Yale–already suffering from budget cuts, application-malaise, and high-schooler homophobia–may finally be throwing in the towel: that is, canceling its subscription to left-wing-propaganda-rag its favorite newspaper, the New York Times.

For several years now, newsy Elis could begin their day munching on Lucky Charms and catching up on Dowd-ravings, provided pro-bono in dining halls by the Yale administration. However, the Yale College Council recently poked its nose into the issue, and decided that, since they themselves–too busy faux-politicking and planning their reelection campaigns–don’t have time for the Times, neither does the rest of Yale. They recommended either cutting the number of subscriptions, giving students free access to the online version, or–heaven forfend!–scrapping it altogether. Some wise Yalie words:

“It’d be a sign,” Julian Reid ’13 said. “They [would be] restricting our access to knowledge.”

Yup. Uppity, over-caffeinated Yalies responded exactly as expected. Charlie Jaeger ‘12–self-proclaimed internet kingpin, Yale FML infiltrator, ‘Saybrook Blog’ and ‘Overheard in Saybrook’ founder, and, as of a day ago, Facebook Fan of the New York Times–quickly started a Facebook group in protest: “Keep the New York Times in Yale’s Dining Halls.” As of writing, it has a whopping 812 members. (For some perspective, the Facebook group “YALE HAITI RELIEF” has 13 members.)

Meanwhile, Charlie’s new Facebook friend Ben Stango ‘11, head of the Yale College Democrats, started an online petition, which currently has 206 signatures. It roasts the YCC quite enjoyably:

President Levin is considering eliminating the copies of the New York Times placed outside of our dining halls. The Yale College Council, the body charged with representing our interests, voted last week to support only buying the New York Times on Sunday without surveying the student body’s desires. Yale aims to produce an informed and well educated student body–these actions threaten that goal.

Boom goes the dynamite. We’re really hoping that the NY Times controversy results in an epic YCC-coup (Imperator Stango, we’re looking at you). Maybe wishful thinking, expecially considering that, well, most Yalies really don’t care. Thanks Yale Daily News for actually polling people before heading angrily to teh internetz:

Here’s an idea: What if we pay for all the upset kiddies’ NYTs by hiking their tuition? I mean, I’m a Wall Street Journal fan, so no biggie. President Levin, I know you’re busy dealing with the ire of the student body, but what do you think?:

“Levin, who is in Switzerland this week, was not available for comment.”

At a time of crisis, where’s a Prez when you need him??? We hope, at least, that he’s enjoying his fondue and milk-maidens while his university battles it out over a newspaper that won’t exist in 10 years anyway.

Are “Ivy League” hauteur and speech-patterns “cool” or “biased” and phonily “magnanimous”? Says some weirdo tea-party website run by a guy who will be Secretary of the Interior in the Palin-Beck administration:

Of course, very few people openly say they are “upper class”-at least not in public! Beyond money, attitudes can place one in a particular class in the public mind. Speaking of which, a finely tuned ear can detect in Obama’s speeches an Ivy League ring or bias. Consider again his magnanimous announcement that he has arrived to “rebuild the middle class.”

And we just reread Maureen Dowd’s column. (We usually don’t have the time to devote to the ritual three parsings required to begin to understand her.) It’s almost as though Maureen Dowd doesn’t REALLY think Barack Obama–Columbia and Harvard Law grad–is as cool as Scott Brown!

Whereas Obama had to force himself to nibble French fries and drink beer (instead of his organic Black Forest Berry Honest Tea) during the Pennsylvania primary, Brown truly loves diners, Pepsi, Waffle Houses and the unwashed masses.

Ooh, burn! The “Ivy League cool” president is effete. Maybe Maureen Dowd can start writing for NewsBlaze?

Gawker points us to a 2001 Crimson profile of America’s next top conservative pundit, and erstwhile Harvard student, Ross Douthat. In the dwindling of Kristol’s limelight and Glenn Beck moving to some off-the-grid commune with his followers (a boy can dream!), Douthat is one of the more influential conservative pundits, if only for the rare penumbra of sanity — if, you know, prickishness — that comes from his columns. “Move Over Limbaugh,” says the Crimson, but Douthat’s really more like the kid in your Econ lecture who won’t shut up about Ayn Rand. Still annoying, but more human. Sort of. Also, he’s just striking a pose of conservatism so he can be different, which is also like current college students we know!

