Playboy Magazine, the foremost authority on sex, has named Yale University as one of the colleges with the “Best Sex Life”. We assume they’re referring to your regular ol’ mom-and-pop sex; no word yet on what the gays are up to (yet!). But if we’re to believe the old “1 in 4″ adage, they’re doing pretty well for themselves. [Ed: It was 1 in 3 the last time we checked heard.]

But what does this mean? Playboy doesn’t really explain the methodology behind their “Best Sex Life” rankings, so we can only guess at how they arrived at such groundbreaking analysis. Are they referring to frequency of sexual encounters? Quality of coitus? Riveting and engaging pillow-talk? Have Yale students finally learned their lesson from Maria Yagoda?

That noise you hear is the collective wail of virgins crying in the library.

A high school friend of Eric Yee ’12, the Yalie who was arrested in Los Angeles after writing threatening comments on ESPN.com, recently delivered the email below. Claiming Yee is no Seung-Hui Cho or James Holmes, Yee’s friend reveals that Yee took an internship at JP Morgan and was planning “to start an independent hedge fund in Manhattan on his own.”

“I did not contact you only to state my dissatisfaction with how this entire ordeal has been covered,” he writes. “I also wanted to prevent any further misrepresentation of my colleague.”

To the writers, reporters, and others involved in the coverage of Eric Yee’s Arrest:

The presumption of innocence is a staple amongst an individual’s legal right, yet the events following Eric Yee’s arrest, specifically the media coverage, has already caused irreparable damage to the reputation of a man who has yet to receive his verdict. I understand that the phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’ concerns one’s legal rights but is not its sheer existence a result of our great nation’s emphasis on the importance of equal trial and fair judgment by all? Should not an entity that was created to provide accurate information to the people, to present the facts in a manner that does not hide nor have any ulterior agenda, be less involved in the affairs of the subjective, to be less involved in distorting the factual in hopes of sensationalism? If you were planning to portray Eric Yee as a psychopath by continuously reminding the public that the house he has been living in since infancy happens to be situated next to two elementary schools, by removing crucial details concerning the fact that the firearms had been his father’s and not Eric’s, and by blatantly lying to the public by stating that his comment “…I wouldn’t mind killing [children]” was equivalent to him stating a detailed plan of terrorizing local schools, you may as well have stated you thought he was guilty and that everyone else should believe so. You are not writing celebrity gossip, you are writing about a man accused of terrorism and mass murder. By demonizing a man who has yet to be found guilty of any intent, you are overtly accusing him of a crime that I and everyone else feel very seriously about and by doing so, potentially ruining a man’s bright future without knowing the result of his conviction.

Of course, I did not contact you only to state my dissatisfaction with how this entire ordeal has been covered. I also wanted to prevent any further misrepresentation of my colleague. I do understand that what Eric posted on ESPN was wrong, and certainly worrisome outside of context. As every other human being in existence, he has said and done things that can be labeled as completely stupid. But to suggest that the statement he made can be extrapolated to be surefire intent of mass murder is nothing short of nonsense, and an entirely poor judgment of his character.

Eric Yee is the farthest thing from a Seung-Hui Cho, a James Holmes and he is not the mentally disturbed psychopath that many news sources have portrayed him to be. Compared to the various interviewees composed of frightened mothers, strangers, and essentially only those who know little to nothing about who Eric is, I am writing about a close friend who I have known for the past eight years. I met Eric Yee during my freshman year at Valencia High School. We both took AP Biology together and we would compete for the top class score on every exam. As seemingly silly as our academic competition was, it drew us close together. We both maintained lofty aspirations of one day attending an Ivy League university and fulfilling our own personal ambitions. We became fast friends and were both very close with a variety of other wonderful individuals who are also currently writing to you in his defense. I remember when he was admitted to Yale, and I to UPenn, how excited we were to have our dreams realized and we spoke extensively of our bright futures. When he told me he had gotten an internship at JP Morgan, a top investment banking firm on Wall Street, I was not surprised. When he told me he wanted to start an independent hedge fund in Manhattan on his own, I never doubted that he would achieve success. Even now, after having recently graduated from UPenn and being apart for four years, I still keep in close contact with Eric and I always knew he was on track to leading a successful, productive life.  Read the rest of this entry »

