Shocker: Of the 31,127 students who applied to the University of Pennsylvania last year, some were not “Penn material.” And thanks to one brave Princetonian, we now know who wasn’t up to par.

The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that former admissions officer Nadirah Foley, Princeton Class of 2011, was fired by the university late last year after she was discovered mocking applicants’ essays on Facebook. According to The DP, Foley also shared these essays over College Confidential, prompting responses such as “This loses my respect for UPenn and for the general admissions process SOOO much.” Everyone in the admissions department must be devestated.

Here are some of the students who proved worthy of Foley’s scorn:

• A student who had ”long and deep” connections to Penn because he had been circumcised at the school’s Hillel.
• A student who overcame his fear of going to the bathroom in the great outdoors.
• A student who thought Penn was near the beach.

Hey everybody! It’s time for another installment of “Corey Dissects a News Article From an Ivy Daily – Line-by-Line, Paragraph-by-Paragraph – And Adds Some Jokes And Stuff In Between.” (Actually, remind me to come up with a more succinct name for this.)

Anyway … today’s article comes from the Daily Pennsylvanian and is titled “Students Admit to Stealing at Fraternity Parties.” In other news: water is wet, college graduates are having a rough time finding jobs, and the Chicago Cubs are not a very good baseball team. This from the front-page story:

Traffic cones, fraternity pledge paddles, handles of Banker’s vodka and an 8-ball are among a list of things that Penn students have admitted to stealing from fraternity parties.

Theft usually occurs when fraternities or an off-campus house affiliated with a fraternity hosts a party for students. In these situations, students create a “wide open door” for theft, Vice President for the Public Safety Maureen Rush said.

Was it really necessary to put “wide open door” in quotation marks, as if it’s some little-known technical term for people walking into your fraternity house and stealing your shit?

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Penn’s student newspaper is getting some heat for an anti-Palestinian advertisement  – described as “inflammatory,” “extremist” and “defilement” by critics – that ran in its print edition earlier this week. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it should.

The group behind the ad is the David Horowitz Freedom Center (run by it’s namesake, at right), which has been placing, or trying to place, similarly incendiary materials in Ivy League newspapers for some time now. In May, the Brown Daily Herald and the Yale Daily News both published a DHFC ad called “Wall of Lies,” which incited an angry response from students. According to a commenter on the DP’s website, the ad also ran in that paper around the same time. We called the DP to confirm, but haven’t yet received a response. (Update: The “Wall of Lies” ad did run last spring.)

The marketing push seem to be part of Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Campaign,” which takes Horowitz to campuses all over the country, where he says things like: “There is a movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews that is being supported [at U.C. Santa Barbara] by the Muslim Student Association.” At other points — and I’m not even trying to make a subjective claim here — he pretty roundly lumps all Palestinaians into the “TERRORIST” category. And those Keffiyahs you like to wear for nights out in Brooklyn? Sorry, but the terrorists just won.

Though we haven’t yet seen the most recent ad — it might be “Wall of Lies” again, but it also might not — we’re pretty comfortable assuming that its tenor is just about what you would expect, based on the response it’s generated thus far.

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It seems that Penn students’ penchant for heavy petting isn’t limited to members of the human race. The boys of Zeta Psi–artisans of culture that they are–raised a few eyebrows last week when they brought a camel to Spring Fling. The five-year-old camel, which apparently answers to the name of “Khan” or “What the Fuck, a Fucking Camel,” was the star of Zeta Psi’s annual petting zoo–an event that coincided with the school’s campus-wide slop-a-lot singalong, and that accordingly got a little drunk-funky.

According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Khan the camel was spotted lolling around on the ground outside the frat house, no doubt as trashed as the Penn students themselves. One of their sources reported that “Zeta Psi ‘was packed full of people, all around the camel’ and ‘girls were groping it and they were drunk.’” It speaks volumes about Zeta Psi that their most popular member has four hairy legs and a hump and smells like goat pellets. It also speaks volumes about Penn girls that their beer goggles turn them into animal lovers. But anyway.

The only person to take issue with this situation–everyone else was clearly having barrels of fun rolling in the hay with the camel and his friends, the wallaby, the rabbit and the sheep–was a postdoctoral fellow named George Leslie, who spotted the petting zoo orgy and immediately cried foul to several media outlets. Leslie’s primary complaint was that petting zoos and loud music shouldn’t mix, although anyone who’s ever been to Miami Beach might say otherwise. An investigation by the Office of Student Affairs/Fraternity Sorority Life has since absolved Zeta of any wrongdoing, since apparently using a camel as a lounge chair is totally within the dictates of Natty Light Law. Looks like Khan and Co. can still return next year to smoke a few more doobies and get their asses stroked by Penn freshmen. Living the high life!

It’s that time of year again! Sleigh bells ringing, chestnuts roasting, drunk people making faux-gingerbread houses out of dried Ramen noodles and marshmallows. And of course, grouchy, grinchy college students bemoaning their final exams, and specifically the fact that they have to speed-learn fifty fun facts about Viking headgear and how to say “give me my camel back, asshole” in Coptic.

There’s always one guy who thinks his workload is important enough to make headlines, and this year, it’s Penn senior Alec Webley. Webley’s latest column in the Daily Pennsylvanian, aptly titled “Abolish Final Examinations,” explains that we should scrap final exams in favor of “continuous assessment.” And then he takes the words right out of our mouth:

Abolish finals? “Heresy!” I hear you cry. But what on earth is the point of them? If the professor assesses material learned every week in a class and incorporates cumulative questions, why subject students to a two-hour supplemental test at the end? Likewise, if professors want a 30-page research paper, surely requiring an abstract and sources by one date, a first draft by another, then a second and so on will generate better papers? They don’t even need to read the initial drafts!

