Welcome back to IVY reality index, where we watch Ithaca College’s masterful Cornell mock-soap-opera and dissect it with the obsessive zeal of a seventh grade girl seeing Twilight for the eighth time. This time we enlisted the help of Real Live Cornell Guy (and fraternity brother, to boot!) Michael Morisy ‘07 to help break it down.

But first, an update on last week’s reality index: Remember when we accused the Black Kid With No Name of having a weird pseudo-British, quasi-Australian accent? Turns out the actor is from Zimbabwe, and that’s actually the way he speaks! Apparently the Zimbabwe accent sounds just like an American theater geek faking the Queen’s English. Who knew? Anyway, on to…

IVY Episode 2: In Which The Sissy Liberates Himself After His Girlfriend Goes On A Trampage

Note: If you have trouble with the embeds, go to ICTV’s website and watch there.

Ep 3 and two reality indices (Christmas comes early!) after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The intrepid lads and lasses of Ithaca College — some sort of liberal arts dealie that coexists with the Ivy Most Likely To Have An Inferiority Complex And/Or Belong To A Sorority — have created a delightful little soap opera entitled IVY. Filmed on Cornell’s campus, IVY “may or may not be based on actual Cornell students. … Okay. Yeah, they’re kind of based on actual Cornell students. Like pretty much.” The resulting parody so inspired, so ingenious, so delightfully spot-on, why, it almost makes you wish you went to a safety school! But seriously: I nearly died choking on my Diet Coke Plus with Vitamins during the opening scene, featuring a back-to-school monologue from Sorostitute #1, Emily:

Sure, the acting can be a little awkward, and the camera work kind of makes me motion-sick, but in the context of college, social discomfort and a lingering scent of vomit only enhance the cinema vérité quality. Emily emerges as the Blair Waldorf of the bunch, the scheming princess with her pussywhipped pre-med boyfriend, Chris. But Chris is having a change of heart! He’s thinking about dropping out of Orgo! Even worse— he might be falling for Natalie, the outcast studio art major with a nose pierce and Jenny Lewis bangs!

After the jump (and mostly because “Gossip Girl” isn’t on this week, which leaves a big hole in the “painfully-soundtracked elitist melodrama” part of our hearts) more video and we knock off Daily Intel’s Gossip Girl reality index.

Read the rest of this entry »

The price of attending an Ivy League school is not the tuition — it’s the subsequent lifetime you spend encountering your classmates’ bylines.

A brother can’t even glance at a periodical without suffering flashbacks. Open the New York Times and boom, it’s 30 years ago and Nick “One F” Kristof is hitting on your girl at a Crimson party. Grab The New Republic — God, that dweeb Beinart would wake you up every morning at 7 a.m. braying show tunes down the hall in Pierson. Flip through the New Yorker and wow, there was that time you and Phil Gourevitch stayed up after that party in Risley, had a lot of wine, really just talked, and one thing led to another and it’s not like it makes you gay, it was just college, you know? We digress. Ivy bylines — they’re everywhere! And they will haunt every minute of your media-soaked life.

It’s no secret that Ivy Leaguers run the Fourth Estate. It’s a given, a commonly acknowledged conceit … that also happens to be completely, totally wrong. How do we know?

Meet our newest recurring feature: the IvyGate Index®, a highly scientific measure of Ivy influence in various industries. In each installment, our crack statisticians (poached in a clandestine midnight raid on the U.S. News & World Report compound) will pore over reams of data, using patented hegemony formulae to give you the numbers you crave with cutting-edge graphical representation. That’s right, bitches: pie charts.

This week, we point the mighty IvyGate Index® telescope at the top rungs of the media ladder. Verdict: Shockingly little dominance!
 

In conclusion, the media industry’s IGIQ (IvyGate Index Quotient) is 44 percent. After the jump, we’ve included a note on methodology for all you budding freakonomists. Next week: robber barons of the extraction industries.

Read the rest of this entry »

Haven’t you heard? Brown University was actually number six in the U.S. News liberal arts rankings! It also charges $16,000 for tuition, has a firm grounding in the Protestant faith, and is located in Arkansas!

Oh shit. Sorry, that’s John Brown University. We almost thought our friends in Providence had shattered a stereotype — how disappointing.

