Ragtime January 28, 2008
- Brown: Well fuck you too, MPAA.
- Columbia: “Columbia by all rights ought to be a great, world-renowned institution, yet it continually settles for mere excellence.”
- Cornell: Some financial-aid envy.
- Dartmouth: “Any new chapter of the fraternity must participate in a “Men of Principle” program and sign a pledge that the chapter’s physical plant will be alcohol-free.” John Belushi is spinning in his grave.
- Penn: “It was really high energy, everyone was really excited to welcome the new class,” said College junior and president of Delta Delta Delta Rebecca Feldman. “Each girl had a sister waiting with a poster with her name on it.” OMG YAY!
- Yale: The U.S. Senate wants to fuck Yale up.
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January 28th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
With regards to the Yale article, does anyone else think it’s ridiculous that the government wants to issue a law telling a private institution how much of its money it has to spend, and how to spend it?…
January 28th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Those “private” institutions are necessarily a product of our country’s public political structure and owe their success to the privileges that our public sphere has created for them. (One concrete and trivial example of this is their tax-exempt status.) In return, they can be expected to serve some public interest.
So, no, I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all.
January 28th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Furthermore, all major universities receive large grants from the government to do research. Universities are part of the military industrial complex. The most notable examples are… well, just pick one from the list. MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, etc.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Agreed with Y’08. Universities have a pact with the public; if they aren’t serving the public’s needs than the public ought to know it and be able to carry out the due action from there.
While I hardly think that control of a college’s finances should be turned over to some governmental bureaucrat, I’d certainly appreciate the information being made public.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Agree with TKB. They have tax-exempt status because they are an educational institution - do we next expect the US Senate to tell nonprofit charities how to spend their money?
January 28th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
At y10: Neither does the gov have any obligation to provide giant chunks of money every yr to top research universities. In fact, everyone who posts on this site is a beneficiary of gov grants. If not for these grants, the Ivy League would be crippled and be forced to spend down their own endowments.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
I’d also like to point out that they DO serve the public interest by providing education in the first place… in fact I’m pretty sure the gov’t wouldn’t be giving them money in the first place unless they thought there was some benefit to the public there (this statement does not imply that all instances of gov’t funding imply an expected increase in the public good, but in context of upper education, this is true).
Many of our country’s leading universities predate the country in which they now find themselves. Product of our country’s public political structure, you say?
January 28th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
“Neither does the gov have any obligation to provide giant chunks of money every yr to top research universities”
Oh, I agree completely. But of course the government provides grants because they believe that they benefit from the investment - they have strong relationships with these universities, the US military benefits from a lot of research, and these universities are vehicles of social mobility.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:58 am
@TKB and y10: Yes, these universities serve the public interest by providing education, insofar that this education goes only to the few thousand privileged children who get to go to Y, H, etc. Yet is this proportional at all to the amount of grants received by all these universities? No.
As y10 noted, the relationship between top universities and the gov is a symbiotic one: the gov gives money, the universities provide the research. But I’d argue that this symbiosis is more than a mere business relationship. The Ivies have traditionally been the fountainheads of change, and accordingly the Ivies should embrace this rather than sit back and rub their hands like a bunch of corporate CEO’s. The Ivies could take a very proactive stance on this.
Furthermore, who needs whom more? Is it the gov that needs Y more, or is it Y who needs the gov more? Might I remind you that schools like MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, UChicago are all relatively young schools- yet their endowments have been able to grow substantially even within their short lifetimes, under the aegis of gov research grants. Clearly, if the gov would so desire, it could make its own resources a lot more competitive. Even if you interpret the symbiosis between gov and Y in strictly business terms, the negotiating points tip in the gov’s favor.
Now I am not suggesting that Yale should open its doors to everyone, but surely Yale could do more than to hide its investment plans for vain competition against H (you know this). Its yield for the public interest should be at least proportional to the amount of tax dollars it gets from the public.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Hey man what if all the ivies straight up had a war? Who would win? Or what if like an alliance of princeton and MIT invaded harvard and or yale? Wouldn’t that be tripy?
January 29th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
or trippy
January 29th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
You mean like a physical warfare employing force? I’ve always had this fantasy.
But I think Harvard would win, since it can afford a small army.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
@rufus: We already tried this. It was called gocrosscampus, and Harvard failed miserably. Columbia, miraculously, managed to survive almost to the end. I believe Princeton came out on top, unfortunately.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Columbia survived cos no one cared enough to deal y’all the final blow. You had like one territory for the majority of turns. :P
As for actual physical warfare, while funding is clearly an advantage to Harvard and Yale, my bet would be on Cornell because of size and geographic advantage- no one’s gonna go all the way out there.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
@TKB:
and if they do, they will get lost in the gorges.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
@TKB:
and if they do, they will get lost in the gorges. sorry, had to say that.
January 29th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
It’d come down to Dartmouth and Cornell, no question. With the other six Ivies sandwiched between Philly and Boston, that stretch of coastline would turn into a total shitshow until nobody was left. When all’s said and done, Darmouth and Cornell could just descend from their northern perches and play janitor. That said, I think Yale’s societies could definitely provide a leg up in terms of funding and military connections. What are they for, if not to provide special ops for Old Blue in an Ivy War?
