Lead tidbit: As mentioned below, Heath Ledger has become the latest tragic chapter in the annals of New York celebrity noir, dying of an apparent drug overdose at his apartment in SoHo. At the moment, Ledger’s death is refreshingly uninteresting, as revealed by the media’s now-futile attempts at milking an alleged Olsen twins connection shortly after news of Ledger’s death broke online. While the TMZ crowd performs admirably in the face of an Anna Nicole Smith-type heroin overdose-cum-paternity battle-cum-love quadrangle, they have thankfully little to say about the kind of desperation that makes a successful young actor spend a cloudy Tuesday afternoon loading himself up on drugs. Indeed, some depths are apparently harder to plod than others…
Elsewhere, IvyGate (an outlet from which, as our sidebar suggests, we derive no pleasure whatsoever) has mysteriously failed to report on the arms cache found in the apartment of a CU AIDS researcher. We’re not sure what to make of this–usually the Gate is quick to pick up on any bizarre, Ivy-related crime story. In fact, it’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect–nay, depend upon–from IvyGate, a website which we would never read, ever…
And lastly: More essential reading from Andrew Delbanco, although I take exception with at least one of his conclusions. The Yale decision isn’t bad because colleges will feel obligated to follow suite. As he explains, most private universities can’t, and as he implies, most could never hope to compete with Yale anyway in terms of endowment or number of applicants. He hits on the real problem a couple paragraphs later:
“At Yale, Mr. Levin has acknowledged that another motive for the new policy is to blunt the growing pressure on wealthy universities to spend more income from their endowments. But is supporting upper-middle-class students the wisest way to dispense the additional money?”
Umm, no. In fact, Yale’s attempt at staving off government pressure to spend more of their endowment money (unlike most other tax-exempt institutions, universities don’t have to spend 5% of their endowment annually. Levin and his ilk want to keep it that way) probably means they won’t be forced to spend where it really counts: on the lower and lower middle class applicants who need the most help.