Brown University, the tropical island to which celebrities deport their children, doesn’t have poor people:

Under 50 percent of students receive financial aid, and a majority of students pay full tuition — $53,136 in the current academic year — which itself is more than the median U.S. household income.

The O.C., FOX’s hit drama running from 2003 to 2007, heavily featured Brown. In the first three seasons, main character Seth Cohen — a pot-smoking, geeky, comic book lover with a witty sense of humor — had his sights set on Brown. Yet in a plot twist, Seth is denied admission, and instead, Summer Roberts — his superficial, valley-girl girlfriend — is offered a spot.  Read the rest of this entry »

We’re not going to lie: this list is based off of a completely anonymous email we received an hour ago. Grain of salt and all that. The only other evidence we have is that one of the members listed below recently friended around half of the other members on Facebook. DEER ISLAND HERE WE COME.

Commenters, you can set us straight. Love, IvyGate

To: tips@ivygateblog.com
Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 12:54:39 PM
Subject: Skull and Bones Class of 2013

Amalia Skilton
Bay Gross
Dakota McCoy
Elizabeth Asai
Fatymatou Dia
Ilana Harris-Babou
Jacob Paul
Julian Reid
Lawrence Lim
Maddy Sharp
Max de la Bruyere
Meredith Potter
Samer Sabri
Teddy Collins
Yishai Schwartz

Per the star-spangled Daily Princetonian, a Monday debate moderated by Politico’s Jonathan Martin

pitted former Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan and former George W. Bush communications adviser Jim Dyke against Press Secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Jesse Ferguson and former Communications Director for the House Budget Committee Nu Wexler.

Three different commenters on the Prince’s website state that the debate—on which the Prince’s article is based entirely— was conducted off-the-record. Or, in American, don’t quote us on this:

I attended the event and all the participants clearly stated they were doing this discussion off the record.

And: “Remember when all the participants said that they were doing the discussion off the record?” And: “These things were pretty clearly off the record.”

That didn’t stop the Prince from publishing an 810-word article which promiscuously quotes Martin et al’s political banter. Zero of which amounted, as far as we can tell, to any actual revelations—but still! Journalism! Integrity! Ethics! Etc. The dailies are supposed to be the good guys, remember?

According to a fairly insane website, Dartmouth student Travis Blalock ’12

will walk with you around campus to show where major hazing practices occur and which areas you should avoid. As with any tour, questions are welcome throughout the event and you should feel free to inquire about certain groups in which your child is interested.

Blalock adds: “we are in the exploratory stages of developing a hazing simulation for our tours.” For now, however, Hazing Tours will “work like traditional tours.”

Wow. So it’s both controversial (or edgy! or whatever!) and a complete disappointment. Only ten bucks, though!

Who is Travis Blalock? We have no idea, but (he claims) he’s not against hazing. From the press release we received:

Read the rest of this entry »

In January, a Yale graduate student named Margherita Viggiano published the absolutely insane correspondence between her and Edward Barnaby, the Yale dean who had removed her from Alexander Nemerov’s famous art history course after she complained about a fellow grad student’s gay boyfriend, threw several tantrums about being Catholic, and distributed an elaborate conspiracy theory linking Yale University to “Satanic Freemasonry,” a “pact with the devil,” and a “New England sea-monster.”

“Viggiano may now go down in Yale history,” the Yale Daily News wrote thereafter, “as the grad student who objected to discussion about the Virgin Mary’s ‘boobs’ and told a dean that he should ‘see how [God] reacts’ to him, curtly wishing him good luck directly afterwards.”

And now this: Over the past few days, Viggiano has published several rambling, strangely-formatted blog posts in which she calls Yale professor and famous literary critic Harold Bloom a “super-sized moron,” a “super-sized fraud,”  a “madman,” an “idiot,” and a “donkey.”

Viggiano’s reaction stems from Bloom’s The Book of J, a combination of Biblical criticism and translation published in 2004. In it Bloom theorizes (in Viggiano’s words) that “an adulterous and divorced Hittite woman” authored the first five books of the Bible. “How,” Viggiano wonders, “did this garbage survive peer-review, exactly?”

Yes! She’s BACK! In the same posts, Viggiano mentions “correcting students’ papers,” and she remains listed in Yale’s directory, so we think she’s still employed—but if you know anything else, drop us a line.

