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very ironic announcement that I just got in my Harvard email announcing a forthcoming lecture: HARVARD UNIVERSITY EDMOND J. SAFRA FOUNDATION CENTER FOR ETHICS Eliot Spitzer, former Governor and Attorney General of New York, will deliver a public lecture as part of the 2009/10 Labs Lectures on the Question of Institutional Corruption. Thursday, November 12 at 4:30pm Emerson Hall, Room 105 25 Quincy Street, Cambridge This is a ticketed event.

Love Can Mess You Up: Before Arthur David Horn met his future bride Lynette (a "metaphysical healer") in 1988, he was a tenured professor at Colorado State, with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale, teaching a mainstream course in human evolution. With Lynette's guidance (after a revelatory week with her in California's Trinity Mountains, searching for Bigfoot), Horn evolved, himself, resigning from Colorado State and seeking to remedy his inadequate Ivy League education. At a conference in Denver in September, Horn said he now realizes that humans come from an alien race of shape-shifting reptilians that continue to control civilization...

Nazis in the Ivory Tower by Steven Plaut Over the past two decades we have witnessed the emergence of a mass movement of political extremism and support for totalitarianism on Western college campuses. Large numbers of university professors and administrators today advocate politically extremist positions that combine support for totalitarian Islamofascism and its terrorism with deep hatred of Israel and anti-Americanism. The dimensions of the phenomenon vary by campus and also by academic discipline. Middle East Studies is arguably the worst. The pro-totalitarian ideology and the hostility towards Israel and the United States have been documented for years by campus...

How Harvard Nearly Went Bankrupt After A Rogue Interest Rate Swap Went Very Sour Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2009 17:45 -0500 The school that epitomizes the dangers of groupthink (especially by very intelligent people) and tends to get caught in both the virtues and vices of its own ingeniosity, saw just how expensive hubris can be in 2009. Harvard's endowment dropped 27.3% in 2009 to $27 after hitting roughly $10 billion higher the year before. /snip Yet most notable in the entire report is an interesting story for all those who claim that representing the $200 or so trillion...

In early October, Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist, visited Princeton and Yale, two of America’s top universities, to speak to students, who are supposed to be tomorrow’s elite. The students did not feel any sympathy – indeed, were almost hostile – towards Mr. Westergaard, an artist who has been living under constant police protection since he drew a cartoon of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, four years ago. Mr. Westergaard arrived at both Princeton and Yale heavily guarded by policemen. Ten officers kept watch inside the room – with more on guard outside – when he addressed his audience in...

-Ronald Reagan Eureka College -George H. W. Bush Yale University -George W. Bush Yale University Harvard Business School - Bill Clinton Georgetown University University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar) Yale Law School -Barack Obama Occidental College (transferred to Columbia University) Columbia University Harvard Law School

During the Anita Hill hearings after a series of implausible witnesses all of whom were black Yale law school graduates, Juan Williams wrote in the Washington Post that he could now understand the wisdom of the saying that Yale law school had ruined more good black minds than crack. I have found that to be an accurate observation and have always been grateful to Juan for having brought that to my attention. Obama's communist "green czar" lays out why this is so: "I had a professor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard and Yale [for law school], which was...

Yale University is publishing a book about the notorious cartoons of Muhammad, printed in Danish newspapers in 2006, that inflamed radical Muslims and touched off riots in which upward of 200 people were killed. While many Muslims say any depiction of Muhammad is blasphemous, the irreverence shown to Judeo-Christian religious figures has become so commonplace in Western culture that only the deeply religious notice anymore, and when they complain, they're dismissed as bigots or worse by academics and journalists. By comparison, the Muhammad cartoons were quite mild, but you're going to have to take our word because Yale, that bastion...

Note to the reader: Dr. Henry Louis Gates has reach and influence in the academy, and that reach can–and has–severely damage careers. A pseudonym, in this case, is essential. Notes from a Phantom Negro. The Ivy League is not real life. College in general is not real life, and the Ivy League is a more fantastic version of college. The amenities are better, the rules are flexible and everyone, student and faculty alike, is well aware that the realities of life as most people know it are merely a peculiar footnote to the day to day of campus life. I...

