IvyGate's Guide to Admissions: Part III

Your dream school is Columbia, but your intuition (or that flaccid rejection letter) tells you that you're not Columbia material. What is one to do, aside from attending NYU? In this five-point guide, we explain how to gain that coveted admissions letter from this neoclassical jewel on the hill. But be forewarned: Columbia is known to induce extreme feelings of academic inadequacy, general sleep-deprivation, and a social life (and for some a sex life) that revolves around the Butler library.

1. Do well at another school (read: get straight A's and suck up to profs who will write your recommendation letters) and re-apply as a transfer. This is the obvious choice, and the choice that has the least stigma. Transfers, especially those to CC, make other CC students feel good about themselves. Every time they see a transfer they think to themselves, "See some people do want to be here." And if you've transferred from Yale, say, or Harvard, it helps prove to them that hey, so what if I got rejected to them in high school, I live in New York City and it's omfgawesome. But it doesn't really qualify as a backdoor since it's also the hardest way of getting in. For this year's freshmen, Columbia College's acceptance rate was 8.68% and SEAS's acceptance rate was 17.6%, for an overall admit rate of 10.04%. The acceptance rate for transfers is even lower. Out of 1,401 applicants to the College and SEAS, only 112 students were admitted, or 7.99%.  It's a shot in the dark, but maybe, if you really hate the school you landed at and you act like annoying grade-obsessed gunner in all your classes you might as well give it a try.

2. Apply as a freshman or transfer to Columbia-affiliated Barnard College. The women's college has been a source of endless debate and angst ever since Columbia College went coeducational in the early eighties, after years of failed discussions to integrate with the University at large. No one, not even the president of Barnard, seems to really understand the school's tangled relationship with Columbia. On one hand the Barnard website touts the fact that "Barnard has its own campus, faculty, administration, trustees, operating budget, and endowment." On the other hand, Barnard students receive Columbia email addresses, have full access to Columbia classes and student organizations, and earn degrees signed by both Barnard and Columbia presidents. Most gripes around Barnard center around the fact that its students get in easier but are de facto Columbia students. (The acceptance rates for this year's freshmen and transfers were 28.5% and 29.1%, respectively). Angsty prestige-driven Columbians should be more concerned about recruited athletes, don't you think?

More backdoors after the jump.

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This week The Eye (weekly magazine of the Columbia Spectator) investigates the eerily eugenics-y world of Ivy League egg donation via pseudonymic sorority girl Alex Greenbaum:

How has she been feeling since her egg-removal surgery in September? She takes a long gulp from her Ethos water bottle and pauses for a few seconds. “You know, I felt like shit for days,” she finally says. “But they were able to extract 10 eggs from me... my check just cleared, so that’s $9,000 I can put to post-graduation travel and apartment-hunting.”

Alex's financial woes stem from her lack of a "viable major" (fertility jargon infecting every area of her life, apparently) and "My parents said they won’t pay for my BlackBerry [after graduation]." Kind of makes you miss the good old days, when impoverished lady students just plain whored themselves for extra cash, right? Like high-end prostitution, high-end egg donation requires a certain nubile je ne sais— oh, who are we kidding. We know exactly which quoi they want, and it's the same Barbie doll nonsense as everywhere else. In Alex's words:

“If I was short, overweight, or a minority, I’m sure I wouldn’t have found immediate success or made that much money to start. I made more money than what’s typical because I was deemed an ‘ideal type’ by the agency."

As the article continues, the only thing creepier than the $500K payday "for an Ivy League donor who was taller than 5 feet 10 inches and scored at least a 1400 on her SATs" is author Sadia Latifi's rhapsodic description of Greenbaum's statuesque Aryan glory. (Despite "50-percent Jewy-ness" — a minority who doesn't resemble a minority! Jackpot!) Read the rest of this entry »

When I was trying to decide which "New Yorker Festival" events to cover, the "American Dream" discussion between Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri and T.C. Boyle caught my eye. Why, you ask? Primarily because its panelists have Ivy ties, making this post marginally relevant to the topic of the blog. Also, the Ivy League and the American Dream seem to be somehow linked. At least, after spending so much money and emerging with no practical skills, I hope they are.

This discussion took place in what I think was a church on the Lower East Side. Young and old New Yorker fans packed the room to capacity. In fact, there were people standing in line outside the building (this made me feel bad about nodding off a few times during the discussion. But whatever--I was tired.) The moderator, a British guy who probably works for the New Yorker, opened with a joke about how incongruous it was for a British guy to moderate a discussion about the American Dream.

