Remember that Yale freshman (and soon-to-be Harvard transfer) who filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton because he believed that Old Nassau had rejected him for being Asian? After which The Daily Princetonian mocked the complainant by, um, making fun of him for being Asian? 2006: stellar year for race relations in the Ivy League!

Minus the race-baiting Prince column, it’s happening all over again, this time with an unnamed Asian-American of Indian descent, who has filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights against Harvard and Princeton for discriminating against Asian applicants. The complaints have stirred sundry responses of equally mild outrage. Even the more right-wingy op-eds read as though their authors are posed in perpetual shrugs.

There may be a decent explanation for the befuddling lack of concern, as Daniel de Vise of the Washington Post argues. The entire basis for the 2006 complaint, and the current complaints against Princeton and Harvard, is that Asian applicants whom either school admits almost always possess the highest SAT scores of their class. However, as de Vise points out:

[R]emember that Asian-Americans outscore all other racial and ethnic groups on the SAT. A college where Asian students have lower SAT math scores than whites would be a statistical oddity.

Which means the whole problem is more likely found in that sinister totem of elite colleges: holistic admissions. As both a phrase and an idea, “holistic admissions” is sort of misleading: it describes the method whereby colleges admit a carefully calibrated freshman class, not individual applicants. Such a process contradicts the bizarre caricature that statistical studies paint of college admissions. To draw a meaningful conclusion from, say, this Princeton study, you’re required to imagine that admissions committees serially pit the applications of two students against each other, much like an episode of Celebrity Deathmatch. (Which would be really exciting to watch, no?)

Probably the biggest concern is that if Harvard and Princeton can be found to discriminate against Asians based on statistics alone, then pretty much every elite college (with the exception of Berkeley, and apparently CalTech) can be found to discriminate against Asians. If that’s true, it would be an enormous (and very newsworthy) conspiracy. And if it is a conspiracy, then Harvard and Princeton appear to be exceptionally incompetent conspirators: though Asians account for some 5% of the U.S. population, they make up, respectively, 17% and 19% of Harvard’s and Princeton’s undergraduate bodies.

So, Mitt Romney, huh? While Mittens continues to alienate pretty much everyone with his proletarian LARPing and overall blasé demeanor, elements of the GOP are still holding out hope that there could be a late-entry candidate to replace him. (We’re going to assume that Newt bursts like an overripe pumpkin before the Florida vote.)  Who, though? Right now—indeed, at this very moment—those mysterious Establishment Republicans are probably wheedling Princeton alumnus, Governor of Indiana, and total stoner Mitch Daniels ’71.

Tonight, Daniels will deliver the GOP response to Obama’s State of the Union address. The occasion raises vital questions. Like: who is Mitch Daniels? What eating club did he eat at? Which and how many drugs was he on? Here’s your IvyGate Cheat Sheet Thing©, The Mitch Daniels Edition:

Princeton

• Woodrow Wilson ‘71, then Georgetown Law ’79 (campaign website)
• Member of Charter Club, which uses sign-in (Daily Prince)
• “Active in the campus antiwar movement” (Ibid.)
• Member of Princeton’s College Republicans (Ibid.)
• Vietnam: Daniels “legally deferred his eligibility while in college and after graduation his draft number, 147, was high enough that he was not called.” (Republic Candidates)

Drugs

• “Daniels was arrested, indicted and convicted on charges of drug use as an undergraduate in May 1970”. (Daily Prince)
• Which drugs? Weed, LSD, and unidentified pharmaceuticals. (Ibid.)
• How much weed? Two shoeboxes full of weed. (Ibid.)
• Drugs were an “unfortunate confluence of my wild oats period and America’s libertine apogee.” (Ibid, Washington Post)
• What did Daniels get? A night in jail and a $350 fine. (Ibid.)
• Was that normal? Ha, no.“Six months after [Daniels’s] arrest, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided a case involving an 18-year-old who was caught with a tiny amount of pot (clearly just for personal use) and got a sentence of two to three years in prison. (Reason.com.)

Miscellaneous

• Favorite color: blue (VoteSmart profile)
• Governor of Indiana since 2004
• Senior advisor to Ronald Reagan
• Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush
• His marriage is a Jonathan Franzen novel (Republican Candidates)
• Has a personal cheerleading section led by William Kristol, Harvardian and Weekly Standard editor/founder (The Weekly Standard)
• Slight resemblance to William F. Buckley, Jr., he of God and Man at Yale fame, maybe? Yes? No? Come on, it’s obvious.

