The Yale Daily News has uncovered a bombshell: The University Dining Services-operated Thain Family Cafe secretly replaced its caffeinated espresso with decaf beans. They've been serving useless, unstimulating brown water to caffeine-fiending students since April 15, with no intention of revealing the ruse. This scrappy student paper got their hands on the documents that prove it: "An unsigned letter received by the News last week included a supposed photocopy of a Thain Café logbook entry from Feb. 29 that reads: 'We will also run out of reg. espresso and French roast most likely—secretly use decaf espresso to substitute the espresso—for the French, I don't know—I think we'll just have to be out.'" Cafe Manager Brian Yezierski denied the charges. But! Journalism!

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]

Oh noes! Someone at the Spectator, Columbia University's student paper, wrote a negative review of literary mag n+1 editor Keith Gessen's novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Now another Columbia kid, Mark Krotov, is coming to the rescue! Wait for the disclosure: "I have done a little work for Gessen and his magazine, which has a very low circulation rate." NEG! Is it just us, or is Keith's entire world very incest-y?

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:

This week's f-ing crazy Ivy Leaguer is from Princeton. (Finally, someone taking the heat off Yale!) A frosh, previously kicked out of school, has been charged with "kidnapping, aggravated assault, endangerment of an injured victim and making terroristic threats." Specifically, he beat up his pregnant ex-girlfriend, although without using his hands: "'he is a pianist' and did not want to injure his fingers." [Daily Princetonian]

For every genius the Ivy League cranks out, there are a few duds. Reports the Yale Daily News, art major Aliza Shvarts artificially inseminated herself "'as often as possible' while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood..." Sounds awful! Plus: we were not aware that one could auto-artificially-inseminate outside a clinical setting. But we must all try to be sophisticated: what is the statement? Oh, she wants to "spark conversation" about art, the human body, etc. Mission accomplished! Consider the conversation officially sparked. [Yale Daily News]

We always had a feeling that the ruling class had little workshops that they kept from the proles: which forks to use, how to keep your hair shiny and blonde, etc. "Secrets about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation," as Jay McInerney wrote. Well, they do! Harvard Business School's Luxury Goods Club will teach you how to purchase your first diamond.

Akash Maharaj faked his way into Yale and was ultimately brought down by his vindictive Latin lover, Skull and Bones member Victor Cazares. Theirs was a torrid affair, we can only assume, filled with explosive fights and banal Facebook Wall postings, IvyGate reports. These Facebook Wall notes are notable both in their level of obsession, and as a window into the minds and unique courting rituals of the MySpace Generation. "Wait. if you're 'studying with victor,' why aren't you here?"

There are lots of membership-only oak-paneled private clubs in this city, former Gawker Joshua Stein reports in Page Six magazine. And you're probably not a member! But why not? There's been a thinning of the (dues-paying) herd lately: the olds who run and populate the places are "dying off." In order to attract youngs, they're going absolutely wild: "relaxing dress codes, holding mixers, staying open past 10 pm." Sounds stuffy, but... how would you like the cushy surroundings of your very own private club?

Sure, Akash Maharaj-the 26-year-old Trinidad-and-Tobagonian who lied his way into Yale and was snitched out by his jilted ex-boyfriend-is only the latest in a long line of fraudy fraudsters to bamboozle the Ivy League institution. But the big deal? He's the first one to do it in the Internet Age. Now it's a big, stinking pile of mess, and Yale blames you!

What do we know so far about fake Yalie Akash Maharaj? First, that his ex-lover is the one who brought down his ruse. Second, that the ex in question may be Victor Cazares, thought to be a member of the secret society Skull and Bones. Third? We have a pic of the jilted Cazares (see left), and he is definitely wearing a pink bunny (or kitty?) hat. However, bunny hats and duping Ivy League universities may only be the tip of this crazy iceberg:

Yesterday we told you about the Ivy League imposter who transferred from Columbia to Yale, faking his resume and references. Akash Maharaj, a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago, was arrested last fall; he now faces fraud and larceny charges. It was a story of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps gone wrong... until his lurid, baroque tale unfolded further, starring a vengeful Latin ex-lover! It looks like fellow Yalie Victor Cazares, a maybe-probably member of the secret Skull and Bones society that also counts George W. Bush and John Kerry as members, was the one who turned him in.