And then the panelists started talking.

Boyle on social mobility:

If the 'American Dream' is about about social mobility, I am its exemplar.

Boyle, working-class son and author of World's End and other award-winning books, modestly admits it wasn't until he was a junior in college that he "blundered into a creative writing class."

London-born Lahiri, Barnard '89, on America:

It's taken me my entire life to understand and accept that I'm an American.

Lahiri explains that Indians are more exotic in America than in Britain, where they are part of "the fabric of the culture."

After the jump, Jeff Eugenides, Brown '83, tells us greed is good and Boyle tells us his pet name for his wife. Read the rest of this entry »

Male chauvinists, stop reading now, or forever mourn the loss of the next minute of your life: Senator Hillary Clinton, presidential unhopeful, gave a press conference at Barnard College today addressing a recent US Government Accountability Office report on pay inequity for women in the workplace.  IvyGate was pleasantly surprised that Barnard let us into the press room, where we proceeded to snap a bunch of shots of HRC from close range.  But, before the photo barrage, let us turn to the topic at hand: the fact that, on average, women earn twenty percent less than men for the same work.  The fact that Hillary earned (we're ballparking here) twenty percent less votes than Barack Obama was not mentioned.

Although we had our suspicions about this press conference (suspicions involving the barely-departed coattails of one Barack Obama, see Liveblog 9/11/08), Hillary was eloquent, thought-provoking, and (we can't believe we're typing this) funny.

Some highlights, after the jump:

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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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In another sign of the coming apocalypse, last night students at Barnard's Sulzberger Hall were forced to evacuate their dorm following a series of pipe and heater explosions. From The Spec:

Near the TV lounge, there was just a small pool of water and there was fog in the windows," said Jill Ross, BC '11 and a resident of the fifth floor of Sulzberger. "I saw this brown water beneath my feet [in the stairwell] and thought, 'I really hope this wasn't a sewer.'"

According to The Spec, "Many Barnard students compared the experience of being evacuated down stairwells amid flooding, to the Titanic." At least, you know, they have a proper sense of perspective. But where's Leo when you need him?

So, remember how we made those pro-ana jokes about the Columbia hunger strikers, whose demands were so vague we figured they were just anorexic kids looking for attention? Upon the hospitalization last night of hunger striker Aretha Choi, Barnard '10, an article from last spring's Audrey (an Asian-American women's magazine) came to light:

Aretha Choi, a Korean American freshman at Barnard College in New York City, began watching her weight in middle school. ... By her junior year [of high school], she was anorexic. At 5-foot-7, she withered to 90 pounds. Doctors pleaded with her to be hospitalized...

Oh. Shit.

Aretha's post-strike statement expressed shame and invoked God in the name of starvation-related-medical catastrophe:

I felt utterly ashamed and I felt that I had let the four other strikers, the many supporters, and myself down. Only 4 days? Only 4 days? Only 4 days? That was the question plaguing me until I was laying with fluids running into my arm.

Lying in the starchy hospital bed, I was covered in self-disappointment. I could not help but wish God had given me more strength so that my body would have held out longer. I wanted to go back out to the tents. I felt like I had given up.

Does this mean Aretha's "supporters" were actually "enablers"? Speaking of which, how weird is it that Gandhian scholar and Barnard professor Dennis Dalton joined the strike? Having previously starved in protest of noble causes like ending apartheid, Prof. Dalton now seals his activism and physical wellbeing with a group of eating disordered undergrads. Must take the winds out of the sails a little, huh.

After the jump: Aretha-relevant portion of the article (including some damning Phillips-Andover discussion), which is actually pretty heartbreaking. 

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Three Columbia and two Barnard students started hunger striking yesterday, drawing a candlelit vigil of 70 and tummy rumbles all around. Drawing from the 520+ word "Statement from the Strikers" posted on the hungry kids' kinda-pro-ana blog, the Spec reports, "Among the litany are issues including alterations in the proposed Manhattanville expansion plan, more support for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and stronger administrative response to bias incidents."

Funny how rebels with too many causes end up rebels without a cause. Bwog reports that a sixth striker dropped out last night, presumably because he got hungry. Also, starvation-ville is

Festooned with banners and full of cushions and survival supplies--we noticed a few jumbo rolls of toilet paper--the three-ring tent complex has seen a steady flow of visitors and curious passersby.

