Conservatives have said for years that the Ivy League elitists hate the troops. In recent years, Ivy Leaguers have attempted to undermine the United States military by trying to disenroll family members from the Naval Academy or contaminating the Marines with gay. But as of yet, no Ivy alum has physically harmed members of the military. Until now.
The New York Timesreported last week that Dr. Gary Kao of the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center is the worst doctor since Doug from Scrubs. Dr. Kao--who has a Ph.D. from Penn--had been treating veterans with prostate cancer by using a common procedure in which radioactive seeds are implanted into the prostate to attack tumors. The obstacle for Dr. Kao is that you can't find the prostate on Google Maps.
Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.
Yeah, that's not good. So that patient had to return for a second implant. This time, Dr. Kao injected his rectum, missing the prostate again. According to the Times, Dr. Kao's team at the V.A. Hospital had screwed up 92 of 116 cancer treatments over six years. That rate of failure is so incredibly high that Dr. Kao must have been trying to give veterans radioactive butt on purpose. One internal medicine doctor--upon seeing the 92 of 116 statistic--said, "He could have done better just by guessing."
In a bizarre alternate universe, one where giant alien robots masquerade as roadsters and fighter jets, and where non-banker Ivy League twerps inexplicably manage to land hot girlfriends, Penn and Princeton are not rivals separated by state lines and forty-five miles, but constituent parts of the same university:
Twenty seconds into the newest trailer for Transformers 2, viewers are treated to a sweeping aerial shot of Princeton's campus. Immediately after that, there's ground level footage of Penn's Quad. There the mother of Shia LaBeouf's character spins around in a circle and says, "Look at this place - I feel smarter already. Can you smell it?"
"Yeah," her husband replies, "smells like forty thousand dollars a year."
Actually, it's more like fifty thousand. And does anyone know why Michael Bay decided to film on two separate campuses? We were baffled last year, and we still are.
Attention Elis: You may have already won the Swine Flu Clearinghouse! According to the Yale University Health Services, at least four patients are currently being treated for influenza A and awaiting test results from the Connecticut Department of Health, AKA Swine Flu Central.
While other schools seem to be sticking to the Cover Your Cough handbook, Yale looks like they might actually be taking this shit seriously. Because kids are dying. In Mexico. Accordingly, the Yale administration has put a stop on all funding to go to Mexico based on a campus-wide email that made it into our tip box. (Don't worry, students are going to go anyways. Chiapas is crazy this time of year.)
In an unexpectedly extreme move, Dartmouth is actually pulling kids out of Mexico. It looks like the 11 study abroaders at the Dartmouth Language School Abroad program in Cholula might not learn the subjunctive case after all. Hopefully they got in on the hot sauce manufactured there. You know, the one with the wooden top. IvyGate favorite, that is.
After the jump, a school-by-school report of the biggest health scare in the United States that doesn't really seem all that scary. But it's always fun seeing surgical masks in the street.
In an "After the Recession" interview with the New York Times, today, President Obama slammed the quality of education at U.S. colleges in the age of grade inflation, naked parties, and IvyGate.
The somewhat convoluted criticism outlines the difference between the high school education his grandmother used to ascend to corporate vice presidency and the college education most kids are currently using to ascend the stairs of the local unemployment office. And he trashes the letter-writing skills of University of Chicago Law School students!
She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —
Today, you mean?
THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School.
So you're probably thinking where's the Ivy? Who needs to know how to write a letter when some can pull in six figures for kissing great ass? Excellent question, Watson! No matter what the name of the school is, the recession is slapping the meaning of employability across its status-obsessed face. And even Obama's Columbia-Harvard one-two doesn't mean a thing if you have no real abilities.
After the jump watch some Wharton students wipe their noses on the cuffs of their Thomas Pink shirts.
This specific quiz application, now over 51,000 users strong, exists alongside those soothsaying exercises like "Which Disney princess are u?" and "ARE YOU GOOD IN BED?" but we're sure this is the real deal. Written by a graduate of both Harvard and Columbia (and NYU), the questions might as well ask what your favorite brand of socks is or which Golden Girls character have you thought about during sex.
But really. What are the criteria? One wall poster from India also wants to know "How reliable is it?" So being the mad scientists we are, we devised a rigorous experiment, put on lab coats, and got out our electric orb that makes your hair stand up.
