• 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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• Columbia: “‘Rooster’s breakfast’ is Slovenian slang for ‘early morning sex.’”
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton’s gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: “An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event.” Gin and anchovies — busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

If you torture a dog with random electric shocks, will the dog become sad?

Such was the question millions of Americans were once frantically asking, until Penn professor and psychologist Martin Seligman decided to find out once and for all. (The answer: Yes.) However, Seligman’s results, after they were first published 40 years ago, had a perhaps unintended effect. As it happened some time later, CIA torture aficionados became very interested in Seligman’s work and wanted to examine the implications of this revelation for human torture. Seligman’s dog studies, it turns out, were instrumental in developing techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. So say the muckraking journalists, at least. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports:

[Writer Jane} Mayer's book [The Dark Side] alleges that Seligman’s research heavily influenced the psychologists that developped [sic] CIA interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. But in a pre-publication review of the book’s content, Harper’s Magazine writer Scott Horton writes that Seligman “assisted” in the development of their interrogation techniques. This statement has since circulated on several psychology-related blogs and is a claim that Seligman unequivocally denies.

At last, the truth comes out: everything is the Ivy League’s fault. Read the rest of this entry »

The Daily Pennsylvanian – yet again proving true the axiom that Ivy League Dailies have no senses of humor – wants to make sure that you do not enjoy April Fool’s Day. After campus pranksters began placing tickets to a “secret” Obama event scheduled for April 1 in Easter eggs scattered around campus, the newspaper’s “journalists” decided that most students probably wouldn’t be able tell the whole thing was a joke and that they therefore had to “break” the “story.”

For some, April Fools’ Day has come early — despite the “Obama” eggs scattered around campus and the flyers posted on Locust Walk saying otherwise, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama will not be speaking at Irvine Auditorium tomorrow night.”

I guess the DP was worried that some incredibly gullible hopemongers in the student body would fall for the prank, which obviously would have been tragic.  God forbid kids who believe everything they ever see or read should have to suffer the non-existent consequences of their non-actions.

Still, the DP was too lazy to do any follow-up: who was behind the hoax?  What did students think of the hoax? Etcetera.

As our tipster wrote, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Happy April Fool’s, folks.

Having recently left his cushy post with us for the greener swamplands of DC, Jim Newell is already rolling in the perks. Today he wrote an op/ed for the Daily Pennsylvanian on that whole Stetson affair thing.

Seizing on the telling detail (“Lasers! Amy Gutmann in strapless red!”) and making use of everyday analogies (“It’s like a babysitter refusing to feed an infant its Gerber, and then at the end of the day asking that infant for $3.5 billion.”), Newell makes a compelling case that Lee Stetson should not be forced to give money to Penn even though he had sex with a 19-year old, or something like that.

After the jump — words, sweet words.

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Sighted: Beauty & the Geek star Joshua Green at Princeton University’s D-Bar (“Debasement Bar,” in de basement of de graduate college here, remember? B&G brought their camera crew there to recruit last year). The 5′5″ Joshua wore yellow shirt unbuttoned at the neck, damp black chest hair mussed across his pallid chest. His dance-move of choice is a lateral jumping movement paired with upraised arms and pumping fists.

I cornered Joshua and demanded an impromptu photo shoot (more pictures after jump). Sadly, the CW keeps its reality slaves on a strict gag order; I failed to get any details juicier than those his stock-quote-chocked Daily Princetonian profile. Penn ‘06 Will Frank got some press, too, in the Daily Pennsylvanian. Where is he these days, anyway? Anybody have sightings?

But enough rumormill foreplay. Let’s get down and dirty with this week’s episode, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »