Freeze Magazine, a year-old online magazine for college girls, recently opened the polls for their second annual Mr. Harvard Freshman contest. The magazine describes itself as the source for students "too old for Seventeen, but not yet ready to move onto Marie Claire," and the contest stays true to that. Though the contest page lacks last year's inclusion of boys playing bad guitar, there's more ammo for ridicule than you'd believe.

Avid Freeze readers might know the magazine best for the How to be Anorexic features or Why Boys Hate You columns, but the Mr. Freshman issue is the tops—despite Freeze's obvious rip-off of The Crimson's 15 Hottest Freshman. The contest itself is pretty simple. Apparently, a bunch of wannabe YM editors and future cougars make a list of their young crushes and let the world vote on the cutest of them all. In their own words:

We began our search for Harvard's most witty, kind, charming and attractive freshman males with a pool of over 700 males. Through a grueling selection process in which we narrowed these 700 down to just over 80 and then again to a group of 30, the final cuts were made and this group of 13 freshman males was chosen. In addition to being recognized as a Freeze Freshman, the Freeze Freshmen are the only men on campus eligible to compete for the title of Mr. Harvard Freshman.

The finalists received not only a free photo shoot and Adobe Creative Suite touch-up session but also a 100-word interview to say things they'll soon regret. Check out the highlights of said interviews à la Clint Eastwood and some laughable photos after the jump.

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Last week, Harvard President Drew Faust sent out a university-wide email detailing to what extent the school of swank would be impacted by the global economic crisis. In short, Harvard "has weathered many storms" (read: "has lined their pockets well") but will suffer some set-backs in coming months. The fortune few will ride this one out with some paycuts and constraints. According to Dr. Faust:

Harvard is not invulnerable to the seismic financial shocks in the larger world. Our own economic landscape has been significantly altered. We will need to plan and act in ways that reflect that reality, to assure that we continue to advance our priorities for teaching, research, and service.

Thank God: Harvard is going to focus on teaching and research again. For a second, it looked like the nation's oldest institute of higher learning just enabled psychopaths and racial profilers. The announcement from President Faust, Larry Summer's replacement in Massachusetts Hall, sounds less like a policy shift than it does a PR stunt. Just 6 weeks ago, the Harvard Management Corporation (HMC), a bunch of suits who control the fate of the universe—err, the endowment—announced 8.6% growth on Harvard's already gargantuan $36.9 billion portfolio as Standard & Poor's lost 3.6%.  Break out the $100-bill-scented tissues.

While the next Dear "John Harvard" letter from the HMC isn't due until next summer, Harvard shows no signs of tightening the belt so far.  In her letter, President Faust emboldened the college's commitment to providing full rides to students whose families earn less than $60,000 per year. Meanwhile, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government just shelled out $10 million for a program to train emerging leaders from developing countries. [Insert: "Not so evil after all" comment here.]

Read Faust's letter in full along with some sob-stories about poor, jobless HBS grads after the break.

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American movies and TV shows are filled with fictional Ivy Leaguers. (To name a few, Bruce Wayne of "Batman" is a Princetonian, Peter Parker of "Spider Man" is a Columbian, and Elle Woods of "Legally Blonde" is a Harvard Law student.) But, as a seeming reflection of real life, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton get the most attention; the others - most notably Penn, Cornell, and Dartmouth - are, to the chagrin of many of their alums, given the shaft.

"The Office", however, runs against the media's obsession with the H-Y-P triumvirate and features a character that bleeds Big Red blood: Cornell alum and highly successful Dunder Mifflin lackey Andy Bernard (Ed Helms). Though the show's writers have made several rather deprecating jibes at Cornell in past seasons, they've ratcheted it up to new heights in the newest episode, which aired last Thursday.

On the day after Halloween, Dwight Schrute - the Assistant to the Regional Manager - struts into work sporting a Cornell sweater. This distresses Andy quite clearly; he laughs tensely at first, and then - once Dwight is at his desk - walks over and informs him that he shouldn't be wearing Cornell merchandise. The Cornell references escalate as the episode proceeds; near the end Andy conducts an alumni interview with Dwight, who has ostensibly applied to study at the Agriculture School.

After the jump: a few quotes and a YouTube video.