After tooling around with this for about 5 minutes, we think we've got it solved. Answer "Money" to question 8, "Clubbing" to question 5, and "I'm flawless" to number 10. You'll be a Harvardian every time.
Check out a few screen shots after the jump. And to answer those hanging questions: Thorlo and Blanche.
Penn grad DJ Lubel '05 popped back into the spotlight this weekend with his video about the Ivy League swill in Murray Hill. The video references to "Jew geography" and Lehman Bros emeriti in that elevated piece of Manhattan in the 30s on the East Side. Cool, but it's worth watching for the dood-bros mooning the camera in front of the stretch Hummer at Joshua Tree.
The song's audio has actually been floating around the Internet since last year or so. NYMag nailed it when they summed up the point:
We all go to temple but we worship the dough We've got more Japs than all of Tokyo Pour me a Grey Goose and Red Bull As I take this Adderal pill Tonight I'm blacking out up on Murray Hill
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.
There are many reasons to avoid Penn: rapists, child pornographers, murdering professors, greedy Wharton students, etc. Now, to the indubitable chagrin of Penn's administrators and the glee of Columbia's Bwog, there's another: a string of life-threatening meningococcal infections.
On Friday, Director of Student Health Evelyn Wiener sent a university-wide email stating that
a third student has now been hospitalized with a confirmed case of meningococcal infection. As a precaution, and to ensure that all students needing to receive preventative treatment have received it, the University has decided to cancel, through this weekend, and perhaps further as circumstances indicate, all official University and student-sponsored parties. This includes, specifically, all parties, on- or off-campus, sponsored by student groups, all Greek-related parties, all College Housing and housing-affiliated parties, or any other gatherings where significant interaction with food, drink, or intimate contact is likely. Athletic and performing arts events will be held as scheduled.
As we have learned the three hospitalized students had common interaction through the Greek system, we have set up a special clinic for tomorrow, Saturday, February 14, at Student Health Service, 3535 Market Street, beginning at 9am. Those who have attended fraternity or sorority events since February 2, or had close, prolonged contact with anyone who attended any Greek-related events since February 2, should visit the clinic for evaluation and possible preventative treatment.
Unlike some other Ivy League schools, Penn will not be laying people off, initiating hiring freezes, or slashing budgets, said President Amy Gutmann in yesterday's university-wide email. In fact, things aren't so bad in Philadelphia. Gutmann writes:
As a result of the record-breaking success of our first year of the Making History campaign, coupled with the prudent choices we made before the economy worsened, we are well-positioned to weather the economic storm.We will continue to plan for the future just as we always have, by implementing sound budgets, by managing our costs, and by maintaining focus on our highest school and institutional priorities.
But what does "well-positioned" mean? According to Gutmann, it means Penn won't resort to any exceedingly unpleasant measures. She writes:
Penn's commitment to need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid remains resolute.
While we are not implementing broad-scale layoffs, hiring freezes, or across-the-board budget reductions, individual Schools and Centers have the flexibility to implement additional cost-cutting measures as needed to create balanced and sustainable budgets.
Sounds good. But what are these "additional cost-cutting measures?" According to this email, they involve not hiring more people and firing existing people. After the jump, Gutmann gives you the bad news.
Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!
This morning, the New York Times reported that Harvard's endowment has lost $8 billion, or 22 percent of its value, in the last four months. In a letter to the deans, University President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst '82 said that the total loss in value will likely be closer to 30 percent by June, the end of the current fiscal year. Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, and the $8 billion loss alone is larger than the endowment value of all but four other American universities (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). Read the rest of this entry »
Conservatives have said for years that the Ivy League elitists hate the troops. In recent years, Ivy Leaguers have attempted to undermine the United States military by trying to disenroll family members from the Naval Academy or contaminating the Marines with gay. But as of yet, no Ivy alum has physically harmed members of the military. Until now.
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Attention Elis: You may have already won the Swine Flu Clearinghouse! According to the 
In an 
Do you ever feel like the admissions committee just got it wrong? That you really are more of a 
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.
There are many reasons to avoid Penn: rapists, child pornographers, murdering professors, greedy Wharton students, etc. Now, to the indubitable chagrin of Penn's administrators and 
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