Nifty hunger strike bonus: Fewer bathroom breaks, reduced likelihood of soiling protest-tent. Meanwhile, administrators are kinda confused by the cluster of angsty starving kids in the middle of campus. Barnard prezzie Judith Shapiro points out that, though hunger strikes work for political prisoners under totalitariasm, they "may not always be a necessary strategy in a particular situation." Like rich brats on a liberal college campus in the most media-savvy city in the world, in the country that invented free speech. But the real gem from the Spec's coverage was Mark Lenger SEAS '09:

"It's too cold for a hunger strike," Lenger added. "When Gandhi was doing hunger strikes, he was doing it in a balmy, sub-tropical area. ... Unless we can see your ribs sticking out, then it's, really, in a PR perspective, sub-optimum."

May I propose an alternative: Hunger strike bikini babes calendar!

On Sep. 7, the Columbia Spectator published an op/ed so awful it became popular on the internet, garnering 160 comments (at last count) and smashing what we assume to be the previous record of 6 comments.

"The Truth About the Academies," by Idris Leppla, declares itself the "first part of a four-part series." The author, a Barnard student writes:

I know why I chose Columbia: the campus is magnificent, the education is top-tier, and my peers are intelligent. I could look at a stranger, tell him or her that I went to Columbia, and hear the predictable, "Wow, you must be smart."

And it's all downhilll from there. Here's Leppla on her quixotic quest to disenroll her brother against his will from the U.S. Naval Academy:

...the lieutenant reminded me that my brother had signed an oath legally binding him to the Navy. When I reminded the lieutenant that he had signed that oath after he had been yelled at all day and that his hair had just been shaven off during his first day there, he comforted me that John was not at all forced to sign the oath.

They shaved his hair? Why that's just like Abu Ghraib. The Spec has since taken down the article, which is a shame because it was really, really bad -- the kind of wretched awfulness that transcends politics and -- maybe, just maybe -- unites a divided country in a time of momentuous decision.

UPDATE: The Spec says that the article is unavailable for technological, not editorial, reasons. It has been re-posted elsewhere on their site.

After the jump: the article in full

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It's been a busy week in terms of Middle Eastern politics on Ivy League turf.  Harvard and Yale refused to sign a petition in support of Israeli universities, and now Columbia is joining the fray with yet another petition-based controversy, this time surrounding an Arab anthropologist's tenure.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard is the author of Facts on the Ground, which questions the archaeological record behind Israel's Jewish origin.  The ancient kingdom of Israel and Judah, Abu El-Haj writes, are "pure political fabrication."  Citing lack of academic rigor and throwing the "pure... fabrication" label back at Abu El-Haj, the "Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure" petition had 1240 signatures at press time, nearly all of which were accompanied by the undersigned's academic qualifications, mostly from Columbia and Barnard.  Petition author Paula Stern Barnard '82, runs the Stern Group, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. runs blog A Soldier's Mother.

Some say Stern's position in international business and policy as the mother of an Israeli soldier gives her petition ulterior motives (edit: whoa. this stuff gets crazier by the minute.).  "Grant Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure" had 266 signatures at press time, nearly all boasting impressive academic affiliations.  "Grant" also gestures to racial prejudice, claiming Abu El-Haj "has been singled out from among many other authors who make the same points essentially because of her last name."  "Grant" petition author Paul Manning of Trent University writes, "We believe that these attacks on Ms. Abu El-Haj are part of an orchestrated witch-hunt (reminiscent of course of McCarthyism) against politically unpopular ideas."

Manning is the second Ivy academic to cry "McCarthyism" this week.  On Tuesday Harvard sociologist Neil Goss announced his finding that "A greater percentage of social scientists today feel that their academic freedom has been threatened than was the case during the McCarthy Era," with Middle East researchers leading the quashed-freedom brigade.  Yesterday Yale University Press narrowly escaped a lawsuit that, in the UK, forced Cambridge University Press to pulp its stock of Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, by Matthew Levitt (meaning the American edition remains in print).  Abu El-Haj's criticism comes mostly heavily from Jewish organizations, whereas Levitt's detractor is KinderUSA, a pro-Palestine non-profit that claimed libel.

EDIT no. 1: Thanks Professor Manning. Ivy or not, you can edit our essays any day.

EDIT no. 2:  This is ridiculously complex.  Just go to the comments; Paula and Paul are letting their hair down there.

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