Conservatives have said for years that the Ivy League elitists hate the troops. In recent years, Ivy Leaguers have attempted to undermine the United States military by trying to disenroll family members from the Naval Academy or contaminating the Marines with gay. But as of yet, no Ivy alum has physically harmed members of the military. Until now.

The New York Times reported last week that Dr. Gary Kao of the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center is the worst doctor since Doug from Scrubs. Dr. Kao–who has a Ph.D. from Penn–had been treating veterans with prostate cancer by using a common procedure in which radioactive seeds are implanted into the prostate to attack tumors. The obstacle for Dr. Kao is that you can’t find the prostate on Google Maps.

Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.

Yeah, that’s not good. So that patient had to return for a second implant. This time, Dr. Kao injected his rectum, missing the prostate again. According to the Times, Dr. Kao’s team at the V.A. Hospital had screwed up 92 of 116 cancer treatments over six years. That rate of failure is so incredibly high that Dr. Kao must have been trying to give veterans radioactive butt on purpose. One internal medicine doctor–upon seeing the 92 of 116 statistic–said, “He could have done better just by guessing.”

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Professors in the Ivy League apparently are somewhat aware of the problems facing academia. You usually don’t see them doing anything about it other than whining at conferences and writing editorial columns in the New York Times. Tenure is a great thing, sort of like being emperor of Rome while it burns down. No one’s gonna stop your fiddling (or publishing).

Francis McLellan, a Brown Ph.D. and Princeton’s former head Russian language instructor, evidently had a different experience as a senior lecturer than the professors did. Lecturers are to Princeton what migrant laborers are to, well, Princeton. And it seems as if four years of teaching elementary language made giving up women, possessions, and meat an attractive option for McLellan. In January he was tonsured Iosaf, a hieromonk in the Russian Orthodox Church. Now he’s archimandrite of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, a city just slightly less dangerous than Cambridge. Sexy monk results after the jump.
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Given the insanely high costs of tuition these days, college students have certain expectations of their academic institutions. These expectations include good concerts, at least one place on campus that sells crepes, and cops that aren’t complete buzzkills. Most importantly, students expect their college to keep their personal information safe. So when a Cornell-owned computer containing the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of Cornellians was stolen, it was clear that somebody focused too much on the crepes. On Tuesday afternoon, Cornell sent this e-mail to over 45,000 current and former students and faculty in order to say “our bad”.

Dear Current or Former Member of the Cornell Community: 

Last week, we learned that a Cornell-owned computer that was stolen earlier this month contained your name and Social Security Number. Please accept our most sincere apologies for this unfortunate event. 

In order to inform you of this situation as quickly as possible, we are sending you this email in advance of a formal notification via U.S. mail. 

Hooray! We’re all fucked!

The entire e-mail after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

In a Daily Beast blog post, students, parents, and admissions officers share their advice for prospective students and parents regarding college visits. (Tour guides are not typical students? ZOMG!) But included among the “no duh” suggestions and Cornell student bitching is a juicy piece of Ivy League gossip. This less than subtle quote from an anonymous alum is listed as an example as why prospective students should “ditch their folks” on the tour:

“[There was] the tour of a certain Ivy League campus wherein a certain B-rate comedian turned almost-senator (and alumnus of said institution) huffed, sighed, squatted, and wisecracked his way through said tour—to his son’s chagrin, and everyone else’s disgust.” — a 2007 Yale alumnus

It’s clear from the amount of information provided that this nameless Eli can neither provide a proper blind item nor accept the fact that Norm Coleman lost the Minnesota Senate election. However, this tidbit does produce some questions. Al Franken is a Harvard alum. His son Joe–seen here being embarrassed by his father back in 1999–attended Princeton and, just like anonymous Eli, graduated in ‘07. [Gasp!] DID HAVARD REJECT JOE FRANKEN CUZ HIS DAD IS LAME!? How could they do such a thing? The 1990s were his decade!

