If you’re anything like me, you’ve been sitting around wondering, “When will Harvard get the recognition it deserves?” The wait is over, my friend. In US News and World Report’s 2009 “National University Rankings,” Harvard surpassed Princeton for the top spot, ending 8 straight years of New Jersey rule. This comes on the heels of Princeton’s first-place finish in the flawed but entertaining Forbes.com best college list.

Harvard, incidentally, was just ranked “Most Overrated” in Radar Magazine’s guide to America’s worst colleges. The guide cites Harvard’s 25% virgin rate. But would you really want to have sex with that twenty-five percent? In other news, Cornell is listed as the runner-up to “Most Overrated.” When you think about it, it’s kind of a compliment. That is, until you read on and get to the part about Cornell’s status anxiety and Ithaca’s geographical advantages. To wit: “Thankfully, rocky gorges surrounding the campus continue to provide the sweet release of death for those Cornellians who just can’t take it anymore.”

But enough about suicide: following her venerable leader, Columbia advanced in the US News rankings. Yale and Dartmouth stayed the same. UPenn, Brown and Cornell all lost ground. The Liberal Arts Colleges are still unimportant.

Here’s how the Ivies fared:

1. Harvard (ranked 2nd in 2008)

2. Princeton (ranked 1st in 2008)

3. Yale (ranked 3rd in 2008)

6. Penn (ranked 5th in 2008)

8. Columbia (ranked 9th in 2008)

11. Dartmouth (ranked 11th in 2008)

14. Cornell (ranked 12th in 2008)

16. Brown (ranked 14th in 2008)

After the jump, Harvard tells you she’s embarrassed by all the attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

Roy Den Hollander — Columbia B-school grad and self-described “anti-feminist” — took aim this week at his alma mater’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. In a lawsuit charging sexual discrimination, Hollander calls the institute “a bastion of bigotry against men.” Using Title IX as an “analogy,” Hollander adds the Columbia suit to a growing stable of “Men’s Rights” crusades, including a lawsuit protesting Ladies’ Nights at bars, and another against VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act.

In an hour-long phone interview, Hollander waxes poetic on physical desire, his background as a draft-dodger, and the best places in New York for middle-aged dudes seeking jail-bait booty (dance class). As for Women’s Studies at CU:

The whole program is about benefiting females and teaching that guys are evil and that guys are responsible for all the world’s evils.

He also told me about his “Russian mafia prostitute stripper” “mistress to a Chechen warlord” ex-wife, and how she used VAWA to persecute him and/or attain US citizenship.

Roy is surprisingly interesting for a guy who spends 90% of his waking life plotting the destruction of feminism, and the other 10% trying to get laid. Our epic conversation, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Radar magazine delivers a shocking blow to elite education by including an Ivy Leaguer in gonzo-journo story “Inside the World of High-Class Hipster Hookers.” Seriously, $40K-per-year education and Sally Straight-A grows up to be a hipster?

Just kidding! The shock is that she became a whore:

After graduating from an Ivy League college in 2006, Kelly says she was thinking about going to grad school to become an English professor. She’s decided to put that aspiration on hold, though, while she rakes in the equivalent of an investment banker’s salary selling sex.

I’d make a joke, but I used them all up on a nearly identical story last March.

As it turns out, finance is something of a sister industry to the whore-o-sphere. The three main characters get into the business of vag-selling at the behest of some “sleazy banker types” they meet at a bar. Whore #1 gets sleazy banker’s business card, and before you know it she’s making $3000 a thrust! The ladies frequent “douchebag spots in the Meatpacking District” and turn themselves into an unstoppable trio of whoredom. Each girl has a special personality niche, just like in Charlie’s Angels:

These days Heather tends to book with more bankers and Wall Street types, Olivia with a lot of retired hipsters and club owners, and Kelly with men from the art world. During a typical week they each entertain at least three different clients—and sometimes as many as nine. “I don’t mind sleeping with two guys in a night,” Kelly says. “Just as long as the second client isn’t rough with me.”

Ivy League Angel has all the time management skills.

Read the rest of this entry »

As we prepare for our grand return this fall (regular posting schedule resumes after Labor Day), this little ol’ blog is looking for fresh meat.

If you’re interested in editing, contributing, or becoming a columnist, email tips [at] ivygateblog.com. “But wait,” you say. “That’s the tipline!” Did I mention we’re looking for tech staff, too? We want photographers, videographers, tech folk, business folk, and basically anyone with any sort of skill that we can exploit, manipulate, and/or sell on the street. This is the Ivy League, after all. You people are supposed to be talented.

Just like your childhood and your first relationship, all good things come to an end. So it goes with this guest editorship. We’ve laughed, we’ve left comments, we’ve been called a douche bag. Most of all, we’ve been awkwardly attracted to each other. Would I do it again? Only to see you smile. Also, I like staying up late during the workweek writing blog posts.

All the best,

DAN HALEY

Thanks for bearing with us for the past two weeks. Enjoy the rest of the summer - if you still have one - and try your best to avoid any IvyGate-worthy entanglements. Your future self will thank you.

JAMES YU

An “Ivy Montrealer” recently informed us of a juicy bit of hypocrisy: Canadian and McGill graduate Padraic Scanlan, whom we covered last November for penning a damning critique of Yale and other privileged American universities in the McGill Daily, is now going for his PhD in history at Princeton. To refresh everyone’s memory, here are a few excerpts from Scanlan’s column:

New Haven reminded me vividly of Detroit - class and race are lashed together in a widening spiral of systemic oppression in both cities. Both cities are scarred with bombed-out buildings and condemned lots. In both cities, black and Hispanic Americans are crushed by the combined weight of a decimated economy, mounting personal debt, and pervasive, systemic racism. The only difference between Detroit and New Haven is that in New Haven, Yale sits, gleaming and gated.