But will he run for President?

• “For a Republican hero to ride in on a white horse, it would take a scenario that verges on political science fiction.” (TPM)

No matter how many famous novelists in its employ, Princeton University is firstly a grooming school for bankers. With that in mind, the student-led Occupy Princeton has, for about a month now, protested (i.e., TERRORIZED) several recruitment events hosted by human rights organizations such as J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Which has struck many of the group’s betters as kind of . . . bizarre, yeah? Don’t these people want . . . money? And a summer property in an equatorial country? What else are we here for??

Fortunately, chipper Prince contributor Elise Backman ’15 and Prince columnist Aaron Applbaum ’14 have offered a time-tested solution to appeasing Occupy Princeton: Just work for Wall Street! Easy! You’ll fit right in!

Applbaum, from January 9:

It is true that the Princeton students of today traditionally become the Goldman partners of tomorrow, but chanting at them repetitively only serves to alienate them, not to change their minds.

Traditionally? Unless that awful Henry Moore sculpture is in fact a secret wormhole to Lower Manhattan, working for Goldman Sachs is about money, not one’s ride on the Long Orange Line.

Becoming more politically engaged and discussing fiscal policy, I believe, is the way to shift the dialogue and create the change sought after by the Occupy contingency. I see this as a way to alter, and break through our [in]famous complacency. This is not to say that Washington is exclusively at fault for New York’s behavior — both financiers and policy makers are to blame for their actions — but the two are inextricably tied and an opening for change right now lies in the political arena.

This is the counter-argument to the Occupy movement’s rather explicit charge that money has corrupted American politics? Unless Alan Greenspan recently rewrote several founding documents, no, “financiers” and politicians are not “inextricably tied.” Well, they are, of course. But that’s the problem, not an a priori truth.

And here’s Prince contributor Elise Backman, from January 11:

When I have tried to discuss Occupy Princeton with my friends affiliated and unaffiliated with the movement, at the first sign of a critique I am met more often than not with, “Oh, of course, you just want to go make money on Wall Street,” “Don’t you care about the economy at all?” or my favorite: “You’re so politically apathetic — how Princeton of you.” Are we all suddenly politically apathetic if we don’t support Occupy Princeton?

Oh yes, the very reasonable “friends” argument: my friends said something, so everyone thinks it. QED! But wait: Read the rest of this entry »

Harvard and Princeton reinstated their early admission programs for this year’s admissions cycle. According to this nifty chart put together by Jeremy Bleeke of the Columbia Spectator, ED/EA applications remained constant or increased slightly at Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth, while dipping slightly at Penn, decreasing more at Columbia, and dropping significantly for Yale. It is unclear just how much of this has been because of Harvard and Princeton’s programs, but we’re willing to wager that it’s more than a little.

The New York Times has a more detailed discussion here, complete with stats.

Earlier this month, Trojan released its 2011 Sexual Health Report Card, which ranks colleges based on factors like how many free condoms you can pilfer from campus health services without getting noticed. While some Ivy Leaguers are not known for, let’s say, getting laid, our schools have made sure that we will be very safe in the circumstance that sex does happen to us.

Let’s take a look at the results:

• According to Trojan, Columbia, where students can Ask Alice how to get rid of hickeys and where to pump breast milk on campus, is the #1 most sexually healthy campus in the nation for the second year running.
• Brown, the birthplace of naked parties, comes in 4th, up one from 5th last year.
• Princeton, eager to get behind last year’s “gentlemen’s sex competition“, has improved its ranking from 8th to 3rd, sending a signal to students that any subsequent stately sexcapades shall be seriously safe.
• Harvard fell from 16th to 30th.
• Yale and Cornell held pretty steady, at 14th and 17th respectively.
• Penn fell, from 38th to 42nd.
• After falling sixty-one spots in 2010, from 19th to 80th, Dartmouth is up slightly to a pretty unimpressive 67th.

View the official press release with the complete rankings here.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this post incorrectly published rankings from 2010. Our bad.

So this happened:

*There’s a less lazy way of delivering this joke, and we absolutely would have explored the potential therein, but for the hiccups and the headache and, seriously, fuck tequila.

