Welcome to the second installment of our guide to Ivy pizza (we've already done this with sandwiches and drinks). In our first installment, we reviewed the pizza at Harvard. I know, I'm also skeptical Boston has good food. But let's table that for a moment and focus on today's post: The Slice at Columbia. Reviewing Columbia's pizza is complicated by the university's location. In New York, good pizza, great pizza, abounds. But it's not to be found in Morningside Heights (try Nino's in Bay Ridge, or Grimaldis in DUMBO, or anywhere in Bensonhurst). Regardless, there is a pizza hierarchy at the school Law and Order keeps calling Hudson University.

1. Koronets: You may know Koronets as the place with the gigantic slices of pizza. For around $3.00, you get a slice the size of two normal slices. It's freaking huge. It's also gooey, greasy, and wonderfully moist. Koronets is great when you're drunk but it's a decadent delight when you're sober. The next time you're walking on Broadway and wanna grab lunch? Fuck Chipotle. Go to the place with the large pizza slices.

2. Famiglia's: Decent but overpriced (average one-topping slice will run you $3.25), Famiglia's offers a wide variety of slices and toppings. If you want a slice of Hawaiian, this is where you go. Famiglia's is also the option most like a real pizzeria: the decor is closely modeled after that of an authentic pizzeria and the kitchen dishes up hearty favorites like lasagna and baked ziti. In short, Famiglia's is a good but pricey fake.

After the jump, Pinnacle, Papa Johns, V&Ts. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Op-ed section of yesterday's Times, Mark Taylor - chair of Columbia's Religion Department - broke from the rank-and-file optimism of Ivy League academics on academia by asserting that "Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning." (For those who have been living under a rock for the past fifty years, in 2008, Forbes gave Detroit - a city saddled with crime and unemployment - the dubious distinction of being America's most miserable city).

We're guessing that this Benedict Arnold of a professor has tenure because his ideas, which include retrenching both doctoral-level education and academia as a whole, are unlikely to popular to many colleagues and administrators at Columbia, a place dredged in the virtues of a classical education. (Columbia College, as one example, continues to yoke its students to a stringent core curriculum).

The problem, Taylor explains, stretches back to Kant, who wrote in the late 18th century that to "handle the entire content of learning" professors should teach different subjects. This, he argues,

has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

More after the jump.

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Do you ever feel like the admissions committee just got it wrong? That you really are more of a Princetonian than an East Tennessee State Universitian? A new Facebook application called "Which Ivy League School Are You?" can clear everything in just 10 multiple choice questions.

This specific quiz application, now over 51,000 users strong, exists alongside those soothsaying exercises like "Which Disney princess are u?" and "ARE YOU GOOD IN BED?" but we're sure this is the real deal. Written by a graduate of both Harvard and Columbia (and NYU), the questions might as well ask what your favorite brand of socks is or which Golden Girls character have you thought about during sex.

But really. What are the criteria? One wall poster from India also wants to know "How reliable is it?" So being the mad scientists we are, we devised a rigorous experiment, put on lab coats, and got out our electric orb that makes your hair stand up.

After tooling around with this for about 5 minutes, we think we've got it solved. Answer "Money" to question 8, "Clubbing" to question 5, and "I'm flawless" to number 10. You'll be a Harvardian every time.

Check out a few screen shots after the jump. And to answer those hanging questions: Thorlo and Blanche.

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The ruinous state of our economy has done little to deter this year's batch of Ivy aspirants; for the class of 2013, acceptances rates fell at six of the eight Ivy League schools.

Harvard and Yale solidified their positions as the toughest schools to get into, at 7% and 7.5%, respectively, though the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey - while maintaining its third place position - slid, much to the dismay of some prestige-hungry Princetonians,  precipitously close to its proletarian New York City peer.

If we had to hazard a guess, we'd say the general rise in applications to the Ivy League may be owed in part to its constituents' sizable endowments and commitment to need-blind financial aid; in marked contrast, several other selective colleges and universities - including Colby and Oberlin - are, according to the New York Times, looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make admissions decisions this year."

Perhaps the decrease in selectivity at both Princeton and Penn is due to the fact that they are,  or rather have been, traditional feeders into Wall Street - a Wall Street that is no longer as glamorous as it was a few years before. If that yawn-inducing class on financial derivatives or corporate valuation isn't going to net you that super sweet 100-hour a week gig at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns you might as well learn hot boxing 101 and take creative writing classes pass/fail at Brown.

This shot of James Franco snoozing through class has been making its way around the Interweb. While Columbia freshman have been losing sleep and getting giddy from the thrill of walking around Morningside Heights with Spiderman's best friend, it looks like the MFA pursuit has been pretty breezy so far. After all, just a week ago, press releases announced that Franco's first book, a collection of short stories, would be published by Schribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

In other Franco-Columbia news, further details from last year's rumors of James starring as a young Allen Ginsberg in the biopic "Howl" have been confirmed. Last year, the New York Observer reported on the role and also Franco following in Ginsberg's footsteps at Columbia:

According to Hollywood Reporter, the film will focus on the obscenity trial surrounding the 1957 American publication of Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl."