Now that we’re back for summertime fun, it seems like a good time to catch up on all the things we missed while seeing Star Trek 79 times. This is a first in a multi-part series making up for lost time. It will continue through the next few weeks or until Jared Kushner fires all of us, whichever comes first.

It’s inevitable really. With the death of print imminent–and more importantly, a $3.2 million apartment that one can’t not buy–the Harvard silver-spoon legacy and New York Observer publisher has been on a pink slip rampage. At the start of May, the Observer’s cleaning lady got the boot. Then just over a week ago, a significant portion of the writing staff was axed. Amongst the casualties are former Gawker editor and Penn alum Doree Shafrir and Princeton eating club investigator and popular guy Spencer Morgan. But Jared Kushner’s thirst for blood was not yet quenched. So last Thursday, he acquired the daily e-newsletter (and money vacuum) Very Short List and fired everyone there.

As for those who got the boot, you would think that Kushner with all his riches would be able to generously compensate his former employees. However, they’re reportedly just getting the standard minimum of one week of severance pay per year of service. And that’s because Jared Kushner has already pledged his massive wealth to those who are truly needy: Harvard students looking for loans.

Jared Kushner–the Harvard alum who bought the New York Observer as his graduation present and recently fired the cleaning lady to cut costs–and his brother Joshua have a new enterprise. It’s called UniThrive and works kind of like Robin Hood. (Take from the rich. Give to the soon-to-be rich!)

Basically, a student loan networking website currently in beta. Students who register at the website request a loan of up to $2,000. Alumni then search for students, pick the ones they like, and pledge some money to loan in order to fulfill the students’ requests. The best part is that all the loans are 0% interest. It’s a great deal–as long as you go to Harvard, because the only school whose students can use this website is the Kushners’ alma mater.

It’s not as if the people behind UniThrive know much about the debt Harvard students face, having been accepted after Big Kush donated $2.5 million to the school. The website’s pitch to Crimson alumni paints it as a social networking site as much as a donation site. And though the Kushners may not be hip to some internet trends (see the Twitter pages of Jared and Josh), this new website does resemble a financial aid-version of match.com. Jared is actually very familiar with dating sites, as he likely met his fiancee through JDate.

At least the Kushners with their billions of dollars are finally doing something to help those in need. And who could be more needy than students accepted to the most prestigious school in the country? Take that you freeloading third-world entrepreneurs! You’re not good enough for Harvard money.

The markets are dropping, the sky is falling, Bobby Jindal is about to take over America. The King of Antigua just raided your trust fund and Lehman is still the best job on Wall Street and it already went under. Welcome to the Brave New World of Ivy League Poverty, in which the value of silver-spoons is falling fast.  Anon, the dawn of a disgusting, moldy-mustard-hued morn in which we are no longer able to sell our diplomas to the highest Wall Street bidder, or fetch lattes for some Fortune-500 sack of cash who pays you with the gold coins he sweats at night. We’re liberal and OMGbama enough to know things could be a lot worse, but somewhere along the way, “but for the grace of God goes I” turned into “at least I’m not that pathetic guy” and “At least I’ll always have Harvard. I could’ve been somebody, once!” — and therein lies the genius of new blog Poor Rich Kids (helmed by an enterprising pair of lazy-ass HYP grads) which offers marching orders to the overeducated and underemployed:

Even if you’ve been cut off, so to speak (and every poor rich kid will insist that he/she is entirely financially independent), your parents want to know that if someone holds you at gunpoint and the $6.32 in your wallet just isn’t enough, the thief / poor-poor-person will be able to take their credit card. This way the poor-poor-person will feel satisfied and won’t kill you. So your parents give you their credit/ATM card, just in case. There is, however, another acceptable use for your parents’ credit card: buying items from the pharmacy. Use their credit card to buy a carton of cigarettes.

But then I read entries about how the jobs of choice for the poor-rich are “blogger,” “freelance writer,” and “thinking about grad school,” and, like, close to home.