Allegedly upset over the high prices of Nike’s new LeBron X sneakers, Yale dropout Eric Yee ’12 was arrested Monday after posting comments to ESPN.com threatening to kill the kids he was babysitting. According to The Los Angeles Times, Yee said he would mimic the shooting earlier this summer in Aurora, Colorado. Much to the surprise of everyone no one, ESPN promptly alerted the local authorities, who discovered Yee living at his parents’ house in Los Angeles.

The house just so happened to be across the street from an elementary school and a middle school, and Yee just so happened to have several guns at the house, so the LA sheriff’s department decided to lock him up with a $1 million bail. According to The Washington Post:

“Yee was arrested for investigation of making terrorist threats. Bail was set at $1 million because the threat involved children, his home’s proximity to two schools and several unregistered weapons that have been recovered.”

The Post reported that a bail this high is “normally reserved for murder or other crimes that could result in life sentences.”

At Yale, Yee was an economic major, but withdrew in May for “undisclosed reasons,” university officials told The Post. Yee was also a member of The Leadership Institute, which according to their website, “works to provide comprehensive leadership training for all Yale students in order to produce moral, courageous, and visionary leaders who will serve as catalysts for positive change.” Looks like it didn’t take.

On Sunday morning, the Yale Daily News published an involved fact-check of former reporter (and fired WSJ intern) Liane Membis ’12, raising many new questions about the veracity of Membis’s reporting, the paper’s ethical standards, and the leadership of embattled editor-in-chief Max de la Bruyère.

Focusing on Membis’s “reported pieces,” de la Bruyère mostly describes errors like quote-changing and creative paraphrasing. In the last two paragraphs, however, he discusses a 2009 article in which Membis brags about the “expensive meals,” “liquor,” and “hotel accommodations” she accepted from her “sugar daddy”: an older, married manager at an unpaid summer internship.

He reports that Membis “offered the News different stories about the story’s authenticity”:

In an Aug. 31, 2009 email, she said, “My story is not exaggerated, so no correction is needed.” But in a March 2, 2011 email, she wrote, “The piece … was originally written under the pretense of it being a fictional piece by the Scene staff; it was edited without my presence and published in the fall of 2009, with exaggerations which were not true.”

de la Bruyère leaves a laundry list of questions unanswered. Among them: why are her statements in 2009 and 2011 so contradictory, and what occasioned them in the first place? Which “exaggerations” is she referring to? If the article is exaggerated, why was it corrected only a few days ago? Under which context did Membis actually write this article? And most importantly: is what she wrote true?

Membis asserts that, in a bid to shock readers with suggestions of a married man’s infidelity, News staffers rewrote her article without her knowledge. So, is that true? May News staffers alter a writer’s work in that way? de la Bruyère simply doesn’t answer any of these obvious questions.

This is irresponsible: these questions are checkable, and—given Membis’s lack of cooperation—checkable only by the Yale Daily News, and perhaps only by de la Bruyère himself. And yet, apparently, they have not been checked. In an article otherwise characterized by tedious detail, de la Bruyère obscures crucial information about Membis’s most controversial work.

Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to the final list (published at the end of this post) of faculty, administrators and CEOs, the Yale Corporation has assigned four Counselors (student, faculty, staff, and alumni) to, well, counsel, the Committee in its search for the next Yale University overlord supreme leader tzar president. Of particular interest is the decision to, for the first time ever, officially include a student in the decision-making process.

They clearly went for looks instead of brains (jokes! JOKES) in choosing Student Counselor Brandon Levin ’13.

Former Yale College Council President, current Whiffenpoof, and one of Yale’s “50 Most Beautiful People”, Levin is a good representative of your typical Yale student: too overachieving for his own good.

