‘A Different Kind of Ivy’Dartmouth’s new president took over last year with fresh ideas about higher education. October 7 put them, and her, to the test.
It’s Really Hard to Sleep at Princeton“The nightmare scenario, if you will, is that you apply with a 3.5 from Princeton and someone just as smart as you applies with a 3.8 from Yale.”
Private High Schools’ Secret ShameKids at Dalton and other prep schools have been settling for second-choice schools. Has the system screwed the rich?
in other news
Recent Ivy League Grads: Media GoldAn ‘Observer’ story today reminds us that we always seem to be reading shocking tales of graduates from elite schools having to do — gasp — hard work.
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair to Teach at Yale University
Tony Blair, fresh into his first year of retirement from helming the United Kingdom, will take up a position as a fellow at Yale in the fall. A press release from the university announces:
Mr. Blair will lead a seminar at Yale and participate in a number of events around the campus. The course in which he will participate with Yale faculty will examine issues of faith and globalization. His efforts at Yale relate to the work of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that he will be launching later this year.
Blair will be a “Howland Distinguished Fellow,” a post once filled by Indira Ghandi. Blair’s son Euan is currently studying for a master’s degree in international relations at the school. In 2006, it was reported that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all competed for Euan’s affections when he was choosing schools, and in the end he selected Yale, which gave him a full scholarship. A prescient move, it would now seem.
intel
Are the Other Ivy League Colleges Cooler Than Columbia?Today a Dartmouth student blog took a peek at the numbers of alcohol-related infractions per thousand students in each of the Ivy League schools. Unsurprisingly, Dartmouth itself came out on top. There’s not a lot going on off-campus in terms of nightlife, and since the popular fraternities are in and around school grounds, it makes sense that the university would be busting people with high regularity. But what we find more telling is that Columbia University is the Ivy League school with the second-lowest percentage of drinking infractions. Below Brown. Is that possible? There are plenty of reasons kids at Columbia wouldn’t get busted as much (they can drink anywhere in the city, they are too cool to get drunk), but the laws of physics imply that there would be a high level of obvious partying up there in Morningside Heights. We’re talking:
Hundreds of Freshman + Dozens of Places to get IDs x Thousands of Delis Where Owners Don’t Care If You Are Underage / Limited Entrances And Exits To Dorms That Are Monitored For Safety = Easily Detectable Drunkenness
This makes us worry. Surely our proud Manhattan Ivy Leaguers should be getting busted more frequently. Clearly the school is not working hard enough. Or is it possible that our best and brightest are the second-lamest in all the Ivy League*? That would be pretty devastating.
How Do the Ivies Stack Up on Alcohol Enforcement? [Joe’s DartBlog via IvyGate]
*Daily Intel does not advocate underage drinking. As to whether or not we think it is “cool,” we plead the Fifth.
gossipmonger
Gwyneth: Hungry AND Pregnant?Gwyneth Paltrow may have gone to Mount Sinai Medical Center on Monday to deal with pregnancy complications. Pink is teaming up with PETA to help stop horse-drawn carriage rides in Central Park. Billionaire Band-Aid heiress Libet Johnson refused to let her husband, weight-loss guru Dr. Lionel Bissoon, see their adopted child after they broke up. WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne had BBQ and finger food at his wedding to former magazine editor Maile Carpenter this past weekend. Maroon Five guitarist James Valentine wrote about how much harder he used to party on his MySpace page. 5WPR founder Ronn Torossian has really low standards for the cases he’ll agree to take on. Ed Burns claims that critics in New York hate his films because he didn’t go to an Ivy League school and his dad’s a cop.
the sports section
A Look Back at the Other March MadnessWith the end of March, and, tonight, the end of its best-known Madness, we thought we’d let you in on a secret: There’s a different March Madness, and it took place last month on a different set of hardwood courts. It’s the College Squash Association Individual National Championships, which were held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Ringe Squash Center, and they were — you may be surprised to hear — as exciting to watch North Carolina State’s legendary comeback against Houston in the 1983 NCAA finals, just a little more understated.
intel
New York Rap Institution Turns to the Ivy LeagueNew York’s most revered independent rap label is banking on a pair of Ivy League rappers to resurrect it. Rawkus Records — founded in 1995 by Horace Mann grads Brian Brater and Jarrett Myer with $10,000 from Rupert scion and Harvard dropout James Murdoch — introduced Brooklynites Mos Def and Talib Kweli to a mass audience, made it into the big leagues, and then disappeared, dropped by Geffen Records in 2004. But this week saw its first major release since then, with School Was My Hustle, by the two-man act Kidz in the Hall, coming out on Halloween. The duo’s 22-year-old emcee, Penn alum Naledge, admires the label’s history. “You bought their records because of the brand,” he says. “It wouldn’t matter what the artist was; you knew if it was Rawkus, it was top-shelf.” And founder Myer thinks Kidz lives up to the tradition. “Right now,” he says, “investing the right artists can make Rawkus way bigger than it ever was.”
— Amos Barshad
