This might be nothing (let us know!) but it is interesting:

For the past ten months, Richard Levin—the President of Yale—has been locked in a mysterious court battle with a resident of North Haven, Connecticut, over what appears to be a vehicular tort (according to the case detail’s code) filed against Levin, and for some reason Yale University as well.

The case file indicates that on June 28, 2011, an individual who appears to be a student at Gateway Community College, in New Haven, filed a complaint against Levin at the New Haven branch of Connecticut’s Superior Court. Over the next seven months, according to the case file’s history, representatives of Levin’s law firm requested seven individual time extensions. Then, in January 2012, the firm filed a motion for dismissal, which Judge Robin Lynn Wilson subsequently denied. Three weeks ago, on March 30, the firm filed another motion for dismissal, but that has yet to be judged.

This morning, a court reporter at the Superior Court told IvyGate that, because nothing in the case had been argued before a judge (as opposed to a clerk), there are no transcripts of the case on file. (Bummer, we know.) We were unable to obtain a phone number or email address of the resident who filed against Levin.

What does any of this mean? Did Levin crash into someone’s car (hopefully unlike Anthony Marx)? Why has this been dragging on for nearly a year? Why was the motion for dismissal denied? Aliens? Freemasons? Sea-monsters?

Anyway! We are not, despite appearances to the contrary, legal experts, so if you have any idea what’s going on, do get in touch.

(Updated with Wolf’s Head)

Just like yesterday’s big reveal of the newest members of Yale’s ultra-secret Skull and Bones society, we really and truly can not verify this list these lists (the pains and hardships of anonymous emails).

But you can! Let us know if we fucked up. We’ll forever be grateful. Well, not really, but we know how much you guys like calling us out.

We’re not going to lie: this list is based off of a completely anonymous email we received an hour ago. Grain of salt and all that. The only other evidence we have is that one of the members listed below recently friended around half of the other members on Facebook. DEER ISLAND HERE WE COME.

Commenters, you can set us straight. Love, IvyGate

To: tips@ivygateblog.com
Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 12:54:39 PM
Subject: Skull and Bones Class of 2013

Amalia Skilton
Bay Gross
Dakota McCoy
Elizabeth Asai
Fatymatou Dia
Ilana Harris-Babou
Jacob Paul
Julian Reid
Lawrence Lim
Maddy Sharp
Max de la Bruyere
Meredith Potter
Samer Sabri
Teddy Collins
Yishai Schwartz

In January, a Yale graduate student named Margherita Viggiano published the absolutely insane correspondence between her and Edward Barnaby, the Yale dean who had removed her from Alexander Nemerov’s famous art history course after she complained about a fellow grad student’s gay boyfriend, threw several tantrums about being Catholic, and distributed an elaborate conspiracy theory linking Yale University to “Satanic Freemasonry,” a “pact with the devil,” and a “New England sea-monster.”

“Viggiano may now go down in Yale history,” the Yale Daily News wrote thereafter, “as the grad student who objected to discussion about the Virgin Mary’s ‘boobs’ and told a dean that he should ‘see how [God] reacts’ to him, curtly wishing him good luck directly afterwards.”

And now this: Over the past few days, Viggiano has published several rambling, strangely-formatted blog posts in which she calls Yale professor and famous literary critic Harold Bloom a “super-sized moron,” a “super-sized fraud,”  a “madman,” an “idiot,” and a “donkey.”

Viggiano’s reaction stems from Bloom’s The Book of J, a combination of Biblical criticism and translation published in 2004. In it Bloom theorizes (in Viggiano’s words) that “an adulterous and divorced Hittite woman” authored the first five books of the Bible. “How,” Viggiano wonders, “did this garbage survive peer-review, exactly?”

Yes! She’s BACK! In the same posts, Viggiano mentions “correcting students’ papers,” and she remains listed in Yale’s directory, so we think she’s still employed—but if you know anything else, drop us a line.

