Last week, Georgetown sophomore Charley Cooper made national news with a job listing for a personal assistant. He's 20-years old and apparently the whole college affair all too much for him to handle on his own.

According to Vox Populi, the Georgetown Voice's blog, the original as went something like this:

As my PA you will receive an email once a day by 9:00 am with a task list for that day and a time estimate for each task. Important tasks will be bolded on the list and must be done that day (even though everything on the list should theoretically be finished on a daily basis) …

PA example tasks -Organize closet -make bed -Drop off / pick up dry cleaning -Drop me off / pick me up from work -Do laundry -Fill up gas tank -bring car for servicing -schedule appointment for haircut -Pay parking tickets -manage electronic accounts -shopping and running errands -other random tasks.

Needless to say, Georgetown is not in the Ivy League. (And neither is Mr. Cooper.) But when a student does something so god-awful douchey that the Washington Post reports on it, something must be done.

Everyone's favorite Yale student, Aleksey "So Sexy" Veyner, might've done something like this. And Mike Kopko definitely started DormAid, a service that offered maid services to Harvard dorm rooms and pissed off pretty much the entire school. But Georgetown should know better, right?

After the jump, a couple of reasons why not.

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Recently, Google suspended 22 Gmail accounts at Brown due to a bug that allowed those students to read other students' emails. This occurred as Google was transitioning some accounts from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail. In some cases, students were able to read others' entire inboxes for a full three days between September 12 and September 14.

But after Google froze the accounts the following week without notifying any IT authorities at the university, Brown's Computing and Information Services department threw a minor hissy fit, citing a lack of communication with the company, even after the problem was fixed within a few days. Director Donald Tom later elaborated:

I've spoken very forcefully with the account [executive], my boss, senior administrators at Brown--including the president. [Google needs] to find a better way to communicate with us.

But looks like Tom had an awfully quick change of heart during the span of time between being interviewed by the Brown Daily Herald and Sarah Perez. In an article published by the Herald on September 16, Tom seemed to get over himself.

... I think that overall, I was just impressed with how fast they handled it.

That's what she said.

Yesterday, the Cornell Sun published a photo of a severed pig's head on the Arts Quad, displayed in all its rotten glory along with a sign proclaiming, "Maybe it's the beast, maybe it's just us."

According to Dear Uncle Ezra, a campus-related advice blog and Cornell's own stand-in Carrie Bradshaw, the slaughtered head may have been a fraternity's collegiate reference to Slope Day, Cornell's drunken end-of-the-year party. It might also be a literary reference to Lord of the Flies. (Too stupid to create their own reputation so they had to steal Dartmouth's and Brown's? We thought as much.) Uncle Ezra went on to elaborate on the accused frat members:

Perhaps, deep inside, they truly crave the common sense authority that members of a mainstream society have and yet they have been denied by this godless institution where apparently "adult" students behave within a supposed institution of higher-learning as if it was merely high school with no rules.... I would hope that, in the future ... other students at Cornell would see past some silly fraternity idiocy and be more disgusted by the deplorable self-poisoning and immorality occurring around the fraternity's fitting choice of symbolism...

Come on, Uncle Ezra, cut them some slack. How else are Cornellians going to allude to Hogsmeade in order to hang onto the one piece of good publicity in a decade?

Emma Watson has arrived in Providence with the paparazzi in tow. A few hours ago, the UK's Daily Mail newspaper published the first photos of a very un-Hermione-looking girl lounging in the grass at Brown and performing what appears to be a variation on the tolasana yoga pose.

According to a statement from Brown's director of communications, Watson will receive the same rights and protections as any other student on campus. (Seriously, we want this confirmed in party photos.) Emma is following suit, explaining that she's just a regular limey:

But I do hope that it will be only a short time before I am known as "Emma Watson, the student from the UK" rather than "Emma Watson who starred in those Harry Potter films".

Good luck in college, Emma.  And remember: No Glove, No Love.

More photos after the jump.

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Brown is the douchiest school in the country, according to GQ. Princeton is number three. Harvard is number four. Does this seem wrong? Keep reading, Deep Springs grads. It gets worse.

Just before the station wagon left the IvyGate garage, GQ published a "heavily researched, possibly stereotyped, but still accurate guide" to the nation's 25 Douchiest Colleges. In their own words, the GQ editors observe the inherent paradox of the douche:

The question isn't whether you're a douche bag when you go to college. We were all kind of douche bags when we went to college, if we're going to be honest about it. No, the question for America's youth is: What kind of douche bag do you aspire to be?

Gottseidank Yalies, Dartmutts, and Columbians, you're off the hook. Harvardians, Princetonians, and Brunonians are not so lucky. Cornell, Penn: honorable mentions don't always need mentioning.

After the jump, what's wrong with the list, and what you can do about it.