In an email interview, Levin expressed his views on his new role as Student Counselor.

My role is, first and foremost, to act as a conduit for the views of students in providing counsel to the Yale Corporation. So, I don’t see myself as conveying my own views to the Corporation; rather, it’s far more important that I solicit the views of students about the direction the University should pursue in the coming years, the attributes ideally found in a new president, and any recommendations they may have for particular candidates. In this sense, I aim to be a facilitator and ‘funnel,’ liaising between all Yale students — undergrads, grad students, and professional school students alike — and the Search Committee and Yale Corporation.

The Corporation has, of course, already faced criticism for its choices to the Search Committee and that criticism has faced criticism too. And while this initial grumbling is to be expected, we wonder whether students will maintain an interest in choosing Yale’s most powerful figure. Does your typical Yalie really consider the influence of the President on a daily basis? Levin the Younger is keepin’ that dream alive: Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Jade Bonacolta has been fired from The Spectator for plagiarism.

Earlier today, we reported on a Columbia Spectator article that had a suspiciously similar lede to a certain other paper’s coverage of the same topic: the university’s acquisition of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s archives. Since then, The Spectator has removed the article in question and replaced it with an Editor’s note confirming that at least three paragraphs in the story “were largely identical” to ones in The New York Times aka the Grey Lady aka the national newspaper of record. (The full text of the now removed Spectator article can be found at the end of this post.)

To make matters worse, the Columbia student — Jade Bonacolta, a Spectator associate arts and entertainment editor — stole the material from New York Times writer Robin Pogrebin: a Yalie. This is just like Jonah Lehrer ripping off Fareed Zakaria, amiright?

Presented below are the three plagiarized Spectator paragraphs alongside their original New York Times source material:

Spectator:

“Frank Lloyd Wright was notorious for saving everything, from his personal correspondence to scribbles on Plaza Hotel napkins. Since Wright’s death in 1959, these relics have been locked in storage.”

New York Times:

“The Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t a hoarder. But he did save just about everything — whether a doodle on a Plaza Hotel cocktail napkin of an imagined city on Ellis Island, his earliest pencil sketch of the spiraling Guggenheim Museum or a model of Broadacre City, his utopian metropolis. Since Wright’s death in 1959 those relics have been locked in storage at his former headquarters —Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wis., and Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Ariz.”

Spectator:

“Among the University’s future collection are the famous original drawings for Wright’s Fallingwater, a home designed amid a rushing stream in Pennsylvania, and the Robie House, a Prairie-style building on the campus of the University of Chicago.”

New York Times:

“Among the gems in that material are drawings for Wright’s Fallingwater, a home cantilevered over a stream in Mill Run, Pa.; the Robie House, a Prairie-style building on the University of Chicago campus; Unity Temple, a Unitarian Universalist church in Oak Park, Ill.; and Taliesin West.”

Spectator:

“‘While Wright is typically thought of as a lonely genius, you move him into the Museum of Modern Art, and he’s dialoguing with Le Corbusier in the company of Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn,’ said Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the MoMA.”

New York Times:

“While Wright is typically thought of as ‘a lonely genius,’ Mr. Bergdoll said, ‘you move him into the Museum of Modern Art, and he’s dialoguing with Le Corbusier in the company of Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn.’”

There you have it. And not only did Bonacolta lift basically full sentences from The New York Times, she went a step further and took a full direct quote from someone she most likely never even spoke to and changed it. Fact: if it’s not in quotation marks, they probably didn’t say those words.

Click through for the full text of the original Spectator story. Read the rest of this entry »

In a very, very early (9 AM) email sent out to students yesterday morning, President Richard C. Levin announced his resignation as President of the University, effective at the end of the current academic year.

“It is a source of great satisfaction to leave Yale in much stronger condition – academically, physically, and financially – than it was when I began in 1993. Our faculty is stronger than ever, and our deans and directors all have clear and ambitious agendas that will keep the University moving forward.”

