Take note all you Woody Woo majors: it gets worse!

...then CA was like, 'meh'

• First up, our very own billionaire dorm donor Meg Whitman ‘71 has spent $162 million (and counting) of her own money in the race for bankrupt California’s governorship, breaking the self-financing record set by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. So that’s fun. Not so fun? Turns out all the money’s going to waste — rival Jerry Brown leads in polls. Coulda bought another college.

• As if Meg wasn’t having a bad enough week, her son Griff Harsh ‘09 has been accused by gossip blog Gawker of covering up a rape allegation during his sophomore year at Princeton. It’s been blowing up online this past week. Not the best PR — for Whitman, or, well, Princeton, I guess.

• The cherry on top of Meg’s campaign? At least she’s kind of like, the female “Governator,” or at least according to this attack ad running now.

• Moving on! Eliot Spitzer ‘81 was denied entrance to the Harvard Club of New York. A spokeswoman said he was “disappointed.” Maybe it’s because his new show on CNN is getting awful ratings? Maybe the raging sex scandal? Either way, Spitzer could deign to rejoin the Princeton Club. Quoth the Times:

He could rejoin the Princeton Club of New York, on West 43rd Street, one block to the south, where his membership has lapsed. Dues for alumni are slightly higher — ranging from $205 to $1,605 — and there are only two international-level squash courts, compared with four at the Harvard Club.

Only two? Exactly what kind of club are we running in New York?

Ken Buck photoshops pictures in America

• And, vote for worst week/month/year?: Tea Party member Ken Buck ‘81 from Colorado recently compared being gay to alcoholism on “Meet the Press.” File under “Awful things.” Another great comment?: “I disagree strongly with the concept of separation of church and state.” File under “Things not to say.” If you’re interested in learning more about Buck, head over to Mudd and read his thesis for the politics department (”Saudi Arabia: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place”, 75 pages). A subject ripe for political incorrectness; hopefully more thought went into that than whenever he talks.

• Not everyone’s had a bad month, though: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels ’71’s gaining traction as a possible GOP candidate for the 2012 presidential race. Newsweek reporter (and UPC alum) Andrew Romano ‘04 recently profiled Daniels and noted that the GOP should take note of his pragmatism and fiscal restraint. Fun fact: Daniels spent two nights in jail during college for possession of marijuana. No word on if he inhaled.

(images via wired.com and republicanbuffs.com) (and, a prior version of this article said Whitman had spent $71 million on her campaign, which is, like, half of the amount at the time of NPR’s reporting.)

The point is, elite universities are terrible choices for huge donations. Supporting education in America is a worthy cause; but there are many, many more effective ways to help the masses than giving millions to Ivy League schools. No matter what those schools’ endowment officers tell you, they do not really “need” that money, not in the same way that, for example, clinics in sub-Saharan Africa need it. Furthermore, most rich people do not give money to fancy schools out of a desire to improve education in America. According to academic research, hey [sic] give in order to make it easier for their own children to get into those schools. Or, in the case of people like Kravis, they give in order to have a building named for themselves at their alma mater, so that the legacy of their Gilded Age travails may be spread to generation upon generation of bored business school student.

It’s an argument worth listening to. After all, we are sitting pretty at a cool $13,386,280,000 in endowment as of 2009 – and there’s no doubt a lot of that was received in colossal chunks just like this one. So are we just complacent witnesses to this “moral crime”?

That’s a pretty serious label to slap on, but the reasoning is basically this: people who are able to throw around staggering, world-changing sums of money ought to throw them at the “most pressing problems.” Using that money to plump one’s ego is a grave ethical offense, an offense only made worse by the sheer magnitude of the gift, all those 0’s after that 1, all that $$$ at stake. And here, in a moment of gorgeous irony, Gawker cites the argument of Princeton’s own philosophy professor Peter Singer.

… which, in a sense, reminds us why all these donations are important in the first place: enablers of gross egotism though they may be, colleges like ours are still saying really important things and doing really important stuff. Ideally that money is headed towards need-blind admissions and research and solutions to those very same “most pressing problems.” Some valid points are raised — “Columbia will survive without Henry Kravis’ money. So will Yale, and Harvard, and Princeton. For the poorest and unluckiest people in the world, the same can’t necessarily be said” — but the overall argument rings a little bitter and narrow-minded. Read it and see for yourself.

