Boldly we Ivy Leaguers stride forth into the 2010s, leaving in our dust the dregs of this lame, lame year. Pause, though, to recall all those things that befell the Ivy League that we’re hopefully leaving in 2009 — and some good things, too! But when the fact that Amy Gutmann hasn’t found any time for impromptu photoshoots for the third year running is a good thing, we know we’re in trouble.

Yalies were told to repent for their (sexual, mainly!) sins, but it was the staffers of the Crimson who seemed naughtier to us. Cornell’s fiendish ticklers were the naughtiest of all! Hopefully they learn what “off-the-record GChat” means in 2k10. The raunchy Princetonians—now, you know, having nightly orgies in their dirty mixed-gender rooms—are the Cornelians’ spiritual heirs. Worst of all, their coed rooms are unaffiliated with eating clubs.

After the jump, big celebrity scoops of 2009, whose very “bigness” depends on how much you love Harry Potter films or voting Democratic.

In fame and the game news, Emma Watson went to Brown and immediately broke free of the celebrity chains that so constrained her. By performing impromptu yoga on Providence lawns.

Barack Obama, Columbia ’83 and apparently more memorably Harvard Law ’91, was inaugurated President—breaking the Yalie streak in the Oval Office beginning just after Reagan (who didn’t need no stinking Ivy League).

One of Obama’s first teapot-tempests was the Henry Louis Gates imbroglio. If only the Cambridge police were as good at protecting Harvard students from POISONED! COFFEE!! as they were at protecting homes from their own residents and at taking umbrage at the President. But, um, maybe they’re not the most racially tone-deaf of the year.

Obama also had to deal with a sleepyhead NEC director in the form of Larry Summers who left Harvard in worse shape than he found it, despite knowing economic theory better than your professors.

In a tacit admission of status anxiety over Harvard’s prestigious law professor Laurence Tribe—or, just a sign that bitches are bored—Princeton freshman girls started a “tribe” of their own! Not to go back to the “eating club” well, but you couldn’t just wait until after bicker to exclude people, ladies? It’s no wonder all the Princeton ladies were so bored: Princeton, New Jersey, is no Ithaca. I read it in USA Today, the official newspaper of staying in unfamiliar hotels, so they know travel.

Finally, Meghan McCain, CC ‘Post Grad, never had a post written about her on IvyGate this year, though she was mentioned a scanty one time. So we feel like we should honor her non-stop quest for attention in a year where she had no reason, politically or aesthetically, to exist publicly.

No, don’t look at her, okay look at her but talk about her IDEAS, okay, here’s an incisive political commentary on Whoopi Goldberg, xoxo lylas!!!!

Meghan, your Twitter—where you lambaste opponents for perceived slights and make sure to publicize exposure you’re “embarrassed” about—is a glimpse into the shrewdest Realpolitik mind since Kissinger’s. You will either end up Queen of New America, post-apocalypse, or in Oprah’s seat, post-2011.

Meghan, you are the pinnacle of Ivy League attention whoring to which all the rank amateurs in this post (okay, maybe not Obama) aspire. You lead the Tribe. You are this reporter’s Woman of the Year (unless Emma Watson did something interesting in the waning hours of Dec. 31 that we just haven’t found out yet).

How sad! Keep sending us tips, and see y’all in MMX!!