Low-income students told by Princeton University to attend $52,000-a-year prep school.

Listen up, poor kids: This is as close as you'll get to Princeton probably.

Always having their fingers on the pulse of how the other half lives, Princeton University counselors have advised students--including those of low-income and financially strapped backgrounds--to attend Lawrenceville Prep, The Peddie School of New Jersey, and other prep schools to learn the "academic rigors" of the Ivy League staple before applying again (with no guarantee of admittance!). The guess is that Princeton assumes these students can also learn the economic rigors of being homeless soon, too.

Lawrenceville charges a $52,000-a-year tuition, all with little financial aid. BUT Lawrenceville boasts a nine hole golf course and a $380 million endowment, so that seems fair.

Princeton spokesperson Daniel Day told The Tab, "We recognize that some students might benefit from a post-graduate year of study after their high school graduation to help them strengthen their academic foundation." And that foundation of knowledge is seemingly built on wondering how you'll feed yourself while broke.

"Ultimately it is up to the student whether or not to complete a post-graduate year at any school," he added.

Ultimately the average and lower income family recognize that some schools, like Princeton, might benefit from learning that not everyone lives in a bubble of Xanadu-like wealth.

Poets Reading Poetry: Billy Collins

Poetry is meant to be read aloud, but rarely is. As Oscar Wilde once said, "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

So, cutting out the middle man, here is where we'll post famous poets reading their own poetry--the words off the page and in your ears, as they intended. And hopefully nothing is lost in the process.





In the separate--but often connected--worlds of academia and poetry, few ever garner major popular attention in our modern world. Yet, Billy Collins is about as close as what we have to trendy and fashionable in those worlds today.

From 2001 to 2003, Collins was the U.S. Poet Laureate, and for good reason. His work is lauded for being approachable, accessible, and admirable. It's often humorous and light, but without being flimsy. Collins regularly finds a slice of our everyday lives and remarks upon it, seemingly with a joke or two, but always with an underlying message to be had.

Approachability with Collins doesn't simply stand with his poetry, but with the man himself. In a world where famed writers often align themselves with Ivy League or elite institutions (ahem, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, etc.), Collins has chosen to work at places like Lehman College, Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, CUNY, and Rollins College.

He's gone on tour to read his work with singer/songwriter Aimee Mann. He regularly appeared on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show, and was even animated as himself for a PBS show about an animated dog called Martha Speaks. Collins has also given multiple TED talks, one of which was voted as one of the 100 best ever given. His approachability and popularity has become so infectious, that when signing a contract with Random House, he was given a six-figure advance, something unheard of in the world of poetry.

In the reading of "Marginalia," Collins' voice rarely is too animated, nor is it monotone. It's a voice that's straightforward, the kind you'd expect to hear while talking over coffee with a friend. It's accepting and observational and just wants to talk about your respective days.


Marginalia, by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
'Nonsense.' 'Please! ' 'HA! ! ' -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote 'Don't be a ninny'
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of 'Irony'
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
'Absolutely,' they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man! '
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written 'Man vs. Nature'
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; 
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'

So which college or university sent the most students to the 2016 Olympics?

There is no major rhyme or reason explaining which schools sent the most students to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, just like there's no rhyme or reason to Ryan Lochte. Some things defy explanation.

In U.S. News and World Report's list of the top 11 schools sending the most students to the Games (you know, ties happen, like in the Olympics--everyone gets a bronze!), you find Ivy League, Big 10, Big 12, SEC, and Pac 10 schools.

The list:
1.  Stanford University, 29 students
2.  University of California-Berkeley, 16
3.  UCLA, 15
3.  USC, 15
5.  Penn State University, 13
5.  UNC-Chapel Hill, 13
7.  University of Oregon, 12
7.  University of Texas-Austin, 12
9.  University of Washington, 11
9.  Princeton University, 11
9.  University of Georgia, 11

If you're wondering where your no-name NCAA Division III backwater Podunk of a powerhouse college ranks, let's assume not too high.

