Today, we belatedly return to the story of Mohammad Usman, the former Dartmouth student who pled guilty two weeks ago to defrauding the College of over $18,000. Usman’s fabrication of aid and grants carries a maximum of fifteen years in jail. (He’ll serve much less, if any).

We bring him up now for two reasons. First, what’s the deal?? Who is this budding con artist? Dish, y’all. Second, a tipster pointed out, well, who he is: no stranger to publicity, Usman spent his sophomore fall as the only boy at Wellesley. A Dartmouth administrator told him his plan to transfer to the all-female institution for a semester was “impossible,” but already Usman was no man to be held back by mere rules.

I believe the word is chutzpah. The Boston Globe wondered, why go snorkeling in estrogen? To live the liberal-arts ideal of “experiencing a wide variety of things.” Well, if you insist, he’ll cop to being “very attracted to intelligent women.” All that, and some MASSIVE foreshadowing: “It's important to me to get the most of my 50 Gs.”

(Note that when he spoke to the Globe, Usman entered Breastchester single. Interviewed later by Cornell’s Kitsch, his story flipped---a pre-existing “relationship ended while he was still at Wellesley.” Human; all too human.)

The Wellesley coup made Usman a “folk hero” among his friends, and that was before he tried to scam Dartmouth.  You have to be impressed by the pair on this kid, if nothing else. As Nietzsche said, “One is punished most for one’s virtues.” Tell us more about this Icarus of thinking outside all the wrong boxes (well...). You have to hope the bilking wasn’t motivated by the recession, which obviously isn’t real.

• Brown: Incoming Dartmouth president wants to bring to Hanover "the same inspiration I found here." Fuck that shit! In the most impartial possible way.
• Columbia: "Even last semester I drank every day." Every SINGLE day?! If only Belushi could've lived to play you.
• Cornell: "I'm talking about pirates versus ninjas." Whoa, okay, hear me out: kittens, Impact font, bad grammar. Are we too visionary?
• Dartmouth: Remember how OLD the Ivies are, besides Cornell? Like, England's idea.
• Harvard: Rolling Stone publisher insists print still lives, loves the Eagles.
• Penn: Art club president "calm in the face of the squirrel theft." At last, "what public art is all about:" defacement, failure.
• Penn: Prez Gutmann: "We just don't have the money." Enough PR doubletalk!
• Princeton: Those spooky, seemingly-parodic gay-hate ads making the rounds---Princeton prof.
• Yale: Rhythm method?

A Princeton cop, perhaps bored with patrolling kids too concerned with their “futures” to make his job necessary, got himself in trouble. The charge:

[H]e provided alcohol to teenagers and played drinking games with them at a party he attended with a 14-year-old boy* in upstate New York in October 2007.

Officer Garrett Brown claims he nursed a drink and bounced. Funny—cops hate when you say that. Better to be honest, especially when there’s “a photograph showing Brown sitting at a table with teens and holding multiple bottles of beer.” (Double fisting!!! You go, sir!) But the real nightstick in Brown’s side is Martha Gates, the host of the party. Presumably by way of saving her own ass—she plead guilty to “unspecified misdemeanor charges”—Gates testified against Brown, even going so far as to claim that he “chewed tobacco with the six teens present at the party.”

Leaving aside how pathetic a party “six teens” is, Gates herself may be the future star of this case. Attempting to discredit her testimony, Brown’s attorney pointed to “her former gang affiliation and her severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.” You have to admit, she was a party waiting to happen.

*I know, right? The article doesn’t mention him again, so you’ll know when we do.

The cop’s fate and Harvard police behaving (not quite as) badly, after the jump.

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The D’s peerless police blotter is back for spring in its usual trifoliate glory: animals, townies, and reckless intoxication.

Did you know there are BEARS in Hanover? They ate someone’s bird feeder, presumably jealous of human kindness toward animals that can’t eat us. Inexplicably, the woman “claimed that the bears had just come out of hibernation.” Are you sure? God, she must be an explainer. Worse than man hands, promise.