Douthat has always stood apart from the crowd. As the sole Republican in a “staunch, hardline-Democrat family”, [sic] he formed his conservative worldview from an early age as “a way of rebelling against my parents”. [...] “I am most proud of the fact that I have made—and kept—friends, in spite of the fact that my public persona is to disagree with everyone here.”

At least he knows that writing is all about persona, and not at all about knowing the adjective “Democratic.” Why the Crimson ran a profile of one of their own columnists, we aren’t sure, but thankfully they were wise enough to plant the seeds of doubt in our mind as to whether or not Douthat’s position on “homosexuality” (which he apparently… opposes? Like, in general?) is informed by hard-won experience:

Indeed, his room is adorned with posters of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe – stars from Hollywood’s glamour heyday – as well as a towering tribute to Gladiator. “I think that Russell Crowe’s evocation of manhood is something all men should aspire to”

Mm-hm. It’s not just glamorous screen divas our Ross loves, though — it’s also power!

“Coming to Harvard, I now have a new sense of the power and success that is at our fingertips – I know I will be one of the 25 richest writers of the future”, [sic] he says.

Well, it’s not the future yet — we’ll know when conservative columnists write their columns from green moon cheese, but Ross, you’re well on your way! Congratulations on leveraging a Harvard degree into, um, what it is you do now.

To those insane enough to still want to date someone from Princeton, Yale, et al. after attending an Ivy, a new, more blatantly bourgeois dating service now caters specifically to those elitist desires. According to their mission statement, the Ivy Plus Society, also referred to as TIPS (we couldn’t have come up with a more ironic acronym if we tried) aims at creating “a community of talented, dynamic individuals” with 75% of their members claiming single status. Most likely an attempt to encourage genetically customizing future purebred offspring, the new venture founded by Jennifer Wilde Anderson, Yale ‘01, that stole Harvard’s final club/Princeton’s eating club concept targets recent alumni from the Ivies as well as their “plus” counterparts, such as Duke and Berkeley. The seemingly arbitrary qualifications even reach across the pond, with the London School of Economics making the list. Taking a Sex and the City approach to elitism and the dating scene, Ivy Plus assures the hesitant with promises of “fabulous”:

[W]e all need a few nights to set the roof on fire and fill-up [sic] a glass or three with a dash of chaos & adventure.

Read the New York Times response after the jump.

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Why would the New York Times bother to do a story on your slightly unhelpful yet quasi altruistic non-profit tech start-up? Because your name is Joshua Kushner, your brother Jared owns the New York Observer, and the word “scion” can be applied to you, that’s why.

It seems aside from pimping themselves out to a shady Mexican billionaire and music mogul David Geffen the Times is buttering up the Kushners for a loan by writing a 1,300 word profile on little bro Joshua’s new pet project UniThrive. Besides being all jazzed that they might get some sweet Kushner cash, there was a fail. The reporter didn’t even check out the microfinance group Kiva.org and the Times was forced to run a correction yesterday. That’s just odd given UniThrive co-founder Tanuj Parikh is the cousin of Kiva’s president.

Details and why begging is the new working after the jump.

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In the Op-ed section of yesterday’s Times, Mark Taylor – chair of Columbia’s Religion Department – broke from the rank-and-file optimism of Ivy League academics on academia by asserting that “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” (For those who have been living under a rock for the past fifty years, in 2008, Forbes gave Detroit – a city saddled with crime and unemployment – the dubious distinction of being America’s most miserable city).

We’re guessing that this Benedict Arnold of a professor has tenure because his ideas, which include retrenching both doctoral-level education and academia as a whole, are unlikely to popular to many colleagues and administrators at Columbia, a place dredged in the virtues of a classical education. (Columbia College, as one example, continues to yoke its students to a stringent core curriculum).

The problem, Taylor explains, stretches back to Kant, who wrote in the late 18th century that to “handle the entire content of learning” professors should teach different subjects. This, he argues,

has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

More after the jump.