What’s really disappointing, though, is that JBU’s namesake isn’t even crazy-eyes-abolitionist-martyr-who- hacked-his-victims-to-death-with-a-broadsword John Brown. It’s named after John E. Brown, a kind evangelist who taught needy children after WWI. Couldn’t they just fudge it, though? It’s a Christian school, after all, and Brown the Crazier did think he was the Avenging Angel of Death.

But hey, at least it’s diverse, right? No? Better fix that, or J-Bro might have to chop up a bitch.

A stunned Ivy League wakes up, sheets soaked with sweat, to a shocking new world order…

GOLIATH SLAIN BY SLIGHTLY SMALLER GOLIATH: PRINCETON CLAWS TO NO. 1 SPOT AS SHATTERED HARVARD PICKS UP THE PIECES
PRES. TILGHMAN DRINKS SWEET VICTORY NECTAR FROM GOLDEN CHALICE; CRIMSON UNABLE TO COMPREHEND NEWS, WON’T UPDATE SITE

PENN PLUNGES THREE SPOTS TO NO. 7
ENTIRE ADMISSIONS STAFF RESIGNS, TAKES OWN LIFE IN HAIL OF SUICIDE-BY-COP GUNFIRE ON 34th ST

DUKE ASSAULT ON IVY LEAGUE FINALLY REPELLED
Blue Devils Blue at No. 8, Three Down; ‘Harvard of the South’ Now Just ‘Of the South’

COLUMBIA CLINGS DESPERATELY TO NINTH PLACE FOR 65th CONSECUTIVE YEAR
‘We Have Jeff Fucking Sachs!’ Wail NY’ers as Bollinger Forced to Share Manhattan Mansion With Dartmouth Bumpkins

Cornell (No. 12), Brown (No. 15) Increasingly Irrelevant
Don’t Deserve All-Caps Headline; Pres. Skorton, Simmons Receive Prank Rearview Mirrors in Mail

Yale Somehow Completely Forgotten Despite No. 3 World Rank

What a lovely afternoon! Birds are chirping, children are laughing, and look, here’s a stoop sale with books! What shall we buy? The Client? Too long. Best Lesbian Erotica? We’ve had better. Look no further: Scaling the Ivy Wall: Getting Into the Selective Colleges (© 1975), and it’s only a dollar!*

Truly, it is an artifact. What kind of car is a “flivver”? Who or what is Bennington? A telling passage:

Despite the fact that it will cost over $6,000 a year at most selective colleges, the applications continue to pour in. Obviously, whatever Harvard or Vassar [Ed. note: ???????] costs, it seems worth the sacrifice.

As you might expect, the most entertaining reading is about “The Changing Campus.” After noting, bizarrely, that hitchhiking is a complete necessity on every college campus, the authors turn to the brave new world of sex: 

Take co-ed dormitories. Girls and boys live on separate floors, or in separate entries. But then an affair begins, and a suite that is male or female becomes de facto co-ed. Cohabitation, they call it, and there is no word for the distress this situation can cause impressionable roommates.

Not even the realization that the class of ‘75 included a lot of our parents can make that less amusing.

*(Actual titles, seen consecutively)

While flipping through a discarded UVA alumni magazine at the gym [Ed.: They're letting Wahoos into Park Slope now?], we came across this charming letter to the editor:

It would seem there is a disturbing trend of pro-gay advocacy in Alumni News. In the class notes section, which I always look forward to reading, I was disturbed to read a proud “new parents” announcement of a girl to a pair of men.

Some on your editorial staff may think that this is progressive, politically correct and reflective of changing attitudes toward the family and marriage. To me, it is an insult to the core of society: the family. In the sad wake of the sexual revolution, there is already tons of data by sociologists that children raised in a home with a mother and father with whom they have a biological connection are the most stable, and less likely to fall into adolescent delinquency, substance abuse, teenage sex, etc. If the aim of the University is to serve society, then we need to foster an environment that helps strong citizens to grow and develop, and not just benchmark the steps taken by different persons as if any choice is equivalent.

I ask you if it is reasonable to endorse with normalcy the actions of a fringe of people that affect the foundations of society.

Barbara Ellen Spencer (Col ‘83)
New Delhi, India

Yes, yes, this could just be the regressive ramblings of one cranky alum. Except the previous letter happens to be from someone disputing the Big Bang theory on the grounds that it sounds too crazy. Looking good, UVA. Lookin’ good.