The girls who brought us the Harvard douchebag contest have extended their reach beyond Cambridge. Yesterday, Windsor Hanger '10, Stephanie Kaplan '10, and Annie Wang '11 of Harvard's Freeze College Magazine launched their new "collegiette's guide" called Her Campus, setting a new precedent for useless Ivy League publications (which, to be fair, could explain about 90% of all Harvard media enterprises).

After contacting co-founder and CEO Kaplan about what these three Prada Devil wannabes hope to accomplish with their new cyber digs, she responded with a lengthy mission statement:

From: stephanie@hercampus.com
To: qichen@ivygateblog.com
Subject: Re: IvyGate's inquiry about Her Campus
Date: Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:20 PM

HerCampus.com is an online magazine for college women that seeks to pave the way for the media industry to successfully make the transition online.  Her Campus will transition magazines to today's digital world by individualizing its content college by college by setting up "My Campus" branches, beginning at Harvard and eventually expanding to 1000+ colleges and universities nationwide.  By supplementing national with local content, Her Campus represents the future of online media.

Uh, was there ever a time when the internet wasn't national? Not only that, but the pearl-donning triumvirate of the Ivy League's new Seventeen seems to think they're the first ones to come up with the idea of female-oriented college media. Read more after the jump.

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In the latest update into the case of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student whose body was discovered in the basement of Yale Medical School, officials have confirmed that Le was strangled to death:

According to a spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, Ms. Le died from 'traumatic asphyxia,' caused by 'neck compression.'

This is a reversal from the statement issued yesterday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which instead of releasing the cause of Le's death, stated

it would withhold that information indefinitely at the request of prosecutors. At the press conference, Lewis declined to comment on a report in The Hartford Courant that said Le died of asphyxiation.

This admission seems to suggest that the case is proceeding quickly, and is closer to identifying the perpetrator.

Police have recently identified 24-year-old Raymond Clark as a suspect in the Anne Le murder at Yale. Cops arrived at his apartment in Middletown, Connecticut but did not arrest him, claiming to only have a "person of interest." A lab technician at the lab where Le worked, Clark displayed visible chest marks and also failed a polygraph test. But according to a source close to Clark and his family:

Of course, he had scratches on his arm--from his cat. I know he didn’t do it, but I can’t understand how anybody would do that in the first place and put her in the wall like that. And they would have had to do it at night because certainly nobody could have done it during the day when everybody was looking.

Clark hadn't been seen since last Thursday following the Tuesday disappearance of Le. Le's body was found this weekend in a chute in the basement of the pharmacology research facility on 10 Amistad Street. Yale has since increased security in the surrounding area following the murder. Le's fiancé Jonathan Widawsky, who had been cleared of being a suspect, has been assisting police with their investigation.

Late this afternoon a woman's body was found in the basement of 10 Amistad Street at Yale Medical School. Based on the wording of Yale President Richard Levin's email to the community, the body is presumably Annie Le, the graduate student and bride-to-be who went missing last Wednesday. Today was to have been her wedding day.

Our hearts go out to Annie Le’s family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified.  I have met again with her family and conveyed to them the deeply felt support of the Yale community.

The body—which was hidden inside of the walls of the same building where Le was last seen—has yet to be officially identified by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Yesterday, investigators discovered a set of bloody clothes hidden in the ceiling of the Amistad building. Though the clothes did not match the outfit Le had been wearing when entering the building Wednesday morning, police began searching local landfills and an abandoned industrial area in Hartford for evidence.

Le's wedding has been canceled and her fiancé, a student at Columbia, is not a suspect.

Read President Levin's email in full after the jump.

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Harvard Medical School recently announced that it would loosen its restrictive policies regarding student-media interaction. Called "ill-advised" and "problematic" by Harvard professors themselves, the old policy stated:

All interactions between students and the media should be coordinated with the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. This applies to situations in which students are contacted by the media as well as instances in which students may be seeking publicity about a student-related project or program.

Dr. Nancy Oriol, the developer of a guideline that essentially censored HMS students on medical conflicts of interests, continues to insist that the policy's goal was to "help students, rather than limit speech or control what they say on controversial topics."

This comes after HMS came under fire for its dubious approach to medical ethics and suspiciously opportunistic professors, including those who served as paid consultants to drug companies and brushed off questioning students who didn't want to kill their future patients. (HBS is looking less corrupt by the minute.) But in a less than prudent choice of PR action, HMS didn't even bother submitting its conflict of interest policies for review to the American Medical Student Association last year, promptly receiving the very non-Harvard grade F from the board in 2008.

Read more about the irony of Harvard's crappy report card after the jump.

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A student at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has been the first to die of complications of swine flu in the recent outbreak on Cornell's campus. Warren Schor '11 of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity passed away at the Cayuga Medical Center. He was 20 years old.

Although approximately 450 students have presented flu-like symptoms, a representative of the Cornell Flu Line stated in a phone interview yesterday that so far only two students had been conclusively diagnosed with H1N1. Vice President of Communications Tommy Bruce now reports that number at 520. Neighboring Ithaca College has reported at least 18 students are symptomatic.