January 29th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Penn students are already battle-hardened veterans of a war zone, and with so many weapons in the surrounding area and the nation’s largest private police force on its payroll, you can’t count out Penn.
Attackers would be weakened before even reaching campus due to the heavily-armed West Philly populace, and in any case, Wharton would find a way to economically choke its opponents into submission.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
“Might I remind you that schools like MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, UChicago are all relatively young schools- yet their endowments have been able to grow substantially even within their short lifetimes, under the aegis of gov research grants.”
.
Had you substituted Johns Hopkins for Chicago, you’d have made a better case. JHU gets more government money than any other school. (The amount is stunning.)
.
But Chicago is an exception: They lag severely on govt grants. Read up: the school is debating starting an engineering school to collect more govt cash. They’ve also been lackadaisical about technology transfer and monetizing patents; again, an area they are working hard at improving. That’s also an area which has generated some of the recent endowment controversy. Top it off with running Argonne and Fermilab (not wildly profitable). But Chicago served the nation well from an early age: without the first controlled nuclear reaction, the Manhattan Project would have not happened.
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Chicago has money for three good reasons: Rockefeller endowed it well from the get-go; the econ and b-school alumni have donated handily; and, much of the work done at Chicago is pen-and-paper theory — which requires less expensive infrastructure.
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That said, taxing endowments is just the latest fad in anti-intellectualism. We have the world’s envy in our educational institutions. So we cut state funding for public schools and propose taxing the private ones? Why don’t we all just turn commie and be honest?
January 29th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Seeing how Columbia recently just invaded a large portion of Harlem, the other Ivies will be sure to ally with the brothaz in the hood.
Actually, Columbia’s layout is interesting. It really is like a city within a city, like a fortress. If we locked all of the campus’s gates, there can be no way in from the outside.
January 29th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Donations to universities are tax deductible, this money goes into an endowment. To maintain its tax-exempt status, a university must conform to certain conditions. In this case paying off at least 5% of its endowment every year.
For example: Yale has been paying off about 3-4%/year. Their rationale (and everyone else’s) is that they are outperforming the market and the percentage they pay taxes into account what their endowment growth should be. Others (Alums, lawmakers, needy students) disagree.
The rationale for why charities have to pay off a certain part of their endowment is this: A tax deductable gift should do the same amount of ‘good’ for the public as tax monies would. If that money were locked up in an endowment, the public would never receive its benefit. S
January 30th, 2008 at 12:34 am
Suppose Yale pays 5% this year on assets of X. Next year, the subprime mess causes a further shitstorm and their assets drop to 0.85*X (unlikely, but not impossible). Will you make them pay 5% of X, 5% of 0.85*X, or some other figure? Remember that Yale has fixed costs and may need to pay more than 5% of 0.85*X (in down years) to meet those fixed costs. Should we account for that possibility? In other words: Do you want Yale to pay 5% on average or minimum? If minimum, don’t you think that might be onerous in a severe downturn?
January 30th, 2008 at 2:53 am
Alums and students disagreeing and vocally trying to advance their cause is one thing. The government getting involved is another altogether. Don’t conflate consumers and regulators.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:10 am
That scenario is why Yale is only paying 3-4% this year, they have a weird formula that calculates exactly how much to pay out every year. In the 70s (with high inflation + stagnant stock market returns) they paid nearly 8%/year.
But because returns have been so high (29%+) for so long, the government and alums are annoyed with how little ‘good’ is being done with the endowment. Both groups (I’m not conflating them) are annoyed. There are bills being considered that would force more of the endowment to be paid out, while alums who have donated are clamoring for more of their donations to be spent. They are doing things like splitting endowed professorships, asking to name additional buildings etc etc
January 30th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Assuming that each Ivy became it’s own warlord state, the winner at the end will be…Cornell
Events:
The first non-aggression pact will be between Columbia and Yale. This will leave Yale free to pursue Harvard to the north and Columbia free to advance on Princeton in the south.
Harvard and Yale will fight it out but it will be in Brown’s Rhode Island territory. Brown and Yale, being ideologically closer in the far liberal sense will form the Yale-Brown alliance versus Harvard.
Harvard, being the egotistical megalomaniacs that they are, will attempt a two front campaign and will invade Dartmouth. Dartmouth will take a page out of Napoleon’s Russian campaign and let Harvard take Dartmouth. Cantab asses will freeze in the mountain cold and the Dartmouth Outdoors club will raid them all the way back to the MA border. And like Russia, Dartmouth will have neither money nor manpower to go beyond their borders.
A divided and weakened Cantab army will then fall to the Yale-Brown alliance.
Cornell, having none of supply ports and harbors available to rivals (Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia) will attempt to set up supply lines for their massive student body through the St. Lawrence seaway. But Canada will get in their way. With no supply lines they will stay put for the time being.
Princeton, despite being wealthy (on a per student basis), has no supply lines with New York falling to Columbia and Philadelphia to Penn. They will become the battlegrounds between Columbia and Penn and will eventually favor Columbia b/c Princeton envies Penn’s basketball team since it reminds them of better times. Together, the Princeton-Columbia alliance will defeat Penn.
