Around the Ivies: Falling from Frat Windows, Controversial Chaplains, and Even More Stanfordians
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Ivy grows on Harvard's Memorial Church on a warm August day.
The quick and dirty about what's been going on around the Ancient Eight (and other schools too).
College students across America may just have returned to campus, but the school year is already proving eventful.
Over at MIT, an intoxicated woman fell from a window at the Lamda Chi Alpha fraternity last week, taking the term “drunken stumble” to whole new levels. Luckily she survived the incident, but the same can’t be said for the fraternity’s social prospects. MIT has banned all fraternity, sorority, and independent living group gatherings of more than 49 people. Really, we’re just surprised that many people showed up in the first place.
In other falls from grace, Yale’s chaplain Rev. Bruce M. Shipman has resigned following the publication of his controversial three sentence letter on Gaza to the New York Times. Powerful words, clearly. No word on his future career plans, but we hear there’s a spot open at BU for a new Dean of Arts and Sciences.
Also suffering from campus controversy, an exposé of sorts on Dartmouth’s Greek life recently hit the shelves. Former SAE Dartmouth bro Andrew Lohse released a book titled “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: A Memoir,” that claims the frat served lemonade contaminated with urine, and asked its pledges to swim through feces, to name a few of the organization’s hazing offences. The book promises 320 pages of unsavory anecdotes and gross insights to Dartmouth’s Greek scene, and follows up to Lohse’s 2012 Rolling Stone feature. But apparently it’s true what they say: any publicity is good publicity, because Dartmouth’s SAE chapter has been more popular in the past two years than it had in the five before. Go figure.
Moving on to an institution that apparently doesn’t celebrate exclusivity, Stanford recently announced they’re planning to increase their undergraduate enrollment, and will be accepting around 100 extra students for the fall of 2016. We applaud their efforts, but commiserate with those 100 unlucky students who’ll be missing out on a single next year.
Also now more inclusive, Mount Holyoke will begin accepting applications not only from cisgender females, but also others who identify as women. The college’s president, Linda Pasquerella, made the announcement in her welcome address on September 2, in which she said the college recognized that “exclusion from the category of ‘woman’ based on properties of birth is nothing new”.