• 
• Brown: Ruth Simmons’ approval rating slightly higher than that of bunnies, candy canes. [BDH]
• Cornell: How To Get Tenure, Step One: Go on a hunger strike. [Sun]
• Columbia: Hillary Busis ‘10, now you shall know the curse of celebrity. [Spec]
• Dartmouth: Yes, there is a rapper named Young Ivy. [The D]
• Harvard: “What Is The What”: A confusing title of staggering pretension. [Crimson]
• Penn: Grad student protesters wield hideous, ten-foot tall, zombie-like puppet of Amy Gutmann, then express surprise when she won’t talk to them. [DP]
• Yale: Harvard 2007 presidential selection bears “eerie similarities” to Yale’s in 1992. Spooky! [YDN]

Pull up a chair, tuck in a napkin, it’s time to lose our shit over sandwiches again. Today’s installment is from Charlie Niesenbaum, the Cornell Daily Sun’s official snack food columnist (sometimes we really, really love college papers) whose work just may surpass genius. Let us know what Stuff Between Bread we should get after next.

When it comes to sandwich culture, Cornell has a lot to offer. On-Campus Dining tries its best with purveyors such as Cascadeli, Mac’s, Trillium and Bear Nasties. However, there can only be one true champ, only one that is truly “tasty-ass.” That sandwich is the Hot Truck’s Triple Suicide. 

For those who don’t know, Hot Truck is the West Campus sandwich institution founded in 1960 that brought late night delicious to Cornell and invented French bread pizza. Just to clarify, this isn’t fifth grade Friday school lunch, this is a one-third loaf of French bread loaded with cheese and sauce and baked fresh in the oven. How good are these sandwiches? When things get crazy at the Hot Truck wait times can stretch over an hour. At night. In sub-freezing temperatures. And in the snow. These sandwiches are that good.

The rest of the Hot Truck Menu pulls no punches with inventive items like the Krazy Korean, Mr. Pink, Ho-Ho, Re-Re and Flaming Turkey Bone (which the menu describes as containing “no actual flames, turkey or bones”). The Triple Suicide reigns over all of them.

According to the menu, the T-Sui comes with tomato sauce, mushrooms, sausage, pepperoni, mozzarella cheese and six meatballs. What the menu cannot describe is exactly how you feel after cramming one of these down after a typical night on the town. Every year more than one freshman makes the mistake of trying to scarf a whole T-Sui too quickly after a night of drinking. That is a mistake you make exactly once. But this meat monster doesn’t like to be kept waiting either. Because of the tons of sauce, cheese and oil on the fresh toasted bread, Hot Truck subs don’t keep well. My advice is, order the numerically challenged Half Triple-Suicide.

Besides our recent stint as a dream College in the classic 2004 teen comedy “The Perfect Score”, Cornell isn’t known for much besides suicide. So, if you are ever stopping by Cornell with two friends, try our Triple Suicide. It’s to die for.

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College love is a blessed thing. Common ground is easy to find with any potential mate. Options fairly force themselves on you (sometimes in a good way, sometimes not so much). And the stakes are so deliciously low, you can mess up with few consequences a semester abroad can’t fix.

And then, on graduation day, it all ends. The tassels come off, and you discover a whole new, totally unwelcome aspect of romance: effort. Love will never be the same.

This fact was made painfully clear Friday night at an event hosted by the Ivy Singles Social Club of Washington, which our D.C. bureau chief felt obligated to crash. The largish crowd gathered on the top floor of a Spanish restaurant in Arlington.

A quick glance around the room put the average age at about 45. On the youthful end, you had a few recent post-docs, lawyers, consultants, many of them new to town. On the mature end, you had the fixtures — people who had been attending Ivy singles events for years. Needless to say, these were not silver foxes. Makeup: caked. Hair: radioactive yellow. And when God was handing out bald spots, this group got a generous helping. We have a full head (for now) and felt like jailbait. One sweet woman did buy us a beer, but alas we forgot our permit for cougar-hunting.

