The state of Alabama—and, indeed, the southern region of America as a whole—is reeling in shock and disbelief this week after reports that a white frat boy at the University of Alabama yelled "nigger" at a black student walking by his frat house. A white frat boy, in Alabama, uttering a racial slur? Now we've heard it all.

Columbia University: where you can almost taste the class conflict lapping at the edge of campus. According to a credulity-straining (fictional?) report in The Morningside Post, Columbia student Jane Watkins was hurrying up 114th on her way to class when she was rudely mugged. By very polite muggers!

James Franco grabs overexposure by the balls, then teabags it, in Columbia College Hollywood's Master Class: Editing James Franco… with James Franco, in which film students edit footage of James Franco under James Franco's tutelage while James Franco films them.

A University of Rhode Island professor of "entrepreneurial management" has been arrested for felony mortgage fraud. Entrepreneurial!

When students at Washington University found out that grizzly cub Bristol Palin was getting paid $17,500 out of their activities fund to come speak about abstinence, they got upset. So, having learned from others' past mistakes, Palin pulled out.

Tihomir Petrov, a math professor at Cal State Northridge, has been charged with two misdemeanors for allegedly pissing on a colleague's office door due to some sort of dispute between the two. The school took this dispute very seriously.

As we've heard, our nation's college students are quite mentally unstable. In fact, the results of a new survey say our college freshmen are more stressed than ever before. Is it debt? Insecurity? Inferiority? Or is it...rave parties?

The city of Evanston, Illinois was planning to crack down on Northwestern University students' hard-partying ways by enforcing an obscure anti-brothel law. But cops now say there will be no change in enforcement. This calls for an epic, destructive kegger.

Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University, plans to start enforcing a "brothel law" that prevents more than three unrelated people from sharing a house or apartment. Why would they bother? To cut down on college parties, of course.

The number of applications to Columbia University shot up by 32% this year. Why? Probably because state schools suck and other NYC colleges are banning smoking, while Columbia has readily available drugs and awesome professors. Plus, Columbia=cool.

A sunny reenactment of recent trends in American higher education: due to the recession, enrollment rises. Due to the recession, state funding was down. Federal stimulus funds provide momentary rescue! And now: federal funds end. States are still broke. Urgh.

You know how, when you applied for college, you sent the same bromide "Why I want to go to _____ University" essay to every school, because all colleges are interchangeable anyway? Turns out John F. Kennedy thought so, too.

While New York City college student Hubert Blackman was vacationing in Las Vegas he hired a stripper to come to his room. She gave him a lap dance and performed a sex act on him (illegally). Now he's suing.

To succeed in America, you must get a college degree. To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning. College kids don't learn stuff.

University of Colorado sophomore Nic Ramos paid off his entire $14,309.51 tuition with a 33-pound duffel bag of cash—dollar bills and change. He did this to show how expensive college is, or something.

In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is digitizing reams of JFK artifacts. Among them: The president's application to Harvard, including mediocre test scores and a refreshingly banal personal essay.

You're a college professor. A student's missing class because she's just given birth. Do you a) send an email to the entire class polling them on what grade she should get? Or b) anything but that? One professor chose "A."

Chinemerem Eze, a Nigerian national attending Brooklyn College, believed that her landlord had hidden a camera in her apartment. When she asked school officials for help, they shipped her off to a psychiatric ward. Then she found the camera.

Today we discovered the rapping branch of Tom Hanks's family, namely a son who goes to Northwestern and spits rhymes about said institution. As in any good rap battle, this prompted a sizzling hot response from a commenter.