James Franco, of Spider-Man and Pineapple Express fame, is now a student at Columbia's School of Arts, where he is pursuing a pricey MFA in writing. News of this has traveled fast, especially around Morningside Heights. It seems like many Columbians have been desperate to catch the star's attention whenever he makes a public appearance. Gawker, via the Commentariat, reports that recently, while studying in a campus coffee shop, a crowd had formed around him like "cats in heat":

About 20 minutes later, people start hoarding around the entrance of the cafe, and by 11:50PM, most Columbians, particularly the type of ridiculous, squealing, freshman girl are all harassing the poor guy. At first, he would try not to respond. This made things quite awkward since the gawkers were shameless enough to literally go right up to him in desperate attempts to get his attention. Ha! He thought his headphones had the power to transport him into another world where he could be a student in peace."

Granted, on the one hand these stalkers should give the poor man some space, but on the other hand Franco should have given more thought to studying in a place as noisy and public as a coffee shop! Someone direct him to one of the quiet wings of Butler ASAP. There will still be students staring at him from across the room but at least in theory they'll be quiet. If they aren't he can at least sic the librarians on the worst offenders. On another note, one must wonder what Franco is trying to get out of Columbia to begin with. The Ivy League cachet? Starving artist cred? A sweet book deal with an advance that pays .000001% of the money he makes off a typical blockbuster? Who knows, but good luck!

Seriously, Harvard? Seriously? You have this guy as a professor for six years and not one of you has anything to say about it on ratemyprofessors.com? My disappointment is only rivaled by Associate Professor Summers’ disappointment in the “post-pubescent children of notables� (i.e. bitterness toward his self-chosen path of academic poverty—the non-tenure track).

In a ridiculously self-masturbatory opinion piece for the Times Higher Education, John H. Summers, Harvard history professor, whines about how his wealthy students “worked exceptionally long hours, [and] were aggressive in exercising their talents.� Wait, there’s more! Summers moans, “I had to grade the students, and I had to grade them well. Everyone expected a recommendation letter.�

Wow, really? Hardworking and talented Harvard students expect good grades and recommendation letters? Madness, I tell you. Don’t do it, Professor Summers! Don’t give in to the temptation.

Well, he didn’t. Summers goes on to criticize Harvard’s grade inflation as taking away the “one instrument of power [he] wielded,â€? calling the “tacitâ€? expectation that students earn no lower than a B “a sign of corruptionâ€? that “abridges the academic freedom of the teacher.â€? Read the rest of this entry »

Speaking of exorbitant “independent college admissions counseling," Sarah Jessica Parker's next venture is The Ivy Chronicles, based on a book by Karen Quinn. Parker will play Ivy, a woman who loses her job, gets divorced, moves from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side (which is apparently still affordably bohemian in Movieland) and "starts a business to help upper-middle-class women get their children into elite kindergartens," or "Baby Ivies." To summarize another way: "Marking a huge departure from [Parker's] previous acting gig, Ivy is about a single gal in New York City who lives in a series of wildly unrealistic apartments."

Read the rest of this entry »

So you're a few hundred grand in debt and fresh-faced in the big city -- or, if you're a Columbia grad, just happy to get out of Morningside Heights -- with a B.A. in Comp Lit and, I don't know, hopes and dreams. Even if your semesters reading Baudrillard don't have any practical application, you figure that your degree must at least carry some weight, right? Right?

Erroneous, my friends.

Doree Shafrir's Observer article, "Ivy League Slaves of New York," is pretty self-explanatory by its subtitle: "America’s best and brightest are unpacking their gilded diplomas and getting to work as assistants in New York’s media dens, pinching themselves at their good fortune. Suckers!"

It appears that many graduates are coming to New York with visions of a swift ascent in a shiny media universe, but are quickly shot down. In fact, a certain brand of diploma might actually work against you:

Ms. Marcus explained that her former place of employment had a policy about not hiring anyone who had gone to an Ivy League school, because 'they didn’t want people whom they could perceive as a threat.' (The evidence bears this out somewhat: Ivy League grads do seem partial to cashing in via book deals; Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada, graduated from Cornell, and [Bridie] Clark is a Harvard alumna...)"

Well, if your Ivy League credentials are holding you back, you know our favorite fallback option: nepotism! Kidding(ish). Read the rest of this entry »

Gawker and Dealbreaker are writing about the sad saga of John Fitzgerald Page, Wharton '88 and Ivy League douchebag extraordinaire. This is usually our territory, so we feel a bit jealous/remiss in bringing you sloppy seconds.

