Leave it to CNN to find a new and charming tidbit on the single piece of summer Ivy League news everyone is already sick of hearing about. Apparently, Henry Louis Gates sent a bouquet of roses to neighbor Lucia Whalen as an "expression of gratitude" for calling the police, albeit mistakenly. Perhaps Gates felt a little guilty for all the racial and political brouhaha he and the Cambridge Police stirred up. After the incident, Whalen was accused by the media of racism and received multiple threats to her personal safety. At the recent press conference she held on July 29 to clarify what had been written in the police report, she defended herself by saying that she did not assume the two men in front of Gates' house were black before she dialed 911. Cambridge Police spokesman Frank Pasquarello lauded Whalen for her actions:

She did the right thing. I applaud her. She did what we tell people to do: call when you see something suspicious. She did her civic duty.

Obama himself felt a little remorseful about the entire stupid situation, so--as everyone on and below Earth is aware of by now--he invited Gates and his arresting officer James Crowley to a beer summit at the White House last Thursday to promote better race relations. But perhaps in another poor act of judgment, Whalen remained the only person in the controversy uninvited to the reconciliation picnic hosted by the Commander-in-Chief. After being asked about the gathering, which has the entire American beer industry questioning its legitimacy/promoting their products, Whalen's lawyer Wendy Murphy responded that her client "doesn't like beer anyways."

Is a gender discrimination debate heating up to add to the racial profiling fire?

In the news conference that preempted Wipeout last night, the Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times asked President Obama about Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest and what it says about race relations in America. Here is his response (in text here):

Two minutes later, fat people were getting knocked around by giant bouncy balls. Read the rest of this entry »

It's not surprising that 70 percent of Supreme Court Justices seated since 1950 attended some Ivy League institution—Harvard and Yale have the best law schools in the country. When George W. Bush had to make up for the embarrassment that was Harriet Miers, he went with Samuel Alito, a graduate of Princeton and a Yale Law alumnus. President Obama continued the trend by nominating Sonia Sotomayor last May, betting she would have an easy time getting confirmed with alma maters identical to Alito's. Except for the fact that Alito was a conservative student who hated the liberal Princeton administration and Sotomayor was a liberal student who hated the conservative Princeton administration.

The hearings start next Monday and with endorsements from the ABA, the Fraternal Order of Police, and former FBI director Louis Freeh, Sotomayor is likely to be confirmed as the first Hispanic Justice and the 1,000,000th Ivy League graduate on the Court. This is despite drawing fire for supposedly claiming a "wise Latina" would make better decisions than a white man. Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee's sympathy for Princeton grads after the jump.

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Harvard Law graduate and Cornell professor William Jacobson is a member of an exclusive club, as he is one of the few arch-conservatives to make a home in Ithaca. Before this week, Jacobson was one of the lesser-known members of this group that also consists of Ann Coulter and the blind guy staunchly opposed to anal sex, even though his initials spell "A.S.S." But this week, Jacobson catapulted himself through the ranks of the Big Red Staters, thanks to his shocking expose of liberal media bias in MSNBC's coverage of President Obama's trip to an Arlington burger joint on Tuesday.

Mitchell even noted that Obama left a $5 tip in the tip jar. But she didn't mention one arugula-like fact, and you couldn't hear it on the MSNBC video because Andrea and her correspondent Kelly O'Donnel (they needed two people to cover this story) were talking so much.

NBC's regular news reported Obama's order as follows: ""I'm going to have a basic cheddar cheese burger, medium well, with mustard," Obama said. "Do you have spicy mustard? I'll take that."

Actually, the quote was "you got a spicy mustard or something like that, or a Dijon mustard, something like that" (at 0.55 of the unedited video below without Mitchell's talkover).

Obama ordered his burger with DIJON MUSTARD! Bet he had to seek John Kerry's counsel on that.

If anyone knows elitism, it's a Harvard Law-educated Cornell professor who worked for many years as a lawyer in Rhode Island.

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The Larry Summers saga is one for the ages.  Like a young Anakin, this son of economics who rose from the deserts of New Haven now casts his (rotund) shadow on the universe once again.  A recent New York Times retrospective depicts Summers and his new position at the helm of the Obama economic team as a phoenix rising from the flames of defeat to save a broken nation.  (Star Wars references stop here.)  Sure, Summers said some rather distasteful things about women.  Yeah, he was never the popular kid at school.  But as one fellow president has shown, bullies get jobs whether people shake their hands or not.

Just like in the Simpsons episode where Nelson falls for Lisa, Larry Summers has shown some signs of rehabilitation.  (Summers' wife, a professor in Harvard Department of English and American Literature Department, is named Elisa.)  As the Times praises the man and the Crimson keeps up their Larry-guard, nobody really knows whether to welcome the man back to powerful office or just cower in the corner of the playground as usual.

So what's the deal with the boy genius turned girl-bashing old man who chased away half of Harvard's Af-Am Department?  He's actually a pretty good economist and kind of a decent guy.  His John Bates Clark medal, an award up there with the Nobel in the field of economics, should grant the man some credibility.  Meanwhile, Summers tossed buckets of Harvard's hefty endowment at a financial aid overhaul program—a move matched by many elite universities—while his predecessor at the Treasury, Robert Rubin of CitiBank failure fame, just made buckets of money.  And descriptions like this of Lawrence the Terrible turned Pal from Mass Hall are downright sad:

After his five-year Harvard presidency, Mr. Summers at first seemed to have trouble letting go, colleagues and staff members say. He was on sabbatical but still roamed campus, especially the residential houses and pizza parties of undergraduates, who adored him so much they gave him a standing ovation at the next year’s graduation.

