Mar 23

Ivy League Round-Up

Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Ivy League, Penn, Princeton, Yale

DEVON GRANDY (New York, New York)

Where Break Out The Oreos has fun with some of the recent headlines coming out of the Ancient Eight. Of course, this being Spring Break and all, “recent” gives us about a three week grace period. Bear with us. Oh, and Yale gets brownie points for giving BOTO twice the material to work with.

Seven Brown students were arrested this week at an anti-war rally in Providence. A whopping “more than twenty people” were present at the rally, which apparently succeeded only in demonstrating that Columbia students aren’t the only ones who stage self-defeating and inconsequential protests.

The rest after the jump:

Cornell’s men’s basketball team was shockingly routed by Stanford in the first round of the Big Dance. The Cornell Sun reports, qualifying a loss that was “20 years in the making” right off the bat with that classic, ageless qualification of collegiate athletic failure: “they’re still not a smarter school than us.” We know it well here at Columbia.

Dartmouth’s strange culture of wilderness alcoholism continues to evolve; students have reportedly been utilizing the university’s “Good Samaritan” policy to relocate their irritatingly drunk fellows from the dorm hall to health services, regardless of whether or not the subject of the calls is actually at risk of alcohol poisoning. Break Out The Oreos doesn’t remember much of Sunday school, but we remain convinced that the relevant biblical parable hinges on causing one’s classmates to wake up in Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center with a hangover and a dose of embarrassment.

Harvard’s Houses welcomed their new undergraduate compatriots at the end of the week in an event that can probably be summed up quite nicely by the first few words of the Crimson’s article: “Hints of late-morning vodka and the buzz of rivalrous housing chants wafted in front of Annenberg Hall…” Between quotes such as, “We’re hot, we’re drunk, we’re going to the quad!” and the strange obsession with animals, BOTO had to do a double-check to make sure that this story was indeed about Harvard and not Dartmouth. Photographic evidence of crimson provided all the verification we needed.

Penn will lose three of its chefs this summer to the Summer Olympics in Beijing. There is nothing else interesting happening at Penn. Nothing.

Pi Day at Princeton is apparently “a time of rejoicing,” proving that some people in the Ivy League never checked their nerdiness at the door. Regardless, BOTO is happy for the Princetonian’s senior writing staff, which must still be ecstatic off of the high of being able to publish the headline, “Have your pi and eat it too.” So ecstatic, in fact, that they forgot their capitalization and commas.

Tony Blair will teach a seminar at Yale next year as a visiting fellow. While making life extra-awkward for his son Euan (currently enrolled at Yale’s international relations graduate program), Blair may finally be able to bring some much-needed peace and prosperity to New Haven due to its uncanny parallels with Northern Ireland during his time as Prime Minister.

Yale will also play host to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will deliver a speech on climate change next month, commemorating the centennial of Teddy Roosevelt’s announcement of the Conference of Governors. BOTO recommends that the Yale University Press quickly establish the copyright for the title From Rough Rider to Governator: How Machismo in Power Saved America’s Resources.

Just for the record, one can actually type in “governator” to Wikipedia and be taken straight to Schwarzenegger’s article. What a strange world we live in.