Hopefully Mr. Franco will not go overboard in his attempts to mimic Ginsberg: if he goes too far he might end up getting kicked out of Columbia, where he enrolled in an MFA program this fall.

Since Franco enrolled in classes at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia last fall, it's been a waiting game for him to do something special. The book deal is OK, falling asleep is boring, but interacting with the freshman cats-in-heat would be downright grand. (Obscenity now!) Keep your cell phone cameras ready for his next move.

Minor YouTube celebrity and shameless self-promoter Aleksey Vayner went to Yale. Georgetown Law student - (really?) - and plagiarist Kaavya Viswanathan went to Harvard. Resident at New York Presbyterian/ Columbia Hospital Matt McCarthy went to Yale and then Harvard Medical School, so he certainly edges out his infamous Ivy peers for prestige, and with the release of "Odd Man Out", his error-ridden memoir about his year pitching for a minor league baseball team, he may top - or at least match - both Viswanathan and Vayner for deception.

A few days ago, The New York Times reported that "Odd Man Out" - which delves into the particulars of "playing with racist, steroids-taking teammates, pitching for a profane, unbalanced manager and observing obscene behavior and speech" - contains evidence of "wide-ranging errors and misquotations":

Several times in the book, which he devotes mostly to the antics of libidinous teammates and his manic manager, Tom Kotchman, McCarthy directly quotes people stating incorrect facts about their own lives and tells detailed (and mostly unflattering) stories about teammates who were in fact not on his team at the time. The book's more outrageous scenes could not be independently corroborated or disproved; several teammates who were present said in interviews that they were exaggerated or simply untrue.

Is there a listing for "selective hearing" in the DSM-IV? More after the jump.

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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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The recent lathering of attention received by Ithaca College's Cornell spoof, Ivy, puts the short, sordid history of Ivy League soap operas into perspective. For about a decade and a half, students inside the gates have been making soap opera-style parodies of their wild Ivy lifestyles. After most of the shows died off or went into Vimeo-shaped retirement homes, Ivy churns on and shows that non-Ivy students can not deal better insults but frankly better operate cameras.

The Ivy League soap fad started up with Harvard's Ivory Tower in 1994 when Chrysler still made the LeBaron and students still watched TV. The show stuck around until about the Y2k scare and probably featured Zack Morris types with plaid shirts tied around their waists. Then word got beyond the Georgian brick walls and Northwestern started a show too, evidently scaring the Ivory Tower crowd back up Rapunzel's braids. (Insert bad 90s Dave Matthews joke here. Actually, don't.)

Since the Interweb was still pretty infantile then, it's probably best to skip ahead to 2006—the golden year of Columbia's The Gates, the sort of re-arrival of Ivory Tower, and the national media hit The B.C. (We'll give you three guesses where that one's from. Hint: It's not an Ivy.) Basically, each show had one good episode that featured either (a) a lesbian sex scene, (b) Harvard kids, you know, hangin' out and tryin' not to act like they go to Harvard, or (c) getting a free trip to Hollywood to meet the real cast of The O.C. (Alright, we didn't actually watch The B.C.—we just read the Times coverage of their dope junket in LA.)

Read more and watch clips from Ivy Soap purgatory after the jump.

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Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!

This morning, the New York Times reported that Harvard's endowment has lost $8 billion, or 22 percent of its value, in the last four months. In a letter to the deans, University President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst '82 said that the total loss in value will likely be closer to 30 percent by June, the end of the current fiscal year. Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, and the $8 billion loss alone is larger than the endowment value of all but four other American universities (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has those moments where your mom gets a screen name or your high school frenemy pokes you and you think, Man, technology is the worst. Along those lines, did you know that the terrorists use social networking sites too? True story! It appears that Al Qaeda has been distributing training manuals with instructions for would-be terrorists on how to use digital platforms to accomplish their, erm, goals.

Columbia will use any excuse to throw a capital-S Summit, so in a few weeks the Law School will host Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, Howcast, Access 360 Media and the U.S. State Department to discuss the "best ways to use digital media to promote freedom and justice, counter violence, extremism, and oppression":

These young leaders will form a new group, the Alliance of Youth Movements, which will produce a field manual for youth empowerment. The field manual will stand in stark contrast to the Al Qaeda manual on the basics of terrorism, found by Coalition Forces in Iraq... [It] will form the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on using social-networking and other technologies to further their causes.

The Howcast press release doesn't provide details on what exactly in the terrorism manual requires an in-kind response, but the forum was specifically inspired by an anti-FARC Facebook group that helped organize millions of Colombians to demonstrate against the guerrilla organization. Whoopi Goldberg, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and MSNBC's Luke Russert are scheduled to speak. Read the rest of this entry »