Mitt Romney, sentient Republican stereotype, has spent his life trying to appeal to voters—an effort which has turned into a cycle of Mittens saying something villainous or condescending; liberals being outraged and amused at the same time; and then Mittens mumbling that he’s successful, and he doesn’t know why all of you are picking on him. Not coincidentally, he spent a few years at Harvard Business School—the designated laboratory of world destroyers—where he refined his collegiate confidence into something resembling misanthropy.

Wonder how HBS feels about this? You may want to read between the lines of this Wall Street Journal interview with the school’s managing director of admissions, Dee Leopold (pictured):

WSJ: Do you ever question your admission decisions?

Ms. Leopold: Sure. This process isn’t perfect. We’re like very experienced country doctors who see a lot of patients.

We’re screening out undesirable qualities that would be toxic in our community. We like to think that our arrogance detectors are pretty good. We’re looking for confidence, with humility.

Would Mittens, picture of humility that he is, have survived Leopold’s “arrogance detector”? Would his hair? CURIOUSLY, Leopold follows this remark with an anecdote involving what could be Romney’s protégé:

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If we were all given a time machine and a fat envelope from Harvard College, chances are that many of us would take it. Because when it comes down to brand appeal, endowment size, and ability to inspire a tangled matrix of envy and admiration, Harvard is king. But since most of us will never know the Yard from the inside, we must content ourselves with denigrating it in public and obsessing over it in private, through books like Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton.

The memoir, which was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, traces the two years Broughton spent as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. What seems especially interesting about Broughton’s book is that he entered HBS not as a businessman but as a journalist; before entering the Class of 2006 he was Paris Bureau Chief for the London Daily Telegraph.

As the WSJ reviewer notes:

Some of what he found won’t be surprising, particularly the sense of entitlement for which its students and faculty are famous. The self-regard must get handed out with the matriculation packets. Most graduate business schools, you might have noticed, award MBAs. HBS, according to the dean, specializes in “transformational experiences.”

It’s fitting that “transformational experiences” sounds a lot like freshman convocation jargon since Broughton makes HBS sound a lot like college. The MBA’s “had two modes: deadly serious and frat boy, with little in between.” More titillating details after the jump.

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No, actually that headline is totally false. It belongs to the more interesting article the WSJ should have written. But in any case Collegiate does have the highest percentage of students who enroll in either “Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins” in case that motley group means anything to you.

In this article, which is clearly aimed at soliciting the self-satisfied clucks of its affluent readership, the WSJ employs what is possibly the most dubious methodology of all time in order to produce a fancy ranking of high-schools. See if this exercise makes any sense to you:

Weekend Journal looked at the freshman classes at eight top colleges — Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins — and compiled a list of the students’ high-school alma maters. The survey ranked the high schools based on the number of students sent to those eight colleges, divided by the high school’s number of graduates in 2007, limiting the scope to schools that had senior classes of at least 50. The “success rate” column represents the percentage of students in each high-school’s graduating class that attended one of our chosen colleges.

Pomona, seriously? In any case, all of the usual suspects put in an appearance, NYC private schools (Collegiate, Trinity, Chapin, Brearley), New England boarding schools (Andover, Exeter, Groton, Deerfield), the famous magnet schools (TJ, that school in Illinois that’s like TJ) , and the schools that make local sense (Princeton High School) But there are also some schools nobody saw coming, like Daewoo Foreign Language High School, located in Seoul.

After the jump — the chart of schools, with juicy glosses like, “The school, founded in 1635, sent 25 kids to Harvard–more than any other high school on our list,” and “Many students at the Jewish day school spend a year in Israel before college, which the school says may affect its numbers in our survey.”

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Despite the fact that we spend hours and hours obsessively scanning obscure publications like Inside Higher Education and painfully low-quality dailies like The Daily Princetonian for any mention of the Ivy League which could supply us with a post, no matter how tenuous or irrelevant (thanks, Chris and Nick — you guys are the best), somehow we missed this incredible article which ran in the WSJ about a month ago.

The WSJ dispatched their spirits critic (yes, the WSJ has a spirits critic) to write a column on drinks named after schools from the Ivy League. The result is a cool, complex mix of colorful reportage and incisive comment that goes down easy yet leaves one shaken. The author begins with a story surely familiar in one form or another to many denizens of the LES:

The bartender knew the times were changing when some Ivy League toffs wandered in: “You’ll think I’m kidding,” the saloon-keeper told Delaplane, “but I got an order couple nights for a Yale Cocktail!”

Yale wasn’t the only Ivy with a cocktail to its name. Depending on the Bartender’s Guide the saloon-keeper bought, he likely would also have found cocktail recipes immortalizing Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and Brown (Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania seem to have missed out when the collegiate cocktails were being named). Sadly, these drinks have been all but forgotten, and in the rare instance where one persists — the Yale — the cocktail has become a parody of its former self.”

Imagine that: Yale a parody of itself. The problem with the Yale Cocktail, opines the author in vaguely racist undertones, is that its once signature constituent, Crème Yvette, an exotic, expensive European liqueur “flavored with violet petals, vanilla, and spices,” has been replaced by blue curacao. The Yale Cocktail has lost its “subtle taste and elegant dignity (a status impossible for any drink that relies on blue curaçao).” Yeah, we know what you really mean.

The author writes of the Harvard Cocktail, “It is as delicious as it is aristocratic,” and he calls the Princeton Cocktail,”one of the most appalling concoctions ever devised.” Cornell gets mentioned a couple times in parentheses.

After the jump — the full article.

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