Princeton-Columbia will then turn their eyes north towards the Yale-Brown alliance and violate Columbia’s non-aggression pact with Yale due to the diabolical schemes of Princeton, who has always resented that they didn’t matter in the H-Y rivalry. Princeton-Columbia and Yale-Brown will fight it out over the Hudson with each side getting progressively weaker with time. Also note that Brown and Princeton were ravaged as battleground sites previously, so were only able to contribute minutely to this battle
Cornell finally negotiates a supply line for the St. Lawrence with those damn mounties and come storming out of the highlands in superior numbers overtaking a weakened Yale and Columbia and their allies.
Result: Cornell wins
January 30th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Alright, I think I speak for all of us when I say we’re bored and IvyGate needs a new post now.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
The ivy leaguers don’t need the senate to fuck them up your mommy and daddy did a spectacular job of removing your baby killing consciences. Lets all here a big round of applause for the disintegration of the ivy leaguers entirely you prissy little satanic pricks. Such concern about your cash flow to your prissy little institutions creating one trick hate ponies, and little concern for the mass murder, torture, stealing and lying and how you got it all in your resource wars. You’re a murderous lying lot aren’t you. Truth is the enemy in america. No wonder you’re all doped up on anti depressants and anti psychotics you greedy idiotic freaks. Ha, ha , ha Carlos Slim Helu’s sure rich and makes you kindegartners look like fools for legislating our return to kings, and of course satan america in the rear.
How is team sodomy america today ? Did you find some innocent youngster to practice on, an infant perhaps, we all know how american pussies back away from a tough fight. The cult of the media won’t allow me to play with my reindeer games openly and they prefer a pickle jar for me, so I rag on you for the record, and get them too.
Ah poor little satan’s crew too stupid to win the race, and who’s king strategy was it to pollute your own backyard to thousands of feet beneath the surface ? What sort of king leads his country his empire to that suicidal genocide, ? , hmmm, america naturally.
I’m gonna take your little eric prince and tell him a bedtime story before I put him to sleep, pull down his pants , and leave him taped to a pole on Polk Street in San Francisco. I like telling the nursery rhyme about Goldilocks and the Three Bears when I put my opponents to snooze for a while. Is it a deep freeze back East ?
Every word I utter, every fart I make, every word I print, every american Christian’s fake, and the c.i.a. is my bitch. They missed killing me many times and oh how I blabbed and oh how they’re busted bad. In return I saddled them up and rode them hard just the way they like to play. The final is yet to come, a spectacular american exit en masse, bravo, rapture.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
You nazi bastards, your c.i.a. sucks cock but only after the dick has been buried up their ass and left to hang for 28 days, premium aged beef just the way the american intelligence w community likes to take it. How are your murder the messiah, kill the potential Christ plans going ? My guess is y’all get raptured, thank GOD no more america, what a blessing for the rest of the planet, no more america, yahoo, lets all celebrate.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
HAHHAHAHAHA WOW the comment by Just A Thought was far funnier and entertaining than something i’ve read on ivygate for a long time!
haha kudos just-a-thought, whoever u are.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
“Every word I utter, every fart I make, every word I print, every american Christian’s fake, and the c.i.a. is my bitch.” @christianarchisti: Sting called. He wants his song back.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:48 am
ivygate is dead… dead.
January 31st, 2008 at 2:10 am
So…Cornell pretty much doesn’t really matter in the war, then? They don’t really have much involvement. Seems just like real life to me.
February 1st, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Sting is gonna get more than his fucked up little song back and that’s why I used it this way you outsider clueless fuck. How about hide the two litre pop bottle sideways up his ass magic trick ? He earned it the hard way, c.i.a. prerequisite.
February 14th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Nice endorsement of Obama. The guy who will stop the influence peddling in DC is the same guy who had an indicted slumlord partner in buying the Obama mansion on Chicago’s south side, contribute nearly a $100K in campaign contributions that then had to be “donated” to a charity, and after getting the Obamas their $1.6 million manse is reduced to “5 hours of legal work” by the candidate. Endorsing the Empty Suit is certainly in keeping with the IvyGate style of journalism.
February 14th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Nice endorsement of Obama. The guy who will stop the influence peddling in DC is the same guy who had an indicted slumlord partner in buying the Obama mansion on Chicago’s south side, contribute nearly a $100K in campaign contributions that then had to be “donated” to a charity, and after getting the Obamas their $1.6 million manse is reduced to “5 hours of legal work” by the candidate. Endorsing the Empty Suit is certainly in keeping with the IvyGate style of journalism.
February 14th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Nice endorsement of Obama. The guy who will stop the influence peddling in DC is the same guy who had an indicted slumlord partner in buying the Obama mansion on Chicago’s south side, contribute nearly a $100K in campaign contributions that then had to be “donated” to a charity, and after getting the Obamas their $1.6 million manse is reduced to being described as “5 hours of legal work” by the candidate. Endorsing the Empty Suit is certainly in keeping with the IvyGate style of journalism.