One can only imagine what would happen if any passionate Christians still remaining at Yale demanded a Christ Month, with full staffing and funding from the university? What would the campus look like with crucifixes, crosses, and chalices hanging from trees like the pink and lavender streamers that presently cover the campus each April during the BGLAD Pride Month celebrations? Such an image of Christian images and icons at an Ivy League school founded 300 years ago by a Christian church is unimaginable, isn't it? The answer to that question provides a snapshot of the intellectual and moral deterioration of...

After only two months of the Obama presidency, Americans are horrified, angry, depressed, and on the verge of full-scale revolt against the president and his toadying Socialist acolytes for doing their best to destroy our once-vibrant economy, inflict decades of debt on our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and usher in what historians will surely record as The Age of The Hubristic and Incompetent Presidency. This assessment is borne out by polls, man-and-woman-in-the-street interviews, escalating unemployment figures, and creeping inflation which threatens to become the hyperinflation that will put the final nail in an economy that up until 2006 – when...

For two centuries, Wall Street survived wars, depressions, bank panics and terrorist attacks. Now Wall Street as we know it is dead. Gone. When a healthy and thriving person dies suddenly, a medical examiner may talk to family and friends to see if the deceased had recently changed behavior in some way. Wall Street did change radically in recent years in one notable way. Twenty or 30 years ago, it was common for the best and the brightest to be doctors or engineers. By the 2000s, they wanted to be investment bankers. When Wall Street was run by people randomly...

The heirs of an Apache chieftain whose remains are rumored to be held inside Yale's oldest secret society filed a lawsuit today demanding the return of their ancestor's skull. Twenty descendants of the legendary Apache chieftain Geronimo are suing the federal government, the University and the society Skull & Bones in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to seek the return of his remains as well as punitive damages. One hundred years ago today, Geronimo died of pneumonia at Fort Sill, Okla., but the suit alleges members of the society exhumed his remains in 1918 or 1919 and...

With conservatives so absent from university faculties like Harvard, I thought I'd share my correspondence with Donna Kalikow, of the kennedy School for Government at Harvard University.... let's see if this tactic works

College Recruiting Roulette Rules by: Deborah Lambert, January 27, 2009 Kathleen Kingsbury, in a Daily Beast exclusive, lets college admissions officers tell their personal stories about why some students make the cut and others don’t. She advises students who’ve mailed off their applications to “recalibrate your expectations based on your race, your wealth, and whether the NFL team in the city where that college is located is on a losing streak. The shadowy world of college admissions has left millions of confused and frustrated rejects in its wake. (So stop practicing the oboe.) Current and former admissions officers from colleges...

Chinese aim for the Ivy League The Boston Globe Sunday, January 4, 2009 BEIJING: The book spawned a genre, selling more than two million copies in China on the premise that any child, with the proper upbringing, could be Ivy League material. Now, eight years after the publication of "Harvard Girl," bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like "How We Got Our Child Into Yale," "Harvard Family Instruction" and "The Door of the Elite." Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation - some might say a single-minded national obsession - of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents:...

The debate over the long-term value of a pricey private-school education is heating up, especially in this tough economy. Sure, everyone knows that by sticker price alone, public schools are a sweet deal, with out-of-state tuition and fees that run about 30 percent less than most of their private rivals—and in-state fees running up to three-quarters less. Indeed, the math is pretty jarring; the difference, on average, ranges between $7,700 and $18,600 a year, obviously no small matter with stock market woes depleting so many people's savings. But in the back of everybody's mind, there's that nagging question: Is the...

I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife. Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite. One gal-pal classmate of my wife's has even traveled from New York's Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn't a redneck missing half her teeth - she's a lawyer. The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an...

The Perils of the Ivy League by Burt Prelutsky Ivy certainly looks nice, but you wouldn’t want to stroll through it. Here in Southern California, it’s common knowledge that most of our rodents hang out in the stuff. If bubonic plague ever breaks out in L.A., the source will be found lurking in the shrubbery. What has me dwelling on ivy is my recent realization that much of what I don’t like about American politics—namely, American politicians—can be traced back to Ivy League schools. It can’t just be a coincidence that four or five universities keep spitting out presidential candidates...

Four years at Yale costs $180,000. Here is how senior Aliza Shvarts planned to conclude hers: The art major would repeatedly artificially inseminate herself, then induce miscarriages, which she would record on video. She would build a four-foot-wide plastic cube and wrap it in layers of plastic. Between the layers would be Vaseline mixed with blood from the miscarriages. She would hang the cube at an exhibition and project video of the miscarriages onto four of its sides. "This piece," Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News, "is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as...