Unless Cheetos consumption becomes a competitive sport, plenty of us from no-name schools will have to find our rooting interest in the athletes that matter. Like that flag bearer guy from Tonga. Nobody flag beared better at flag bearering like that guy. He won, like, six gold medals in flag bearing, I think.

Poor school and rich school are not the same school.

The Commonwealth School, founded in 1957, is a tony private institution in Boston. With a yearly tuition of $40,000, it typically sends students off to MIT and Ivy League universities.

The Commonwealth Academy, founded in 2011, is a small private school 90-miles away in Springfield, MA. With a yearly tuition of under $1,200, it typically does not see students attend the elite educational colleges of America.

This hasn't stopped the School from filing a $2 million lawsuit against the Academy claiming "irreparable harm" and financial loss that is "presently incalculable" has occurred. Why? Because both facilities use the word "Commonwealth" in their name.

While the School claims they didn't even know the Academy existed until 2015, School headmaster William Wharton tells the Boston Globe that the word is "a part of our identity, and it’s something that we ultimately have to protect." Nothing like stopping confusion among things by creating confusion in the first place.

One major sticking point is that Massachusetts officially goes by the title of Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (As do Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.) With both institutions located in the same state, and thousands of different locations and buildings in the state all labeled with the word, it's a tricky argument by the School.

Then there's one other minor issue, if this isn't already too much commonwealth for you to handle in one sitting: There's already a separate Commonwealth Academy, located in Virginia, who says they're perfectly content with the similarly named school in Massachusetts.

A hearing on the matter is expected to be held on July 12th.

In the meantime, no common sense or common good can apparently come from "Commonwealth."

Facebook is less particular about their hiring practices, while still being particular.

Potentially an executive at Facebook.

Investment banking.

Law.

Consulting firms.

A small handful of other professions.

Does your mom or dad wear a monocle or own a Bentley [but only with a man servant behind the wheel]? Did your grandfather have a closet full of top hats and smoking pipes? Do you know the elderly nanny that raised you better than your mother and father?  Does your name sound like a piece of furniture from Pottery Barn? Congratulations! You won the life lottery, and odds are you're employed in a small segment of career fields that desire such a background.

Facebook once operated similarly as well. As a smaller, promising upstart years ago born of Harvard's bosom, Facebook focused on hiring from a pool of candidates largely out of Ivy League schools, with the occasional Stanford thrown in for good measure. But today, as powerful companies focus solely on pedigree regardless of ability, the pool has drained thin. Very thin. This has led Facebook to expand their own talent pool search.

"We recruit from three hundred schools," Facebook vice president Janelle Gale mentioned at a San Francisco educator conference recently, all while shuffling her abacus and looking to be awarded a gold star. "We want to hire people who’s need to learn is greater than their need to be right," Gale said. What does that even mean? I don't know, but it's exciting in its ambiguity!

"We want people who are open and receptive. We want to make sure people are in jobs they are good at and enjoy," she continued.  People who are open and receptive and willing to accept being wrong when told so? Sounds like me as a bagger boy at a grocery store when I was fourteen. Where do I sign up?

Gale never specifically detailed the alleged three hundred schools Facebook recruits from, but Forbes analyzed LinkedIn's searchable database and found "at least 40 Facebook employees attended Arizona State, while nearly as many hail from Cal State, Chico. The University of Oregon has at least a dozen alumni at Facebook; Texas Tech can count six."

That's a steep drop off. Texas Tech counts six and we're only four schools into counting. Incuding the Ivy League and a handful of other overly connected schools, we still have a list of roughly 280 schools to flesh out. So how thin is this Facebook job search?

This is all related to what Lauren Rivera wrote late last year in the Harvard Business Review, studying how elite corporations have an incestuous relationship with elite schools, creating a cycle of elitist entitlement. "[Elite professions have] on-campus “school lists” [with] two tiers, based largely on prestige," Rivera notes. "So even before applications are received, employers allocate jobs based on alma mater, skewing opportunities toward (and against) students from particular campuses [...] This leaves most students from nonlisted schools out of the game."

