Which I guess makes Ann Coulter... Angela? See, here he is pointing to his Cornell Diploma in order to settle some ridiculous argument. So this is what he'll do without George Bush to kick around!

Salacious college gossip site JuicyCampus is going out of business. You'd think collegians would learn to be polite! But here's "cool" blog IvyGate, calling this nice article the "nerdiest story of the day." That's mean:

According to financially troubled magazine US News & World Report, the best college in the world is financially troubled Harvard, whose endowment has "suffered investment losses of at least 22% in the first four months of the school's fiscal year," according to the Wall Street Journal. Turns out all those colleges investing in real estate and private equity and commodities was only a brilliant idea for like ten years. This is a loss of $8 billion! So now the endowment is only like $29 billion. Is the Ivy League too big to fail?

Ever get to the point at the end of the month where you thought about putting something in hock to shore up extra cash? That's what colleges are doing, especially the multibillion-endowed Ivies who have invested in the types of things that there is "no public market for," explains the New York Times. Now that the economy's tanked, the result is that schools—especially billion-dollar-endowed Ivies—are short on money. They're desperately trying to sell off some of these investments for only half of what they'd get under normal circumstanes. “It is a little like having to go to a pawn shop,” said one university endowment manager who said its policy is not to discuss performance publicly. “People don’t want to admit they have to sell this stuff."

As I was journalistically perusing the internet last night, I came upon an entry in a web log ("blog") that tickled my ol' funny bone. It seems that well-off Ivy League students at Princeton University are participating in short role-playing games in order to "experience the virtual realities of poverty." "Quite unlikely!" I scoffed. Do I detect a prime opportunity to make fun of college kids? Why, this one is straight from the textbook!:

While Ivies like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are bleeding endowment money in the market downturn, their graduating seniors are facing a decimated job market upon graduation. What to do? "Prompted by inequalities in American society—or sensing that the economic crisis limits their short-term career opportunities—young people are applying in force to such organizations as Teach for America," reports the Columbia Spectator. It's amazing how altruistic the unemployed can get! "With many top firms in jeopardy, Columbia students who in other years would have landed prestigious internships or six-figure jobs are simply out of options." And now they will have to resign themselves to two years of teaching poors, where they will annoy people ad nauseum about how much they "learned" after they finish the program.Meanwhile, Harvard's President Drew Faust told the AP,

Hey Ivy League students, did you think that the walls of the Ivory Tower would shelter you from this global financial crisis? Figured you'd be able to continue pulling in your financial aid and frolicking in your school's brand new buildings full of fancy professors who teach one class per year and spend the rest of the time writing little-read books? Think again! Because it looks like even the mighty Harvard is losing billions in the current market downturn. More billions than you might expect:

Oh, good one. The smaller text on this ad (for a website that sells college info) gives all of Barack and Michelle Obama's Ivy League credentials. The payoff line: "From Bush League to the Ivy League." See, everything's better now that Ivy League grads will be in charge! Except that George W. Bush went to Yale and Harvard. Taste the failure, Ivy League. Failure of all you stand for. Click for the big version. [via Adrants]

Everyone's forgetting to pay their taxes these days—from gay club Mr. Black to every celeb (especially Wesley Snipes) to private men-only Harvard clubs. Don't they know that you can conveniently pay your taxes online? It's easy! Notice a pattern here: it's men who are bad at paying their taxes. [Crimson]

No plans for 9/11 day yet? Why not enjoy Barack Obama and John McCain at Columbia, one of those Elitist East Coast Ivy League Colleges of The Elite, where they will talk about civic duty for "ServiceNation, an organization that aims to increase public service participation." You know, "public service participation" like "community organizing," which, as we all know, is gay and elitist and not something seriously important like shooting wolves from airplanes. Anyway. We assume Obama will talk on behalf on public service and McCain will become confused and angry and speak against it. [CollegeOTR]

Hey everyone, IvyGate would love to introduce you to a charming new member of Princeton's incoming class, one "Stephany Her RoyalHighness" of Facebook. Probably DYING to escape the sweltering heat and unwashed rubes of Plano, Texas, Stephany has penned something of a manifesto for her freshman year, and posted it to the Princeton 2012 Facebook Group. Sure, it's a wildly elitist piece of work, starting with "do not let ANYONE tell you that you are not better than them, because you are," and continuing on to, "You have deserved this. You are Hitler the fourth, Alexander the Great the Second, Napoleon the Fifth, here to destroy the world we know." But also, and perhaps more importantly, it's a sort of cartoon Ivy League elitism as plausibly imagined by someone from a politically conservative Republican family in a place like, say, Plano, Texas. So maybe the post is a mocking satire? Or an escapist fantasy? You try figuring it out:

Grads of the same six schools that everyone went to (as famous novelist Keith Gessen once said) are doing pretty well in terms of earning power, reports Business Week. "...Graduates of prestigious institutions, especially Ivy League universities, earned the biggest salaries... 'The happiest and richest people look for schools to help them develop their talents in whatever field that owns their soul,' says [Washington Post columnist Jay] Matthews, who graduated from Harvard." May we suggest a semi-well-paying career that you probably haven't thought of that might feed your soul even more? (No, it's not blogging—that destroys it.)From the NYT:

Bruce Ivins, the scientist who killed himself after the government linked him to the 2001 anthrax attacks, reportedly loved sorority girls. As all Americans do! He was supposedly obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sisters of Princeton. Now, as you can imagine, those girls are fielding a lot of media requests. They don't get it, though! As a sister writes to IvyGate: "i dont really get why he would be so interested in Kappa…i mean of all the sororities on campus we are the most diversely boring…and also the most unworthy of obsession." Regardless of whatever the hell "diversely boring" means (Ivy League education!), surely there's something interesting enough about these ladies to encourage a man to commit bioterrorism, right? We may never know, if these Facebook messages imploring everyone to keep silent are effective.

We just discovered this recent gem from the Times Higher Education. A certain Harvard professor is tired of babysitting teaching those "post-pubescent children of notables" who can buy and sell him! Especially Jared Kushner, son of real estate developer Charles Kusher—also known as the boy who bought the New York Observer. Professor John H. Summers recalls him as a student—which was not that long ago, as Kushner is 27. The juicy bit? Kushner's Observer takeover resulted in a pay cut for Prof Summers, who did freelance reviews there.

Daphne Oz, Princeton '08 and author of the freshman-15 battling book, The Dorm Room Diet, also put out an awesome workout video. The perils of gaining a couple pounds must be fought tooth and nail, says the daughter of frequent Oprah guest Dr. Mehmet Oz. Click for the gayest workout video of our time, starring Daphne's ex-boyfriend (says Ivygate) and sister. (Lessons: the "dorm-room workout"? It's Pilates. But never underestimate the power of a connected parent in publishing.)

Former Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan famously tried to sue all her students for being mean to her. Now, as a researcher at Northwestern, she's probably less likely to have her academic feathers ruffled by entitled little Ivy frosh retching at talk of power structures. But she does still have to deal with their student newspapers digging up embarrassing things about her. Embarrassing things like... her senior thesis. It's called Montaigne and Macbeth: Rebellion, Gender and Patriarchy in the Renaissance. Of course.

For some reason we thought 02138—the annoyingly named pretend Harvard alumni magazine that proclaimed itself Vanity Fair for people who went to Harvard and wished to read a second, inferior Vanity Fair each month—had already been shuttered by Atlantic Media. Well, it's alive. Tiny, unknown Manhattan Media (they own the New York Press and some things you've never heard of) bought the magazine from Atlantic Media for an undisclosed price. The publisher will remain cofounder Bom Kim (for now), but Manhattan Media has decided to expand the brand into—wait for it—social networking. Then they will introduce new versions of the magazine for every other Ivy League school, because if there's a group of people who don't have enough media outlets to write for, it's Ivy grads. Amusingly, the Manhattan Media press release announcing the deal leaves out their only existing holding anyone remembers reading: the embarrassing second-string alt-weekly New York Press. That release after the jump, along with a selection from this week's Press "guest sex columnist." [NYT]

Finally, some good news for the students Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan (we can spell her name without looking it up now! Christ!) tried to sue, or is maybe still trying to sue, or who at the very least will soon end up in her tell-all book. The writing class they took with her last semester is now retroactively pass/fail! School officials "reviewed the grades she gave to students in the Winter term and have concluded that they were not consistent with the feedback that she provided to the students." So said Associate Dean Lindsay Whaley, who will now be added to the lawsuit, in the court of make-believe. [Dartmouth Review]

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!