The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire lawyer who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two...

The Real ‘Truth’ About the Academies By Michael Podberesky PUBLISHED OCTOBER 15, 2007 In its series on the Service Academies, Spectator has published two submissions: an ignorant, invective piece titled “The Truth About The Academies” by Idris Leppla, whose brother attends the Naval Academy; and a very fair and honest account by Emily Haney-Caron, a self-described anti-war liberal whose fiancé attends West Point. To these voices I would like to add my own—as a graduate of the Naval Academy and a current student at Columbia. Leppla’s unfounded accusations against my alma mater cannot go unanswered. I do not question Spectator...

Ahmadinejad to Speak on Campus By John Davisson SEPTEMBER 19, 2007 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia from School of International and Public Affairs interim dean John Coatsworth, according to a spokesman. The event is scheduled to take place on Monday, September 24--the same day that Ahmadinejad is scheduled to address the UN General Assembly--as part of the World Leaders Forum and will be sponsored by SIPA. "Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious," University President...

A LETTER FROM ED HALDEMAN, CHAIR OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, TO THE DARTMOUTH COMMUNITY Dear Members of the Dartmouth Community, Earlier today, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees took several steps to strengthen the College's governance. Given the intense debate about this issue in recent months, I wanted to write to you as soon as possible to tell you what we've done and why. Let me start by saying Dartmouth has never been stronger than it is today. It's one of the most selective institutions in the country. Our commitment to teaching has never been stronger and student satisfaction is...

Our culture touts free sex, but in reality life just does not seem to work this way. Sex is not free. The cost of attachment or resentment or insecurity often arises the morning after. In the past few years, particular attention has been given to sex at Harvard and Yale. In 2004, sophomores Camilla Hrdy and Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg decided to start a magazine entitled H-Bomb, which the Harvard Crimson described as a “porn” magazine. The premiere issue included erotic fiction, nude photos and poetry about sex. In 2004, Eric Rubenstein, a Yale senior aiming for a Hollywood film career,...

I must confess to being disappointed five years ago when my son, Vineet, told me he had no interest in applying to any of the schools I consider elite. He said he would fit in better at a public state university and he didn't believe that choice would lessen his chances of career success. Perhaps it was the bias that my company's venture capitalists showed toward management teams from top-tier colleges that skewed my thinking. Whatever the cause, I have since concluded I shouldn't have been upset in the least. An education from one of the world's top schools may...

Right now, all over the country, high school students and their parents are scheming to get into the Ivy League. Young people are groomed practically from birth to be attractive to mysterious and all-powerful admissions committees guarding the gates of the eight universities that comprise the Ivies. Articles and books are written on packaging strategies, which classes and activities are "in" and which are now "passé," which provide an edge, and which might harm a student's chances. There is even a psychological malady known as The Yale Syndrome, a sort of obsession with college admission that creates an unusually proximate...

Cornellians in Sage Chapel fell silent April 19 as the university organist struck the first notes of a prelude in a ceremony memorializing the 33 students and faculty at Virginia Tech university who had lost their lives three days earlier in a campus shooting by a Korean student, who subsequently killed himself."We are one," said Cornell President David Skorton. "We are one community, one people, one planet. We are here today to affirm that oneness ... We are here to bear witness to the passing of the 33 members of our family at Virginia Tech University who have met an...

Sean Barrett has seen a lot in his four years at Harvard. He’s consistently been among the top Crimson finishers at various regional meets since his freshman year. He’s seen coaches come and go. He’s competed with and against formidable tracksters across New England and beyond. Now he’s getting ready to embark on a journey that will show him more about himself and his world than he could ever imagine. Barrett has joined the U.S. Marine Corps and has committed, initially, to serving four years. It’s a decision that seems almost incongruous for a bright athlete from the Ivy League....

Abortion 101 at Yale By Michelle Malkin   ·   January 25, 2007 06:25 AM Dawn Eden reports that Yale medical students are celebrating "Roe v. Wade week" by holding a seminar, open to non-medical students, on how to perform abortions. --- Yale 'Roe vs. Wade Week' teaches non-medical students how to make a baby go (Whiffen)poof Good morning! I'm exhausted after taking two trains and a cab back from New Haven, so I'll leave it to Stephen of  For God, for Country, and for Yale to offer details (and, I hope, photos) of my Theology on Tap talk. I can tell...