Phew. At least we now know Facebook's hiring ambiguity wasn't done out of nobility but just pure necessity. The plebeian masses thought they might have a chance for a second, and that can't happen.

Even distinguished people have failed before.

You'd never know it of course. In an era where social media allows individuals to craft idealized versions of themselves for public consumption, you'd never realize that failure and disappointment exists for others.

Princeton University psychology assistant professor Johannes Haushofer decided to post a CV of every professional and academic failure he's encountered in his career, including rejections from degree programs, research journals, and funding for projects. Haushofer did this to "balance the record" in the public sphere and hopefully encourage others facing similar disappointments.

New "publication": My CV of Failures! https://t.co/d8ot5vvynY

— Johannes Haushofer (@jhaushofer) April 23, 2016

As Haushofer wrote on his website:


"Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible," he noted.

"I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me.

"As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days."


So when life has you down because you're somehow reenacting the lyrics to a stereotypical 1970s-era country song, when life is really just miserable, realize even an Ivy League professor has had those days, too.

Over 1,200 Columbia University students aren't fans of modernist art, but big supporters of crisp lawns.

Henry Moore was a famed English-born sculptor. Maybe you're not well-versed in famous 20th century sculptors because you have an active social life outside the realm of scultping or don't dabble in multimillion dollar lawn art.

But Moore's sculptures are found around the world. How "around the world" are we talking?

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Piazza San Marco, Prato, Italy
Toronto City Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Kenwood House Grounds, London, England
Jardine House, Central, Hong Kong
Zürichhorn, Zürich-Seefeld, Switzerland
Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Bouwcentrum, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany
--and on--
--and on--
--countless international locations--
And the list continues on around the world until you eventually include:
Columbia University, New York City, New York, USA

And what would be the point of stating how worldly accepted Moore's work is?

Over 1,200 students have signed a petition published in the school's newspaper arguing against the placement of Moore's Reclining Figure (1969-70) in front of the school's library simply because they think it's ugly. Thank goodness, too, because in a world of chaos, violence, and injustice, I'd hate to see so many people get behind something trivial.

The petition is passionate in its plea (my thoughts/sarcasm in parentheses):

As both inheritors and wards (ooh, they went big time and dropped a "wards" in there) of our beautiful campus ('beautiful'--funny word to use when you're arguing against art), we object to this desecration of our home. ('Desecrate' means a violation of something nearly sacred, like knocking over tombstones. In other words, Columbia is old and forgotten?) Whatever its artistic merits (said with a dismissive hand wave/finger snap), the sculpture in front of Butler Library will disrupt an otherwise crisp, geometric, and symmetrical landscape. ('Crisp' should only reference salads and January mornings.) Further, Moore’s modernist figure clashes with the neoclassical aesthetic instantly recognizable to generations of Columbians. (My long-deceased great-great-great-great grandfather will never recognize the place now.) It will also rob the the community of some of the few precious square yards of grass open to the public. (Yes, come gather, all of New York City, on yards on grass.)

The snow is hiding all the yards of crispness!!

The petition won't hold. Moore's Reclining Figure already has a base constructed outside of Butler Library and is soon to be set, ready to assault the tender sensibilities of Columbia's huddled, frightened masses.

This is Columbia University, not Canada. Toronto's City Hall might slum it with a Moore sculpture and amuse that hoi polloi, but they elected a mayor high on crack after all. Columbia students would suggest that explains Toronto's choice in art.



photos: Columbia and Wiki Commons

Cornell's endowment chief is leaving $6 billion fund, apparently because he wasn't making the endowment enough money?

A.J. Edwards, endowment head of Cornell University, still brought a return on the endowment year after year. It just appears it wasn't enough.