The Cornell Sun reports that, at the behest of Gannett Health Services, the Inter-Fraternity Council had instated a weeklong moratorium on social events to help prevent the spread of the disease. But, due to a flood of flu-related visits, Gannett also has stopped scheduling routine appointments, so they may just be canceling frat parties to avoid the standard Sunday morning rush for Plan B.

After the jump, the administration's response: a lesson in hygiene.

UPDATE: Some have questioned whether it's appropriate to have jokes in the same post that acknowledges a death. No element of this post mocks the deceased or those grieving—in fact, any humor is directed at the administration and their lack of response that precluded the student's death. However, since we wrote most the post before the death, then updated it afterwards, the tone may now be off. It's our policy never to take down posts, but as a concession we've added a more somber picture and adjusted some language.

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Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor Emeritus of Divinity, exercised his 300 year-old right to graze his cow in Harvard Yard yesterday.

The Hollis chair, first held by Edward Wigglesworth in 1722, is the oldest endowed professorship in the country, and the perks match the needs of 18th century Harvard professors. (Might these also include the right to own house slaves and the liberty to beat women with thumb-sized sticks?)

Cox equates his cow grazing with saving the Earth, although the event itself seems a bit more niche. In front of a crowd of students, faculty and onlookers the cow, a Jersey named Faith, ate grass while a band of tubas played in celebration of Cox's retirement. There was even a pretentiously titled Latin oration: Ager Secularis: Movere ad Deum et Ruminare.

This cow idea could spawn some budget solutions. And it could potentially revitalize the Cambridge meatpacking industry. Think Bartley's best burger but MUCH fresher. And, in this case, blessed.

After the jump, more photos and a real live (think anticlimactic) video of Faith eating grass.

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Recently, an email has been circulating around Yale ranking the attractiveness of 53 freshmen women. Titled "The Preseason Scouting Report," it apparently ranks the women by how many beers guys would need to find each girl hot. (Go ahead and park the ambulances in front of Stiles to be on the safe side.)

IvyGate has been trying to track down the elusive email, but sources in New Haven have been hesitant to share the document, citing fear of negative consequences from university administration, who have not yet caught the perpetrator. According to a Yalie:

From: [redacted]@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Do you know where I can get this email?
Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:15 PM

Everyone I know who has it knows the author, who has expressed a desire to minimize proliferation at this point.  Less publicity might equal less punishment if/when he/they get caught. The university is pretty pissed because we've had a few very public cases of sexual harassment over the years (google: i love yale sluts) and I think they're gonna crack down on this one.

If any Yalies want to share the misogynistic wealth, email IvyGate at tips@ivygateblog.com.

College rankings are generally quite zany, but this year's lists have taken ridiculousness to a new level. We've seen the Princeton Review name Columbia as topping the list of the best college towns--with Barnard coming in third despite being located three yards away. We've seen Forbes rank Cornell as the 207th best university in America thanks to a formula that assigns a 25% weight to RateMyProfessors.com. We've even seen GQ magazine redefine the Jeremy Piven Hierarchy of Assholery™ by sticking Brown at the top of their "Douchiest Colleges" list.

It's all made for great amusement (and page views, cha-ching!). However, we here at IvyGate feel we can do one better in terms of ludicrousness, while at the same time create a college ranking equally as reasonable as anything U.S. News can produce. (Ivy League schools only, of course.)

Like Forbes, we're also going to utilize a website in our ranking methodology. However, we're going to show up those flat-tax pussies by giving our chosen website 100% of the weight. Also, the website we've chosen is one that, like RateMyProfessors, is very popular with college students. The difference between IvyGate's data source and Forbes' is that ours is a trusted source of factual information and it is a better teacher than any professor in history--because no professor has encyclopedic knowledge of British monarchs, the periodic table, and Seth Rogen movies. Our chosen source of college ranking data is Sporcle. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Cornell Sun published a photo of a severed pig's head on the Arts Quad, displayed in all its rotten glory along with a sign proclaiming, "Maybe it's the beast, maybe it's just us."

According to Dear Uncle Ezra, a campus-related advice blog and Cornell's own stand-in Carrie Bradshaw, the slaughtered head may have been a fraternity's collegiate reference to Slope Day, Cornell's drunken end-of-the-year party. It might also be a literary reference to Lord of the Flies. (Too stupid to create their own reputation so they had to steal Dartmouth's and Brown's? We thought as much.) Uncle Ezra went on to elaborate on the accused frat members:

Perhaps, deep inside, they truly crave the common sense authority that members of a mainstream society have and yet they have been denied by this godless institution where apparently "adult" students behave within a supposed institution of higher-learning as if it was merely high school with no rules.... I would hope that, in the future ... other students at Cornell would see past some silly fraternity idiocy and be more disgusted by the deplorable self-poisoning and immorality occurring around the fraternity's fitting choice of symbolism...

Come on, Uncle Ezra, cut them some slack. How else are Cornellians going to allude to Hogsmeade in order to hang onto the one piece of good publicity in a decade?