A unnamed Trinidadian student was arrested for fabricating his transcripts and recommendation when he transferred to Yale from Columbia, and could do 25 big ones in prison if convicted. There are also possible federal charges for "stealing" thousands in financial aid—although he pleaded not guilty. You gotta admit the kid showed gumption: we think the whole "college-application fraud" thing may have actually been a piece of performance art!

Sex writing is, at this point in the zeitgeist, the ghetto of journalistic topics. "Who am I?" begins the anonymous lady behind "Sex and the Street," the new Princeton sex column. "I'm just an ordinary girl with an extraordinary preoccupation with sex." Not so extraordinary to be preoccupied with sex: our biological drive to mate and procreate is very strong. To build your notoriety as a dude writer, it's important to have big ideas, or at least think you have them. For postmodern girls, however, it seems the fastest shortcut to getting attention is writing about sex or relationships, faux-frankly.

So last night we ran an email from an anonymous correspondent who was outraged because Harvard is not admitting any transfer students, including her, for two years. The sad thing put in "hard work, blood, sweat and tears," including filling out eight applications, and was still facing a shameful life at a lesser Ivy, or perhaps (horror!) outside the League entirely. Her email was filled with palpable outrage and Gawker commenters felt her pain, though probably not in the way she intended. Now the would-be transfer has written in to say she has "worked hard throughout my life," including working a full-time job to pay her way through school. Then she said something about "the lifestyle seems to have its perks," which all of a sudden makes her seem less sympathetic again and maybe rich? Anyway, she was a reasonably good sport about the whole thing in the email, which we've reprinted after the jump.

Imagine you're an aspiring plutocrat, attending a top college that is, shamefully, not Harvard. Horrified at the thought of being second-tier aristocracy for the rest of your life - Brown? Penn? Seriously? - you work as hard as you've ever worked in your pampered life to try to transfer in to the to that most crimson of Ivy League schools. You write eight admissions essays and mummy and daddy even finance a "leave of absence" from school so you don't earn too many credits and lose your transfer eligibility. Then you find out that, horror of horrors, Harvard won't be taking you or any other social climbers for another two years, i.e. the rest of your college career. Ha ha, the whole nation would laugh at you, and that's what's happening now to people like the following sad tipster, who wrote in about her "hard work, blood, sweat and tears," as though she were a field worker or Iraq veteran or something:

Whatever happened to all-American college pastimes like smoking weed and robbing the pizza delivery guy? Kids in fancy schools these days apparently spend all their time engaged in a "team-based locally social online sport." No, not organizing group sex encounters on Craigslist; playing GoCrossCampus, a popular nerd-based internet game similar to Risk. And it's not just confined to Stanford, as we had hoped; it's everywhere!

The Times' "Editorial Notebook" section is the box on its Op-Ed page that invariably contains a pointless, grating rumination about life on the farm in Connecticut or something equally inapplicable to NYC life, written by someone who should be unemployed but is, instead, rich and a member of the Times editorial board. Today the section offers the opinions of a Harvard man. Kudos to the Times for luring an Ivy Leaguer into the dirty, ink-stained corridors of journalism! So what important topic is Philip M. Boffey, '58, so eager to explain to the nation? Harvard, of course!

We've mentioned JuicyCampus before, that anonymous collegiate gossip board ruining lives at 60 campuses nationwide. Did you know, some students are using it to call girls sluts and stuff? Well, they are! Yale isn't having any more of it and want to have the site banned, but that "could go against Yale's official policy of protecting freedom of expression, 'even when some members of the University community fail to meet their social and ethical responsibilities.'" Some say this should not apply to anonymous speech. Slut. [Yale Daily News]