As it were, these are excellent sloppy seconds. Here is an excerpt from an email Page sent to a potential Match.com date:

So next time you meet a guy of my caliber, instead of trying to turn it around, just get to the gym! I will even give you one free training session, so you don't blow it with the next 8.9 on Hot or Not, Ivy League grad, Mensa member, can bench/squat/leg press over 1200 lbs., has had lunch with the secretary of defense, has an MBA from the top school in the country, lives in a Buckhead high rise, drives a Beemer convertible, has been in 14 major motion pictures, was in Jezebel's Best dressed, etc. Oh, that is right, there aren't any more of those!" 

The 36-year-old Wharton graduate currently lives in Atlanta, where, if his website is to be believed, he banks/models/personal trains/acts/beats Vayner's records for personal development etc.

Our favorite part is the Napoleon Dynamite-like "Skills" section, in which Page describes some other things he's incredible at:

Soccer (State Championship Game), Bowling & Archery (State Championship Match), Baseball, Skiing, Swimming, Weightlifting (Bench & Leg Press/Squat over 1200 lbs. combined), Golf (Hole in One), Volleyball, Football, Billiards, Softball

DIALECTS & ACCENTS: English, Southern, New Yorker, Aristocrat, British, Irish, Australian, French, Indian."

Our only consolation in getting scooped by Gawker on our own beat is knowing that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Ivy League douchebags we have yet to reveal!

Over at Gawker and Dealbreaker, an email has been making the rounds that spells out which courses at Yale are the notoriously easy "guts" beloved of athletes and lazy people in general. The author, known only by his enigmatic first-name "nick," is full of brilliant pensées like the one below:

Generally speaking everyone has been wasted at some point and stared blankly at the sky and been like, shit, space and shit is sweet. And then you get to Yale and you find out that you can take astronomy to meet requirements and that its not hard math or anything and you think this is the sweetest thing ever.

After the jump: the amazing email in full. But really, why stop with Yale? What are the guttiest courses of the Ivy League?

Read the rest of this entry »

In a tragic turn of events for college students nationwide, birth control costs on campuses are going through the roof. Last year's Deficit Reduction Act has recently been fingered as the culprit in the rising costs.

The $39 billion in cuts were leveled at things like subsidized student loans, Medicaid, candy, children's toys, etc; Gawker alerted us this morning to a Wall Street Journal article which dished the full details of its implications for subsidized contraceptives.

Anne Marie Chaker writes that "through an arcane set of circumstances" the act has disincentivized drug companies from subsidizing their product for school markets.

The contraceptive prices offered to schools are now included in a complex calculation that determines certain Medicaid-related rebates that drug makers must pay to states. In this calculation, deep discount prices would have the effect of increasing drug makers' payments.

Colleges and universities say the change is having a significant impact on their health centers and the students they serve. Prices have begun skyrocketing for many popular brands of birth control. Health centers are having to reconfigure their offerings and write new prescriptions. And college students are making some tough choices, such as switching to cheaper generic brands or forgoing their privacy in order to claim their pills on their parents' insurance.

The higher prices took effect earlier this year but savvy college health providers stocked up before the changes, forestalling the impending contraceptive cost crisis. Don't just feel bad for the "very fertile" college women who will now have to suffer higher prices or a lack of privacy to get their birth control, though. The schools that received those subsidized products were making a tidy profit, too, which has now evaporated as they turn to subsidize contraceptives for their students.

Free market solutions, anyone? I hope you're happy, Republicans.

--SAM JACKSON

We're back, briefly, to post an op-ed we wrote for the commencement issue of the Harvard Crimson. They made us edit out "a publication that many people believe shits tulips," in re the Crimson (we suggested "poops tulips" as a replacement; no go), but surprisingly, they left in most everything else, including a reference to "Glory Holes of Fame 3." We're grateful, and impressed. (Special thanks to our handler, Adam Guren '08.) Here it is:

Blogging the Ivy League's Follies

By CHRISTOPHER BEAM and NICK SUMMERS 

One weekend in October, we ruined a kid's life.

We didn't mean to. Well, more like we didn't expect to. At 4 p.m. on a Friday, we posted to our blog a video that a Yale senior had included in his investment bank applications-a ludicrous sequence that, if you believe what you see, shows off his 495-pound bench press, 120 mile per hour tennis serve, motivational schlock, and ballroom dance moves. As other blogs piled on, word spread fast-and faster still when we reported on his shady consulting firm, fake charity, and partially plagiarized book about the Holocaust. All that Aleksey Vayner had wanted was a job at Goldman Sachs. Instead, by Monday, he became the most scrutinized student celebrity since Kaavya Viswanathan '08 "internalized" another author's novels.

We launched our web site, IvyGate, last July on the premise that the students of the Ivy League are ridiculous enough to deserve, well, ridicule. If Page Six and The Chronicle of Higher Education had a one-night stand, we'd be their illegitimate daughter.