On a $6 billion endowment, Edwards averaged a 10% return every year over a five year period through 2014, but that's slightly below the 10.4% return other universities with an endowment over $1 billion saw.

Remember, this is an endowment. It's essentially money to sit on, which a university will do next to nothing with except to say, "Hey, look how big our endowment is!"

The final straw for Edwards came after the 2015 fiscal season saw only a 3.4% return--again, a positive--which some felt was a stark contrast to Princeton, which had a 12.7% return on their endowment investments.

But it's Cornell after all. It's supposed to pale in comparison to Princeton. Everyone knows this. When you rattle off the eight Ivy League schools, you inevitably stop at after six, pause, and entirely forget Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania are the last two.

Hell, the University of Pennsylvania is just happy if you don't call it Penn State.

A new college ranking says your best bet is to go to...CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College?

A ranking of 900 colleges and universities by a company called CollegeNet focused not on prestige, but on how much bang for your buck you get for attending the institution. Specifically, how well do various places of higher learning provide improvement on economic mobility and how affordable are these schools to families of disadvantaged financial means?

The top ten schools according to CollegeNet are nothing remotely close to those found in the Princeton Review or U.S. News and World Report's annual listings.

CollegeNet's ten are (with U.S. News and World Report's ranking as comparison):

And where do U.S. News and World Report's top five colleges and universities rank on CollegeNet's social mobility index?

I think we all kind of knew on some level that what's-its-face school...hold on, let me look it up again...uhh...CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College was where we all dreamed to go.


Ranking Graphs: CollegeNet, U.S. News, via Yahoo

Cornell's president wants students to put away their electronics and get some sleep.

Cornell University president Elizabeth Garrett isn't thrilled with students sleeping less and less these days, and wants to see that trend turn around.

As she tells the Huffington Post, "I always worry about them because you deal better with things when you're rested and have a sense of balance and good judgment."

I assume everyone at Cornell must be an insomniac, because otherwise they'd have the good judgment not to go to Cornell, amiright?? (((rim-shot!)))

Studies show that people who drastically sleep less than they should tend to be more at risk for depression, risky behaviors, and memory loss. So Garrett has some advice for incoming freshman.

"Don't be constantly looking at your cell phone, or listening to things, and interact with your colleagues face to face in real time," Garrett tells HuffPo, "because you can't replicate the kinds of engagement that you have in a group of people sitting around watching each other's facial expressions."

Like the facial expression of disappointment when you realize you attend Cornell.

Alas, I assume this is what every incoming freshman at Cornell looks like:






Real time? What is real time? Is there fake time? Real time is one of those silly phrases that people use that doesn't actually mean anything--and this is coming from an individual running an Ivy League institution. She probably means in person, at that moment. Otherwise, Garrett is dipping into the human construct of what time actually is, a rationalization of existence broken into measured units. That's a philosophical debate I didn't see happening when talking about sleep.

And "listening to things"? Listening to what? Does Garrett mean an iPod? A fan in order to have white noise? Or am I staring at my couch and hoping it will talk to me? Because these are all things, but they all suggest different levels of mental health. Specificity would help so we all knew what she meant.

Prisoners debate Harvard students, and the prisoners won.

The Bard Prison Initiative, part of Bard College located in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y, seeks to change the perception of prisoners convicted of violent crime, as well as put the "correction" in "correctional facility."

Part of this initiative has led to a prisoner debate team, which started in 2014. The team takes on some of the bigger powerhouse colleges and universities throughout the country, and isn't just competing--they're succeeding. Their latest success? Defeating Harvard.

“They caught us off guard,” Anais Carell, a 20-year-old junior from Chicago, told The Wall Street Journal.

As Alex Hall, a 31-year-old from Manhattan convicted of manslaughter countered, “We might not be as naturally rhetorically gifted, but we work really hard.”

The $2.5 million budget for the program isn't supplied by the state (which cowers at using tax dollars to educate prisoners), but instead by private donations.

