You might wonder, why do we always see Ivy League characters in books, movies, and on television?  Well, when you get 7 of the country’s most prestigious schools together with Cornell, their combined influence and effrontery is bound to influence pop culture.  Here begins IvyGate’s 2-part “investigation” of Ivy League schools and their fictitious alumni.  To begin, Brown University:

The first person we’ll examine is Hermione Granger…oh, wait…that really happened.

Okay, let’s move on to our next, and certainly most famous and relevant Brunonian: Brian Griffin.  No student could typify Brown University more with his contrarian nature, sickeningly left-wing agenda, air of superiority, and casual (causal?) use of alcohol, pot, and various other drugs.  Most notably, however, he didn’t graduate, rounding out the underachievement of all Brunonians!  Like most Brown students he has very little to put on his résumé, besides things like a hydroponics lab and that one summer in high school spent working to cure Koalas with an extra nipple. Read the rest of this entry »

Brown University, the tropical island to which celebrities deport their children, doesn’t have poor people:

Under 50 percent of students receive financial aid, and a majority of students pay full tuition — $53,136 in the current academic year — which itself is more than the median U.S. household income.

The O.C., FOX’s hit drama running from 2003 to 2007, heavily featured Brown. In the first three seasons, main character Seth Cohen — a pot-smoking, geeky, comic book lover with a witty sense of humor — had his sights set on Brown. Yet in a plot twist, Seth is denied admission, and instead, Summer Roberts — his superficial, valley-girl girlfriend — is offered a spot.  Read the rest of this entry »

The numbers that are the dick-measuring contest known as Ivy League admissions are finally in, and IvyGate could think of no better way (we didn’t try that hard) to gauge the different school’s reactions by taking to the streets to interview students and determine their (hilarious) reactions to the statistics.

Brown University rolls in (alternatively, “wraps up”) with an admission percentage of 9.6%, a .6% increase from last year! When asked about this rise, I was met with stony eyes and this response: “Brown recently discovered that admitting more students meant more money from tuition. The following year admissions rose higher than for any other Ivy League institution. Where do you think we got the money for our new pool?”

Columbia coasted into a .5% increase from 6.9% last year, on which a student commented,

I’ve never looked at Columbia’s admissions the way others look at it. Others look to decrease the number to appear better. Columbia has always let in more than they can, because we’re not looking to falsify our admissions statistics, though they will automatically be low, as it is an Ivy League school.

Yeah…you can only expect so much from a school in baby blue.  Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend we received this charming tip from someone at Brown:

If you’re having a slow news day, you might want to have fun with this
A chick named [REDACTED] (class of ’13) has posted a number of pics of herself
engaged in all sorts of Brown-related silliness.
My personal favorite is her and a friend sneaking around the Whispering Arch
(attached)
Her OKCupid account, by the way, is [REDACTED]
Links: [REDACTED]

Attached were pictures clearly lifted from Brown Bares, a pun-tastic, semi-famous Reddit forum on which Brown students “Bear” all—ha! oh god!—for the clicks and comments of their enlightened, sex-positive peers. Or, in English, it’s basically naked Brown students.

When we received the tip, the first thing we thought was: we probably shouldn’t be checking IvyGate’s email account while waiting in line at CVS. But the second thing we thought was: do we really want to ruin Brown Bares for our own—what? Pageviews? Unique visitors?  Unlike, say, oh, one or two IvyGate celebrities, these Brown kids eagerly posting their flesh online aren’t in it for attention or power or whatever it is that Brunonians consider the meta-currency of their hipster fortress. (Reblogs?) Read the rest of this entry »

You need to watch this film. Or at least the 1-minute highlight reel we’ve assembled above. (Watch an extended reel here.) The MacBook Pro, directed by Brown student Jed DeMoss, features Soul Surfer star Lorraine Nicholson drinking champagne straight from the bottle and Madison Utendahl, the daughter of Tyra Banks’s estranged fiancé, swearing a lot. Better yet, it shows off politically-connected wild-child Lucas Mason-Brown getting very, very high. The plot involves a mysterious entity stealing Apple laptops from Brown students. And you thought Scout Willis’s secret Twitter was bad!

The 20-minute film was posted on Vimeo more than three months ago, lingering there ever since, until a tipster pointed us to it. 

This is what Brown University has become. A dossier of the film’s main players, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

[Ed: We just received a DMCA complaint from Time, Inc., so we’re removing the scan from People magazine. Sorry!]

Upon our report of  Scout Willis’s secret Twitter, two publications—People and the Pulitzer-nominated National Enquirer—began work on filling in the rest of the story. Here’s what they found!

First, People. (The print article isn’t yet online, so we’ve uploaded a scan here.) The magazine found Scout Willis’s Brown instructor (!)—for this Fall 2011 course (!!)—who explained Scout’s Twitter project using an especially unfortunate phrase:

Scout LaRue Willis ’12, wayward daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, is notable for attending Brown, being in a band with Jann Wenner’s son, supplying vocals to classmate Nico Jaar’s recent track, “As I Say”, and exposing her buttocks for some sort of fashion website—according to which Scout “is an open spirit that warms and lights up any cold space or empty soul within range.”

For the past four months, however, Scout has been updating a secret, pseudonymous Twitter account, on which she periodically mentions her “coke habit”, “casually taking MDMA”, and “railing Klonopin”; makes strange, cinematically violent threats against her Brown classmates and others; posts amateur photography (such as this picture of her with Terry Richardson, for whom Scout apparently posed topless after Richardson tried to have sex with her); and of course spews lots of hipster nonsense—e.g., “Have you even READ the Wikipedia page for Gravity’s Rainbow?”

