Hi, this is Michael, the guy who disappeared? Well, it's that time again, when Nick and Chris, sorely disappointed, brush off the old and usher in two new guest editors to amuse and delight. Oh, the times we had: We watched the claws come out and saw the blood of source code spill. We watched as Columbia, once again, jacked its own students while Cornell's mystic buzz machine won every award, ever. We even read a book! And listened to rap! And discussed, like, world politics or something! Oh, and we discovered that the worst people in the world are really --SPOILER ALERT!!!-- into ranking themselves. There was some other stuff, too, but I'm tired of typing and you're tired of reading.

Maureen would have contributed to this post, but the trauma of editing IvyGate made her need to go out and drink heavily tonight. She wishes our readers the best, even the one who called her a whore, because she's forgiving like that.

Seriously, it was a lot of fun, so be nice to the new guys. We hear they're even better than us!

--MICHAEL MORISY and MAUREEN O'CONNOR

New information on David Light, champion of the second amendment, has been released and places much of what has been written and said in context. Sure, there was the misunderstanding with the shots into the ceiling and not-so-subtle death threats, but Newsday reports that the kid's really an environmentalist at heart:

The affidavit cites e-mails to friends in which Light allegedly describes throwing pounds of chemicals into New Haven Harbor and the ocean to create explosions.

Eureka! The Harbor area is poised to spontaneously combust at any moment anyways, and Light's just helping it along, similar to controlled burns for forest fires. But as the charges leveled against the suspended Eli go from amateur gun collector/ceiling artist to bomb developer/raging pyromaniac, we find the kid not so much malicious as just unable to get past that Freudian fascination 13-year-old boys have with explosions:

In an e-mail to a friend in February, Light wrote that he had just received a shipment of a highly explosive chemical.
"I'm very very excited!," he wrote, according to the affidavit. "So... how soon do you want to do something dangerous??? cause it would be very easy to convince me to go out tonight."
In another e-mail in February to a Yale student, Light began by writing "Yea, haven't shot anyone lately," the affidavit states.

But it's not just the man trying to dim the Light: Momma is, too. Newsday quotes an e-mail Light sent to a friend: "my mom saw them and was like 'are those tank shells for the new gun that we're getting for you?! Can we reverse the order?!' It was pretty funny... they are very large bullets...". Haha, silly mom! Tank shells? That's crazy talk woman! At least until little Davey gets a tank to shoot them from. Meanwhile, the defense is trying to play it off as shenanigans :

"Unfortunately because of the timing and the environment, this is going to be projected on a larger stage than it really merits," Dow said. "We're talking about a college student who allegedly made significant errors of judgment."

Boys will be boys, Your Honor, boys will be boys. Go read the article. It's worth it.

--MICHAEL MORISY 

After stinging criticism that the U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings were "dubious" and possibly even damaging to low-income students (leading to many safety schools small liberal arts colleges boycotting the whole process), the magazine vowed greater transparency and "substantial changes in methodology". Today, we can see what a radical changes Mort Zuckerman has wrought (or not), and how the results are sure to send the insecure into spasms of self-doubt once more.

Here's how the Ivies stacked up:

1. Princeton University (NJ) (2007: Ranked 1st)
2. Harvard University (MA)  (2007: Ranked 2nd)
3. Yale University (CT) (2007: Ranked 3rd)
5.   University of Pennsylvania (2007: Ranked 7th)
9.  Columbia University (NY)   (2007: Ranked 9th)
11. Dartmouth College (NH) (2007: Ranked 9th)
12. Cornell University (NY)  (2007: Ranked 12th)
14. Brown University (RI) (2007: Ranked 15th)

See the release in all its embargoed glory and the top 25 schools after the jump.

--MICHAEL MORISY

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, hundreds of universities rallied behind their Israeli counterparts and signed a petition in opposition to a proposed UK boycott of that nation's academics. The presidents of Dartmouth, Cornell, and Princeton all signed on to the statement that Columbia President Lee Bollinger drafted. Heck, even Penn President Amy Gutmann, of faux suicide bomber photo op fame, signed on. Sure, it's mostly just a feel-good resolution that might actually make things worse, but these kinds of things are the bread and butter of academia. Religion masquerading as science? Sign a petition. ROTC knocking at your campus' doorstep? Sign a petition. A rape and/or use of racial epithets may or may not have occurred at a lacrosse team and/or private gathering? Sign a petition.

Except Harvard President Drew Faust does not roll that way, especially not in a way that would have her name printed a good 4 pts. smaller than this riff-raff Bollinger. You can almost feel the frigidity:

Finally, while I am most comfortable expressing my views on such matters directly in my own words as opposed to signing group statements or petitions, I obviously join many colleagues throughout the international academic community in denouncing unequivocally an action that would serve no purpose and would fundamentally violate the academic freedoms we must defend at all costs.

In other words, Faust may agree with what you say, but will defend to the death her right to say it separately. And indeed, a good 15 minutes of intense Google searching could not find a single, lone petition or joint letter that Faust has signed.

Of course, all that is still a bit more admirable than what's been insinuated as Yale's reason for not signing on: Fear of alienating big donors. Come on, Yale, you've got your racially-charged stereotypes all backwards!

[Via 02138]

--MICHAEL MORISY

EDIT: Thanks, G.T.

Sorry for the sparse postings yesterday, but we went all Howard Hughes upon hearing of the latest killer: Pollution. As in, it kills 40 percent of everyone; more than AIDS, heart disease, and Dateline: To Catch A Predator combined. Scary stuff, but Cornell prof David Pimentel says it's so, and his curriculum vitaeis so big and long we're too self-conscious to argue. Plus, he had some hippie grad students read, like, a 120 trillion published papers on the topic, so we're pretty sure he knows what's up.

Basically, Pimentel theorizes that starvation and unsanitary living conditions equal death. And this whole time we thought that combination was just typical college living! It turns out that there are whole countries, like India, which are just big frat mixers.

But if you read between the lines, Pimentel's beef isn't really with pollution. It's with all those pesky people MAKING the pollution. A few years back, Pimentel was one of those Sierra Club candidates dubbed "xenophobic" and "bigoted" by reactionaries when part of his platform for being elected to the board of directors was closing off the borders and regulating the U.S. population. While we hear that sort of talk is common with the plebes, it didn't sit well with the ivory towers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, MoveOn, and the Anti-Defamation League.  Pimentel's bid ultimately failed as those groups tastefully compared his ideas to those of the Nazi party (despite the cult-leaderish picture above, that characterization may have been a wee bit harsh).

So what does the good professor prescribe? In a speech a few years back, he hypothesized that the total sustainable world population should be about two billion peeps, a little less than a third of what we have to deal with now. Sounds about right to us ... Any more than that, and driving the Jersey turnpike gets damn near impossible. --MICHAEL MORISY