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Whartonites worried that the recent i-bank apocalypse will spoil their plans to bathe nightly in a sea of money, fear not! There's always the lottery, an institution weirdly remniscient of Ivy League admissions, anyway. (Fill out bubbles in #2 pencil, wait anxiously, be disappointed 99.9% of the time.) In an article titled "RICH GET RICHER IN LUCKY $CRATCH," the Post reports that the first-ever winner of the "$1 million a year for life" lotto is a dispassionate i-banking Whartonite:

Keenan Altunis, 33, a banker raised on Long Island and now living in London, accepted his prize with a smug shrug, noting he's already a multimillionaire.

"Is it going to materially change my life? No," he told The Post. "I have been a very blessed and fortunate person."

And if that isn't an argument for spreading the wealth around, how about this: Since he lives in Britain, Altunis, an executive at the European banking firm Unicredit, will have to pay New York but not federal taxes on his winnings, which means he'll net $931,500 a year for the rest of his life.

Irony Gods, are you serious?

"Don't get me wrong, no matter how rich anyone is, a million a year is a lot of money," he said. "But I don't expect this to change my life very much at all."

The family left New York yesterday for a vacation in the Caribbean - one that had already been planned and paid for prior to his winning ticket.

Apparently so.

There is a chance that every single news outlet misspelled Altunis' name (sweet justice?) because the only Keenan Altunis we can find in Penn's records is one Kenan Altunis (Wharton '97), whose sole claim to fame was being in a frat and being quoted in the DP once about beer. IronyGoddammit.

Radar magazine delivers a shocking blow to elite education by including an Ivy Leaguer in gonzo-journo story "Inside the World of High-Class Hipster Hookers." Seriously, $40K-per-year education and Sally Straight-A grows up to be a hipster?

Just kidding! The shock is that she became a whore:

After graduating from an Ivy League college in 2006, Kelly says she was thinking about going to grad school to become an English professor. She's decided to put that aspiration on hold, though, while she rakes in the equivalent of an investment banker's salary selling sex.

I'd make a joke, but I used them all up on a nearly identical story last March.

As it turns out, finance is something of a sister industry to the whore-o-sphere. The three main characters get into the business of vag-selling at the behest of some "sleazy banker types" they meet at a bar. Whore #1 gets sleazy banker's business card, and before you know it she's making $3000 a thrust! The ladies frequent "douchebag spots in the Meatpacking District" and turn themselves into an unstoppable trio of whoredom. Each girl has a special personality niche, just like in Charlie's Angels:

These days Heather tends to book with more bankers and Wall Street types, Olivia with a lot of retired hipsters and club owners, and Kelly with men from the art world. During a typical week they each entertain at least three different clients—and sometimes as many as nine. "I don't mind sleeping with two guys in a night," Kelly says. "Just as long as the second client isn't rough with me."

Ivy League Angel has all the time management skills.

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Have you ever wondered where all those self-styled intellectuals – pale faced, with their hair swept to the side – end up when they are cast out of their ivory towers? Some of them, undoubtedly the more masochistic ones, come crawling back as graduate students. And they are looked upon – often unfairly – by undergrads with a mix of fear and derision. The others, the meaner and richer ones, end up in New York, where they live off their trust funds and fancy themselves members of the literary aristocracy.

A few weeks ago the Daily Intelligencer picked up on a disenchanted blog post by Jessica Roy, an NYU student who had finally made her way into such circles one night only to find that it was populated by a cadre of pretentious and sycophantic Ivy Leaguers. The Daily Intel solicited a more thorough explanation from Roy:

A part of me longed to be absorbed into that elite circle of Ivy-educated literature nuts who have co-opted what it means to be a writer in New York. Because these days, if you’re not with them, you’re being mocked by them. I have thin skin, so I figured the former would be my best bet.

More unsettling dirt on your former classmates after the jump.
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That certainly seems to be the opinion of a few journalists recently. Wait,  seems to be? With a headline like "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," you just know the author is not too keen on the Crimson. The author is none other than our old friend Cockmaster D (William Deresiewicz for our forgetful readers). Goold ol' Cockmaster D recently discovered that he was too elitist to interact with a plumber, so obviously the rest of us are just as bad.

Because we're coddled with extensions on papers and rampant grade inflation, we grow up to be the worst people ever. Also, it's because we have gates:

The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect.    

He's right. Gates might be cool when every other college does it, but how dare we use them to keep people out!