Studies show the Bard Prison Initiative program actually works long-term. 40% of general population prisoners end up arrested within three years of their release. Those prisons with strong educational programs have recidivism rates that drop to 22%. By comparison, the recidivism rate for alumni of the Bard Prison Initiative program during that same time period is only 2%.

Putting the "correction" back into "correctional facility." What a concept.



Full disclosure: I have worked on educational programs through a prison. Some of the smartest, most gifted individuals I've ever known were men who committed a violent crime--often, usually, a crime of passion. A crime I could commit. A crime you could commit. A crime any of us would commit if placed in the same situation, position, or bearing in life.

And these same men I'd trust with my life, despite the fact that some might have already taken the life of another. Because they accomplished the one thing most any of you reading this cannot do--that I cannot do--and that is correct what needs correcting in ourselves.

Forbes releases their list of America's top colleges.

You know, the usual suspects.

Poll of graduates shows Harvard University is every stereotype you've envisioned.

Harvard University's school newspaper, The Crimson, polls graduating seniors every year regarding a myriad of topics, and this year's results are either to be expected or frightening, depending on how much of a cynic/realist you are.

The highlights:

Hey, Big Spender!

19.42% of graduating males report their first job's starting salary will be $90,000 or more, with 6.2% reporting they will earn more than $110,000 starting immediately. (Now would be the time to wax poetic about that time you graduated college and worked as a waiter at Applebees.) There's income inequality among genders at Harvard though, as only 3.57% of females report they will earn a starting salary of more than $90,000 upon graduation. The glass ceiling is universal, regardless of economic background.

Overall, nearly 70% of males and 45% of females report they will earn at least a $50,000 salary with their first job. In case you're wondering, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median individual income for any American is roughly $29,000.


So everyone on Wall Street attended Harvard?

The finance industry is attracting the plurality of graduates. Nearly 1-in-4 male Harvard graduates report entering the finance field, and 31% of all graduating seniors, male or female, report their first job will either be in finance or consulting.


Put another way, it's not an accepting place.

When it comes to accepting diversity on campus, Harvard apparently has a long way to go. 36% of non-white students reported feeling marginalized during their time at the university, with 60% of African Americans responding as such.

Likewise, sexual assault is abundantly prevalent on campus, with 12% of females and 2% of males reporting they have been sexually assaulted during their time at Harvard. Of those who responded about being assaulted, only 16% ever reported the crime.

42% of all Harvard graduates reported seeking out mental health counseling at some point. Of those that directly sought help through the school, 57.9% were neutral, dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied with their treatment. This contrasts greatly with students who sought counseling through off-campus means, where 74.4% of respondents reported they were satisfied or very satisfied with their treatment.


Politicians learn from a young age.

And, lastly, the Crimson reports that 17% of all Harvard graduating seniors admitted to cheating on their academics while attending the school.

The real kicker? Those who admit to be entering the field of politics proclaim to be much more honest. Only 7% of potential politicians admitted they ever cheated academically.

College student who was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools makes his decision where to attend.

In a surprise to everyone, Tunde Ahmad selected Cornell University.

No-HA! No one would ever do that.

Ahmad chose Yale. It's always Harvard or Yale.

Here he is on the Ellen Degeneres Show making his decision, where Ellen also gives him the good news that she'll pick up the tuition tab.

Harvard doesn't have books made of human skin.

For nearly a decade, the idea has floated around the internet about Harvard channeling its inner Silence of the Lambs, even though actual evidence was limited at best.

The university's newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, published an article back in 2006 claiming rare books existed in the school's collection that were bound and covered with human flesh.

An inscription is to blame. One book in question states the following:

“The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.”

This inscription alone has caused speculation for years that poor Jonas Wright was really having a bad day. Yet, according to Harvard Law School's blog, research done by Daniel Kirby, a conservation scientist at Harvard University's Art Museums' Straus Center, used something called peptide mass fingerprinting to analyze the cover and bindings of the book to discern once and for all if Jonas has forever been memorialized in literal literary form.

