince)
• “Active in the campus antiwar movement” (Ibid.)
• Member of Princeton’s College Republicans (Ibid.)
• Vietnam: Daniels “legally deferred his eligibility while in college and after graduation his draft number, 147, was high enough that he was not called.” (Republic Candidates)

Drugs

• “Daniels was arrested, indicted and convicted on charges of drug use as an undergraduate in May 1970”. (Daily Prince)
• Which drugs? Weed, LSD, and unidentified pharmaceuticals. (Ibid.)
• How much weed? Two shoeboxes full of weed. (Ibid.)
• Drugs were an “unfortunate confluence of my wild oats period and America’s libertine apogee.” (Ibid, Washington Post)
• What did Daniels get? A night in jail and a $350 fine. (Ibid.)
• Was that normal? Ha, no.“Six months after [Daniels’s] arrest, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided a case involving an 18-year-old who was caught with a tiny amount of pot (clearly just for personal use) and got a sentence of two to three years in prison. (Reason.com.)

Miscellaneous

• Favorite color: blue (VoteSmart profile)
• Governor of Indiana since 2004
• Senior advisor to Ronald Reagan
• Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush
• His marriage is a Jonathan Franzen novel (Republican Candidates)
• Has a personal cheerleading section led by William Kristol, Harvardian and Weekly Standard editor/founder (The Weekly Standard)
• Slight resemblance to William F. Buckley, Jr., he of God and Man at Yale fame, maybe? Yes? No? Come on, it’s obvious.

But will he run for President?

• “For a Republican hero to ride in on a white horse, it would take a scenario that verges on political science fiction.” (TPM)

Bulletin! Cornell frat TKE has been officially disavowed by the university until at least 2015, reports the Daily Sun. Was anyone expecting otherwise? No. Nobody was expecting otherwise.

Interesting tidbit: In the last 12 years, TKE has turned up in just three Sun headlines:

• April 27, 2011: Sixteen Former SAE Pledges Plan to Join TKE
• January 5, 2012: After Hospitalization, TKE May Lose Recognition
• January 19, 2012: TKE Will Lose Recognition After Reported Hospitalization

After this rather steep dramatic arc comes a masterstroke of p.r. from TKE national (bolding ours):

Tom McAninch, TKE’s national spokesperson, said that the TKE brothers were not to blame for the hospitalization. McAninch said the freshman arrived at the event intoxicated and “was immediately escorted away from the function when [the TKE brothers] noticed he was intoxicated.”

“If anything, they should be commended for their actions,” McAninch said. “There’s no connection between [TKE] and the individual going to the hospital. Aside from him showing up at a recruitment event, there’s no connection there.”

Yes, TKE didn’t have anything to do with a hammered freshman going to the hospital. That’s exactly what Cornell says is the whole problem! From the Sun:

“The board believes the members of TKE had an obligation to seek medical assistance for the freshman student, and while [the TKE brothers] claim he was ‘handed off’ to his roommate, it was insufficient action considering the risk to his health at that time,” the memo states.

It’s pretty breathtaking that the inaction of TKE (D.B.A. a wholly owned subsidiary of SAE) obliges a professional flack to praise a total lack of concern for others as some kind of virtue. Outside of Greektown, that’s just called being a jerk.