Tipster:
I see Yale’s freshman rowing team have a great christmas postcard …
http://imgur.com/xZx2W [Ed: NSFW! NSFW!]
Censored version below. (Further reading here.)
Season’s greetings everyone!
Although he was best known for his Big Ten career, former Penn State coach Joe Paterno first made his name as an Ivy League star, playing football for Brown in the 1940’s. And while it was once an honor to call Paterno an alum, his alma mater has publicly renamed an athletics award that was given in his honor, is reviewing his membership in their Athletic Hall of Fame, and, less publicly, removed his name from a list of “Prominent Brown Alumni,” distancing themselves from their former star quarterback. Well, sort of.
The reasons for these changes are clear. In the wake of the Sandusky sex scandal, Paterno’s reputation has been severely tarnished, as it was determined that not only did he know his assistant coach had molesting young boys, he went out of his way to hide it. As Louis Freeh wrote in his independent report on Penn State released earlier this month:
“[Paterno] repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the University’s Board of Trustees, the Penn State community, and the public at large.”
Doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that you want to be advertising on your website.
However, even after removing his name from their alumni list and taking his name off an athletic award, Brown has left up what seems to be a fairly substantial connection to Paterno: a webpage titled “The Paterno Legacy.” Read the rest of this entry »
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Unfortunately, the collegiate sexual abuse scandals keep piling up. Wednesday, The Boston Globe reports, Stephen Embry filed a sexual abuse lawsuit against Harvard University, claiming he was repeatedly molested by a Crimson swimming coach on Harvard’s campus from 1969 to 1972. Although the abuse started when he was 12 years old, Embry first realized he was molested in 2008, after decades of repressing the memories.
According to The Boston Globe, “Embry said he was raped and sexually assaulted approximately 100 times over the course of three years, usually at the Harvard pool.” Ben Merritt, the accused Harvard swimming coach, lived near Embry’s family and would regularly drive him and several other boys to Cambridge to practice.
Embry is also charging that Harvard misled him about the statute of limitations on abuse claims when he raised his concerns with the school. Embry wrote Harvard in 2008 shortly after piecing together his abuse, The Globe reports, and described living “in a state of abject fear.” According to The Globe, in 2010, a university attorney told Embry that she had “been unable to find anyone who would support your suggestion that Harvard is legally responsible … [and] The time has long since passed for bringing a legal claim against the university.”
However, The Globe states, “Under Massachusetts law, victims of sexual abuse can file a civil claim within three years of when they realized they had been abused.” If Embry had first realized what had happened to him in 2008, and reached out immediately afterwards, he still would have been legally within his rights in 2010 to take action against Harvard.
Additionally, the suit states that Harvard failed to disclose a previous claim brought in 1996 against both the university and Ben Merritt. According to The Globe, the complaint against Harvard was dismissed, while the suit against Merritt reached a settlement. A few months after the lawsuit was filed, The Globe reports, Merritt committed suicide.
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Samyr Laine, Mark Zuckerberg’s freshman year roommate at Harvard, will travel to London next month to compete in the 2012 Olympics. A member of the track and field team while at Harvard, Laine is representing Haiti in the triple jump, in which he holds Crimson records.
However, according to Bloomberg News, this means nothing, because Zuckerberg is rich and Laine can’t afford to eat. As they helpfully point out:
“Zuckerberg, 28, with an estimated worth of $16 billion, ranks 40th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Laine grabs free pizzas these days through a deal at a local restaurant, and sometimes needs help from his parents to pay his share of rent.”
The article goes on to mention how Laine can only afford a trainer who doesn’t ask to be paid. He “survives” thanks to a monthly stipend from the International Olympic Committee and money from the U.S. Athletic Trust, which is helping him and two other Ivy League Olympians. Additionally, Laine has two sponsorships: one that gives him clothing and another that gives him food.
On the other hand, Zuckerberg may now be too cool to be bothered with such trivial things as talking about his pre-billionaire status friends. As Bloomberg reports, a Facebook spokesman “declined to pass requests on to Zuckerberg seeking comment about his former roommates.”
Whatever man. We all know who was bringing more girls back to D11 Straus Hall.
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Make all the jokes you want about fencing being a girly sport; about guys in bee-keeper suits waving their epees around like magical wonder wands. Fencing, it turns out, is more masculine than you ever imagined, even on the ladies’ side. Take Cornell, for example. The women competing on the Big Red fencing team are dogged competitors with raw, ferocious athleticism to match that of any dude. Especially when it turns out they are dudes.
The New York Times ran a story yesterday exposing the roster chicanery that college sports programs use to pack more men onto their athletic teams in the age of Title IX. The 1972 federal law mandates that colleges field a number of female athletes proportional to the overall percentage of women on campus. This has created a number of issues for collegiate sporting clubs in which girls are under-represented, limiting the number of spots available for men. As a result, athletic directors employ all sorts of creative write-arounds to satisfy Title IX without actually, you know, satisfying Title IX.
Case in point: Cornell listed 34 women on its ’09-’10 varsity fencing squad — which is cool and everything, except…
Only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men.
Oh.
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