When it comes to college students acting like fools, Vayner was just the beginning. This year alone, there was the candidate for class president at Princeton accused of setting a squirrel on fire; the University of Pennsylvania grad student found to be commuting to class from prison; the Skull and Bonesman arrested for burning an American flag still attached to a New Haven home. For the sake of all the moms and dads reading this, we won't even get into kitchen sex at Brown, testes flambé at Cornell, or one fine arts major's vision of anal rosary beads-let's just say our tipline stayed hot.

Indeed, all was bountiful in Ivy blog land. But! Every time we posted an embarrassing photo, named a name, or otherwise sentenced a 19-year-old to eternal Googleability, our shriveled little blogger conscience piped up: Maybe it's not okay to bust on students. Do they deserve the sort of scrutiny the media gives, y'know…grown-ups?

Of course not. But it's also time that we stopped treating school like Las Vegas, as if what happens at college stays at college. The undergraduate years, the theory goes, are for making mistakes-hooking up with your suitemate, say, or majoring in philosophy-with limited consequences. There's good reason for this exceptionalism: If everything that happened in college were suddenly in the public domain, students would feel less free to take risks-although it's debatable whether getting trashed and uploading your drunken rendition of "Fat-Bottomed Girls" to YouTube is the sort of risk schools want to encourage. Subjecting everyone involved in a student government scandal or newspaper plagiarism case to the same treatment as Tom DeLay or Jayson Blair would stunt growth more than thalidomide. Better to let students screw up privately now instead of publicly later.

But the walls around the college experience are crumbling. Between Facebook and YouTube and whatever those crazy twenty-something billionaires think of next, student life is only getting more transparent. There's no such thing as a purely on-campus issue anymore, now that online discussion threads like Harvard's BoredatLamont or Brown's Daily Jolt have elevated anonymous libel to a fully searchable art form. Every time a kid loses an internship because an employer found annotated bong-rip pics on a MySpace page, students clamor that their privacy has been invaded. At IvyGate, we deal with fallout all the time. But what are bloggers and journalists supposed to do when it's the students themselves who put the material online in the first place, and when, nine times out of 10, it's their fellow students who cheerfully tell us where to find it? What should we publish, and what should we hold?

For actual celebrities, the decision is easy: A sighting of Lou Dobbs '67 in Harvard Yard ("looking puffy, greasy, and lumpy all at once…lighting a cigarette as if it might be his last") is just plain blogworthy. Same goes for students who inject themselves into the public arena. When a Columbia student and Marine reservist started debating campus military recruiting on FOX News, for example, he became fair game; when it emerged in March that he'd acted under the nom de porn Rod Majors in such films as "Glory Holes of Fame 3" and "Touched by an Anal," fairer yet.

But when it comes to students going about their own business, there's stuff we regret. In November, for example, a passed-over Crimson staffer sent to his peers a 1,200-word resignation e-mail so livid we ran it under the headline "Unpromoted Crimson Editor Burns Bridges, Collects Ashes, Re-Burns Them; Then Packs Ash Ashes Into Payload Of Nuclear Warhead And Hurls Into Sun." Did we serve readers by reminding them that behind this august broadsheet is a staff just as fallible as any? Absolutely. But we also ran the kid's full name, an inclusion that added no humor or news value and only resulted in there being a Google hit for "[his name] AND tool."

So keeping names out is one way we can keep college blogging civilized. But that may not be much consolation to the hardworking staffs of Harvard-Radcliffe TV and the Harvard College Democrats, whose homemade videos were described by IvyGate commenters as "TORTURE" and a "poo nugget," respectively. You don't need a name to go ad hominem.

Every time we try to encourage decorum, or at least accountability, we're reminded that this medium is by nature carnivorous, and getting faster and more unfeeling with each passing news cycle. It's up to us-and the other campus blogs, more of which launch every day-to insist on standards, no matter how sophomoric the subject matter. To give fair comment to the people we write about. To respect Google's lidless eye. To bear in mind our own college screw-ups as we castigate others.

In other words, to rip responsibly. Oh, and to post as many videos as possible of guys lighting their genitals on fire. You really have to check that one out.

We've often wondered what might have become of Aleksey Vayner had he never made his hit film "Impossible Is Nothing." Where would he be in five years? What levels of success would he have achieved?

We're pretty sure the answer has arrived in the form of Timothy Ferriss, Princeton '00. Currently a "guest lecturer" at Princeton (sounds a little misleading to us; he's not in the official directory), Ferriss has honed self-help guruship down to an art -- he's good-looking, well spoken, and he knows you initially assume he's a fraud. His new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, explains how to work very little (check e-mail twice a day, outsource all your work to Asians for $5 an hour) and still live your dreams. Among the dreams Ferriss has already lived: Motorcycling across China. Dancing tango in Argentina (and on Regis and Kelly). Kickboxing. Skiing in the Andes. Gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks. In other words, impossible is nothing.

