Unlike some other Ivy League schools, Penn will not be laying people off, initiating hiring freezes, or slashing budgets, said President Amy Gutmann in yesterday's university-wide email. In fact, things aren't so bad in Philadelphia. Gutmann writes:

As a result of the record-breaking success of our first year of the Making History campaign, coupled with the prudent choices we made before the economy worsened, we are well-positioned to weather the economic storm. We will continue to plan for the future just as we always have, by implementing sound budgets, by managing our costs, and by maintaining focus on our highest school and institutional priorities.

But what does "well-positioned" mean? According to Gutmann, it means Penn won't resort to any exceedingly unpleasant measures. She writes:

Penn's commitment to need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid remains resolute.

While we are not implementing broad-scale layoffs, hiring freezes, or across-the-board budget reductions, individual Schools and Centers have the flexibility to implement additional cost-cutting measures as needed to create balanced and sustainable budgets.

Sounds good. But what are these "additional cost-cutting measures?" According to this email, they involve not hiring more people and firing existing people. After the jump, Gutmann gives you the bad news.

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College and university presidents are well-compensated, and, perhaps, rightly so. Like the CEOs of large corporations, they are responsible, chiefly, for the maintaining and generating of income. So with a down year for endowments, and a budget-constrained future ahead, it's no surprise that several have opted to forgo raises or to return a portion of their salaries back to the schools they helm.

For some who have gone this route, this outward show of generosity smells like a reactionary PR move more than else. Last Tuesday, the day after The Chronicle of Higher Education published its annual survey of presidential salaries, "Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and her husband made a $100,000 gift to the university to support undergraduate research."

Do these donations suggest that that college presidents are overcompensated? Maybe - but maybe not. Except for the president of Suffolk University, who earns a whopping $2.8 million dollars a year for manning a school that no one outside Boston has ever heard of, presidential salaries are roughly equivalent to their for-profit counterparts. And they are much lower than the robber barons, i.e. the heads of investment banks, that are largely responsible for crippling our economy.

Dear Amy, et al.: instead of returning your tax-deductible chump change, how about keeping annual tuition raises at, or under, the rate of inflation?

We're already salivating for the December issue of Glamour magazine, featuring all four female Ivy League presidents as 2007 Women of the Year.

Prince and DP reports confirm that The Prezettes -- Princeton's Shirley Tilghman, Brown's Ruth Simmons, Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust, and Penn's Halloween- and maybe-Jihad-loving Amy Gutmann -- will appear in glossy photos alongside the likes of Jennifer Garner, Elizabeth Edwards, and child actress Abigail Breslin. Gutmann has already begun denying the fact that she's totally pumped to get airbrushed:

Though Gutmann doesn't "have much time to read magazines like Glamour," she said she is pleased that the magazine will use the Fund to raise money for charities that support causes for women.

Whatevs, Amy, we know you're excited to get a professional blow-out and glossy photos, and for little girls the world around to cut out your picture and decorate their notebooks with it. For those who can't wait to see if the Gutbomb reprises her strapless red Homecoming dress, fear not! IvyGate will be there for you on November 13 when Women of the Year hits newsstands.

See Philadelphia media? If we all team up, we can sometimes make Penn speak -- that is, beyond the inane drivel that Dementor-ish University spokeswoman Lori Doyle shits out every few days.

Philadelphia magazine's online Daily Examiner picked up where we left off re: new Wharton Dean Thomas S. Robertson's academic and domestic partnership with Scott Ward (left), ex-Wharton prof and disgrace to humanity. The two were teaching at Harvard when they bought the home in 1977, according to Philly Mag. And according to Jerry Bessette, who broke the Ward-doing-boys news to Robertson last fall, Robertson responded, "This scares the hell out of me." He also called Bessette about a month ago, shortly after starting the new post at Wharton, and asked "Do you think there's going to be any fallout [from my friendship with Ward]?"

In other words, the response "Dean Thomas" -- not to be confused with the token black kid in Harry Potter -- sent Philadelphia today has probably been sitting in his e-mail's Drafts folder for some time. The letter and some other pressing super-important issues after the jump.

