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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02138, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year for intrepid journalism in the Field of Writing About Harvard, has just released its second annual list of Harvard's 100 most influential alumni. Can you name all twelve women? (Hint: don't forget Benazir Bhutto.)

Like all lists of this sort, it comes packaged with a poorly edited preface full of stilted phrases ("in the catbrid seat"), inane platitudes ("With so much at stake in the coming year, there's a lot to influence"), and a groping desperation to say something meaningful about what is basically a self-satisfied exercise in name-dropping ("The Supreme Court has shifted ideologically, and the struggle for creating and undoing precedents is fierce.")

The usual suspects are to be found on the list -- financiers (Lloyd Blankfein, Stephen Schwartzman, Henry Paulson), media-barons (Jared Kushner, Mortimer Zuckerman, Sumner Redstone, Jeff Zucker), like a million politicians, and pretty much the entire Supreme Court. And there are a few Harvard is probably not so thrilled about (George Bush, Alberto Gonzales).

Other choices are just baffling -- Frank Rich, really? B.J. Novak? And didn't Bill Gates drop out? But most of all, is Al Gore in fact the most influential Harvard grad today? There's just something sad about that. Discuss amongst yourselves.

After the jump: the list in full.

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It's summertime, the grades are in, and the students are all gone--what's a provost to do but count up the change in the piggy bank? Princeton has been doing just that, and reports that this year they've received a staggering record of $49.04 million in alumni donations, a 21% spike from last year.

 
Reasons? "'Frederick G. Strobel '74, the volunteer leader for Princeton's annual giving campaign for the past three years, said alumni donate to Princeton so readily in large part because of the university's "commitment to excellence.'"

And I got an *awesome* Livestrong bracelet because I actually care about Lance Armstrong's testicles.

A better explanation can be found in a research document on Princeton's own web server: Altruism and the Child-Cycle of Alumni Donation (pdf). Using data from an "anonymous selective research university," Stanford's Jonathan Meer and Princeton's Harvey S. Rosen toss about logarithms, Greek letters, and Tobit estimators to conclude that "about 52 percent of giving by parents whose children apply to Anon U is due to altruism and the remaining 48 percent is due to self-interest."

Maybe the best explanation for increased Princeton giving is the increased numbers of pimply teenagers applying, which in turn is probably due to increased unprotected Princeton alumni sex back in 1988-1990. Don't believe us? Princeton giving broken down by class year. Graduate in '82, kids by age 30, progeny aiming for class of 2012 equals $8 million, or a sick average of $10,267 per alum... probably taped to the back of Jr.'s application. And they said dropping Early Decision would hurt the bottom line!

--BETH MILTON

Kudos to '79 Princeton grad William C. Powers, now a portfolio manager, who this week donated a whopping $10 million to those kids who are truly in need: Princeton football players.

Now, you can argue that the Tigers don't need the money. They are Ivy League co-champs, and they do play in a beautiful new stadium (to be renamed "Powers Field," naturally). But this team has had just four winning seasons in the last decade. That's almost as bad as the crisis in Darfur.

But before all you readers in the Holy See rush off to start the canonization papers, there's something you should know about Powers. He ... didn't give all he could. No, the bastard held out on us, alloting another $500,000 for the school's financial aid effort.

Son of a bitch. Doesn't he know a half mil could have re-sodded an entire practice field?

02138, Harvard's hotly anticipated alumni magazine, will soon embark on its maiden voyage. As IvyGate stands at the port, preparing to wave its kerchief bon voyage to the good ship Bradley, it spies on the dock a mysterious envelope. Could it be? A coveted media kit! We smuggled it home and gave it the old exegesis:

- The official New York launch party (Sept. 26, crash it with us!) will be at The Core Club on East 55th Street in Manhattan. Repeat, the Core Club. We're guessing the Harvard Alumni Association wasn't about to let these carpetbaggers sully the Harvard Club for a night, what with their not-quite-Crimson hue and their irreverent section headings.  

- We also found a minor typo in the spelling of a contributor's name:

No big deal, though: this Peretz guy, whoever he is, isn't even powerful enough to make the "Harvard 100" (see below), let alone get a staffer fired for mistaking his gender. 

- 02138 claims a circulation of 50,000, and we believe them. Sort of. How they found all these names is a relevant question, considering the Alumni Association's mother lion-like protection of its list.  

- The mag's big conceit, and the cover of the inaugural issue, is "The Harvard 100" -- a running list of the school's most influential alums. "Arbitrary power rankings" is our middle name, so naturally we love this, even though it's described in the media kit in this baffling way: "What could make a magazine more readable for, and important to, this audience than one that is truly about them?" Trust us, it makes even less sense in context.

We'll ignore for now the sections named "Gravitas" and "Vanitas" ("Harvard's Page Six -- with the facts straight." Gag) to bring you 02138's first Top 100 list, which has ... um ... 109 names. PR screwup, or brilliant plot to get everyone talking about who will get whittled down? Like we care! Binge away after the jump.

UPDATE 12:45 p.m.: 02138 writes in to tell us that the list of about 100 influential Harvard alumni on the cover is not the list of 100 influential Harvard alumni that will appear in its first cover story. Got that? We asked what the hell the point was, then; "to give potential advertisers a sense of our community and its diversity," a spokesflack said. Thanks, 02138, for reminding us Natalie Portman went to Harvard.

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The price of attending an Ivy League school is not the tuition -- it's the subsequent lifetime you spend encountering your classmates' bylines.

A brother can't even glance at a periodical without suffering flashbacks. Open the New York Times and boom, it's 30 years ago and Nick "One F" Kristof is hitting on your girl at a Crimson party. Grab The New Republic -- God, that dweeb Beinart would wake you up every morning at 7 a.m. braying show tunes down the hall in Pierson. Flip through the New Yorker and wow, there was that time you and Phil Gourevitch stayed up after that party in Risley, had a lot of wine, really just talked, and one thing led to another and it's not like it makes you gay, it was just college, you know? We digress. Ivy bylines -- they're everywhere! And they will haunt every minute of your media-soaked life.

It's no secret that Ivy Leaguers run the Fourth Estate. It's a given, a commonly acknowledged conceit ... that also happens to be completely, totally wrong. How do we know?

Meet our newest recurring feature: the IvyGate Index®, a highly scientific measure of Ivy influence in various industries. In each installment, our crack statisticians (poached in a clandestine midnight raid on the U.S. News & World Report compound) will pore over reams of data, using patented hegemony formulae to give you the numbers you crave with cutting-edge graphical representation. That's right, bitches: pie charts.

This week, we point the mighty IvyGate Index® telescope at the top rungs of the media ladder. Verdict: Shockingly little dominance!
 

In conclusion, the media industry's IGIQ (IvyGate Index Quotient) is 44 percent. After the jump, we've included a note on methodology for all you budding freakonomists. Next week: robber barons of the extraction industries.

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