The book already seems to be taking off. It's currently ranked in Amazon's top 10. The site's reviewers have given it five stars, nearly across the board.

And that's where it gets weird. The Amazon comments are absurdly positive. Frighteningly positive. Eyebrow-raisingly positive. Just look at the slew of reviews left all on the same day, April 24:

C. Ashenden, April 24: I don't give away compliments easily but I guarantee that this book will change your life. Don't wait.

Brian Page, April 24: I'm not a reviewer of books. In fact, this is the only one I've ever commented on. So as the first person to review The 4-Hour Workweek, I'm going to make a prediction. Remember, I called it first. This book WILL be a best-seller.

Sherwood Forlee, April 24: Because of this book, I would have to say that my dreams will soon become reality.

Matt, April 24: I don't know Tim, nor do I have any financial connection to this book. ... I have never written a review on Amazon before, but this book compelled me to write my first. I highly recommend you get it, and I guarantee it will get you thinking about making changes in your life.

Lindsay, April 24: I have always been a little wary of books focused arond life-improvement, but "The 4-Hour Work Week" book strikes the perfect balance between practical guidebook with real-world suggestions for how to maximize the work/life balance (something everyone needs to learn to do) and inspirational encouragement that yes, the life you want is just around the corner.

Michelle Bartakova, April 24: I believe this book is going to be a bestseller, will inspire many, and I would go as far as to say it will save lives. ... The revolution has began.... If this review sounds little bit over the top, well it is and so is the book. This is my first review on amazon, and who knows my next one might be written by my virtual assistant:)

(Hilarious commenter exchange on that last one is here.) When a tipster pointed out the unbroken slew of over-the-top raves to us, we saw this comment among them:

Smells fishy!, April 26, 2007
Reviewer: cyan (Sydney, Australia)
There are 18 reviews beneath me. Every single one was written on the same day. This is the only review of every single reviewer bar one. I wonder what the odds are of 18 individuals who never review on Amazon logging onto the site on the same day and giving the book 5 stars?

Even more fishily, that last comment is now gone. We have to agree, it's hard to see more than a dozen glowing, similarly-argued raves spontaneously cropping up all at the same time -- from people who have never before reviewed another title. If indeed Ferriss had a hand in arranging them, that's not necessarily wrong -- just really off-putting, really douchey, really ... Aleksey.

When Cornell booked Georgia rapper T.I. to play its annual Slope Day, it must have known his reputation. Possession charges, gun fights, parole violations -- Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.'s record is no secret. (We do admire his work with the Make-a-Wish Foundation.) But even they must have been surprised when, mid-song, the emcee stopped the music and went on a two-minute diatribe against a kid who'd apparently thrown a water bottle at him.

Instead of politely asking the student to refrain from throwing projectiles, T.I. took the next logical step and put $50,000 on his head. At a club or arena, this would be notable but uninteresting. At Cornell, it's surreal.

The video below is spotty, so we've included an abridged transcript. You may notice the DJ gets a little carried away with the gunshot sound effects: 

Don't motherfucking play with me, homeboy ... You don't throw nothing at me, I won't throw nothing at you, you dig that? [gunshot sounds] ... I respect your school doing your thang [Ed. note: Can this blurb please be engraved into stone on Ho Plaza?], but I'm a real street nigga, I don't play that shit, homes. ... Anybody else throws something up on this stage, I got 50,000 on his head, I ain't bullshitting. [gunshots] [guns cocking] [more guns shooting / cocking] ... That's the way it goes ... Don't motherfucking play with me man [gun cocks] ... Y'all see what it going have to be , right? ... [cocks] Hey, we need to continue this show. Throw something up here and you're getting thrown out, you're going to jail tonight. ... Let's do this [cocks] ... I need some head busters out there in the crowd. ... I need some plainclothes out there. ... If you see someone throw something, you know them out, come on and get your money.

It's hard to know where to start. First off, is it just us, or is T.I. really telling Cornell to snitch on its own? For shame. Plus, all that gun-cocking gets a little excessive. Everyone knows you can only cock a gun once in between rounds. It also makes you wonder how many "head busters" actually attend Cornell, and whether T.I. is aware of the likely scarcity.

P.S. We're actually not positive it's the original bottle-thrower that T.I. puts the bounty on -- it could be a hypothetical reward for violence against any subsequent hurlers. Close textual analysis appreciated.

UPDATE 5:30 p.m.: Nooooo! T.I. has pulled one over on us for the last time!