Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school famous for its bizarrely powerful Greek system, is having a pretty tough year. Today it gets even worse. Dartmouth has confirmed to Gawker that it extended the suspension of one of its most notorious fraternities, Alpha Delta, over allegations of branding—that is, pressing a piece of hot metal into a fraternity pledge’s skin. If that sounds unpleasant, you might want to prepare yourself for the rumored details of what exactly transpired.

In a speech at Dartmouth's campus on Thursday, the college's president, Philip J. Hanlon, announced that there will be a campus-wide ban on hard liquor from March 30 onward. The New York Times reports that this decision is in response to a "spate of student misbehavior that has tarnished the reputation" of the school.

According to the Valley News, 64 Dartmouth students have been charged with honor code violations after the school discovered widespread cheating in an ethics course designed to help struggling student-athletes.

The brothers of Dartmouth College’s Alpha Delta have a had a rough year. They had to apologize for throwing a “Crips and Bloods”-themed party in July, and one of them was arrested, earlier that month, for peeing on a woman standing beneath the house’s balcony. Such hardships truly test brothers’ loyalty to each other. So does drinking enormous quantities of beer.

Dartmouth College has placed Beta Alpha Omega on “immediate temporary suspension” following Gawker’s report on the fraternity’s publicly available list-serv, where brothers disseminated documents detailing alcohol-soaked initiation rituals (which Dartmouth believes is hazing) and exchanged standard-issue frat bro fodder about “hoes” and each other.

For about a year, the brothers of Dartmouth College’s Beta Alpha Omega—the straight-laced fraternity that famously hosted Rick Perry after a Republican debate in October 2011—have corresponded about house debauchery, fraternity rituals, and other key topics using Google Groups, apparently to avoid using Dartmouth’s own servers (and the eyes of college administrators).

Dartmouth College, the lily-white investment banking camp of the Ivy League, prides itself on its purposely insular and routinely violent fraternities. These two features magically combined last month when Animal House inspiration Alpha Delta decided to throw an enormous “Bloods and Crips”-themed party. Now they’re very, very, very sorry.

Dartblog, a blog dedicated to America's favorite paleo-con farm, has published an alleged draft of an op-ed about to run in the Dartmouth's student paper recounting in exquisite detail the hazing that one frat-inclined student encountered, including being "forced to swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen, and rotten food." Wait, there's more.

You're probably familiar by now with the trifecta of tragicomic outbursts from the last three Republican debates: cheering for Rick Perry's 234 executions, cheering for uninsured sick people to die, and booing a gay soldier. So what terrible thing will happen at tonight's Washington Post/Bloomberg debate from Hanover, New Hampshire? Nothing, if the Dartmouth's powerhouse newspaper editorial board has anything to do with it!

28-year-old Dartmouth grad student Randy Lamberghts was arrested for attempting to manufacture meth in his apartment. He was a chemistry major, if you can believe it.

There is a debate in the academic community about whether or not schools should add a voluntary question about sexual orientation to their applications. They definitely should. After surviving high school, these gay students deserve a prize!

Former Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan, the woman who threatened to sue her students for being mean to her and not caring about post-modernism, is now a research associate at Northwestern. She'll definitely end up with plenty of material for her forthcoming book at NU, especially because the blog College On the Record has already published her email address and invited students to harass her. Venkatesan declined to speak with the Wall Street Journal when they wrote that terrible op-ed about the situation, saying she'd said all she needed to say to The Dartmouth Review (and boy, did she). And today, the Harvard Crimson weighed in!

Now it's official: everyone involved in any capacity with the Priya Venkatesan affiar annoys the hell out of us. To recap, Ms. Venkatesan was a Dartmouth lecturer who decided to sue her students for harassment or something because they heckled her. She is clearly a pompous tool. Her students are also probably pompous tools. Now a pompous tool who writes for the Wall Steet Journal editorial page weighs in with an indictment against academia. Joseph Rago attended Dartmouth, you see, though he totally didn't like it very much and didn't even try very hard in his classes. Because of post-modernism. Writing papers for lit classes is just like "filling in Mad Libs," he explains. Writing indictments of academia for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, on the other hand, is more like Pictionary. After the jump: amusing student reviews of Venkatesan's class from an internal Dartmouth page. The kids didn't really like her!

Dartmouth Dean of First-Year students Gail M. Zimmerman, in an email to students threatened with a lawsuit by Priya Venkatesan:

In case you hadn't heard, Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan has dropped the discrimination lawsuit she inexplicably filed against her former students. Hopefully it'll still all end up in the book! (Complete with thinly-veiled Gawker, if we're lucky.) Venkatesan is now a research assistant at Northwestern, btw. [Dartlog]

Click to viewA Dartmouth lecturer is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her. The email, and so, so much more, below:

Facebook Chat launched in beta earlier this week, available first to students at Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT— schools known for their brilliant graduates who go out and change the world. Or at least make a lot of money. Or write nasty things about the people who do. Also: Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT were the first schools to make Facebook popular, having been the first networks allowed access Mark Zuckerberg's creation. So we have that to thank them for too. Harvard's Alexander Konrad begins to earn our forgiveness, panning the new feature in the Crimson.

We all know those distinguished students of Ivy League colleges aren't having any sex, just writing about it constantly, but are they partying? Yes. Yes they are, according to this chart created by Dartblog. At least they are at Dartmouth, which is miles ahead of the other schools in terms of alcohol infractions per thousand students. Which actually probably means that the Dartmouth administration is just way, way more dickish about it than the rest of the graphed colleges. [Dartblog via IvyGate]

Oh my God, guess what? An Ivy League education may not be the key to success, riches and true happiness after all! Recent Dartmouth grad Jennifer Krimm's Sunday piece in the Washington Post has earned her IvyGate's totally righteous ire. Kentucky public school kid Krimm is an Arabic-speaking Fulbright scholar and former White House intern, and she's pissed that all that resume-packing and bootstrapping hasn't landed her an appropriately impressive job. How dare America do this to her?

A reader informs us that "those granola-eaters over in Ohio aren't the only ones to revel in the frivolous thrills of posting on an anonymous website. Dartmouth has the same thing: BoredAtBaker.com (Baker is the library on campus)." Maybe they are smarter than the Oberlin kids?