Recent Dartmouth graduate and current investment banker Ursula Grisham published a piece in the latest ‘08 Class newsletter that is unconsciously emblematic of the Ivy League’s blithe, proud role in this recession.

The letter, a warm smile towards the mirror, recounts Grisham’s time as an investment banker in Europe. Reveling in her “ambitious, if not whimsical” career choice, she delves into the “aesthetic” dimensions of her experience—thus running like hell from every imaginable real-people consequence of having played house with the global financial system.

After comparing the walk home from her bank to walking home from a frat party, she pulls the blinders tighter:

“One could argue that if there ever were a good time to be in finance, it’s now. There’s no way to learn like being thrown into the middle of a raging storm.”

And the ideal of the liberal arts turned over in its grave. So as not to totally berate Ms. Grisham, there’s a pretty well documented (and perhaps problematic) trend in the appeals of an Ivy-fueled finance career. As so many decorated coeds haven’t learned in the career services office, i-banking on the brink is not about the welfare of billions but about massaging one’s skill set into greater earning potential. Ivy Leaguers are among the only people at no risk of real hardship these days, and here we are, looking for the benefit.

What benefit? Check after the jump. It involves cash and Sarah Palin.

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Tonight, the audience of a free student showing of Watchmen in Cambridge erupted in applause at a line that Nixon actually sort of did deliver:

“Let’s see those bastards at Harvard figure a way out of that one.”

Oh crap, it’s coming true. The movie is f’ing long, almost an hour per upcoming year of recession according to one Harvard drop-out. At least this country’s last depression was also Prohibition, and anyone with gumption could run rum for money.

What are recent graduates supposed to do now? There are absolutely no jobs, and don’t even think about grad school. Finance positions, Ivy gravy until painfully recently, are down more than 70 percent. Which is poetic justice: the hotshot genius “quants” were playing Jenga with the world economy, and they were drunk. And yet, who is supposed to save us? Harvard’s Larry Summers and Dartmouth’s Tim Geithner (among others). Maybe that explains why Geithner’s own government is pulling the rug out from under him. That, or they know the truth.

The Watchman reference makes more sense after the jump.

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