There’s so much more, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, in a completely uncontested vote, Nathaniel Fick (D ’99) will be elected to Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees. The CEO of a Washington think tank, Fick is an attractive candidate: he’s intelligent (Harvard Kennedy/Business), served in the Marine Corps, and will be the youngest trustee by over a decade. In contrast, the other two Trustees who will share Fick’s victory are straight-up Dartmouth drones: an ex-Goldman venture capitalist and a corporate lawyer.

But in light of Dartmouth’s recent hazing scandal, Fick makes for an especially awkward choice. Around the same time that Ravital Segal (D ’09) almost died (and broke her teeth) during a hazing incident at her sorority, Fick defended and valorized his brutal treatment in military training, which he has described as “like fraternity hazing.”

In 2005, Fick was doing the rounds for his well-received war memoir, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, which capitalized heavily on his unlikely path from the Ivy League to the American military. In an interview with Book Reporter, Fick said he realized that “all the hazing and abuse” he underwent at Officer Candidate School were in fact tools of self-improvement: Read the rest of this entry »

Scandal! Some Yale students—“very bright kids, very much tuned into journalism, the managing editor types from the Yale Daily News and Yale Herald,” which describes almost everyone at Yale—have admitted to veteran journalist Bob Woodward that they would have totally reported the Watergate scandal for which Woodward if famous by—wait, no! please!—using Google:

“I have attempted to apply some corrective information to them,” Woodward continued, “but the basic point is: The truth of what goes on is not on the Internet. [The Internet] can supplement. It can help advance. But the truth resides with people. Human sources.”

Let the Yale hate begin!

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend we received this charming tip from someone at Brown:

If you’re having a slow news day, you might want to have fun with this
A chick named [REDACTED] (class of ’13) has posted a number of pics of herself
engaged in all sorts of Brown-related silliness.
My personal favorite is her and a friend sneaking around the Whispering Arch
(attached)
Her OKCupid account, by the way, is [REDACTED]
Links: [REDACTED]

Attached were pictures clearly lifted from Brown Bares, a pun-tastic, semi-famous Reddit forum on which Brown students “Bear” all—ha! oh god!—for the clicks and comments of their enlightened, sex-positive peers. Or, in English, it’s basically naked Brown students.

When we received the tip, the first thing we thought was: we probably shouldn’t be checking IvyGate’s email account while waiting in line at CVS. But the second thing we thought was: do we really want to ruin Brown Bares for our own—what? Pageviews? Unique visitors?  Unlike, say, oh, one or two IvyGate celebrities, these Brown kids eagerly posting their flesh online aren’t in it for attention or power or whatever it is that Brunonians consider the meta-currency of their hipster fortress. (Reblogs?) Read the rest of this entry »

No, it’s not a late April Fools joke. Dartmouth’s medical school is now The Geisel School of Medicine—i.e., Theodore Geisel, a.k.a Dr. Seuss. A tipster forwarded us the following email, which was sent out an hour ago. There’s a joke in here somewhere.

Dartmouth Names Medical School in Honor of Audrey and Theodor Geisel

Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth is fourth-oldest medical school in the
U.S.

Dartmouth College announced today the naming of its medical school, founded in
1797, in honor of Audrey and Theodor Geisel. Their generosity to Dartmouth
during their lifetimes and through their estate plan renders the Geisel family
the most significant philanthropist to Dartmouth in its history. Theodor
“Ted” Geisel, known worldwide as the author and illustrator, “Dr.
Seuss,” was a Dartmouth graduate of the Class of 1925. Read the rest of this entry »

In the latest issue of The Baffler, a wonderful person (and former blogger for Washington City Paper) named Moe Tkacik lambasts The Atlantic’s “soothing IV drip of of frictionless, borderless, culturally agnostic thought-output” with a history of the magazine’s owner, David Bradley. Who, apparently, is obsessed with the Ivy League—to the point that he appointed an intern to catalog its most annoying ambitious students:

[David Bradley] also scouts for career changers: one sad intern spent a summer in the mid-aughts compiling a spreadsheet indicating the location and employment status for every president and vice president of every extracurricular club to have graduated from any of the eight Ivy League schools in the previous decade.

This explains so much. Bradley went to Swarthmore, a small, unpronounceable college in suburban Pennsylvania known primarily for rejecting the kid in your high school who got into Harvard and Yale (and Obama? Supposedly?), so perhaps this was inevitable. Tkacik’s whole essay is a gem (though not online, to our infinite sadness) so go read it, somewhere! (And tell former IG editor Adam Clark Estes we’re very sorry.)

Update: link added.