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Last summer, Keenan Jeppesen, Brown's best basketball player, applied to transfer to Penn, and was turned down. Was his GPA too low? Did he have discipline problems? Do they suspect his involvement in a certain kidnapping?

Nope. Penn's president and dean of admissions felt it would make Penn too good at basketball and Brown too bad. From the DP:

"We feel badly about taking students from Brown, a member of our league," [dean Lee Stetson said]. Stetson stressed that the decision had nothing to do with academic standards. Rather, he cited a desire for fairness and a concern for the integrity of a fellow Ivy League institution.

President Amy Gutmann "and I talked, and we just don't think it's fair to take someone from the other Ivies," Stetson said. "It just isn't fair. He is a Brown student, he chose to go to Brown, and we're hoping he flourishes there. He made his choice, and Brown is his place, just like we would not want to have students taken out from underneath of our program at Penn."

Jeppesen -- who, we should probably point out, is a human being and not just a thing that dribbles -- was faced with returning to a school and a team he didn't like. So he's opted to drop out of school.

Jeppesen is by all accounts a great kid, and certainly a terrific athlete. He lost his chance to earn an Ivy League degree because a couple of academics decided to stick their noses in an arena they know very little about. Somebody let us know the next time these two give a speech about "student-athletes" with a straight face.

Ever since posing for a Halloween photo with a student dressed as a suicide bomber, Penn President Amy Gutmann has been getting star treatment from the Ivy League watchdog cottage industry. Congrats, Amy, you're famous! Here's a quick rundown:  

• The New York Post naturally takes the prize for most creative headline, "DITZY IVY PREXY H'WEEN BALL BOMBS."
• The Weekly Standard puts on a frowny face: "The images are, in fact, disturbingly familiar: Sympathizers of suicide-bombers in the Middle East routinely show solidarity with their 'freedom fighters' by dressing children up in the same type of costumes, complete with plastic dynamite and fake AK-47s."
• The Jerusalem Post is not psyched about Saadi calling himself a "freedom martyr." 
• See the Daily Pennsylvanian for an account that actually acknowledges that the costume was meant to be a joke. Saad Saadi, the student in the photo, says he regrets the photo, but not the costume. Is that one of those "I'm sorry you're offended" apologies? The piece quotes Anti-Defmation League official Barry Morrison: "No right-thinking individual ought to go around in [this] costume unless [he or she] is a suicide bomber or wants to be one."
• The DP also runs a full-length interview with Saadi: "It's the same as dressing up as anything scary."
• Gutmann also apologizes in a guest opinion column, noting that at a party featuring ax murderers, "It's hard to imagine that someone could create an actually offensive costume, but at least one of our students did."

Honestly? Unless you're going as a Katrina refugee named Terri Schiavo with a stingray sticking out of your chest that sends sexual IMs to Congressional pages ... we're not impressed.

Halloween is a fabulous opportunity to make poor decisions. Every year, same story: You start off doing something ironic -- dye your hair, dance to Wham!, get a little too carried away with your Mark Foley costume. Innocent fun. Then you look at the photos the next day and wince at how terrifyingly sincere it all looks.

Well, the unforgiving morning-after eye of Facebook has claimed its latest victim: Penn President Amy Guttman. We're sure it felt hilariously tongue-in-cheek to pose with a student dressed as a suicide bomber at her Halloween party. Apparently these guys didn't get the joke. Li'l Bo Peep Gutmann is a front-runner to be the next president of Harvard, and this is hardly the publicity she needs.

P.S. To be fair, "too soon" costumes were all the rage this year: at one Ivy party in D.C. last week, two girls showed up dressed as Darfurian refugees, alongside a dude with a bandana and scimitar calling himself a Janjaweed militiaman. They saw us wearing a blazer and asked us to be their U.N. negotiator.

P.P.S. We were scared to write about Saad Saadi '06, the student in the photo, when we saw his creepy webpage. Then we learned he's the one who started this Facebook group, so how tough can he be? (Saadi posted an apology to anyone who was offended by the costume, says the web site that found the pic; the text is after the jump.)

UPDATE 8:30 p.m.: Eric Obenzinger, the Daily Pennsylvanian's crack opinion page editor, has an interview with Saadi here.

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