Due perhaps to said drugs, Scout has shared some insanely graphic accounts of her personal life, such as her (really) dirty laundry:

haven’t washed me sheets in like months, cum stains, soda stains, mascara on the pillows the works! finally taking then to the dry cleaners!

On December 31, Scout alerted her readers to her ongoing waxing session:

Getting my vag waxed as I tweet, was jut chastised by a tiny Russian woman for being so hairy

Two days prior, Scout bragged about having drug-fueled sex with a stranger:

Casually took MDMA at this little bar downtown and got fingered by the hot dude who delivered our munches because I was with too many gays

And, in November, Scout tweeted that New York provocateur Terry Richardson attempted to finger her: Read the rest of this entry »

In higher education, anything can be ranked—even more so in the Ivy League. With so many hazing scandals erupting everywhere—at Cornell, at Penn, at Dartmouth, and on and on—the necessary question is: Yes, but which Ivies haze the most? Or the least? Let’s find out!

First, the Ivy League’s least hazy—a.k.a. laziest—members:

1. Columbia

LOL. Columbians don’t “haze.” Hazing is for commoners. Rather, Columbians take unpaid internships at underfunded literary magazines, at which they are subjected to nearly the same amount of humiliation.

Anyway: it looks like the last time any hazing-related event shook Morningside Heights to its core was way back in ’05—i.e., 1905—when Columbia student Kingdon Gould, which was apparently the name of a real person, defended himself against some sort of fraternity-affiliated kidnapping by firing a gun in the air. Oh, Columbia: how you’ve changed.

After the jump, Brown, Harvard, and Yale: Read the rest of this entry »

This interactive hazing death map is the work of Hank Nuwer, a Franklin College professor who has diligently recorded every hazing-related death in the United States since the middle of the 19th century. This is IvyGate, however, so you’re probably most concerned with the Ivy League. That’s where it gets interesting.

Only four Ivies—Brown, Cornell, Penn, and Yale—have recorded instances of students dying from hazing. (Nuwer’s list is imperfect, to be sure—we’ve excluded both a bystander’s death at Cornell and an auto accident involving Yale students; Brown’s sole death is also iffy.) Per Nuwer’s list, the Ivy League has experienced six hazing-related deaths in total. Half of them occurred at Cornell.

In fact, Cornell was the among the first schools in America to witness a hazing-related death, in 1873, in which a student fell into one of Cornell’s gorges, allegedly while blindfolded. Cornell is also among the most recent schools (Ivy or otherwise) to witness another hazing death, in 2011, of George Desdunes. According to ABC News, Desdunes was allegedly blindfolded, too.

Cornell shares some uncomfortable company: it is one of six schools in the United States to have three or more hazing-related deaths in its history. The others are MIT and the Universities of Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, and Texas—at the last of which, in 1928, a fraternity pledge “died from the electric shock when he had to crawl through mattresses charged with electric current.”

After the jump, we’ve collected a list of every Ivy League hazing-related death since 1873:

Read the rest of this entry »

Brown alumnus and football legend Joe Paterno ’50 died on Sunday from complications related to lung cancer. Though primarily a fixture of Pennsylvania State University, Paterno started out as a bookish, isolated undergraduate at Brown, where he served as quarterback for the Bears and graduated with a degree in English. JoePa’s successful football program at Penn State bolstered his reputation as a Ivy League-educated, Virgil-quoting scholar-coach, but he never forgot his experience at Brown, and spent his career trying to catch up to the WASP society that excluded him.

Distinguished by Italian features and a thick accent, Paterno was quickly sorted out of Brown’s social scene. Some fifty years later, as Frank Fitzpatrick details in his 2005 biography of Paterno, the nationally recognized football coach still remembered the slight:

“I walked into a calm sea of blue blazers, sharkskin suits, and Harris Tweeds,” [Paterno] later wrote, “I knew I had blown something when all those cool-eyed faces turned toward me and my sweater, slowly, so as not to tip and spill their stemmed glasses that seemed to hold nothing but clear water, except for an olive in each. I heard somebody whisper, ‘How did that dago get invited?’ . . .”

His exclusion from Brown’s patrician society was apparently so wounding that Paterno almost let his residual anger steer his coaching career. An offer from owner Billy Sullivan to train the New England Patriots for 1.4 million dollars—enough to buy some WASP respectability—tempted Paterno to defect from Happy Valley:

The prospect of owning a vacation home somewhere along that sixty-five-mile-long, hook-shaped sliver of sand where the New England Brahmins had summered forever held a powerful allure . . .

That’s why Sullivan tempted him so. It wasn’t just the salary he knew he could demand. Or the piece of the team he’d been promised. It was all that being wealthy in New England implied. Paterno had grown up living in rented homes. Now he could own not just a home, but the Cape Cod retreat that ‘every rich Yankee kid I’d met at Brown assumed was coming to him, the same as inheriting his dad’s club membership.’

That was 1972. He wound up staying. After taking Penn State’s trifling salary (some 100,000 dollars), Paterno was confirmed as a hero of small-time sports. The success of his Nittany Lions would be the only match for Paterno’s celebrity.

Predictably, his newfound status assuaged his resentment toward his Brown classmates. “As his prominence grew,” Fitzpatrick writes, “old classmates began to contact him or bring their children and grandchildren to visit him in State College. The coach suddenly became an active and involved alumnus.”

By the time graduate assistant Mike McQueary reported Jerry Sandusky in 2002, Paterno had accumulated a treasure chest of recognitions from his alma mater:

Read the rest of this entry »