A growing chorus of artsy Cornellians are up in arms against upcoming mega-cuts in the University’s Arts department. In the midst of financial turmoil, it seems that Cornell is more interested in titration and Tesla coils than Rozencrantz and Guildenstern; the theatrey-folk are taking the lions share of the financial cut backs. The Department of Theatre, Film and Dance has been asked to cut 1-2 million of their $4.6 million budget. In total, $6 million worth of cuts are scheduled for the College of Arts and Sciences. According to Save Cornell Arts,

What this means:
1. The performing arts is being asked to bear a disproportionate size of the cuts among the 27 departments in the College of Arts and Sciences.
2. The types of budget cuts that are being proposed would so severely cripple the performing arts at  Cornell that it would destroy the department’s ability to provide nearly any kind of quality education.

For a school that claims to provide a liberal arts education, this all seems a little fishy and philistine-y. Whatever will the culture vultures do? Maybe in the wake of the Yale admissions video, Cornell is trying to position itself as, well, the non-gay Ivy. Take that, Dartmouth!

Famous performers who have graduated from Cornell’s soon-to-be-castrated arts program include: Jane Lynch (Glee), Jimmy Smits (NYPD Blues), Christopher Reeve, Bill Maher, Bill Nye,  Dan Duryea, and Franchot Tone.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

$150 million in the red, we could deal with the campy, produced-on-the-cheap admissions video.

Layoffs, salary-cuts and a grad-student exodus? Fine, as long as we get to keep our grade inflation.

We could even maturely handle the upcoming cancellation of our New York Times subscription (well, some of us).

But turning down the thermostats and subsequent Gawker-mockery? Let’s just declare Chapter 11, snag some taxpayer bailout money, and get it over with.

In the wake of endowment horror, Yale President Levin plans to “turn all the thermostats down to 68 degrees.” How uncivilized. Gawker predicts that we will “freeze over,” and (genuinely concerned, obviously) asks

Will the roaring fires built by the manservants in the many imposing hearths of the various student groups’ towering stone mansions provide sufficient warmth for our future leaders?

No, our fellow sassy bloggers. No it won’t. But at least we won’t be as chilly as Emily “I put my head on his shoulder in a completely friendly, professional way” Gould’s cold, cold heart.

Turns out all that tuition money Harvard kids shell out is for naught after all. Christian Flow, Harvard ‘10, recently wrote an article for Harvard Magazine on the university’s apparent lackadaisical attitude at giving students an actual education. Based on a personal episode of academic buffoonery involving a flight back home to write a term paper in 24 hours, Flow highlights how professors at the number four douchiest college in America do everything but put their students in the time-out zone and put a hilariously inappropriate amount of effort in squeezing quality work out of their pupils.

In three years at college, I had never been slapped around like this. This was the kind of thing that happened in high school when you didn’t do your reading. Who knew that tenured professors had the time or the temperament for this species of intervention?

Expectedly, all the blame can be dumped on the Harvard Management Company. And as the college devises ways to prevent further whiny and self-entitled protests on student-life related budget cuts, it plans to reduce the number of teaching fellows hired this year, slash small seminars in favor of giant lectures, as well as phase out general examinations for certain honors concentrations.

After the jump, it turns out Ivy League professors don’t actually give a shit how you do in their class. But various forms of B usually cut down on office hour interaction.

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You know Harvard’s broke when they start competing with Hollister. The country’s oldest college recently announced a partnership with clothing manufacturer Wearwolf Group in a ten-year licensing deal to produce a fancy men’s fashion line. Harvard recently started trademarking everything on the planet, but this is a new creative low for the endowment managers struggling to avert the university’s impending bankruptcy. With prices in the hundreds, the new collection oozes wannabe-Chace Crawford, complete with seersucker shorts tailored to a frighteningly obvious degree and über-metro man purses. According to creative director Joan Fowler, the designers took cues from “photos of students lounging in Harvard Yard in the sixties” for inspiration. But to brand-happy Asian tourists’ dismay, “Harvard” only appears on the labels inside, and other references to the university remain minute, such as crimson-colored stitching on the buttonholes. (Really.) Fowler insists that they’re on to something big:

It’s a style that has become current again and not just with the American consumer. We think Harvard Yard will have global appeal.

Coming in light of a “NYC Prep” episode featuring another douchey alum, the Cambridge School for Kids Who Can’t Dress Good dropped down to Perez Hilton’s radar with one uncharacteristically insightful question:

… why???

Unlike some other Ivy League schools, Penn will not be laying people off, initiating hiring freezes, or slashing budgets, said President Amy Gutmann in yesterday’s university-wide email. In fact, things aren’t so bad in Philadelphia. Gutmann writes:

As a result of the record-breaking success of our first year of the Making History campaign, coupled with the prudent choices we made before the economy worsened, we are well-positioned to weather the economic storm. We will continue to plan for the future just as we always have, by implementing sound budgets, by managing our costs, and by maintaining focus on our highest school and institutional priorities.

But what does “well-positioned” mean? According to Gutmann, it means Penn won’t resort to any exceedingly unpleasant measures. She writes:

Penn’s commitment to need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid remains resolute.

While we are not implementing broad-scale layoffs, hiring freezes, or across-the-board budget reductions, individual Schools and Centers have the flexibility to implement additional cost-cutting measures as needed to create balanced and sustainable budgets.

Sounds good. But what are these “additional cost-cutting measures?” According to this email, they involve not hiring more people and firing existing people. After the jump, Gutmann gives you the bad news.

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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 »