• Columbia: "'Rooster’s breakfast' is Slovenian slang for 'early morning sex.'"
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton's gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: "An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event." Gin and anchovies -- busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

If you torture a dog with random electric shocks, will the dog become sad?

Such was the question millions of Americans were once frantically asking, until Penn professor and psychologist Martin Seligman decided to find out once and for all. (The answer: Yes.) However, Seligman's results, after they were first published 40 years ago, had a perhaps unintended effect. As it happened some time later, CIA torture aficionados became very interested in Seligman's work and wanted to examine the implications of this revelation for human torture. Seligman's dog studies, it turns out, were instrumental in developing techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. So say the muckraking journalists, at least. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports:

[Writer Jane} Mayer's book [The Dark Side] alleges that Seligman's research heavily influenced the psychologists that developped [sic] CIA interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. But in a pre-publication review of the book's content, Harper's Magazine writer Scott Horton writes that Seligman "assisted" in the development of their interrogation techniques. This statement has since circulated on several psychology-related blogs and is a claim that Seligman unequivocally denies.

At last, the truth comes out: everything is the Ivy League's fault. Read the rest of this entry »

When child art prodigy Annabel Osberg told the television last week that she was going to take Yale to court for kicking her out of its MFA program, few believed her. Hopefully, this will be the last time anyone underestimates the young painting whiz, who has found a lawyer and politely informed everyone that she is quite serious about this whole suing thing.

In the recently filed lawsuit, a copy of which has been provided by her lawyer here, Osberg reveals a few details of how she got the boot, but nothing yet that offers an explanation to this mystery.

On or about July 7, 2008, the defendant locked the plaintiff out of the studio she was renting from the defendant and thereafter locked her out of the residence she was renting from the defendant ... As a result, the plaintiff has suffered ascertainable economic losses and emotional distress.

Rough, but last I heard, schools don't usually make a habit of locking students out of their rooms just to be a bitch. Osberg wants $15,000 (about 0.00006% of Yale's endowment) and to be re-admitted into the program, but that looks doubtful. Any Yale MFAs still reading IvyGate these days? Send us the full version of this story.

Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest country by population. By most other measures, it kind of sucks.

But try telling that to Indonesia.

Earlier this year, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy released its annual ranking of countries for their environmental practices, weighing carbon and sulfur emissions, water purity and conservation.  Of 149 countries, Indonesia was ranked as only the 102nd best at saving its natural environment, dragged down by its, um, rapacious destruction of trees.

This did not sit well with Indonesia's State Minister of the Environment, a man named Rachmat Witoelar. Though the results came out in January, Witoelar apparently just found out about them, telling the Jakarta Post that the libelous rankings recently arrived on his desk in "the July 7-14 edition" of Newsweek.

"The report is not fair. It is absurd because all the data is invalid. I will send my special staff to Yale to protest their researchers," he said.

Hopefully, Yale will take this very special threat seriously.

When "The Colbert Report" first came out in 2005, I predicted it would be a failure. The Colbert persona, while funny, is exhausting in large doses, and I thought people would get sick of him. This turned out not to be true, for awhile.

Enter Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, which has just come out with the best example I've seen of what happens when you try to hijack something that people have already perhaps had a bit too much of and...completely ruin it.

The idea of the magazine's article is that, since Colbert's conservative alter-ego went to Dartmouth, wouldn't it be a hoot to do a profile of him as though he really were an alum? Except, you know, make it just a tiny bit sarcastic so the VERY acute reader can get in on the joke?

The result is, to steal a phrase from the NYT's A.O. Scott, "antifunny."

Read the rest of this entry »

She may not be old enough for an MFA, but she is old enough to know how to start a media storm.

On Tuesday, we brought you the story of Annabel Osberg, the 19-year-old painting star who convinced Yale to let her into their MFA program -- only to kick her out a year later for having demonstrably failed to, um, age at a fast enough rate. There is clearly something else going on, but Yale isn't commenting on the matter. (The poor public affairs people at the school apparently haven't figured out that trying to clamp down on a hot art-student scandal is a losing strategy.)

In this exclusive interview with WTNH-TV in New Haven, Osberg's got just five words for her former school: I'll see you in court.

Bloomberg News columnist Amity Shlaes has a monster scoop this morning: Ivy League networking is dead.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Shlaes points out, recently tried to quantify the strength of what the authors call the "connection premium" of attending an elite college or business school. Focusing on Wall Street analysts, the economists looked at whether the financial advice they gave was better when they had the same alma mater as a senior officer at the company they were recommending. It was, obviously -- by 8.16 percent.

This all changed, apparently, with a 2000 Securities and Exchange Commision rule called "Fair Disclosure" that prohibited, it seems, chatting over drinks at the Harvard Club. After that, the "connection premium" disappeared. Fair, indeed, I guess.

No one will suffer more from the new rule than Harvard kids, who once made up 19 percent of all networking, according to the killjoys.

After the jump, what schools used to have the most connections. Read the rest of this entry »

I'm a bit of a scrooge when it comes to college a cappella. I can't really explain it -- something about the silly costumes, choreography and bubbly enthusiasm just, well, gets to me.

How thrilled I was, then, to get a fresh perspective, when the Indo-Asian News Service's first-hand account of a Yale Whiffenpoofs concert showed up in my news alerts.

The self-described "uninitiated" reporter, who attended the American Embassy's 4th of July celebration in New Delhi, delivers some inspiring reporting:

The Whiffenpoofs stood in a semi-circle and sang mostly in old-fashioned harmony using their voices and finger-taps as rhythm beats. The concert was interspersed with wisecracks and jokes about the fabled rivalry between Yale and its high-brow adversary, the Harvard University.

Indeed, as I read the article, I realized I had vastly underappreciated a cappella, especially this particular group. Not only did the Whiffenpoofs finger-tap their own rhythm beats, they even managed to slip in that classic jab about how many the Harvard University students it takes to screw in a lightbulb. It must have been quite a performance.

The article continues:

The songs were simple melodies about everyday life of college gentlemen-of the pubs, the beers, girls and contemporary global issues. For instance, 'Gentlemen rankers', one of the Whiffenpoof's early compositions talks about the 'godforsaken troops in her majesty, the empress of England's service during the world war in the colonies'.

This, however, made me upset at the Whiffenpoofs. Contemporary global issues like the empress of England's troops in the colonies are too sensitive right now to be sung about. God save the Empress!

After the jump, the article in full.

Read the rest of this entry »

For a few weeks in May, my friend Greg worked as a "scavenger" at Yale, going through all the crap people leave behind in their rooms after finals and (mostly) trashing it. He was paid pretty well, and got to keep anything he found. His final haul, I believe, was a few bags of chips, a blue bicycle and a ratty Dr. Pepper t-shirt he is way too proud of.

That is all very much less impressive than this.

According to police, a West Philadelphia apartment vacated by seven Penn students last month was, upon later inspection, found to contain a human skull.

Read the rest of this entry »

It's not easy being a Republican at Brown these days. Dessert-tossing anarchists and child pornographers abound. Brigades of Speedo-clad men roam the campus with impunity. Residence hall kitchens, once reserved for late-night snacking and polite conversation about Reagan's legacy, are pioneered for unspeakable X-rated acts. Surely, then, it was only a matter of time before the small but now very angry cabal that is the Brown conservative movement took to the Internets with something like this.

Proudly awarding “demerits” to their liberal enemies for their recent debauchery (and, of course, “merits” to themselves), a spunky group of traditionalists calling themselves the Nathanael Greene Society make it clear that they have had enough. On the Web site, the mysterious group writes (in verse!) about the campus’ loss of “Faith” and “Reason” (capitalizing plenty of nouns along the way) and goes batshit over opinion columns in the Brown Daily Herald and other outrages no one else quite, um, noticed.

Taking few hints from political correctness, the society (named for the dashing Revolutionary War general pictured above) even bestows the “Order of Robert Mugabe” (this already can’t be good, right?) on a black columnist for the BDH. Clever, indeed.

The secret e-society does have some sense of humor (those seeking pecuniary grants form NGS must compose rhymed couplets), but whoever is behind the site apparently wants to remain anonymous, going so far as to register the domain name through a special "private registration" company -- whose existence indicates that, apparently, that's something you can do.

Click through the site, and find out why a pro-choice activist gets a demerit named for Adolf Eichmann, and serial plagiarist and hero Zachary Townsend is likened to Rasputin.