I have a nose for trends, among other things. In January of 2007, I predicted that the troop surge would bring about an immediate end to the war in Iraq. A year and a half later, I’m still collecting money from people who bet against me. Last summer, mere days after it came out, I accurately predicted that Spiderman 3 would be a huge hit. Lo and behold, I was right again.

I am confident, therefore, that I am in a pretty safe place in predicting the biggest, sexiest rivalry of the summer: Sheehan v. Sununu. Big Red John v. Little Blue Jeanne. He puts the “nu” in New Hampshire; she puts the “eehan” in “Katee, hand me that map of New Hampshire from the glove compartment.”

Seriously: Democrat Jeanne Sheehan is trying to unseat Republican John Sununu from his Senate seat in New Hampshire, and yesterday she gave a speech about science at Dartmouth. What better place to pick a fight about the importance of science in New Hampshire than venerable Dartmouth College? What better place in New Hampshire at all, really (besides this place)?

After the jump, the sordid details… Read the rest of this entry »

A particularly detail-oriented tipster noticed that, during a bit about forms of identification on last Thursday’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert brandished a PennCard.

John T. Lowey, are you out there sans ID?

Perhaps Colbert brought it back as a souvenir from filming on campus when the show relocated to Philly during the Democratic primaries. Refresher video after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Folks have apparently known for awhile that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal participated in, ahem, an exorcism while a student at Brown. Now that Jindal has been increasingly mentioned as a potential vice presidential candidate for John McCain’s ticket, it seems like a good time to go over the details again. As TPM’s comprehensive roundup reminds us, Jindal wrote extensively about this experience, in which he and his prayer meeting buddies exorcised the demon out of his friend “Susan” and cured her cancer to boot.

More Satan-rific details after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s this? A college newspaper endorsing Hillary Clinton? Over-educated youth voters that don’t want Barack Obama to be their new bicycle? Did they not see the video of the hot girl jiggling her breasts at the Illinois senator? Did they miss the memo about Will.I.Am? As upwardly-mobile 18- to 22-year-olds, Penn, it is your utmost stereotypic duty to endorse the handsome Columbia grad with the baritone voice, not the angry Wellesley lady with the funny-uncle husband!

Clinton’s camp was so excited to have the support of a single person under the age of 60, they penned a  “MUST READ” press release about it. DP’s ed board writes,

Obama’s charisma far outshines Hillary’s… But choosing the president of the United States is too important a decision to make based on hope alone. After finishing his term in the Senate and better showing us what he can do for the American people, Obama could one day be a remarkable president.

Is this a “pay your dues” argument? The whole point of being an entitled 21C Ivy Leaguer is not paying your dues: You either invent a website and make a billion bucks in a week, or you shuffle lazily through uninspiring office jobs and whine about underutilization. Don’t worry, it’s nothing that can’t be cured with a little Ritalin.

Clinging to their guns in economically depressed North West Philly, it is not surprising that Penn has grown bitter. Nonetheless, they have broken the sacred covenant of Ivory Tower Elitism, and for that, Penn is hereby voted off Ivy Island. We endorse Penn State to take their place. When you squint, the names are almost the same, and outsiders are always mixing the two up, anyway. It’ll be just like “The Parent Trap,” but with elaborate mascots and no Lindsay Lohan remake.

Recently surfaced on YouTube: Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki at this year’s John William Pope Center for Higher Education conference, discussing his Dartmouth-leadership peers:

Those who control the University today, they don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in country. University is their cathedral. Their entire being, both those who fund it and those who teach within it, are tied up in the universities. It is basically their religion.

This should make for good small talk at the next trustee/administration cocktail party.

Zywicki, who is also a law professor at George Mason University, was part of the alumni-trustee power bloc that precipitated recent changes to Dartmouth’s constitution. His massive CV includes titles like “Deadbeats Cost All of Us Dearly” and “Is Tony the Tiger Making Kids Fat?” (answer: yes, but it’s worth it, because obese babies have extra-chubby-wubby cheeks!) Even worse, however, than fat kids and lazy people are liberal pansies and their Catholic-but-not-in-the-good-Jesus-way doctrine:

The establishment within these universities is vicious. They are vicious people. They have their own dogma. … There is a new dogma that is environmentalism, feminism, and, uh, that is the dogma. And they will enforce it viciously. We have the Spanish Inquisition, and you can ask Larry Summers whether or not the Spanish Inquisition lives on academic campuses today.

Does that make Drew Gilpin Faust the pope? Or maybe she’s Jesus, whom Zywicki namedrops later. Either way, it’s a riot. Videos and partial transcript from the anti-Dartmouth and diatribe after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Uproar at conservative education blog Phi Beta Cons (part of the National Review Online) over the revelation that the Harvard Crimson has literally hundreds of editors.  800 last year, to be exact — that’s one in every eight undergrads.  Beta-Con Travis Kavulla, Harvard ‘06 and former Crimson editor (the real kind) explains,

The designation was meant to convey voting membership in the editorial board, rather than the term’s more current meaning of supervisory control. … The real credential to look for, should you encounter an “editor,” is not whether the person is merely a “Crimson editor”-which means he’s completed a semester-long “comp” (a training regime which used to stand for “competition” and now stands merely for “competence”: no joke) and has a full by-line and a vote in editorial-board meetings.

Fellow Beta-Con and Harvard Law grad David French suspects resume padding:

I myself used to hold the title of “editor” of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, a proudly conservative publication. When I was in school (1991-1994), everyone who helped edit articles was called an “editor,” and we were explicitly told that the journal’s leadership gave us that title to “make our resumes look better.”

French ties the herd-of-editors tactic to the downfall of meritocracy, or maybe the annoying availability health care for co-eds (would Mr. French prefer it to be less available?).  We just want to know how many editors signed off on this, and whether they received promotions for it. –MAUREEN O’CONNOR

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.

If the nation’s Democratic machine were anything like Columbia’s, they probably wouldn’t even bother holding midterms. In a good way! CU Dems have campus on such lockdown that even the College Republicans are supporting Lieberman.

This weekend, Columbia Dems ferried the usual busloads of students out to the battleground state of Ohio, where Democratic challenger and golden boy Sherrod Brown (also father of Columbia senior and poll-tested cutie Liz Brown) leads in the polls. Blog-happy Spec reporter Jimmy Vielkind embedded himself with the caravan and continues to file dispatches from the road.

Our favorite moment comes on the bus ride when a volunteer decides to ditch the group and go hiking instead:

“We stopped in Paterson, N.J., where someone defected,” Lamata said. “I guess the phone call was something like, ‘Hey, are you in New Jersey at a gas station? I’m like 20 minutes away. Do you want to go hiking?’”

Maybe we take back that part about the machine.

The moment a political race turns ad hominem, that’s when we tune in. Our ears perked up when we heard one candidate in a New York State Assembly race has accused the other of — cover your ears, children — not graduating from Penn.

Well, it’s slightly more complicated. Greg Ball, a Republican running in the 99th district, accused his opponent Ken Harper of falsely claiming he received a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, the Journal News reports. Sounds more like Harper fudged it by designating himself “English, 1978-82, University of Pennsylvania,” which some political groups misinterpreted and replaced with “B.A.”

So Harper attended Penn for four years and didn’t graduate. Judging from our experience, that’s actually a huge accomplishment. Once you’ve been admitted to an Ivy, it takes nothing short of murder to get kicked out — and sometimes even that might not do it. Our advice to Ken: Accuse Ball of graduating!