• Brown: OMG, somehow we missed this, Ruth Simmons went to the BET Honors! No word on whether BET stars Tiny and Toya were there, or if Lee Bollinger sat behind Carrie Underwood at the People’s Choice Awards.
• Cornell: No more special financial aid for “enrollment priorities” — which, predictably and unironically, meant athletes.
• Yale: Humanities seminars overcrowded; fifteen percent of English majors to be placed in Chemistry department by lottery.
• Harvard: Hey, did you hear there was an election at Harvard — I mean, in Massachusetts? I hope Scotty plans a senior-class mixer and books a good music act for once!
• Dartmouth: School forgets it isn’t Yale or Harvard, attempts to place alumni in the Senate. The Senate in Washington.

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?

Just the other day, a friend had this as his away message: “I really don’t care how much you loved Kurt Vonnegut.” It’s a good thing, too, because we were just about to spill to him about how sad it was, what a loss, so it goes, etc. But then we realized why his callousness made sense: This guy went to Cornell. So did Vonnegut. He worked on the paper. So did Vonnegut. Seriously, Cornell Sun staffers must spend their college careers so steeped in all things Vonnegut that the recent outpouring — sometimes respectful, sometimes awful — was just the last straw. Who can blame them for being sick and tired of hearing about Kurt Vonnegut?

Still, the Sun has given the man a proper burial. Last week they posted a commemorative section dedicated to the author, who worked at the Sun in the early 40s before dropping out to go to war. The Sun ran a straight obit, an affectionate editorial, a video of speech he gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, and some poems Vonnegut himself must have submitted to them in recent years. They’ve also collected a few pieces he wrote for the paper. It’s him, all right. One editorial begins:

Wendell L. Willkie, political yo-yo from the Hoosier State, has demanded a second front — while wearing a rumpled blue serge suit with egg on the vest. This homespun corporation lawyer, probably the last presidential candidate to be born anywhere near a log cabin, has set all England (excepting the stupid military authorities) yapping like a pack of underfed dogs in a kennel.

They also re-publish an excerpt from Vonnegut’s speech at a 1980 banquet, in which he talked about life as a Sun staffer:

We on The Sun were already in the midst of real life. By God, if we weren’t! We had just designed and written and caused to be manufactured yet another morning newspaper for a highly intelligent American community of respectable size — yes, and not during the Harding administration, either, but during 1940, ‘41 and ‘42, with the Great Depression ending, and with World War Two well begun.

I am an atheist, as some of you have gleaned from my writings. But I have to tell you that, as I trudged up the hill so late at night and all alone, I knew that God Almighty approved of me.

Any malnourished, sleep-deprived college paper drone knows exactly what he’s talking about.