Praise granted, Larry Summers does sort of upset people.  No-Drama-Obama surely knows this and anticipates a proper performance when Summers makes the move back inside the Beltway.  Read why it might be a match made in heaven after the jump.

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Last Thursday, the Yale Daily News rained insulting (and aged) statistics onto the campus's crowd of Obama supporters. The title of YDN staffer Divya Subrahmanyam's article alone could reap the scorn of anyone who's ever worked on a campaign:  "Double take: Months of canvassing, 430 votes to show for it?" The article goes on to calculate the underwhelming performance of Yale for Obama workers according to a 2002 formula by Yale political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber.

Yale's Obama faction was not pleased. The flurry of disgruntled comments on the article can pretty much be summed up with phrases like "I'm overwhelmingly disappointed by Divya's article," "And your point is????," or "What a terrible, thoughtless, and irrelevant article." Others point out the YDN's hypocrisy in undermining the efforts of some when the paper celebrated the work of canvassers in Virginia the day before. But Nathan Tek '09 has a point:

just because it makes you feel bad doesn't mean the research is bad or that the article is incorrect. grow up, Dems.

None of which stopped Yale for Change, which sent out a passive-aggressive group email including the word "appalled," accusing YDN of destroying democracy and freedom as we know it, and demanding an apology:

The paper never covered our efforts on election day, only here, an article that demeans our work. It says nothing of the overall ground operation of the campaign. It denigrates civic engagement.  It ran a news analysis piece without running the news.  There are any number of problems that I have with the story, and I imagine the same is true for most of you.  ...  We asked [YDN editor] Tom [Kaplan] to issue an apology, but he refused.

So goes this now classic yet always tired battle pitting poor reporting by Ivy dailies against the soft-shelled emotions of students. Check out Yale for Change's email and some good ol' fashioned fact-checking after the jump.

A tipster points us to this ad (via Gawker) from CollegeClick TV, a website with college tips and statistics, which says:

Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and from Harvard Law School in 1991. Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton University in 1985 and from Harvard Law School in 1988. From the Bush League to the Ivy League. Education is the power to change.

The ad even has some Photoshopped ivy creeping up the front of the White House. As all of you astute readers have undoubtedly picked up on, however, still-President Bush has bona fide Ivy cred too, having graduated from Yale undergrad and Harvard Business School.

Come to think of it, actually, Bill Clinton and George Senior were Ivy grads also.

Lesson: The respective successes or failures of a given president have little to do with his Ivy background. Also: Maybe stick with Unigo for now. Read the rest of this entry »

America's collective crush on Obama finally consummated last night. At 11PM EST, approximately 30 seconds after the polls closed in California, the television networks called the presidential election for Obama and effete intellectual young folks came streaming out of dormitories the nation around and—

Ohmigod. Question 2 passed! It's legal to smoke pot at Harvard!!! (sort of)

Now where was I? Oh, right. Orgiastically celebratory young people, pouring into the street at universities like Penn (and recorded by the Daily Pennsylvanian):

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Many have speculated about Obama's seldom-discussed years at Columbia, where he was either a bomb-hurling radical or a boring bookworm. Yesterday Unqualified Reservations, a not-at-all-journalistically-sound blog read by tens, got the Ivy League blogosphere's collective panties in a bundle by arguing that Obama may never have attended Columbia at all, and is making the whole thing up. UR's rationale? Some guy who went to Columbia once didn't know him personally:

What is the chance that a budding young politician of undeniable talent and promise spends his junior and senior years at Columbia, and no one remembers him?

My guess is that young Barry dropped out of Occidental in '81, not to go to Columbia, but to go to New York and be a black revolutionary bohemian. We know he was a red-diaper baby (no shame in that - my father's parents were CPUSA members), and we know he was involved with an SDS splinter group at Occidental. Zombie has a very interesting timeline of his time in New York, during which it seems very probable that Obama met Bill Ayers. She also links to a completely unsubstantiated and irresponsible speculation that Obama was a roommate of Ayers and Dohrn...

So Barry wasn't the most popular kid north of 114th Street. That means he's a fraud? The proposition is so preposterous, even Volokh Conspiracy disputes it. Among Volokh's evidence: Barry's undisputed degree from Harvard Law School, where we hear they are pretty good at checking credentials. Also, no self-respecting Harvard grad would allow himself to be associated with Columbia— one of the lesser Ivies— if he didn't have to. Case closed.

The interesting part of this story isn't the No-lumbia accusation so much as the conspiracy-theorizing blogger behind it, Unqualified Reservations' "Mencius Moldbug." Not only is Mencius a fellow Ivy League transfer student (Brown '92) but he is... drumroll... an Obama supporter.

Has the world gone mad? Are Brunonians so crazed? My strangely sane correspondence with Mencius Moldbug, followed by a strangely less-sane conversation with Columbia's Office of Public Affairs, after the jump.

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IvyGate is at Columbia University, liveblogging the ServiceNation presidential candidates forum.  Check in while we let you know our every semi-relevant (grammatical accuracy not-guaranteed) thought:

6:15: IvyGate is on Low Steps, currently an epic camping ground:

More coverage, after the jump:

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