STUDENTS at America's prestigious Ivy League universities are rebelling against their colleges' stuffy reputations, casting off society's norms along with their clothes to hold naked parties. The Pundits, a secretive society at Yale University, initiated the events - which profess to be non-sexual in nature - in the mid-1990s, open to a select few. The society claims that president George Bush's daughter, Barbara, attended a naked party during her second year, in 2002. The White House has always declined to comment.

Mon 8 Jan 2007 Birthday-suit parties all the rage for Ivy League students CRAIG HOWIE STUDENTS at America's prestigious Ivy League universities are rebelling against their colleges' stuffy reputations, casting off society's norms along with their clothes to hold naked parties. The Pundits, a secretive society at Yale University, initiated the events - which profess to be non-sexual in nature - in the mid-1990s, open to a select few. The society claims that president George Bush's daughter, Barbara, attended a naked party during her second year, in 2002. The White House has always declined to comment. But the naked parties...

Famed as a hotbed of debate over academic freedom, New York's most elite school is also a playpen for sexual hijinks, sophomoric antics and the wacky indulgences of the children of the rich. While their parents shell out $33,246 a year in tuition, Columbia University students doff their clothes at naked parties, flock to sex toys workshops, broadcast porn on campus TV, bake anatomically correct pies for the "Erotic Cake-Baking Contest" and heat up the steps of the Low Library in a mass makeout session called the "Big Kiss." And of course, there's always the stimulating game, "Guess the Number...

In public elementary schools across the nation, students are taught that America is a land of equality and tolerance. We are all created equal, and we should treat each other with dignity and respect, regardless of race, gender or religion. However, it appears that some of us have forgotten these grammar school lessons. We have turned our fear of living in a post-9/11 society into intolerance towards Arabs and Muslims. A poll done earlier this year by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 46 percent of Americans think poorly of Islam today, along with 33 percent that believe...

Ivy League CEOs Today's Wall Street Journal reports that American business is not elitist: 'Any College Will Do' The college diplomas of the nation's top executives tell an intriguing story: Getting to the corner office has more to do with leadership talent and a drive for success than it does with having an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university. Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges.... Some 10% of CEOs currently heading the top 500 companies received undergraduate degrees...

The left-leaning faction that dominates American higher education doesn't take kindly to strangers--particularly those who challenge the prevailing academic orthodoxies. Just ask Harvard's Larry Summers. Or consider the escalating governance controversy at Dartmouth College. A few reformers have achieved a bit of influence, and now the New Hampshire school's insular establishment is doing everything it can to run them out of Hanover. Since 1891, Dartmouth has been among the handful of colleges and universities that allows alumni to elect leaders directly. At present, eight of the 18 members of the governing Board of Trustees are chosen by the popular vote...

The left-leaning faction that dominates American higher education doesn't take kindly to strangers -- particularly those who challenge the prevailing academic orthodoxies. Just ask Harvard's Larry Summers. Or consider the escalating governance controversy at Dartmouth College. A few reformers have achieved a bit of influence, and now the New Hampshire school's insular establishment is doing everything it can to run them out of Hanover. Since 1891, Dartmouth has been among the handful of colleges and universities that allows alumni to elect leaders directly... In practice, the Trustees have been largely ornamental overseers, rubber-stamping the management decisions of the "progressive" college...

**Vanity** Dear Fellow FReepers: I am counseling a group of high school seniors with a keen interest in attending the Ivy League - we have toured Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and Harvard as well as Stanford. These are conservative (mostly Christian) students and I am well aware of the perils of the Ivy League - I've even had them read "Poison Ivy" and had them consult the NR's guide to colleges. I believe that they are prepared for the left wing bias. That being said, (and NR giving Princeton more latitude for being fairer than other schools to diversity of thought)...

Penn joined the growing list of universities last week opening offices in the nation's capital in order to protect the interests of higher education. The Office of Federal Affairs -- previously located on Penn's campus -- was relocated to Washington last Wednesday in order to establish a more permanent, visible Penn presence, Vice President of Government and Community Relations Vanda McMurtry said. "It's a clear demonstration that Penn wants to play a broader role in Washington in national affairs and wants to be more vigilant than it's been in the past looking out for its own interests," McMurtry said. University...