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The ruinous state of our economy has done little to deter this year’s batch of Ivy aspirants; for the class of 2013, acceptances rates fell at six of the eight Ivy League schools.

Harvard and Yale solidified their positions as the toughest schools to get into, at 7% and 7.5%, respectively, though the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey – while maintaining its third place position – slid, much to the dismay of some prestige-hungry Princetonians,  precipitously close to its proletarian New York City peer.

If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say the general rise in applications to the Ivy League may be owed in part to its constituents’ sizable endowments and commitment to need-blind financial aid; in marked contrast, several other selective colleges and universities – including Colby and Oberlin – are, according to the New York Times, looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make admissions decisions this year.”

Perhaps the decrease in selectivity at both Princeton and Penn is due to the fact that they are,  or rather have been, traditional feeders into Wall Street – a Wall Street that is no longer as glamorous as it was a few years before. If that yawn-inducing class on financial derivatives or corporate valuation isn’t going to net you that super sweet 100-hour a week gig at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns you might as well learn hot boxing 101 and take creative writing classes pass/fail at Brown.

Last week the Nixon Library released over 198 hours of Richard Nixon’s rantings – recorded after his re-election in 1972 – and Gothamist pulled a few interesting quotes on the disgraced president’s disdain for, well, pretty much everything, which includes the Ivy League.

Speaking with Henry Kissinger about the National Security Adviser’s meeting with Ivy League college presidents about the war in Vietnam, Nixon had this to say:

The Ivy League presidents? Why I’ll never let those sons of bitches in the White House again. Never, never, never. They’re finished. The Ivy League schools are finished… Henry, I would never have had them in. Don’t do that again… They came out against us when it was tough… Don’t ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never.”

Of course Nixon’s talking in the context of White House advice-seeking, but the begrudging quality of his words seems to imply that he didn’t like the Ivy League in any context. A partial explanation for this may be found in the fact that while he was accepted to Harvard College on scholarship, transportation and living expenses made him choose nearby Whittier College instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday the New York Times published an exposé, of sorts, bolstering the new trend of foregoing the Ivy League admissions for cheaper, ask-fewer-questions colleges overseas. Top schools in the U.K. and Canada offer world-class educations preloaded with neat things like conversations in foreign languages and cobblestone streets. Apparently, kids also get to skip the crappy American traditions of doing well on SATs and writing personal statements—not to mention getting cured of a nasty case of of a plagiarism.

To high school students considering six-figure debt versus five-figure debt, the move to Europe’s gothic arches and prestigious-sounding names abroad makes buckets of sense. (Reference to the global economic crisis implied.) As the Ivies reaffirm their commitment to increasing financial aid and eliminating debt, however, applying abroad really just seems like an easy way into tweed-wearing university towns. Club meetings at pubs and potential for Old World extravagance run a close second to sounding “original” when telling high school classmates your postgrad plans.

So is the faux-Ivy, go-abroad-for-a-new-accent trend really all it’s cracked up to be? It all depends whether higher education should be what the title implies or just a ticket to drinking pints scot-free at 18. The whole Ivy League thing really is getting a bit tired for everyone (The New Yorker included?), but why not do it for the right reasons? Ivy League educations have never been more expensive or exclusive as they are now weirdly accessible to Europhiles and free to those who read the YDN.

Outsourcing is here, it’s growing, and it kind of sucks. First it was limited to low level work: call centers and their ilk; things American college grads weren’t competing for. But now, more and more, outsourcing is rapidly encroaching on jobs that have historically gone to Ivy League students: analyst positions at New York investment banks.

According to a recently published article in the Times, Wall Street’s woes have fueled a bona fide bonanza of work in cheaper locales like India and Eastern Europe, where the research tasks that were once handed to newly-minted college grads and M.B.A.’s for salaries in excess of six-figures can be had for a fraction of the cost.

At India-based Copal Partners, which “churns out equity, fixed income and trading research for big name analysts and banks… business is up about 40 percent this year alone.” Similar upturns in work have been seen by other third-party firms as well.

It doesn’t seem like outsourcing will stop just there:

After research, the next wave may include more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors… In the future, executives in India like to joke, the only function for highly paid bankers in New York or London will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deals close.

More sobering quotes for all you finance types after the jump.

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