Even among the veterans, the social rules of middle school dances held strong. Women huddled together, while a few stray men sipped their drinks against the wall, just sort of peering. Conversation was expectedly awkward. Lots about the event itself — “Did you hear about the couple that met at one of these and got married?” Only one topic was off limits: graduation year. We touched this third rail a few times before realizing a gentleman never asks. At one point, a female friend of ours started talking to an older man, who volunteered that his passions were “tennis, beaches, and women.” She asked if he preferred them in any particular order. “Depends which one I’ve had most recently,” he replied. She excused herself as the conversation turned to surgery.

Throughout the evening, one horrifying thought loomed: in 20 years (or 10, or now), who among us will be attending these functions? The idea of using your school as a romantic crutch is upsetting — until you realize you already do it all the time. Think about it: Events like this are like Facebook for people who don’t know about the Internet. Our poke is their business card exchange. Still, though, there’s sure to come a time when our diploma is — yikes — the sexiest thing about us. And suddenly, listing our passions to pretty young things at all-Ivy functions will seem like the most sensible move in the world. Tennis. Beaches. Women.

We’re off, we’re off to Duke! Bright and early tomorrow! (Odds we miss the 7:55 a.m. flight: 2:1.) It’s feeling like a serendipitous weekend. The first men’s lacrosse game since The Business is at 12:30, it’s sunny, and we can’t wait to blow through as much of the university’s cash as possible. Wooo!

We asked our Duke correspondent for a fare-thee-well — let’s listen in!

What the hell are you two talking about? People: When these idiots cross the Mason-Dixon line tomorrow, they’re in for some fun toxic culture shock. But they will also see a lacrosse game — and all the of the attendant fatuousness that comes with the “healing” of an institution. While lots of people (esp the flagrantly unethical prosecutor Mike Nifong) have misbehaved since that awful party went wrong in March 2006, the worst are the “Group of 88″ –  faculty members who are genuinely disappointed that a rape didn’t occur, and some of whose number just today published another column in the Duke Chronicle.

Given their appalling assumption of guilt way past when it was defensible, it’s hard to seriously listen to this long list of empty academic platitudes. But let’s give it a whirl, because you smiley guys seriously have no idea what you’re getting yourselves into. The following list of “facts” represent such a smug departure from reality as to cause one to file a transfer application:

Whatever happened at the lacrosse party last spring, three facts remain undisputed: racial epithets were used; a Duke student group hired two female strippers for the entertainment of young men; and underage drinking was encouraged.

Oh, those are the three undisputed facts? Not that three students were indicted for crimes that, the nation now agrees, so obviously did not occur? Not that the name of an institution was dragged through the dirt by overzealous media? Not that Duke’s own faculty are still, one year later, trying to trash several students who have been all but exonerated by the accuser herself?

So what I suspect our pair of Ivy League ink-slingers will find this weekend is a student body sick of the sanctimony of its own faculty. Whatever happens, tomorrow’s lax game will be one hell of a circus show. But what you won’t see or hear much about is the latest woefully under-reported tidbit. Oh, you didn’t know there was a new rape allegation? Thanks to Nifong, God knows what the truth is here, or in the future. Have a great time, guys!! XOXO, write me!

Us again. Well, now we’re in the mood!! Seriously though, we have a big weekend planned. If you’re at Duke and you want to show us around, get in touch. Everybody else, we’ll see you lateish Monday.

• Brown: Pet tarantula actually more like a “feisty, scary-looking mouse” [Herald]
  
• Columbia: Breaking: College Republicans offensive; Pope Catholic [Spec]
• Cornell: Article on university snow policy written by somebody named Shoval. Creepy! [Sun]
• Harvard: Virgins are for pitying, not mocking [Crimson]
• Harvard: A student journalist’s quest for a mature burgundy [Crimson]
• Penn: Reason #682 to give up on grad school [DP]
• Princeton: Jewish students found to identify with Israel; bears found to shit in woods [Prince]

Imagine: A president who didn’t attend a school you play in lacrosse. Who isn’t part of a century-old secret society. Who somehow managed to get where he or she is without a diploma written in Latin with a coat of arms at the top. Why, they– they’ll almost be in touch with the electorate!