Elsewhere, a female Dartmouth student lost a tooth at a party “after she fell face first onto the concrete floor.” Not charged with anything because she’s of age, the young woman can only wonder why the irony-obsessed god of mishap chose to punish her: she lost the tooth at Heorot, the hockey frat. Imitation is flattery, boys.

After the jump: pizza, existential confusion, and the full blotter.

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Economics professor Jeffrey Miron wants to buy black tar heroin, legally. Now. In a powerfully argued CNN editorial, Dr. Miron breaks down how making drugs--all drugs--legal and regulated would solve war, cancer, taxes, government corruption, racial profiling, AIDS and, presumably, difficult-to-open jars.

The last time we checked in with Crimson druglust it was just blow for the good of science. This time, the good Harvard prof is reading the blood on the wall, and he does not mince words: legalization is "the only way to reduce violence." Miron's hook is the horrifying Mexican drug wars--our thank-you gift for taking the bad jobs we need back now, please--but his real target is the U.S. government's "puritanical policies" and "draconian [...] enforcement."

Miron may be gilding your stoner ex-roommate's opinions with vocabulary and rhetoric, but he's still completely right, right? If we'd lost the war on drugs any more emphatically we'd call it Vietnam Cubed, but Congress is dedicated to bogarting our chemical fun. That said, considerable evidence suggests that, eventually, all the lame Americans who vote for lame Americans who hate weed will die (and even now, there may be hope).

After all, drugs are a personal, almost philosophical choice, and they feel totally great at the time--like cutting. The professor calls it the "victimless nature of this so-called crime." Who's worse off if The Man condones methadone Mondays, other than everyone who cares about you?

Dr. Miron says it best: "Obeying the law is for suckers."

Recent Dartmouth graduate and current investment banker Ursula Grisham published a piece in the latest '08 Class newsletter that is unconsciously emblematic of the Ivy League’s blithe, proud role in this recession.

The letter, a warm smile towards the mirror, recounts Grisham's time as an investment banker in Europe. Reveling in her “ambitious, if not whimsical” career choice, she delves into the “aesthetic” dimensions of her experience—thus running like hell from every imaginable real-people consequence of having played house with the global financial system.

After comparing the walk home from her bank to walking home from a frat party, she pulls the blinders tighter:

“One could argue that if there ever were a good time to be in finance, it's now. There's no way to learn like being thrown into the middle of a raging storm.”

And the ideal of the liberal arts turned over in its grave. So as not to totally berate Ms. Grisham, there's a pretty well documented (and perhaps problematic) trend in the appeals of an Ivy-fueled finance career. As so many decorated coeds haven't learned in the career services office, i-banking on the brink is not about the welfare of billions but about massaging one's skill set into greater earning potential. Ivy Leaguers are among the only people at no risk of real hardship these days, and here we are, looking for the benefit.

What benefit? Check after the jump. It involves cash and Sarah Palin.

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Tonight, the audience of a free student showing of Watchmen in Cambridge erupted in applause at a line that Nixon actually sort of did deliver:

"Let's see those bastards at Harvard figure a way out of that one."

Oh crap, it's coming true. The movie is f'ing long, almost an hour per upcoming year of recession according to one Harvard drop-out. At least this country's last depression was also Prohibition, and anyone with gumption could run rum for money.

What are recent graduates supposed to do now? There are absolutely no jobs, and don't even think about grad school. Finance positions, Ivy gravy until painfully recently, are down more than 70 percent. Which is poetic justice: the hotshot genius "quants" were playing Jenga with the world economy, and they were drunk. And yet, who is supposed to save us? Harvard's Larry Summers and Dartmouth's Tim Geithner (among others). Maybe that explains why Geithner's own government is pulling the rug out from under him. That, or they know the truth.

The Watchman reference makes more sense after the jump.

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