“Fight the Power” Friday (Part 2)

Kenneth Goldsmith, a English professor at Penn, has a unique take on authorship, that being: Plagiarism ain’t so bad, necessarily!

Goldsmith’s argument (we think) has something to do with authorship being pretentious and paternalistic, especially in our hyper-connected day and age, when information is cycled and recycled millions of times every day, at the speed of an electron. (Maybe?) To that end, he teaches a class each year called “Uncreative Writing,” in which students are actively encouraged to rip-off their classwork from other writers. Seriously.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing.

Aaaanyway: Crimson columnist Isabel E. Kaplan wrote a pointed critique of Goldsmith’s philosophy earlier this week, which basically amounted to, “This is bullshit.” And we were interested in the good professor’s response. So we shot over an email asking what he thought of the criticisms. In his reply, Goldsmith referred to the column as “stupidity,” then threw the question to some former students, at which point things got a little bit weird.

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Good writing is just as noteworthy as bad writing — moreso even! — so it’s worth singling out every once in a while. And, since we spent the better part of Friday shitting on a Cornell Sun columnist, we figured now was as good a time as ever to highlight another writer from the same paper.

Nathan Tailleur wrote an enjoyable (if heavy-handed) deconstruction of social relations in the Facebook era for yesterday’s edition of the Sun. The takeaway, if I’m interpreting correctly, is that the more navel-gazing and passive interacting we do on social media sites, the more we’re actually punching ourselves in the metaphysical face, or something. Maybe?

As soon as we question the authenticity of experiences we were comfortable having, we expose ourselves to apparently different, but essentially identical issues — only this time they’re about the authenticity of our worries about authenticity. We’re running from context. The reader-author relationship of this very article is a recursive example of this phenomenon — as your eyes pass from word to word in this article, you lay down another layer. You’re waiting for a misstep. You’re looking for truth. You’re constructing and devouring me and I’m constructing and devouring you and down is up and we want to throw a punch but we’re worried we’re going to hit ourselves and we’re all so fucking tangled in the complexity of it all that even if we could stand on two solid legs and stop punching ourselves in the fists there’s no guarantee that the post-postmodern drain hole in the corner of the room will liberate us and we’re all just sooo goddamn tired.

I think this is also what happens to people when they try to read “Finnegans Wake?”

(h/t MetaEzra)

Since IvyGate’s ignominious inception, its muckraking and fun-making have always been spruced up by a little variation. Fuck “too many cooks.” Out with the old, in with the new, that’s what we say. Melting pots, marketplace of ideas, we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for, all that jazz — at least for now. In this spirit, we’re happy to announce the return of our vaunted Guest Editor program. (Basically, a way of tricking gullible but talented people into temporarily running this shitshow/site and bearing the weight of commenter adoration, while we slack off and work on our tans.)

Yes, you heard us right: it’s the tentative beginning of IvyGate Summer Session.

How it works: During June, July, and August, Alex “Yalien” Klein and Dan “PRETTY Dan” D’Addario will step aside (both in London, coincidentally, the former at The Times, and the latter, teaching) into advice and consent roles, while Guest Editors run the site, top-to-bottom. Look for great stuff from new folks, as well as a sprinkling of the tried-and-true.

The important part: We have a month in mind that is as wide-open as Harvard to kids with made-up resumes. We’re currently looking for Guest Editors for the month of June. If you think you’ve got what it takes to plug this leaky vessels for a whole lunar cycle — pizazz, lack of shame, jokes, internet mastery, journalistic experience(?), a sunny disposition — let us know, and we’ll send over (easy) application details.

For glory and gossip: tips@ivygateblog.com

With love,

Alex and Dan

When we heard Maureen O’Connor was promoted to full-time editor at Gawker — and this after the Style section thing! — we thought we’d round up all the old hands and see what exactly they’re up to now. Did you miss them?

Nick Summers, co-founder: Newsweek reporter, of late covering technology, aggressive Tumblr defriender.

Chris Beam, co-founder: Slate reporter, Obama Facebook creator.

Hal Parker, editor emeritus: First year grad student in the doctoral program of philosophy at Penn.

Jacob Savage, editor emeritus: Living in western Massachusetts writing screenplays.

Jim Newell, editor emeritus: Editing Wonkette, the D.C. gossip site.

Robyn Schneider, alumna: Just published a young adult novel–Knightley Academy–under pen name, Violet Haberdasher.

Neel Shah, alumni: Glamour magazine featured man-candy, Gawker and Radar writer–and now, Page Six.

…and too many others to name.

The Daily Beast, for some reason totally not related to linkbait, has released a list of America’s fifty most stressful colleges — taking into account tuition, academic rigor, acceptance rate, crime, and (OMG, LOL) proportion of engineers on campus. Speaking as someone who goes to school in a crimey city with an engineering school attached, neither thing causes me stress! And #1 is Stanford, which, if Palo Alto stresses you out, try Killadelphia. AND and the list, a cutesy, unscientific listicle, uses as its news hook the Cornell suicides… which are tragic events with valences far deeper than people bitching about how “stressful” homework can be! But, okay, sure, Daily Beast, we’ll humor you. Where do the Ivies fall on the ranking? Find out after the jump.

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Check out Maureen O’Connor, graduate of both Princeton and the IvyGate editorship, in the Style section of the Times: one of “the rising stars of gossip blogs.” Maureen, who wrote for something called “the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League,” and has moved on to investigate Peter Orzsag’s hair — what the Times calls a “notable scoop.”

In writing up one of Maureen’s “memorable gaffes,” the Times proved that you don’t mess with an IvyGate editor.

An earlier version of this article contained its own Memorable Gaffe in discussing Maureen O’Connor’s error on the term chyron. In noting that Ms. O’Connor misspelled chyron, the article said “mispelled.” What’s the old saying? People who (literally) live in glass houses . . .

Kudos to Maureen — and thanks for giving us poor college schlubs hope. We too might be famous one day — and have that adorable blazer!

An inside source close to a recent meeting of all eight Ivy League presidents in New York has revealed exclusively to IvyGate that the group is strongly considering adding “at least two” schools to the Ivy League. Especially strong proponents of the plan, which had first been floated internally by Columbia Athletic Director M. Dianne Murphy as a means of increasing interest in and profit from the Ivy League as an athletic conference, are Columbia’s Bollinger and Dartmouth’s Kim. Yale’s Levin, predictably, is strongly opposed. A resolution allowing two to four schools conditional acceptance to the Ivy League athletic conference, but forbidding them from capitalizing on the academic cachet the imprimatur grants, may be reached.

What would the revamped Ivy League look like? Our source tells us that the goal is to include one school with a large student body and aggressive expansion plan, though not especially strong athletics: New York University. The other definite in, if expansion is to happen, would be Georgetown, as a means of slightly broadening the geographic reach of the conference. Farther-flung names were bandied about, including Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Rice — no decisions are being made until a meeting in Providence in May. Arbitration might be required to release whatever “new Ivies” are designated, but Bollinger especially seems to view this as a mere formality.

None of the eight Presidents were available for comment.