For those who don’t know his work, meet Kurt Schneider, ’09: Yale’s musicman. He’s the self-promoting mastermind behind the meteoric stardom of crooner Sam Tsui, as well as other Yale video mock-magnets. His specialty, which has earned him hundreds of thousands of tween fangirls on YouTube, is arranging fey covers of shitty pop songs and producing the living daylights out of them (see this Miley medley). As the man behind the epic success of Tsui and “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” he was well poised for his final, dastardly ploy: making sure that the last piece of multimedia his classmates will remember from their bright college years is his own. Kurt scored thousands of dollars of administration funding to write and direct The Yale Class History Video, played at Class Day in front of the entire school, as well as a gaggle of famous alumni and guests.

The Interwebs (and an annoying Facebook group) are in uproar over an apparent case of college admissions cyber-seppuku. Apparently, a lucky but highly unintelligent high-schooler posted his college successes all over Facebook with a derogative but joking anti-Harvard message. A friend proceeded to leave some unintended dramatic irony on his wall before, allegedly, Harvard got in contact to rescind the offer of admission. Here’s the image:

The “fully paid scholarship” part — for this idiotic-sounding, smiley-using kid — sounds sketchy, leading us to suspect that the whole thing is a less-than-elaborate hoax. And would he really have gotten all of his admissions letters at the same time? Even more suspicious: who would choose anti-fun Harvard over Yale, Duke, Penn or Columbia? (We kid the Cantabs, we kid.)

Well, that’s settled... Our friends over at HuffPost College just released a list of America’s Top Ten “Anti-Party” Schools. Harvard took the number four spot, the only Ivy to grace the list. Their reasoning:

Harvard students must clear proposed parties with school administrators. The school does not recognize fraternities and sororities, and party rules are strictly enforced by Cambridge police — the fun must end by 2 a.m, and once that happens, there’s always homework to be done.

How surprising, given Harvard’s phenomenal history of successful parties! The anti-fun designation probably won’t do much to hurt Harvard’s matriculation rate; only its general coolness and community well-being. So no problem!

Given the insanely high costs of tuition these days, college students have certain expectations of their academic institutions. These expectations include good concerts, at least one place on campus that sells crepes, and cops that aren’t complete buzzkills. Most importantly, students expect their college to keep their personal information safe. So when a Cornell-owned computer containing the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of Cornellians was stolen, it was clear that somebody focused too much on the crepes. On Tuesday afternoon, Cornell sent this e-mail to over 45,000 current and former students and faculty in order to say “our bad”.

Dear Current or Former Member of the Cornell Community: 

Last week, we learned that a Cornell-owned computer that was stolen earlier this month contained your name and Social Security Number. Please accept our most sincere apologies for this unfortunate event. 

In order to inform you of this situation as quickly as possible, we are sending you this email in advance of a formal notification via U.S. mail. 

Hooray! We’re all fucked!

The entire e-mail after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »