It’s Hell Week! Starting on Monday, IvyGate will be devoting its bloggy energies and quasi-journalistic faculties to the Ivy League’s not-so-secret culture of hazing. It’s going to be (as they say) a haze fest.

So get excited for that. In the meantime, we’re especially hungry for hot tips—from you!—on hazing (of course), Greek malfeasance (for example), and any other dirt you might have on the most ambitious young people in the world treating their peers terribly.

Do you have any incriminating emails, pictures, or videos (or some hell-forsaken artifacts we’re not aware of)? Send them to us! There’s two ways to get in touch with IvyGate:

1) Email us. Easy. Anonymity guaranteed, but you knew that already.

2) Or call us! In honor of Gawker circa 2008, IvyGate now has a tip-line. Check it: (917) 830-7IVY — i.e., (917) 830-7489. It’s a Google Voice number that’ll go straight to voicemail. Dial *67 before calling to obscure your phone number.

This should be fun.

That was a little bizarre: Esolen and the Undergraduates for a Better Yale College (the group organizing True Love Week) both wish to regulate the private behavior of consenting adults. That’s the whole point of Esolen’s writings and of True Love Week in general: to tell others what to do. (In this sense, UBYC and a certain Ivy League sex columnist have much in common.) So we asked again: in the world of True Love Week, where do gay people stand?

In light of the extremely deviant kiss-in that interrupted Esolen’s lecture, we’re publishing the full wall of text we soon received from Eduardo Andino ’13 (pictured), another officer of UBYC, whom we paraphrased in the original post:

[Undergraduates for a Better Yale College] was created, as the name indicates, to address the problems of sexual culture on Yale’s campus. We began with the interpretation that campus events such as DKE and the Title IX complaints are symptoms of an underlying malady, a disturbing sexual obsession. As such, it is not an organization which has been made to lay out a comprehensive philosophical system that addresses all sexual questions. Our opposition to Sex Week should be a good indication of what we stand for: a campus that is less obsessed with sex and physical pleasure and more focused on love of the person (note that these two things are not mutually exclusive; rather, sexuality ought to take place within the greater context of love and commitment, which sheer physical desire alone cannot achieve). It is our belief that pursuit of genuine love brings a humanizing effect to campus, and that a lax attitude towards sexuality leads to objectification and disrespect among students (hence DKE, hence claims of a rape culture). We believe that events like Sex Week 2010 indicated that the campus was not only unhealthily fixated on sex, but to a degree that indicated an impending social crisis if things continued to deteriorate. That is precisely the reason we took seriously the idea of calling upon the administration to call off Sex Week, as did the Marshall Committee a couple of months later. The speakers for True Love Week were chosen with an eye towards promoting the idea I stated earlier, that the pursuit of physical pleasure alone and the exclusive focus on sex creates an environment of exploitation, disrespect, and degradation. Sex Week leaves a gap in the anthropology of sexuality by focusing only on (gratuitous) physical pleasure and the act of sex itself. It makes hardly any mention of the interpersonal element of human love and relationship, which is the only context in which sex can be truly satisfying and happy.

Hmm, well. We’re not very convinced that the question of gay people requires a “comprehensive philosophical system” for UBYC to muster an answer. And it’s a little disingenuous to claim that an organization whose website devotes thousands of words, spread over many essays, to explaining their world-view, doesn’t at least attempt to construct a philosophy to defend their leering fixation on the sexual lives of their peers.

Also! Andino appended his wall of text with this:

I cannot help but feel that the tone of this conversation became confrontational before it even began. I invite you to come to True Love Week events and see for yourself what they have to offer. Your tenor suggests you are attempting to catch us in a snare so you can mock us on your blog. I am not fond of this approach. See what we are doing for yourself, and then say what you will, but please do not put us in your inquisitorial chair for questioning. The mean-spirited nature of most of your blog posts and your tendency to delight in gossip does not give me any desire to engage in conversation with you.

Zing!

But really. This is a leader of a group which asks others for the benefit of the doubt, which summons a plea for tolerance for those “with whom they disagree”, and then invites a professor who details, in several thousand words, why he thinks gay people should disappear forever. If good-natured discussion and tolerance are the principles on which the Undergraduates for a Better Yale College believe they stand, inviting such a comprehensively bigoted and intolerant speaker is a strange way to say so.

On Monday, Bijan Aboutorabi ‘12, an officer of Undergraduates for a Better Yale College, which is just here to help, of course, told the attendees of Anthony Esolen’s Monday lecture (part of “True Love Week”) that he’s “very interested to see if Yale students, without disruption, can tolerate someone with whom they disagree.” Why would he say that in the first place? According to the Yale Daily News, Aboutorabi had “heard certain rumors concerning [Esolen’s lecture].” Certain rumors, you say? Hmm! Elsewhere in the News, a columnist said that “Esolen had written a 10-part manifesto decrying homosexuality.”

Looks like IvyGate’s discovery of Anthony Esolen’s treatise against gay marriage and gay people in general struck a chord—though not among IvyGate’s commenters, hilariously—because a group of students interrupted Esolen’s talk on “The Person as a Gift” by making out in front of everyone. There were gay couples! Straight couples! And Esolen’s personal nightmare—lesbian couples!

And now IvyGate has the video. Upon someone playing “I’m Coming Out” about 12 couples rise from their seats and commence making out all over each other. Eww, gross! Sexuality! As they leave, you can hear them chanting “1 in 4, maybe more!” It’d be amusing if Esolen knows what that refers to (God-fearing Christians, obviously). The good stuff begins about forty seconds in.

The footage was furnished by an undergraduate filming the lecture for her thesis; she tells IvyGate that she “didn’t even know that the Kiss-In was happening until after the presentation started.” She also says that Esolen’s preamble was “absurd”—apparently he discussed how Celtic step-dancing “exemplif[ied] the virtues of the nuclear family.” (You can hear a student yell “Gays hate step-dancing!” at the end of the video.)

Minus the race-baiting Prince column, it’s happening all over again, this time with an unnamed Asian-American of Indian descent, who has filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights against Harvard and Princeton for discriminating against Asian applicants. The complaints have stirred sundry responses of equally mild outrage. Even the more right-wingy op-eds read as though their authors are posed in perpetual shrugs.

There may be a decent explanation for the befuddling lack of concern, as Daniel de Vise of the Washington Post argues. The entire basis for the 2006 complaint, and the current complaints against Princeton and Harvard, is that Asian applicants whom either school admits almost always possess the highest SAT scores of their class. However, as de Vise points out:

[R]emember that Asian-Americans outscore all other racial and ethnic groups on the SAT. A college where Asian students have lower SAT math scores than whites would be a statistical oddity.

Which means the whole problem is more likely found in that sinister totem of elite colleges: holistic admissions. As both a phrase and an idea, “holistic admissions” is sort of misleading: it describes the method whereby colleges admit a carefully calibrated freshman class, not individual applicants. Such a process contradicts the bizarre caricature that statistical studies paint of college admissions. To draw a meaningful conclusion from, say, this Princeton study, you’re required to imagine that admissions committees serially pit the applications of two students against each other, much like an episode of Celebrity Deathmatch. (Which would be really exciting to watch, no?)

Probably the biggest concern is that if Harvard and Princeton can be found to discriminate against Asians based on statistics alone, then pretty much every elite college (with the exception of Berkeley, and apparently CalTech) can be found to discriminate against Asians. If that’s true, it would be an enormous (and very newsworthy) conspiracy. And if it is a conspiracy, then Harvard and Princeton appear to be exceptionally incompetent conspirators: though Asians account for some 5% of the U.S. population, they make up, respectively, 17% and 19% of Harvard’s and Princeton’s undergraduate bodies.

Actually, though, it’s about people being really stupid and unethical.

Take, for example, how the whole drama began. How in the world did the Rhodes Trust obtain personal details from Yale’s “confidential” reporting process? Via an informal tip furnished by an unnamed Yale official, of course. That’s not even the dumbest part. A Yale spokesman told the Times that the university “very strongly believes in the confidentiality policies we have in place.” As if those policies had meant anything to begin with! As if they weren’t right then self-destructing!

Consequently, it is beyond doubt that more people now know the identity of Witt’s accuser than if she had remained silent. Witt has described her with enough words that any of his 3,520 Facebook friends could probably figure out her name:

Patrick is aware that the informal complaint was filed by a person he had known for many months prior and with whom he had engaged in an on-again, off-again relationship beginning in the Spring of 2011 and ending about two months before the informal complaint was filed.

Witt’s initial story, in which he was cast as the scholar-athlete stuck between a Rhodes and a hard place—a.k.a. Hamlet, as Bloomberg News called him—was considered, ironically, “the perfect antidote to the Penn State morass.” As it turns out, Yale’s capacity to lie was not limited by the incompetence of its football team. (You may recall that in the game for which Witt supposedly sacrificed his Rhodes candidacy, Yale lost by 38 points.) Like Penn State, Yale’s first and perhaps only interest was its own. That is the only imaginable reason why Yale “unofficially informed” the Rhodes Trust of the complaint, and why it continues to pretend that it didn’t.

The comparison to Penn State is apt in another way, too. The media valorized Patrick Witt in the same manner it crucified Penn State: with relentless and sometimes unthinking coverage (like when the Times accidentally revealed the identity of one of Jerry Sandusky’s victims). Unlike Penn State, however, Patrick Witt is more than just the subject of media attention. He is also largely created by it. Perhaps that’s why certain members of the press—including and especially the staff of the Yale Daily News—appear so invested in maintaining his image, and why other members seem so determined to expose it.

“True Love Week” 

Meet Anthony Esolen, Princeton alum and English professor at Providence College, who will deliver “The Person as a Gift” for True Love Week on Monday. Before UBYC courted the scholar of Renaissance English Literature, Esolen wrote and published an elaborate, ranting, ten-part treatise against gay marriage, in which Esolen blames gay marriage for the destruction of platonic male friendships, the divorce rate of heterosexual couples, and the death of culture itself.

When IvyGate inquired about Esolen’s work, UBYC’s Bijan Aboutorabi told us that his “writings about same-sex marriage aren’t really in UBYC’s topical purview, so [he couldn’t] offer a comment on that subject.”

When we pointed out that UBYC is advertising True Love Week with an enormous pair of gold-plated wedding rings, another officer, Eduardo Andino, told us that UBYC “is not an organization which has been made to lay out a comprehensive philosophical system that addresses all sexual questions.”

You can read all of Esolen’s essays here: Part 1 and 2; Part 3 and 4; Part 5 and 6; Part 7 and 8; and Part 9 and 10.

Don’t want to, though? You’re in luck: here’s IvyGate’s official field guide to Professor Esolen’s elaborate conspiracy theory of gay people, in ten parts (with a bonus bit about lesbians):

1. Gay marriage is basically the same as unwed motherhood, abortion, and child abandonment:

Some people reckon up the losses from [the sexual] revolution in terms of percentages: of unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father.  It will take artists of the most penetrating insight to reckon up the losses as they ought to be reckoned, in human misery. SOURCE

2. Gay marriage is the end of civilization:

What man and woman do in the marriage bed is not “have” sex; the sex, that is the separation, they are provided with already.What they do is to unite, across the separation.And unless man and woman unite — and, given their differences, it always amazes me that they can — the culture cannot survive.The women will split away to protect their persons and their relatively few children; the unattached males will pass the dull hours in destruction. SOURCE

3. Gay marriage pits men and women against each other:

Men no longer celebrate the beauty of women they admire from afar, whose hand they aspire to hold; more to the point, men are no longer inspired by women, as Dante was by his Beatrice, and Petrarch by his Laura. The reasons are distressing. It takes a good man to admire a woman, and a good woman to be admired by a man. But does a good man snarl at woman, calling her names that I do not care to repeat here, or, even if he is too polite to use the words, treating her as such? Does a good woman look down with ignorant contempt upon her brothers?

Perhaps the reader will ask what homosexuality has to do with this problem. It is simple: the acceptance of homosexuality is predicated upon the tacit assumption that male and female are not made for one another. SOURCE

4. Gay marriage destroys chastity:

But how can we recommend chastity to the young, when we enshrine the principal that what they do with their genitals is strictly their own business, and that such activity is all for personal fulfillment? What value can sexual restraint possibly have, except as some cold, calculating means towards keeping one’s resume clean along the road to wealth and power? In particular, how can we even talk about chastity when we accept homosexuality? For a homosexual defines himself or herself by the action. A teenager calls himself homosexual because he has performed homosexual acts. SOURCE

5. Gay marriage destroys male friendship:

Confess, reader: if you come upon two teenage boys in a pond skinny-dipping, it is the first thing you will think, and you will think it despite the obvious fact that before bathing suits were invented it was the only way two boys could ever be found swimming. SOURCE

6. Gay marriage necessitates legalizing incest, having sex in public, bestiality, child abuse, and necrophilia:

On what grounds could we deny a marriage license to an adult brother and sister? Reasons of health? Not if the brother can prove he has had a vasectomy, or not if she can prove she has had her tubes tied. Why stop here? What about people whose desires cannot be fulfilled unless they perform sexual actions in public? Or with animals? Or with precocious children? Or with the dead — so long as the dead can be shown to have consented? SOURCE

7. Gay marriage will convince everyone to get divorced:

We must retrace our steps: we must bring some semblance of justice back to divorce law. But how can we do this, while legalizing homosexual “marriage”? Again, the principle for the legalization is simply that people have a right to “fulfill” themselves sexually. But some marriages are unhappy—or some people who are married come to think that it would be more “fulfilling” to leap over the fence. How can we deny them this? Or how can we blame them for it? How can we penalize the breaker of a family, when his or her motives are exactly the same as those we have blessed in the case of the homosexual. SOURCE

8. Gay marriage is in fact a psychosexual childhood quest for legitimacy (or something along those lines):

Whatever the cause, suppose a boy who is rejected by the most important males in his life: the neighborhood boys, or his brothers, or, most perilously, his father. The longing for male companionship does not go away; and remember, the boyish friendship is expressed with an active and frank physicality. What happens now may depend on other factors: the presence of some one friend in whom he can trust, or a loving father who will make rejection by the other boys pale in importance. Failing that, the boy must struggle on his own to define himself as a boy, or must accept that he “deserves” to be rejected by the others, because he is not a real boy. This struggle is for the central fact of the boy’s existence—and that too is unwittingly supported by homosexuals, who alone among people of all kinds of sexual habits associate their very identities with their longings. SOURCE

9. Gay marriage will treat gay people like adults:

If people understand that some folks are unfortunately attracted to members of their own sex, and if, while they neither seek to reveal it nor feel compelled to punish it, they make it known as a matter of cultural custom that they do not approve of it, then the homosexual is provided with a sane and merciful curb on his behavior.That explains why homosexuals seem to plunge further and further into the bizarre and self-destructive, precisely in those places where bigotry against them is slight or nonexistent. SOURCE

10. Gay marriage will make children think gay people exist:

If homosexual “marriage” is condoned, then of course kissing, holding hands, celebrating anniversaries, talking about your first date, and all the rest must be condoned.If a teacher can casually mention where he met his wife, then the homosexual teacher can casually mention where he met his husband. SOURCE

BONUS: Lesbianism is really bad:

The reader will have noticed that I have spoken mainly about male homosexuality, and have only lightly touched upon lesbianism.  Indeed I think lesbianism is the more dangerous of the two, involving a far more radical rejection of the opposite sex, though it would take a long and very different essay to delve into its etiology and the prognosis for a society that accepts it. SOURCE

The couple’s competing pedigrees—Princeton B.A., Yale J.D. vs. Penn B.A., Columbia J.D.—raise just one very, very important question: why wasn’t this announced in the Times wedding section two months ago? Seriously. The Bobbitts are genetically engineered for Sunday Styles. (Where else can anxious Ivy Leaguers scrutinize the mating rituals of their peers?) Well, it wasn’t for either spouse’s desire for privacy. Oh, Lord no:

Professor Bobbitt asked Justice Kagan if she would be willing to officiate, and she readily agreed. “She’s the most delightful person,” he said of Justice Kagan. “She said it was a terrific idea and she’d love to do it.”

The ceremony itself, held in the chambers of Justice Kagan, was very intimate, with fewer than a dozen guests. Two of Professor Bobbitt’s college classmates from Princeton — Jerome Davis, the Secretary of Columbia University, and Greg Treverton, former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council — were present. Maya was joined by some of her classmates from Penn.

Justice Kagan officiated. Her clerks had created a homemade “Just Married” sign for the occasion (which you can see in the photos below). Another old friend of Professor Bobbitt’s, Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar, sent down several bottles of Veuve Clicquot.

“It was lovely,” Professor Bobbitt recalled. “Unfortunately, we had to come back to New York that night because we had to fly out the next morning to Europe for our honeymoon.”

“Just Married”! Delightful! Very intimate! Too bad, though, that the bride is not, as rumored, a Turkish princess:

In response to this rumor, Professor Bobbitt quipped: “A charming thought — she definitely has a royal attitude toward my closets — but as far as I know, she is not a princess to any recognized authority other than her Jack Russell.”

But according to the New York Post, it’s not so clear why, or even if, Kwek killed herself. Her brother-in-law, Vincenzo Campanella, told the Post that Kwek’s suicide was “very hard for [Kwek’s family] to believe”:

I know my sister-in-law. She’s not like that. To jump out 16 floors takes a lot—to take your life. It all seems a little too fishy. She’s not one to be attached to a guy like that. She’s strong and smart and involved.

“Yesterday,” the Post adds, “Small was seen walking outside his building, staring at the ground, his hands in his pockets.”:

Asked why such a beautiful woman would end her life, he said, ‘I really don’t know why. She was really, really sad, I guess.’

When asked how he was dealing with the tragedy, Small replied, ‘I’m mortified.’

The New York Daily News initially classified Kwek’s death as a suicide—specifically, a “Columbia Coed’s Death Plunge for Love”—before substituting the article’s title with the slightly ungrammatical “Columbia coed Samantha Kwek in death plunge from midtown balcony over breakup with beau” and adding a photograph of Kwek’s body covered with a bloody sheet.

In 2010, a Yale junior jumped to his death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, which is 15 blocks south of 100 United Nations Plaza—the building Kwek fell from.

He’s also famous for treating his daughter, who was admitted to Harvard in 2010, as a show animal. In 2008, he enlisted Dakota Root ’14 to deliver his own nomination speech for the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate. And after Dakota got the big envelope from Harvard (and Yale, and Columbia, and elsewhere) Root immediately trotted her out on Fox News Channel—the entire story being that Dakota was homeschooled, and she got into Harvard. Also: Las Vegas’s public schools are really bad, so there. Unfortunately, Root did not seem to understand the irony of a radical libertarian sending his human issue to the least libertarian university imaginable, and bragging about it.

Two years after using his daughter to score political points, Root has written a magisterial essay on libertarianism’s idea of how education ought to work. (Root’s sole qualification here is the fact that his daughter got into Harvard, so you can trust his judgment.) Essentially, his big plan is: just be rich enough already to hire an army of private tutors for your children. So that’s how Dakota Root got into Harvard. Amazing. How has no one thought of this before?

While other kids spent their school days being indoctrinated to believe competition and winning are politically incorrect and hurt people’s feelings, Dakota was learning to relish competition and value winning.

While other kids were becoming experts at partying, Dakota was learning about sacrifice and discipline. While other kids were busy getting their drivers license at age 16, Dakota was studying for SAT exams, taking piano lessons, Spanish and French lessons, swimming lessons, tennis lessons, fencing lessons, and being tutored for academic excellence.

Listen, folks:

(It goes on.)

My advice as the home-school dad of a Harvard superstar scholar and athlete?

Take control.

Take charge.

Take action.

Be pro-active.

Become the CEO of your child’s future. “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

Only through self-reliance, personal responsibility and rugged individualism, can a parent change their child’s direction and super-charge their future.

Self-reliance: of course. Though we’re unsure how an eighteen year-old tended to by her “devoted Christian homemaker mom” and polished by a personal battalion of coaches and tutors is self-reliant, exactly. We’re also unsure how studying for the SAT at 16, or attempting to be trilingual, or participating in three sports (one of which is fencing), distinguishes Dakota from every other Harvard applicant from Riverdale. We’re pretty confident, however, that piano lessons have nothing to do with individualism—rugged or otherwise.

Why would Root—why would any politician—subject his daughter to public scrutiny? This is the Libertarian Party, so the answer probably has to do with money. Dakota is great publicity—Harvard! Homeschooling! Ayn Rand!—which means money. And Root really needs the money: since the Root Family Robinson bought a comically enormous, 7,000 square-foot McMansion for 1.725 million dollars, in 2002, the house’s value has depreciated 70%. Presumably, Root is trying to pay off the losses of his now-underwater mortgage with the profits of his second-greatest investment: his own children.

Which is kind of sweet, perhaps. But it’s also a little disgusting to watch a politician turn his own daughter into a stream of income, while making a caricature of his own party.

Much like the conspiracy-laden handout she distributed to undergraduates on Tuesday, Viggiano’s thesis faults the Freemasons—the fraternal organization and subject of several airport thrillers—for various corruptions of power. This time is a little different, though. Viggiano, a dramatically devout Catholic, forcefully argues that something called “Satanic Freemasonry” has infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church and contrives to ruin its reputation by arranging for priests to sexually abuse children.

It’s unclear whether Yale has yet accepted Viggiano’s thesis; we’ve emailed Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature for comment, and will update if we hear back.

Referring to an Italian woman who had been “demonically possessed” and the Church’s efforts to save her, Viggiano writes:

Her case is so exceptional, and the reasons of her continuing sufferings so disturbing, that one wonders why the Church hierarchy in Rome did not publicly intervene to denounce the phenomenon of Satanism in the Catholic Church. The crime of her cursing happened in Italy, performed by Italian fallen priests: therefore, it would have been logical for the Vatican, in Rome, to start a formal investigation into Satanism, looking for the causes that drive ordained priests to renegade God, renounce eternal life, and embrace the cult of Satan instead. If the hierarchy had done so, other scandalous events such as the repeated cases of pedophilia would have been better understood – and perhaps avoided – in light of the infiltration of Freemasonic elements in the Church, with an aim to discrediting the Church in the eyes of the world. As we will see in the section Freemasonry and Satanism, the abuse of children is completely in line with the ‘requirements’ of the church of Satan for its adepts. The defilement and, possibly, the ultimate sacrifice of an innocent – and children of course represent The Innocent, par excellence – is Satan’s attempt to ape the Passion of Jesus, to repeat it for his own glory and the damnation of the priests performing it. [clxxiv]

The endnote to which “[clxxiv]” refers is, well, you’ll have to see for yourself, after the jump. (Warning: it’s disturbing.) Also: a PDF file of Viggiano’s thesis, in case she deletes it.

[clxxiv] As we will see, Satanic Freemasonry re-enacts the Passion of our Lord quite literally, with the skinning and crucifixion of innocent victims: preferably children, who are figurae Christi. This practice has been in use since the Passion itself, two thousand years ago – but we will especially focus on a famous artistic representation of this torture dating from the Renaissance.

As for Catholic priests themselves, on the other hand:

Far from being victim souls, many members of the Church hierarchy are often unfaithful and morally corrupted, and a number of them have betrayed God to be part of Freemasonry, which is defined by Jesus as the church of Satan on earth, active within God’s Church itself and covered by a mask of hypocritical respectability.

We’re don’t know what on earth she’s talking about. Unfortunately. At the same time, both the length and complexity of her thesis suggest that those florid emails to Edward Barnaby, her students, and her peers weren’t the result of a momentary lack of judgement, but honest and deep conviction. We’re not sure whether that makes her behavior and her beliefs less, or more, disturbing.

Anyway: here’s a PDF file in the extremely likely case she deletes her thesis. Let us know if you find anything else noteworthy (or amusing).