One was the main character on a show we used to watch before Jim and Pam hooked up; the other the host of a Sunday morning news program we’re pretty sure would be more interesting if not for the painful throbbing in our heads and the indomitable nausea in our stomachs (and fuck tequila). These two don’t have a whole lot in common, but come this spring, they’ll both be giving commencement addresses.

Yes, it’s true. Harvard has selected consistently reasonable, yet totally irrelevant, political pundit Fareed Zakaria as their 2012 Class Day Commencement speaker. Gnome-shaped lovable loser Steve Carell will assume similar duties at Princeton.

We spent the morning pondering which notables the other six Ivies should pick to address their graduating classes come May/June. Check out what we came up with, after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a rundown of the Occupy Wall Street movement around the Ivy League campuses, ranked in order of excitement:

Columbia – Hundreds (thousands?) of Columbia students have been to the protest at some point over the last few weeks; the catchphrase around campus is “have you gone yet?” A large walkout took place last Wednesday. Some students arrested earlier. University President and over 300 professors declare support for Occupy Wall Street; Jeffrey Sachs leads a pack of  students downtown to join protests and avoid watching the football team get ransacked by Penn at Homecoming.

Harvard - Scores of Harvard students join Occupy Boston, five arrested. Harvard doesn’t get much appreciation, though: a Boston Herald op-ed slams student protestors for their $50,000 tuitions and lovely, neo-Georgean dorms with – gasp – private bathrooms! Also, labor unions protest Harvard as a ‘tool of corporations’.

Brown - Econ, history, poli sci, and sociology professors hold an Occupy Providence Teach-In inside a lecture hall packed with “several hundred people.” Meanwhile, Occupy College Hill begins meeting 3x a week on Brown’s Main Green, and even has their own wiki page. Not so disorganized, after all!

Yale – Students will Occupy New Haven this weekend; counter-protest group led by the Yale College Republicans announces it will “Occupy Occupy New Haven“.  Awww snap!

Cornell - Some Cornellians trek to New York City and join protests, others Occupy Cornell on Friday (minutes from the protest here). One op-ed’er tells protesters to “stop protesting and study for LSATs.” Not sure how that one’s gonna work out.

Penn – Occupy Philly receives statement of support from 87 faculty. Penn students travel to protests in Philidelphia (includes a glorious quote by a Wharton sophomore who supports the movement anonymously, saying his sentiments are “not consistent with the general sentiments of Wharton”).”Occupy Wharton” Facebook group is a dud.

Dartmouth – Protesters standing around on a patch of grass apparently want to cure AIDS, stop climate change, and elect Ron Paul.

Princeton – Little online evidence that anybody at Princeton gives a damn, other than one student op-ed calling protesters throwing his support behind the movement after being pleasantly impressed by the  ”jobless potheads” and “banjo-strumming hippies”.

If you have any tips or links we should know about, please email us at tips@ivygateblog.com!

Would you rather: Join the Penn Quidditch team? Sit through a Billy Joel concert? Or join Cannon Club for the low, low price of $850? Don’t worry, “none of the above” is a viable option. Here are your Tuesday headlines:

• Brown: Columnist urges us to embrace the present, by arguing that “there are few Jewish men who know how to truly satisfy, or at least that is what my friends say.” Wait … what? [Daily Herald]
• Columbia: GS student, an openly gay Air Force vet, reflects on the end of DADT. [Spec]
• Cornell: Gaudy bear statues? Bad. [Daily Sun]
• Cornell: Jaywalking crackdown? Worse. [Daily Sun]
• Cornell: Billy Joel concert? Absolutely the WORST. [Daily Sun]
• Dartmouth: Seniors drop resumes, while Andrew Lohse sits in a dark corner somewhere, feverishly typing an op-ed. [The Dartmouth]
• Penn: Quidditch jokes write themselves. Why even bother? [The DP]
• Princeton: Eating club begs for new members. [The Prince]

Rejoice! Orientation is under way, or fast approaching, at our schools. As hordes of nervous and awkward first-years stream through the ivy gates, us upperclassmen happily anticipate the chance to impart some of our time-tested wisdom upon our eager new friends, with minds so pure — and yet-corruptible.

In particular, student publications at  Columbia, Cornell, Penn, and Princeton have taken the lead in creating orientation guides for their freshmen, chock-full of charts, stories, advice, and photos. After the jump are some of the best bits we found. (Look for upcoming coverage on the rest of the Ivies.)  Read the rest of this entry »