We wrote off this video of the Harvard Quidditch Team running around clutching wood between their legs as a (kind of sad) joke, at first. Then we did some research. THIS SHIT IS REAL!!!

By the looks of both national and local news coverage of Ivy League quidditch, the sport is spreading faster than chlamydia amongst teenagers in the plot of a LifeTime movie. According to NECN, over 200 colleges are riding shafts and juggling balls in the Harry Potter tradition. Even Alana Biden, team co-founder and niece of Vice President Joe Biden, is straddling for the new Cantab club sport.

According to the Crimson:

Rush and team co-founder Alana J. Biden ’11 received a $600 club sports grant to fund their equipment, which, according to Rush, is the typical sum allotted to a club team. The team used the money to purchase two Quaffles (volleyballs in Muggle parlance), two Bludgers (kickballs), three hoops for use as goals, and 14 broomsticks.

These brooms, which were the priciest item on the team’s shopping list, were purchased to comply with Intercollegiate Quidditch Association (IQA) regulations. The team bought 14 Scarlet Hawk brooms—for a total of $583.10—from Alivan’s, a Florida-based company that markets Harry Potter-themed products.

Are you kids out of your minds?! That’s nearly $42 per broom!!! For a sport made up by a foxy blonde who smiled when her publicist cupped her Bludgers at the British Book Awards, couldn’t you make this game a little bit more interesting? Count the innuendos in this post and get back to us.

After the jump, videos from On Harvard Time, our favorite quotes about quidditch, and the picture of Rowling getting groped.

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The first book in the Harry Potter series–Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone–was released in the United States in 1998. (Yes, it was that long ago.) Over the next 11 years, the millions of children who first read the book back in the 20th century would all grow up and go to college. And one common action all of these kids took was to evaluate how much the university they attend is like Hogwarts. Well here to finally settle the dispute of which American universities would be most likely to have a chamber of secrets is college admissions counselor Katherine Cohen. Ms. Cohen has toured many colleges over the years and has compiled a list of the five best suited for wizardry. Unsurprisingly, some Ivy League universities made the list. Perhaps surprisingly, only two Ivies made the list.

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Located on 745 acres overlooking Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, this research university is fairly removed from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan (as Hogwarts is from London). Cornell’s West Campus residential community, appropriately called “The Gothics,” along with the War Memorial, Risley Residential College, and the Law Library, are gothic masterpieces. There’s big school spirit here, too. Ice hockey, lacrosse and football games bring out huge crowds. Like competitors in the Triwizard Challenge, Cornellians wear their red scarves when they compete against their Ivy League rivals.

…

Yale University, New Haven, CT
As the third-oldest college in America, this might be as close to Hogwarts as one can get. The campus is full of towers, courtyards, arches and balconies, and boasts some of the country’s most breathtaking gothic architecture. Like Hogwarts, the Yale campus conceals many nooks and crannies. For example, under Sterling Library there’s a tunnel that leads to another library, part of Yale’s large underground network of unseen passageways, some of which remain locked or forgotten. Yale’s secret societies (such as Skull and Bones which has been made famous by Hollywood) may remind Rowling fans of Dumbledore’s Army. A defining feature of this Ivy League institution is its twelve residential colleges. Like the infamous sorting hat, the administration places incoming students in one of twelve residential colleges, where loyalties and rivalries abound.

Ms. Cohen lists “physical appearance, residential community, academic rigor, extracurricular opportunities, and unique traditions” as her criteria for wizarding universities. Oddly, having actual Hogwarts wizards as students is not included. While Ms. Cohen does appear to have all her facts in order (Cornell’s Risley Hall is known for its annual Harry Potter night), she should apologize to Dumbledore’s Army for comparing them to Skull and Bones. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in October, the world’s favorite young hot witch was seen touring the top Ivy League schools. But in April, Emma shocked the Ivy nation by opting to attend Brown over Harvard and Yale. Naturally this sparked a great reaction, mostly from IvyGate commenters who could not believe that someone actually chose Brown instead of settling for it–much less someone as internationally famous as Emma Watson. The three questions being tossed around were:

     1. She’s not actually going to Brown, right?

     2. Harvard and/or Yale must have rejected her, correct?

     3. Holy fuck, why is she going to Brown?

Three months later, these questions can be finally put to rest. With Half-Blood Prince coming out this month, the Harry Potter kids are on the interview circuit. Daniel Radcliffe took a break from being nude to say this to The Guardian about his co-star:

[Emma Watson's] very clever. Do you know her GCSE results?” His eyes boggle: “I was thrilled with mine – seven Bs, two As and an A*. I think Emma got three As and seven A*s – she’s incredibly academic, it’s frightening. Me and Rupert [Grint] to all intents and purposes dropped out of school. And she’s going to Brown.”

Not much reading between the lines needed there. Although Watson may have used the Imperius Curse on Radcliffe to keep him from revealing that she’s going to Tufts. Read the rest of this entry »

The British tabloids leaked early this morning that Emma Watson has decided to matriculate at Brown this fall. Although she was spotted touring campuses in New Haven and Cambridge, it should be no surprise that the tweenie who plays Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series would avoid the gothic arches and Georgian bricks in favor the legendary Providence shopping mall. (Fuck yeah, America.) Yale and his Harkness Tower and Harvard and her Annenberg are notably more Potter than Brown. And notably more difficult to get into.