UPDATE: And for a second helping of irony, note that the “academic research” that Gawker cited is a joint Columbia-Princeton economics paper. Maybe someone just needed to donate a hefty sum to these schools so that smart people at those schools could eventually figure out their intentions behind donating said hefty sum.

The Obama of the media industry?

We told you a few weeks ago how David Remnick ‘81 (a Press Club alum who has hit the proverbial “big time” as editor-in-chief of the New Yorker) was writing a “pimped out” new biography about President Obama. It hit bookshelves today, and critics are absolutely raving about it. And about Remnick!

Yesterday the Times ran a story on how Remnick makes running the New Yorker “look easy” while the media industry collapses around him. Quoth the Grey Lady:

It’s hard to make running any magazine, even The New Yorker, look easy these days. Last year, the magazine’s ad pages fell 24 percent, a little less than the industry average. But Mr. Remnick managed to eke out a small operating profit (excluding corporate overhead charges) by cutting costs, as he had for years.

Understated compliment maybe, but given the Times‘ financial state, you can bet they’re a little jealous of a publication that’s not disastrously bankrupt.

And it wasn’t just the old fogey media that was praising the Princeton man’s virtues. Even Gawker wrote something nice about somebody, and in this case, it was Remnick:

Remnick is perfect for his time and place in the industry. He’s no-nonsense, budget-conscious, and a wise cultivator of talent; he’s also a Princeton man and a willing cultivator of The New Yorker’s insular traditions. … Remnick is the best that anyone could hope for (which is to say, he’s excellent). We’re even willing to indulge his determination to write another fucking Obama book.

And then the media finally decided to like, read the book, I guess, and hey, looks like they love that too! (To save you the effort of reading the reviews, it was called “brilliantly constructed,” “flawless,” and other doting adjectives.)

Michiko Kakutani in the Times writes:

But if the outlines of the story told in “The Bridge” are highly familiar, Mr. Remnick — the editor of The New Yorker and the author of a thoughtful 2008 article in that magazine, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” from which this book apparently springs — has filled in those broad outlines with insight and nuance. He’s used interviews with many of the formative figures in the president’s life to add details to the narrative of his political and sentimental education — in particular, his relationships with his self-destructive father and his romantic, sometimes naïve mother. Writing with emotional precision and a sure knowledge of politics, Mr. Remnick situates Mr. Obama’s career firmly within a historical context.

Which all adds up to say, “Yeah, we’ve read this Obama story a bunch of times, but shit, Remnick told it the best.”

So there you go. Princeton’s very own David Remnick – tearing up the journalism circuit and repping to the fullest.

(photo via dutchproblogger.com)

Jezebel, a self-proclaimed feminist blog in the Gawker network, has seen their coverage blow up with user feedback, having more than 15,000 views and 713 comments on their story at the time of this posting. Gawker has 296 comments and more than 14,000 views.

Blogs aren’t the only interested parties. Amelia Thomson-Deveaux ‘11, co-editor of the feminist blog EqualWrites.org, tells us that a Fox News reporter sent an email on the subject to the EqualWrites address earlier today. At this point she doesn’t “know what their plan is.”

The Daily Princetonian has not issued a response to the controversy. Mendy Fisch ‘11, executive editor for opinion, declined to comment for this post on Princetonian standards for vetting potentially inflammatory opinion pieces or the process of editing and approving opinion pieces.  He also declined to comment on the Prince’s rationale for running this particular piece by an aspiring regular columnist.

Jack Ackerman ‘11, editor-in-chief of and spokesperson for the Daily Princetonian, has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

What’s the hubbub about? At the risk of reducing Neagu’s argument, the gist of the piece is this:

She knew what would happen if she started drinking. We all know that the more people drink, the less likely they are to make wise decisions. It is common sense.

Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.

The Princetonian’s own website has a current 231 comments at the time of this posting, and the paper printed a response to the opinion from members of SHARE and SpeakOut on Tuesday.