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.

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• Columbia: "'Rooster’s breakfast' is Slovenian slang for 'early morning sex.'"
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton's gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: "An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event." Gin and anchovies -- busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

Keep 'em coming!

• Columbia: Casual Encounters at its best.
• Harvard: A HLS message board post threatens gun violence, temporarily shutting down summer classes.
• Harvard: Ivy Leaguers take over the New York Times letters page in reaction to its Wall Street versus activism article.
• Princeton: "Even at Princeton University there are slackers, and Gary Klondike is one of the best." Watch The Take Home Final.
• Penn: One tipster requests that that we print an addition to an earlier post on Ivy League cocktails to include the Pennsylvanian: apple brandy, Madeira, egg white, and lemon.
• Penn: The new College of Arts and Sciences building has been named after a gossip columnist. Students are not amused.

Uproar at conservative education blog Phi Beta Cons (part of the National Review Online) over the revelation that the Harvard Crimson has literally hundreds of editors.  800 last year, to be exact -- that's one in every eight undergrads.  Beta-Con Travis Kavulla, Harvard '06 and former Crimson editor (the real kind) explains,

The designation was meant to convey voting membership in the editorial board, rather than the term's more current meaning of supervisory control. ... The real credential to look for, should you encounter an "editor," is not whether the person is merely a "Crimson editor"-which means he's completed a semester-long "comp" (a training regime which used to stand for "competition" and now stands merely for "competence": no joke) and has a full by-line and a vote in editorial-board meetings.

Fellow Beta-Con and Harvard Law grad David French suspects resume padding:

I myself used to hold the title of "editor" of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, a proudly conservative publication. When I was in school (1991-1994), everyone who helped edit articles was called an "editor," and we were explicitly told that the journal's leadership gave us that title to "make our resumes look better."

French ties the herd-of-editors tactic to the downfall of meritocracy, or maybe the annoying availability health care for co-eds (would Mr. French prefer it to be less available?).  We just want to know how many editors signed off on this, and whether they received promotions for it. --MAUREEN O'CONNOR

You know how, every time new quantitative info on Ivy League competitiveness comes out, people joke about penis-measuring contests?

--MAUREEN O'CONNOR

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

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.

The bizarre message above has greeted visitors to thedartmouth.com for at least the last 36 hours. We're not sure what Al Gore has to do with web-publishing a college newspaper, but here's a message to the commenter who complained Monday that we've been ignoring The D in RagTime: You're in charge of letting us know when the precipitation lets up. (Actually, a D staffer just gave us a sneak peak at the redesigned site, which looks like a snazzy improvement; they say it'll be up soon.)

Anyway, staring at this has inspired us to "investigate" (read: Wikipedia) something that has always jiggled the needle on our BS meter: The Dartmouth's claim that it is America's oldest college newspaper, founded 1799. It just seems off, just like the way they call their top editorial board "the directorate." (Really.) Wiki says that...

...the Hanover newspapers existing then are unconnected to a monthly literary magazine that students established around 1843, which is the publication that evolved into the current paper. For that reason, The Dartmouth currently (2006) states that it is in its 163rd volume.

Guh? Clearly we are gonna need more info than this. Can anyone who's familiar with Dartmouth history weigh in? Probably, there's no point to digging further -- this is an area in which the Yale Daily News says it's the "Oldest College Daily" (its alumni org is vomitously called the "OCD Foundation"); the Harvard Crimson says it's "the nation's oldest continuously published daily college newspaper"; and the Columbia Spectator claims "second-oldest" status, without noting who's first. Help us out, readers: who's lying least?

What goes around goes around goes around comes all the way back around.                            --JT

When Justin brought sexy back [Ed.: Thanks, btw], who could have known that he was describing the Harvard Crimson's Circle of Plagiarism? Stung by "borrowers" Victoria Ilyinsky and Kathleen Breeden in October, the Cambridge broadsheet now finds itself on the catching end of fake writing. The copy-and-paste karma comes in the form of the Michigan Daily's Devika Daga. One of apparently four articles the Ann Arbor music writer ganked -- a 2006 review of a French Kicks concert -- bears an uncanny similarity to a 2003 Crimson piece by new Gawker Weekend editor Leon Neyfakh. Read the latter:

The French Kicks are nobodies.

You've probably never heard of them, and neither has America. They've been mentioned in passing in the same breath as the Strokes and the Libertines-occasionally. Pillars of the rock renaissance-kind of. An exciting new band-if you're into that scene-raising hairs and eyebrows and taking the country by storm-if they can get away with it.

And here's the Michigan Daily's homage:

You've probably never heard of the French Kicks, and neither has America. They've occasionally been mentioned in passing in the same breath as The Strokes and The Libertines. They're pillars of the rock renaissance - kind of. They're quite an exciting indie band, if you're into that scene, raising hairs and eyebrows and taking the country by storm - if they can get away with it.

Sweet cosmic chi no doubt, but all this plagiarism is getting tiresome. Can't we get some more original scandals up in this piece? In the meantime, let's not forget the real victims here. First the French Kicks get panned by the Crimson in '03. Now they get re-panned just because the Mich reviewer couldn't come up with a new word for "blows"?

The editorial board has proven to be an excluding, cliqued organization that stands commensurate with as final clubs, all while criticizing those same clubs with a hypocrisy that would startle Mark Foley.

So a Harvard sophomore wasn't elected to serve another year on the editorial board of the Crimson, and he is just a touch unhappy about it. In a 1,183-word letter of resignation emailed to Crim president Will Marra and the entire board, this kid unloads on pretty much everyone, from the mortals who dared edit his pristine copy to the editors who made the "baffling" decision not to keep him aboard.

On a more personal note, I ask these same incompetent or undedicated peers, who would be editing and evaluating my signed pieces and my layout work next semester if I do not resign: Who are you to judge the quality of my work, when I was the one often cleaning up after your sloppy content and making so many solid contributions to the board this semester?

Yes, I have "weaknesses." I can imagine being criticized during deliberations for not always being the most fluid elocutionist and for not being able to "think on my feet." No, especially not after running on my feet, dressed up, to the board-wide shoot interview from Cabot to Dunster for 30 minutes in the pouring rain. Or going to a schmooze after getting zero sleep the previous night because I was working in The Crimson (how ironic) and had two midterms that week.

The entire rant-tastic missive is after the jump. Baby, this is Harvard! You expected to be judged on your merits?

UPDATE: After some published soul-searching, we've redacted this kid's name.

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