On Wednesday night, Jon Stewart lampooned the MBA Oath established by a group of second-year students at Harvard Business School. Earlier, the Harvard Crimson reported that as a result of the financial apocalypse, Maxwell Anderson, now an HBA graduate, had drafted a Boy Scout-esque pledge, which was then signed by hundreds of fellow graduates. A few lines:

I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.

I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.

I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

But this little tree-house word of honor didn't fly with many other future Kenneth Lays. In an interview with the Daily Show's John Oliver, Bruce Kogut, a business professor at Columbia, admitted that "not a very high percentage" of his students considered taking the oath. Oliver then spoke with a group of Harvard and MIT MBA students who found the oath contradictory to what they've been taught to "be responsible to shareholders." One guy commented, "I feel that ethics is a really fuzzy subject." When asked if she feared going to jail in the future for possibly using illegal profiting tactics, one Harvard student piped up with no reservations:

It's important to be a little bit of an asshole sometimes.

Scout's honor, indeed. See the video after the jump.

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Since the best arbiters of what's "hot" and what's "not" in the lives of college students are, of course, middle-aged newsweekly editors, Newsweek announces the "25 Hottest Schools" of 2007 in this week's issue.

The hot 25 opens with "Hottest Ivy" Cornell University:

Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell is a land-grant college emphasizing problem solving as well as scholarly debate. The university boasts a world-class engineering college and top-flight liberal arts, science and fine arts. The hotel school is considered the world's best. Cornellians, proud of the variety on campus, point to the president, David Skorton, a cardiologist, jazz musician and computer scientist who is the first in his family to have a college education.

Now, land-grant universities are fine and good, but they haven't exactly been cutting edge since, oh, 1862. Other than Newsweek's desire to christen some random underdog the "next big thing," is there any reason for Cornell to be so hot right now?  Regardless, Psych101 taught us that self-fulfilling prophecies totally work.  So congrats, Cornell!  Jon Stewart called you a "frozen hellscape," but now you're on fire.

"Hottest for Rejecting You" goes to the crimson prude, Harvard, for rejecting 91.03% of applicants for the class of 2011.  Though Columbia College proved marginally more frigid by rejecting 91.05% of her high school suitors, sluttish acceptance rates at the Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and School of General Studies, reduced net exclusivity.

Of course, the hot Ivies hold not a candle to "Hottest in the War on Terror" winner New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which is "in some ways the Los Alamos of a new age, this time focusing on searching suitcases and disabling roadside explosives rather than building the A-bomb."  Majoring in airport security, minoring in explosive-sniffing dogs, the average NMT student also has robust social life, due to the availability of pick-up lines like "Want to help me study for full-body cavity search class?"  Works like a charm. 

EDIT:  Looks like "Hottest for Liberal Arts" Princeton University isn't so hot at teaching reading skills, because I totally missed its inclusion in the 25 hot colleges list. Thanks to Cayuga and MITBitch for noticing.  Newsweek emphasizes Princeton's grant-only financial aid department and intellectual life. --MAUREEN O'CONNOR