He also points out that George Bush went to Yale, so take that, Ivy League! Yeah that's right one of the dozens of presidents who went to elite universities isn't so awesome! Clearly we have no defense to these accusations, but are we really that bad?

No, we're worse! After the jump, Harvard is destroying the world (and bruising the butts of old ladies).

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Sound the alarm! A break in the ranks! Princeton grad and Yale 1L Amelia Rawls defies the Ivy tribe this week in a column for the Washington Post, "Best and Brightest, but Not the Nicest," where she reveals the most closely guarded of our cabal's secrets: We are not bionic superheroes. We are not Mother Teresa. In fact, some of us aren't even nice.

I mean the kind of "nice" that involves showing compassion not merely because membership in community service groups demands it. The kind of "nice" that involves sharing notes with a student who is sick or lending a textbook to a friend who doesn't have one.

...these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right."

What kind of horrible people was Amelia friends with in college, that she thinks thwarting sick people and teasing the homeless is normal among her peers? As for taking out the trash -- well, seriously, do you know any 18-year-olds who do that voluntarily?

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Xiaochen Su (Yale '10), following the lead of misanthropic YDN contributor Jun Teresa Ding, has written an op/ed so ill-conceived, insensitive, and fundamentally absurd that you have to wonder if we aren't being treated to some elaborate hoax. It reads like an SAT-II writing exercise, as taken by Thomas Malthus in a bad mood.

Su is alarmed by America's, "increase in population, due to the failure to control population growth in the past." Even worse, Su reports:

"Statistics show that majority of U.S. population growth comes from immigration and high birth rate among the minorities, while the native Caucasian population is stabilizing."

Then Su reminds us why we don't like minorities again:

Notwithstanding exceptions, larger numbers of minorities are ill-educated, have less desirable jobs, and thus are less capable to financially sustain their livelihoods.

In fact, many more minorities depend on government welfare and low-income assistance than whites. Over time, jobs that require less skill will continue to decrease, being outsourced to developing countries with lower labor costs, and the percentage of minorities in the U.S. population will increase, forcing the government to spend much more to evade riots by poor, hungry, unemployed minorities.

The minorities are coming! The minorities are coming! Not to worry, though, Su has a radical solution to thin out the teeming underclasses. It's reminiscent of Communist China, so you know it's good. He want to eliminate the child tax-credit and replace it with... a child tax.

And if this doesn't work, true-born philanthrophist Su thinks that, "welfare programs should be cut back and the cost of children's necessities, such as infants' formula and college education, should be raised in price." He writes of, "extracting taxes and fees from the lower class and poor immigrants." Spoken like a true German bureaucrat. Unsurprisingly, Su is also against immigration by poor people:

"With no understanding of the country's economic dynamics, the poor continue to reproduce and immigrate to lightheartedly siphon off the state's budget."

Those poors, so lighthearted, so numerous, if only they understood this country's economic dynamics like our Great Leader Xiaochen Su.

After the jump -- the article in full.

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Just a week ago, the New Jersey State Legislature - not exactly a body known for model governance or even un-corruptness in general - may have seen its finest hour. In an overwhelmingly bipartisan measure, the legislature passed a specially-designed law to force the University Cottage Club, one of Princeton's eating clubs, to pay its property taxes.

The Cottage Club, a beautiful, McKim, Mead, and White building constructed in 1906, is a member of the National Register of Historic Places. It is also home to football players, soccer players, southern belles, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Cottage had been fighting for a non-profit tax exemption since 2003, insisting, we suppose, that the rampant undergraduate drinking going on inside was in some exceedingly tenuous way related to the public trust. The club had recently won a court case that forced Princeton Borough to refund it over $300,000, money that the club's graduate board apparently desperately needed. Princeton Borough was not exactly thrilled by the ruling: "The taxpayers are being forced to pay for a club they are not allowed to use,"declared Mayor Mildred Trotman.

And so the New Jersey State Legislature stepped in, justifiably preventing a bunch of Princetonians from being huge jerks. Not since 1991, when the Tiger Inn went all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court to avoid extending membership to women, has a Princeton eating club behaved so poorly in such a public light.

To think that the club pursued such intense legal channels - even though they knew an anti-Cottage bill was in the works- is a testament to the narrow-minded parsimony of rich white people. We hope the Borough spends the tax revenue on a brand-new police unit to bust underage drinking - at Cottage.

--JACOB SAVAGE