That dystopian future may not be far off, from the look of things. Even a quick glance at the pool of candidates suggests our next president will probably have no idea what a “residential college” is. PoliticalInsider.com has done everything short of an IvyGate Index to evaluate how Ivy-saturated the 2008 race will be. The verdict: not very.

In contrast to previous cycles, the 2008 presidential field features candidates from lesser-known schools all across the nation, including Hamilton College, Gettysburg College, Manhattan College, and Oucahita Baptist University. Assuming General Wesley Clark (D) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) throw their hats in the ring and former Vice President Al Gore (D) does not, only two of the 22 presidential candidates will have attended an Ivy League university for undergraduate studies (both at Columbia University) and only two more attended Ivy League graduate schools.

Click through to see all the schools the candidates attended, both grad and undergrad. And, of course, let that and that alone inform your voting decision.

What goes around goes around goes around comes all the way back around.                            –JT

When Justin brought sexy back [Ed.: Thanks, btw], who could have known that he was describing the Harvard Crimson’s Circle of Plagiarism? Stung by ”borrowers” Victoria Ilyinsky and Kathleen Breeden in October, the Cambridge broadsheet now finds itself on the catching end of fake writing. The copy-and-paste karma comes in the form of the Michigan Daily’s Devika Daga. One of apparently four articles the Ann Arbor music writer ganked — a 2006 review of a French Kicks concert — bears an uncanny similarity to a 2003 Crimson piece by new Gawker Weekend editor Leon Neyfakh. Read the latter:

The French Kicks are nobodies.

You’ve probably never heard of them, and neither has America. They’ve been mentioned in passing in the same breath as the Strokes and the Libertines-occasionally. Pillars of the rock renaissance-kind of. An exciting new band-if you’re into that scene-raising hairs and eyebrows and taking the country by storm-if they can get away with it.

And here’s the Michigan Daily’s homage:

You’ve probably never heard of the French Kicks, and neither has America. They’ve occasionally been mentioned in passing in the same breath as The Strokes and The Libertines. They’re pillars of the rock renaissance - kind of. They’re quite an exciting indie band, if you’re into that scene, raising hairs and eyebrows and taking the country by storm - if they can get away with it.

Sweet cosmic chi no doubt, but all this plagiarism is getting tiresome. Can’t we get some more original scandals up in this piece? In the meantime, let’s not forget the real victims here. First the French Kicks get panned by the Crimson in ‘03. Now they get re-panned just because the Mich reviewer couldn’t come up with a new word for “blows”?

With squirming delight we read the New York Observer’s Princeton bicker takedown this morning, thrilling to each student’s oblivious elitism, each eating club’s repugnant practices, each Shermanesque detail.

To be honest, we weren’t sure what we could possibly add to Spencer Morgan’s exquisitely unsourced piece — just go take it in now — but readers at Princeton have filled us in on how the campus is reacting to a story that makes the social/cultural scene feel as friendly as Fallujah. One level-headed tipster reports:

Princetonian parents everywhere are probably hyperventilating, but all in all, it’s a lot tamer than it could have been. … Many of us are surprised that the reporter was able to attend several of the parties and get students to talk on the record. To my knowledge, most clubs make members sign an agreement saying they will never, ever, ever talk to the press, on pain of expulsion. When we heard the NYT was doing a story on bicker, for example, my club called a meeting where we were reminded to keep our big traps shut. But for the most part this article has elicited a minor shrug, since it’s all old news to us. 

Another student, belonging to Ivy, messaged the club’s listserv to joke that the misnamed Tamara “Watson” was in deep trouble:

In light of the dirty bicker that obviously took place, you have been retrohosed effective immediately.

To all the other new members, I love you despite any dirty bickering (which would NEVER happen in ivy anyway). You are all wonderful, and Spencer Morgan can stuff his own dick (if he has one) up his ass.

Naturally, not everyone took it as well. After the jump, read one outraged Tiger’s email to Morgan. With critics like this, who needs supporters?

[Photo stolen from New York Observer's Melanie Flood until they make us take it down]

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