Likening New Haven to Detroit is legit, and surely Yale is “gleaming” compared to the city that abuts it, but saying New Haven is filled with “pervasive, systemic racism” seems, well, a bit hyperbolic. Scanlan continues:

You have to visit to really appreciate how obscene the divide is between the rich and the poor in New Haven, Connecticut. Yale is vastly wealthy - I can see now (having never actually visited an Ivy League school before) why McGill’s administration slavers after the prestige and wealth of that select clique of New England universities. It is enormous, full of granite and sandstone, gleaming new electronics, and huge College Gothic piles.

One final quote by Scanlan and some commentary after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

A man who has been likened to Karl Rove if Karl Rove were far less cautious with his private emails, Mark Penn is possibly heading toward the nadir of his political career. But Penn wasn’t always infamous. Back in the early seventies, Penn was just a reporter for the Harvard Crimson.

Rick Perlstein writes that Penn, ‘76, displayed an early interest in public relations in a profile of a traveling encyclopedia salesman. Of the salesman, Penn wrote:

He refused to call selling ‘manipulation,’ preferring the term persuasion. Describing his sales technique as ’showing them the goods and seeing if they’ll buy,’ he compared it ‘to asking a girl out on a date.’

In this excerpt there is a glimpse of the man who told Bill Gates that “Being human is overrated.” This is kind of like what Penn told Hillary when he wasn’t telling her to attack Obama for his lack of “roots to basic American values and culture.”

In addition to writing the usual college news stories (a series of articles on where the JFK Library would be located, an article on the student government running out of beer money, and other such articles), Penn wrote several essays arguing against the impeachment of President Nixon. Like many Republicans at the time, Penn believed the Democrats were angling to install a Democrat in the White House (this was after Agnew’s resignation but before Ford was vice president). According to Penn, JFK, were he then still alive, would side against his party and support his old opponent. Penn writes:

The late President John F. Kennedy ‘40, would have condemned a political impeachment of Nixon just as he abhorred in Profiles in Courage, the attempt to oust Andrew Johnson. Whether the issue is over secret bombings of Cambodia or a militarily imposed reconstruction of the South, the public and Congress should oppose an impeachment which places the opposition party in power.

After the jump, a young Penn’s vision of the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Olympics are already halfway over and our Ivy brethren have fared admirably against all the non-Ivy athletes in the world. As we wait to find out whether Michael Phelps will be tapped for vice president, here’s a running count of how our brave lettermen and women are doing:

Fencing: Sada Jacobson, Yale ‘06 and a member of the US women’s team, took home the Silver for individual sabre and Bronze for team sabre.

Tennis: Tennis phemon and Harvard drop-out James Blake, a member of the US men’s team, almost advanced to the finals after a stunning victory over winning-machine Roger Federer. Unfortunately, Blake lost to Fernando Gonzales of Chile in a close match.

Track and Field: Ivygate’s own angelic Anna Willard, a member of the US women’s team, qualified for the semi-finals in the women’s 3000m steeplechase, coming in 6^th in the third and final heat of round 1.

Women’s Gymnastics: The US women’s team was within striking distance of the Gold when a high risk maneuver by Brown rising junior, the violent and beautiful Alicia Sacramone, backfired and left them trailing the Chinese girl’s women’s team. The US brought home the Silver.

Rowing: Nikola Stojic, Brown ’93 and a member of the Serbian team, earned the fastest time in the men’s pair “B” final.

Ivygate’s own Susan Francia, Penn ’04, helped the women’s eight to a victory in last Monday’s heat.

Harvard’s supertwins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, class of ‘04, raced to a first place finish in the repechages after a disappointing fifth in their first compeitition.

Canadian men’s eight, anchored by Malcolm Howard, Harvard ‘05, and Dominic Seiterle, Dartmouth ‘98, drew the top slot in Heat 1.

Medal-counting continues after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone is getting into the college rankings game these days, and everyone - it seems - has the same goal in mind: to dethrone the juggernaut that is the U.S. News & World Report. But while students and alums of certain liberal arts colleges and lesser-known universities are probably reveling in Forbes.com’s inaugural rankings, the newest kid on the block is unlikely to find much support among the non-Princeton Ivy set this year.

Of the 569 schools included in the rankings, here’s how the Ivies stacked up:

1. Princeton
3. Harvard
9. Yale
10. Columbia
27. Brown
61. Penn
121: Cornell
127: Dartmouth

Brown at 27 already seems like a stretch, but Penn at 61, Cornell at 121, and Dartmouth at 127? How vulgar, indecent, cruel! Some quotes and commentary after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cornell erected a fence blocking access to the popular Fall Creek Gorge swimming hole earlier this week. The fence is part of the university’s reaction to rising sophomore Doug Lowe’s tragic death at the beginning of the summer. While not enough students are around to get angry about their swimming hole being closed, Cornell blog MetaEzra is up in arms.

The policy may seem reasonable when taken at face value, but you have to realize the University is reneging on a tradition of openness and responsibility that has lasted for close to one hundred and fifty years. If I am getting up in arms about the development, it is because I see the fencing as a symbol for what is being lost on Cornell’s campus — Cornell’s very soul.

This must have been a really sweet swimming hole. MetaEzra’s Matthew Nagowski goes on to explain the difference between a Cornell education and whatever it is you get over at other schools.

Cornell has never been an institution of in loco parentis and as a former Cornell professor of mine (now at Michigan State) once so aptly put it, if I wanted my hand held for four years I would have attended Williams or Notre Dame.

Are you calling into question the manly character of Williams, the manliest of the northeastern liberal arts colleges? Oh, this will not stand, Nagowski! After the jump, Cornell explains the reasoning behind the fence.

Read the rest of this entry »