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The Education Life section of the New York Times website features several columns written by students about their college experiences. One of the students whose column is featured is Brown senior Matthew Scult. Matthew's piece is about the semester he took organic chemistry, the universally evil class that results in thousands of changes in major every year. However, this column isn't about Matthew's perseverance or self-discovery in his semester of orgo. He is neither a pre-med student nor a chemistry major. Whereas everyone else who enrolls in organic chemistry does it because they have to, Matthew Scult took the course for the hell of it. If this seems like an attention-seeking thing for a student to do, that's because it is.

Matthew writes about how he took the class all the way to the end, despite advice from all sides to drop it, and eventually failed in a blaze of glory.

The test was handed out, and the furious scribbling began. I slowly flipped through the 15-page exam, answering the two questions I knew, guessing on another and staring blankly at the rest. After about 15 minutes, I stood up and walked over to the T.A. at the front of the room. I said, “Thanks, I’m all set,” and handed him my exam.

Then 400 eyes turned to follow me as I walked out the door — and into the bright sunshine.

Odds are even money that he spent most of the rest of the day thinking about how he would write about taking the test in his submission to the New York Times.

Matthew's column may be slightly irritating to say the least. But for one Yale student (who will remain anonymous), it was the equivalent of slapping Jesus or saying non-complimentary things about Bill Simmons. This Eli expressed his out-of-proportion, boiling anger at this column in a mostly-caps locked e-mail--reproduced in pertinent part after the jump--sent to a Brown student friend of his. Read the rest of this entry »

Here's the important bit from Emma Watson's interview in Paste Magazine.

Paste: You are off to University in the autumn.

Watson: I am—to Brown, which is an Ivy League establishment in the U.S.A. I’ve got a place there to read literature.

Nailed it! Take that Daily Mail and NY Daily News! We laugh at your claims of her attending Columbia. She'll attend Columbia when we get tired of writing about her: Never!

Back in October, the world's favorite young hot witch was seen touring the top Ivy League schools. But in April, Emma shocked the Ivy nation by opting to attend Brown over Harvard and Yale. Naturally this sparked a great reaction, mostly from IvyGate commenters who could not believe that someone actually chose Brown instead of settling for it--much less someone as internationally famous as Emma Watson. The three questions being tossed around were:

     1. She's not actually going to Brown, right?

     2. Harvard and/or Yale must have rejected her, correct?

     3. Holy fuck, why is she going to Brown?

Three months later, these questions can be finally put to rest. With Half-Blood Prince coming out this month, the Harry Potter kids are on the interview circuit. Daniel Radcliffe took a break from being nude to say this to The Guardian about his co-star:

[Emma Watson's] very clever. Do you know her GCSE results?" His eyes boggle: "I was thrilled with mine - seven Bs, two As and an A*. I think Emma got three As and seven A*s - she's incredibly academic, it's frightening. Me and Rupert [Grint] to all intents and purposes dropped out of school. And she's going to Brown."

Not much reading between the lines needed there. Although Watson may have used the Imperius Curse on Radcliffe to keep him from revealing that she's going to Tufts. Read the rest of this entry »

Professors in the Ivy League apparently are somewhat aware of the problems facing academia. You usually don't see them doing anything about it other than whining at conferences and writing editorial columns in the New York Times. Tenure is a great thing, sort of like being emperor of Rome while it burns down. No one's gonna stop your fiddling (or publishing).

Francis McLellan, a Brown Ph.D. and Princeton's former head Russian language instructor, evidently had a different experience as a senior lecturer than the professors did. Lecturers are to Princeton what migrant laborers are to, well, Princeton. And it seems as if four years of teaching elementary language made giving up women, possessions, and meat an attractive option for McLellan. In January he was tonsured Iosaf, a hieromonk in the Russian Orthodox Church. Now he's archimandrite of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, a city just slightly less dangerous than Cambridge. Sexy monk results after the jump.
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The recent shooting on Harvard's campus stinks like a drug deal gone bad, and there are text messages to prove it. A recent article in the Crimson, who have actually been kind of awesome in covering the scoop, details how text messages recovered from victim Justin Cosby's phone threw up some High Times red (green?) flags. A Harvard student, likely the asshole who landed Justin at the scene of the crime confirmed the suspicions.

The May 5 message appears to be directed specifically to students. “Happy cinco de mayo too all my peoples &congrats on another skool year behind,” it begins. “got some crazy jak herrer bud n some caliMIST best of the best and still those 50s.”

Yes, you non-Brown students. "jak herrer bud" and "caliMIST" refer to strains of marijuana. The text from April 20 provides more hints:

“This text goes too all my peoples happy 420,” it reads. “Im gud allday today just hit me up asap stuffs gunna b goin fast.”

An IvyGate executive meeting hours before these findings speculated that the shooting was clearly a drug deal gone bad. Justin Cosby was not a Harvard student and had no apparent connections with the Harvard community. The Kirkland House basement—read "ask no questions land"—also makes for a perfect swap spot. And the shooting? No brainer.

It should be noted that Justin Cosby, a graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, succumbed to his injuries after the shooting Monday. His death is not funny. In fact, it's fairly terrifying.

So how 'bout those budget cuts for security, Harvard? After the jump, Harvard's response to IvyGate's pinpointing the effing irony.

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