There’s so much more, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The numbers that are the dick-measuring contest known as Ivy League admissions are finally in, and IvyGate could think of no better way (we didn’t try that hard) to gauge the different school’s reactions by taking to the streets to interview students and determine their (hilarious) reactions to the statistics.

Brown University rolls in (alternatively, “wraps up”) with an admission percentage of 9.6%, a .6% increase from last year! When asked about this rise, I was met with stony eyes and this response: “Brown recently discovered that admitting more students meant more money from tuition. The following year admissions rose higher than for any other Ivy League institution. Where do you think we got the money for our new pool?”

Columbia coasted into a .5% increase from 6.9% last year, on which a student commented,

I’ve never looked at Columbia’s admissions the way others look at it. Others look to decrease the number to appear better. Columbia has always let in more than they can, because we’re not looking to falsify our admissions statistics, though they will automatically be low, as it is an Ivy League school.

Yeah…you can only expect so much from a school in baby blue.  Read the rest of this entry »

Scandal! Some Yale students—“very bright kids, very much tuned into journalism, the managing editor types from the Yale Daily News and Yale Herald,” which describes almost everyone at Yale—have admitted to veteran journalist Bob Woodward that they would have totally reported the Watergate scandal for which Woodward if famous by—wait, no! please!—using Google:

“I have attempted to apply some corrective information to them,” Woodward continued, “but the basic point is: The truth of what goes on is not on the Internet. [The Internet] can supplement. It can help advance. But the truth resides with people. Human sources.”

Let the Yale hate begin!

Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2012 election nears, politicians across the board has been offering their esteemed opinions. But there has been one voice notably missing: former New York State gubernatorial candidate, and current presidential candidate, Jimmy “The Rent is Too Damn High” McMillan.

That changes tonight, when McMillan teams up with Yale senior Michael Knowles to premiere their new online political talk show “Too Damn Live.” In an interview with IvyGate, Knowles called the live show “a mixture between Firing Line and Ringling Bros circus” and said it would host a featured guest every week.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it doesn’t get much worse than this. MIT researcher Yaron Segal, who received his Ph.D. at Yale last year, was arrested last Wednesday in Colorado after flying there to have sex with a mother and her two daughters, aged 12 and 16. Yes, that’s right, 12 and 16. The good news is the whole thing was a set-up by the Department of Homeland Security, who had been tracking Segal for months. The bad news is … well, he was trying to have sex with a 12 year old. That’s just awful.

Segal, currently a post-doc in MIT’s mechanical engineering department, had been in contact with what he must thought was a lovely mother and her lovely illegal daughters since early February. He first got in touch with undercover Homeland Security agent Vanessa Hipps through online chatrooms such as “childslavesex” and “ChildRapeTortureBrutality.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Journalist Barbara Walters was announced today as Yale’s 2012 Class Day Speaker, and students could not be unhappier. Walters is an Emmy-winning television journalist who in her 40 years of professional experience has interviewed more world leaders than we can name, including every U.S. President from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. But that’s just not good enough for Yale.

Based on the comments of Yale’s Cross Campus blog, Yalies are all up in a tizzy over Walters. At least two commenters express hope that this is an April Fool’s Day prank, and there is a small movement to bitch so much that she just doesn’t show.

Here’s the epitome of the backlash, from commentator Branfoil: “I’m actually patiently waiting for an email revealing this is an april fool’s joke. I can’t believe the SCC dropped the ball so badly on this one. At least I’ll have videos of Tom Hanks and bill Clinton giving class day speeches. I’ll just pretend I graduated those years instead. Maybe we can convince Barbara Walters that we don’t want her to speak and then she’ll decline.”

Classy.  Read the rest of this entry »

A former child pageant contestant (a successful one, it seems) claiming to be a Yale prefrosh—or maybe it’s the other way around—has posted an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit.

Says this prefrosh: “I know this combination seems impossible but it’s not.”

Seriously? Impossible is nothing.