Conservatives in control of an Ivy League school? This dream might become a reality as conservative alumni fight for their rights to be candidates for the Board of Trustees at Dartmouth. This battle began two years ago when two candidates who were endorsed by the Alumni Association were defeated by two “outsider” candidates. Another independent candidate also won a position on the board. Since that time, the University has tried to rewrite the Board’s constitution and bylaws to prevent such a thing from occurring ever again. The conservative blogs and media caught wind of this and since then the Battle...

Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Cole to hold forth from the University of Michigan, where he has been a professor for twenty years. But Yale would provide "honor" and "imprimatur," says Scott Johnson, a right-wing blogger. "That's a huge thing, to have...

If a liberal bias can be proven anywhere in academia, it is most likely to be discovered among the enclaves known as the Ivy League. Brown University is certainly no exception, as Travis James Rowley learned as he began his undergraduate journey there in Providence, Rhode Island. The messages he received from the university and from student organizations that were encouraged by the university were overwhelmingly liberal. As Rowley writes in his book, Out of Ivy:How the Liberal Ivy Created a Committed Conservative this is what he heard: • Have sex. Lots of it. And with as many partners as...

CAMBRIDGE – On Saturday, March 18, Harvard University will host the Iran Freedom Concert, a rally organized by Harvard students to support their counterparts in Iran. "As tensions rise over nuclear issues, our diverse student coalition wants to spotlight the human side of the Iran crisis," said co-organizer Adam Scheuer, a senior and editor at the Harvard Middle East Review. "Iranian students are denied basic rights Americans take advantage of every day. But there is a brave student movement in Iran working for change, and we need to support them." Widespread student protests in Iran have broken out in recent...

The College Rejection Bonanza April 7th, 2006 “April is the cruelest month” – T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland It is rejection time for almost all the applicants to elite colleges and universities. America’s most prestigious schools, which pride themselves on their ever-lower acceptance rates, are basking in their record rejections of hopeful aspirants. Harvard, Yale and Princeton rejected 91% of applicants, Stanford and Columbia 89%, Brown 86%, Dartmouth 85%, Penn 82%. MIT, Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore all rejected 80% or more of their applicants. Among the top state schools, Berkeley rejected 76%, and UCLA 73% of applicants. I suspect Duke, given...

Intelligent design goes Ivy League Cornell offers course despite president denouncing theory -------------------------------------------------------- Posted: April 11, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com Cornell University plans to offer a course this summer on intelligent design, using textbooks by leading proponents of the controversial theory of origins. The Ivy League school's course – "Evolution and Design: Is There Purpose in Nature?" – aims to "sort out the various issues at play, and to come to clarity on how those issues can be integrated into the perspective of the natural sciences as a whole." The announcement comes just half a year after...

See for example this thread first. Have you heard the latest from Yale? (It's certainly "beyond the pale") To admit a man From the Taliban No wonder they want Bush to fail! Alternative middle lines, containing an assonance:To admit Hashemi our sworn enemy

Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.) Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student. The three backers of the foundation that,...

Asset classes--stocks, bonds, real estate, collectibles--are always competing with one another. Each clamors for our spare dollars. For periods we favor one asset class over others (e.g., stocks from 1982 to 2000). But when a collective judgment is reached that a particular asset class has been bid up too high, dollars are pulled and the asset class shrinks in value. Real estate may now be at that point. I can think of only one asset class that in my adult life has outperformed GDP growth plus inflation yet has been blissfully immune from busts--any busts at all. That is the...

Since the New York Times and Wall Street Journal broke the news about the admission of Taliban official Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi to a special student program at Yale, we’ve received numerous emails from outraged Yale Alumni. One email stood out from the rest — "I won’t give Yale one red cent this year, but maybe I will give them a red fingernail instead!" She was referring to the Taliban’s policy of pulling the fingernails off of Afghani women who dared to wear fingernail polish. Some of these women even had their thumbs sliced off as punishment. To date, Mr. Rahmatullah...

In the grand scheme of things, the recent resignation of Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, was a small episode. But its implications are large and reach beyond Harvard -- and well beyond the academic world. David Riesman said that we are living in the cathedrals of learning, without the faith that built those cathedrals. We are also living in a free society without the faith that built that society -- and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it. The faith came first. Centuries ago, farmers and others scattered throughout New England made whatever small contributions they could, whether in...