According to the secret tipsters to News of the World, Emma just fell in love with Rhode Island. Or something:

She looked at universities over here [in the UK] but fell in love with Brown. She has a lot of friends there.”

If any of the sweet blogosphere rumors are true, Emma is going to be majoring in Greenpeace and hopes to become the captain of the inaugural Brown Quidditch team. She’s going for a minor in looking good and making me feel like a creep for watching this video.

Embedded video and action figure photos after the jump. Oh and you “friends” of Emma at Brown. We know you read IvyGate, so just start shoveling the dirt this way, please.

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Barely legal hottie Emma Watson (aka Hermione Granger, aka Harry Potter’s First Boner, in the movies about the kid whose penis is now available for public viewing on Broadway) toured Harvard yesterday and is now wandering the street of New Haven, according to students who spotted her this morning:

Saw her walking around with one of the head tour guides, and now she’s in the admissions office having an interview. Once I muster the courage (read: creepyness), I’ll take pictures from the bushes or save her from being run over by a bus or something.

In the absence of Miss Watson, Harvard has been entertaining a handful of other celebrities. An operative informs us:

Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are currently at Harvard as well. Rumor has it that one of Demi’s daughters is looking to apply. And also JoJo was here like two weekends ago I’m just learning. As opposed to Emma and Demi’s daughter, she came just to party (allegedly) and was sighted at a couple final clubs.

Eh, who cares about Rumer or Bristol or whoeverthehell Ashton is awkwardly fathering these days. Let’s obsess about Hermione Granger a little more. Since Emma’s Grand College Tour appears to be heading south, we predict a Columbia appearance tomorrow (plus partying in NYC for the weekend?) and Princeton next week. Squeal!

Budding paparazzi, get your shutters ready. Next time, we want pictures.

You may recall from Jacob Savage’s “Drinking on Facebook 101,” one of my favorite posts evarr, how ’11s across the League are creating groups to demonstrate their mad drinking skillz, which sometimes reach five Smirnoff Ices in a single night. The standard bearer for this bacchanalian revelry was the Columbia group “Screw the U – Columbia ‘11 works hard but parties harder!!” That’s right, two exclamation points, bitch. 

Given the First Rule of Facebook Groups — for every eccentric group there is an equal and opposite eccentric group — there was no way these chug-a-lugs would exist in a vacuum. With that, allow me to introduce “Columbia ‘11 Works Hard, Stays Indoors, And Does Not Party At All.”

I don’t feel like a jerk describing them as geeks, because they’d be the first to admit it. And while their philistine adversaries have some dizzyingly funny discussion board topics, like “Mary Jane” and “The thin line between drunk and tipsy,” these more traditional Columbia types have “Orientation Iliad Discussion Party” and “Attracted to Dorkiness.”

After the jump, riveting tales of supergalactic love and temperance.

But first, as funny as these groups are, I’m a little worried about the Columbia ’11s. It’s still a month or so before their college experience starts, and many have already cordoned themselves into one-dimensional identities. Isn’t it odd that some of the country’s brightest kids have self-dichotomized — at the college level, no less — into bingers vs. squares? I thought the point of college was discovering nuances and not having to choose between the Screech or A.C. Slater camps. We should emulate Zack Morris: a friend to all of earth’s creatures, a lover of Kelly Kapowski.

Meh. Nerd sex, after the jump. 

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I’m not writing about Harry Potter just because it’s a national obsession: there are some very clear Ivy ties. For example, the Daily Princetonian reported back in January that Daniel Radcliffe was going to be Princeton ‘11. Wait, that was the joke issue? Honestly, I have a very straightforward motivation in promoting Harry Potter–it fosters in children an interest in witchcraft and the occult, and with that in mind, it helps me in my Hell-borne quest to subvert Christian morality and destroy the fabric of American society. Duh.

No, the real connection comes from the way students all over have a tendency to associate the ‘magic of Hogwarts’ with their own schools.

Yale has a particular obsession: when not complaining about Hermione being too attractive, the Yale Daily News passes the time debating which residential colleges are most like Gryffindor and whether Larry Summers is Voldemort incarnate. On Facebook, the story is no different. Yale has spawned “Yale is Hogwarts, Harvard is Azkaban,” and “I Chose Yale Because it is Like Hogwarts” –265 and 448 members at writing, respectively.

Harvard’s response? “Harvard is Hogwarts, Yale is Azkaban”… 4 members. Back in 2001 the Crimson observed that quite a few Harvard students found HP “very harvardish,” or that Hogwarts was “Harvard plus magic.” “The childish nature of the Harry Potter series appears to be a strong pull,” wrote G.M. Sheehan. The debate is since settled; Scholastic’s first reader (Arthur Levine, Brown ‘84) in charge of Harry Potter noted at a Master’s Tea that Yale was “the closest thing you can get to Hogwarts in the United States.” At least Harry and the Potters are playing in Harvard Hogwarts Square on opening night.

But don’t fight about which school is Hogwarts–don’t you see? No one school is, they all are! It’s magic.

Send tips, but not spoilers, to ivygate.guest@gmail.com. Fun campus Harry Potter stories are welcome!

–SAM JACKSON