The findings? The cover is sheepskin, the glue is is a mixture of cattle and pig collagen.

And, thus, this is probably the last anyone will care about Jonas Wright. He just can't win in this situation.




Photo: via Harvard Law blog

Harvard receives a record $150 million gift.

For a university sitting on a $32 billion endowment, the last thing it needs is another kiss of cash from a former student. But whereas countless donations to schools go in the form of having buildings named after the benefactor, hedge-fund chieftain Ken Griffin has a specific reason for his donation of the biggest monetary gift in the school's nearly 400-year old existence.

The $150 million is to be used to fund students less financially affluent than your typical Ivy Leaguer, providing full scholarships for 200 undergraduates, and offering matching funds for 600 others. Current tuition at Harvard runs around $39,000, but including fees, room and board, and other costs, the price is closer to $56,000.

In case you're wondering, according to CNN, 20% of Harvard's students come from families who earn less than $65,000 a year. The US Census Bureau reports that the median household income in the United States between 2008-2012 was $53,046--meaning more than 80% of Harvard students come from affluent (or, at least, quite financially comfortable) backgrounds, at least by American standards.

And there's your education equality in America.

Helen Mirren twerks at Harvard.

Because it's more interesting than Miley doing it.

The 68-year old Oscar winner was honored as Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals' Woman of the Year. The undergraduate drama troupe is the oldest of its kind in the United States, and annually bestows an honor on a male and female actor who have made a lasting impact to the profession.

Part of the award process requires the winner to perform weird pop culture quirks (twerking!), while male troupe members dress in drag.

Yeah, the Hasty Pudding crowd has their fingers on the pulse of comedy, circa 1933.

Most common grade at Harvard University is an A, admits dean.

Confirming suspicions of a grade inflation issue at one of America's premier colleges and universities, the Dean of Undergraduate Education at Harvard University, Jay M. Harris, told the school newspaper the most commonly awarded grade is an A, while the median grade is an A-.

A university full of geniuses? Not quite. The same issue has plagued many colleges and universities, most notably the Ivy League variety. A review of grades at Yale University between 2010 and 2012 showed that 62% of all grades were in the A range.

This all comes on the heals of Princeton University's desire to reexamine its grading policy implemented in 2004, which required that no more than 35% of an individual class's grades should be an A. Critics deem it grade deflation, which puts Princeton in the back of the pack when it comes to which Ivy League school the elites want to attend.

As Yale student Aaron Berman told the school newspaper, "The feeling I got after visiting Princeton was that the grade deflation put too much pressure on students and made students feel as if they were competing for grades."

Because if there's one thing a student shouldn't do, it's work hard for a grade.

Harvard students asked what the capital of Canada is. No one knows.

As someone who grew up and spent most of their life near the campuses and students of Harvard, MIT, Tufts, etc...

Yeah.

Admittedly, Ottawa is a strange, mystical city of the north, full of elves and gnomes. You can't expect people to know that.

'Poopetrator' attacking Yale laundry rooms.

The Yale Daily News reports someone has been terrorizing the Saybrook College laundry room by defecating on clothing left behind in dryers. The 'Poopetrator' has delivered their calling card of chaos on unattended clothes four times in the past month.

Student Lucy Fleming, who had her clothes soiled by the turd terrorist, tells the student newspaper, "The fact that this could happen at Yale is shocking to me. Think about what this means for our community."

It means someone needs to invest in some Charmin.







The best part of the article is in the comments, where Yalies show they can keep things in perspective:

"How could something like this happen at Yale? It would NEVER happen at Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia. Just saying..."

"The perp will fit right in with the #OccupyWallStreet crowd."

"I am letting loose a wail of shame and fear! A sad day for all Yale students, faculty, janitors, and most of all parents."

A "wail of shame and fear."

A wail. Of shame. And fear.