I was all set to write an update on the Princeton USG election (Weinberg/AEPi triumphs, nobody really cares) but then, wandering the Prince’s website, I found this glorious gem, scans from a 1958 Princeton pamphlet entitled “Answers to Your Questions About the Admission of Princeton Sons.”

At a time when desegregation was the all the rage and Stanford neared a 2:1 male-to-female ratio, Old Nassau whispered sweet nothings into nepotistic alumni’s age-spotted ears: Worry not, ye rich and backwards-minded old people. Princeton holds your Y-chromosomed offspring to the absolute lowest of standards, now and forever!

And when it comes to low standards, boy, do those Princeton sons deliver:

Basically, this is a guide to George W. Bush’s life.

“Princeton Sons” goes on to answer such troubling questions as “Why don’t Princeton undergraduates look as glossy as they used to?” and “What about this business of ‘geographical spread’?” the latter of which defends Lawrenceville grads against uncivilized cowboys from uncouth and farflung territories like (shudder) Texas. In a weird way, this too seems to be about George W. Bush’s life.

The Prox has the whole pamphlet in its post, but we’ve got a very special IvyGate’s Guide to Princeton’s Legacy Admissions Guide, complete with PUSG tie-in, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

When we heard that the majority of current Barnard first-years will have been inside the Vag by graduation day, we assumed business as usual for Columbia’s women’s college. Turns out this Vag is coming to Barnard with help from Roy and Diana Vagelos, who have donated generously to the college’s as-of-yet unnamed student center. On Spirit Day, fireworks spelled out their last name over the building site, and commenters at the Bwog quickly took up the nickname:

“I didn’t get into Barnard, but I will be the first to enter the Vag.”
“There will be a library devoted to Kant in the Vag.”
“I lost my pen in the Vag.”

Cute.

The Vagelos have been generous with other Ivies as well. Penn, Roy’s alma mater, has its own Vag program in biology, which, as the Daily Pennsylvanian notes, “has an extremely tight admissions process — only a select few have ever come inside the Vagelos Building.”

Poonam Pai, Barnard ‘08, told us, “On the one hand, it opens Barnard up to ridicule. On the other hand, it’s a name that Barnard students have fully embraced, because, truthfully, it’s funny.” She added, “All in all, I have high hopes for it, and look forward to eating out in the Vag as an alum.”

Not everyone has welcomed the clearly hilarious coincidence. Our more mature classmates (noticeably in the minority) are not amused.

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Even as potential messiah Robert Haines is out polishing his bad-boy resumé and exploring the “acceptable boundaries between people,” darker clouds are massing on Hanover’s horizon.

Remember when Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees voted to pack itself, leading some journalists (“journalists”) to go so far as to declare the death of Dartmouth? Well, not if some crotchety, well-heeled alumni and their lawyers have anything to say about it. According to the Dartmouth, the Association of Alumni has filed an injunction to stop the Green putsch while there’s still time.

Not everyone in the Association is on board, though. For instance, there’s Association President Bill Hutchinson who says:

“I think legal action against the College at this time is probably one of the worst things the Association could do,”

But Frank Gado (D ‘58), a member of the Association Executive Committee and liaison to the legal eagles, is so clearly raring to go:

“Honestly, everybody on our side wanted to avoid a lawsuit,” he said. “We wanted to avoid going to court, but we wanted respect for alumni rights.”

Honestly? Admit it, Gado, you live for this shit. Of course like all legit lawsuits and grassroots movements, funding is provided by anonymous, shadowy backers. Gado explains:

That is really not our concern – whose funds,” Gado said. “I have deliberately chosen not to inquire who is funding this. The Association is the client.”

Over at Save Dartmouth, Adam Rabiner (D’ 88) comments: 

It smacks me as sour grapes or being a sore loser to change the rules at this point and disenfranchise all alumni because the candidates that the alumni governance committees have selected are not winning.

Yeah, sour grapes… why does that phrase seem so suddenly apt?

After the jump — the article from the D

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