Sigh. As much as we’d love the idea of skipping out on our Feudal Politics final exam, we don’t think this would really solve our unhealthy habits. We’re not sleep-deprived because we’re up all night writing papers–we’re sleep-deprived because we stay up until four in the morning watching Geico commercials on YouTube, and then we write our papers. And we’re also sleep-deprived because we’re sex-deprived–which requires a lot of sweat and alcohol, a.k.a. brain medicine, to remedy on a semi-regular basis. Maybe instead of abolishing finals, we should just abolish college students.

Or maybe we should just go read that Econometrics textbook. And fear anarchists like Alec Webley for sowing the evil seeds of procrastination in our vulnerable minds. Beware the Webley, people.

Anyway, we know everyone’s starting to freak out about exams, so consider this our Official Good Luck, Don’t Fail Out of School Or You’ll Have To Work at a Dairy Queen For the Rest of Your Life Announcement. (And don’t forget to do stupid things so we can write about them.)

• Penn: The Ivy league’s application pool rises, the DP reports, with Penn up 17 percent because “just like hot cars and cool clothes, college popularity inevitably waxes and wanes.” Is Penn hot or cool?
• Yale: With Yale’s slight drop in applications, the YDN concludes that, as in golf, the lower number is best. (Perhaps this logic explains the new admissions video.)
• Dartmouth: The winner of Fox Sports Net’s reality show “The Ride,” intends to get real foxy at Dartmouth next fall.
• Columbia: The Lions get more varsity blues—“Squash is an international sport and a natural fit for a university that is committed to diversity and globalization.” And some wonder why Columbia isn’t known for its athletics!
• Harvard: Former Crimson captain plays for Spain’s American football league—Liga Nacional de Futbol Americano—and tackles Spanish culture. “Naps are huge here.”
• Cornell: This headline says it all, “Prof Does the Tangerine Tango With New Plant.” In his defense, the old plant has been looking wilted lately.

We got a rather cryptic email here at IvyGate HQ: “This blog was just started at Penn,” wrote a tipster, providing a link to Against the DP (Agains the DP? Against he DP? The URL provides no answers.)

The disillusionment evinced by our anonymous blogger is neither new nor exciting — a lot of it has to do more with institutional complaints that any college student feels when he realizes his college paper expects more time than the Springfield High Gazette.

But then you get here, and maybe most of us who vaguely consider writing important went to a DP meeting, and were like, Wait, what the fuck? I have to do this like, every week? Or every day? In this nasty window-less building? And I have to write about like, some state senator no one cares about talking to a room of 15 about why pet healthcare is totally vital right now? In the words of my personal deity [sic] Shania Twain, that don’t impress-a me much.

It’s kind of funny that they go on to complain about a copy-editing error in the DP! But there are bigger changes afoot at the Pennsylvanian. Says one Twitterer: “did i miss a post on the death of the dp banquet’s open bar? news of the century! it’s like, ivygate material. (to me.)” Indeed, college newspapers like the DP, once the toast of the journalism industry, are beginning to cut back in ever-more-significant ways; the era of sending reporters around the nation has, if not ended, begun to end. While it’s still winning awards, the complaint that the DP is no fun might be more substantive even than the complainer knows. More hard work for fewer perks affects morale — this maybe doesn’t explain Against the DP, but it’s a start.

We agree with the Twitterer; this IS IvyGate material! And we want to hear from you. Got any scoop on the decline and fall (or not at all) of the DP? tips@ivygateblog.com, kids.

Q: U Penn has a vet school? A: Not for long.

The School of Veterinary Medicine was founded when “West Philadelphia was still the countryside.” You know, before Will Smith got there and ruined everything. The Pennsylvania government just cut $10 million of the vet school’s funding from the state due to that whole recession thing.  Amounting to about 8.5 percent of the total budget, it’s the second cut in six months. All these cuts come despite the fact the Government Accountability Office has noted a decline in the number of vets trained in caring for “food animals,” and the rise in animal-to-human disease transmission. Now they’ll never find the cure for Lena Chen’s “swine flu.”

This is such bad news that the staff of The Daily Pennsylvanian wrote an editorial demanding the state save the vet school. The staff blames Pennsylvania Governor and UPenn Trustee Ed “The Thing” Rendell for the cuts, accusing him of the mortal sins of favoring state schools and hating cows. An erstwhile Hillary Clinton supporter, this is the first time the latter argument has been made about Rendell.

While the Pennsylvanian staff is writing editorials, the vet students are writing letters to the state capital. It is likely the University’s “government affairs office” will make more headway.

It must be a slow week at Not Penn State because an opinion blogger for The Daily Pennsylvanian decided to devote an entire post on the “Best places to kill yourself on campus”. To his credit, the writer provides a hyperlinked disclaimer in the second paragraph:

…stop reading somewhere around HERE if you get all uppity with sensitive things. My editor would like me to link to ponies and rainbows at this point in the post.

One link is to Penn’s Reach-A-Peer Helpline, and the other is to Ponystars, an online game created for five-year-old girls. We get it: the post is not meant to be serious. But is poking fun at suicidal college students ever acceptable? And where’s the editor in all this, the voice of reason that should have shot this down before it saw the light of day? The only conclusion I could draw is that the editor is probably too busy tending to his or her ponies on Ponystar to really care. More quotes from Will Steinberger’s not-so-funny post after the jump.

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