This year will mark Levin’s 20^th as head of the university and the end of a tenure characterized by many changes within the university. Amongst other achievements, Levin oversaw the renovation of the twelve residential colleges, growth of Yale’s endowment despite financial crisis, and the creation of Yale-NUS College (controversial, but we’ll get to that later.)

But lest we get too complimentary here at IvyGate, we probably should not forget the less exemplary aspects of Levin’s presidency.

Levin’s response to the Title XI complaint filed in 2011 (and the ensuing and ongoing debacle) has been heavily criticized. Though the problems with Yale’s sexual culture can’t be fixed by policy changes alone, some students feel that the changes instituted by Levin were really geared more to improving Yale’s image rather than addressing the concerns of students. Read the rest of this entry »

We wrote last week that Sex and God at Yale is based on author Nathan Harden’s disgust for sex, or at least the public discussion of it. Yesterday, Harden addressed our take  on Twitter:

@ivygate What confused me was this review. Why do critics have to pretend I’m campaigning against sex? Straw men fall easily, don’t they?

— Nathan Harden (@NathanHarden) August 27, 2012

So here’s the problem: Harden’s argument for Yale’s decline rests heavily on the menace of the “for-profit sex industry,” which refers to, among other things, manufacturers of condoms, sex toys, and pornography. Here is an instructive passage from chapter 3 (“The Business of Sex Ed”):

To this day, men around the world are debauching themselves over a scene in which [a porn actress] likely contracted the virus that will one day kill her. As for her and the others who contracted the virus during the [2004 HIV outbreak in the porn industry], porn producers are profiting from their damaged lives and, in all likelihood, early deaths.

Now, it’s obvious that Harden thinks this is an indictment of the “for-profit sex industry,” in that it increases and tolerates the risk of sexually-transmitted diseases. (And, clearly, he’s counting on the reader to retch at the fact that people use porn to masturbate.) But Harden is making a far more powerful indictment against capitalism. He has simply discovered that the porn industry throws the worst flaws of capitalism—in particular, the way it rewards exploitation—into a particularly high relief. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Harden, Yale ’09, just released his first book, Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad. The book has some street cred, as Harden is a Yale man himself, and the foreword comes from no other than fellow Bulldog Christopher Buckley, Class of 1975.

However, all of Harden’s arguments are based on the basic principle of “eww, sex.” And if you don’t hold his views, Sex and God at Yale gets real confusing, real quick.

In the introduction, which is puzzling for a whole host of reasons, Harden attempts to identify with an imagined freshman girl at Yale, exploring the weird, wild world of the university. Harden-as-freshman-girl discovers Olympic gold medalists and African orphanage builders scattered around her dorm, so how should she, just a simple small town girl, separate from the pack?

“Let me give you a clue,” Harden says. “You had better throw any ideas you have about self-respect and women’s equality out of the window.” Because, lest you forget, this is Yale, where people play by their own rules. And those Yale boys want one thing: sex.

“Time to get with the program, sister.” Read the rest of this entry »

Following accusations of plagiarism earlier this month, Fareed Zakaria (Yale ’86), the prominent journalist and media personality, has resigned from the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing board. According to The New Haven Register, Zakaria sent a letter to Yale President Richard Levin, in which he said:

“I have decided that I will not be able to serve a second term as a Successor Fellow of the Yale Corporation. I am reexamining my professional life and I have recognized that, in order to focus on the core of my work, I will have to shed some of my other responsibilities.”

Zakaria went on to call his position on the Yale Corporation, “the single largest commitment of time, energy, and attention outside of my writing and television work.”

Among Zakaria’s media responsibilities are a column in Time magazine and a weekly show on CNN. After using several paragraphs from a New Yorker essay without attribution in his Time column, Zakaria was suspended earlier this month by both Time and CNN, but has since been reinstated. Following investigations into Zakaria’s work, both companies have determined that this was an isolated incident. Read the rest of this entry »