"When people talk about 'hooking up,' they're referring to a subculture with a complex set of rules and expectations. Not surprisingly, most of what they know about student 'hookup' culture comes from alarmist news reports of 'risky sex' and movies like American Pie 3, not serious scholarship. In her new book, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (New York University Press, 2008), Bogle wields the tools of the sociologist, employing in-depth interviews with students and graduates from two unnamed universities — one a large East Coast public university, the other a smaller Roman Catholic institution in the Northeast — and placing the culture of hooking up in a historical context." [Inside Higher Ed]

Would you like to know how to get into Yale? This interview with the Yale School of Management admissions guy seems like it should be helpful, but also sort of isn't. His advice? "Think hard about the picture you're trying to paint of yourself." Uh, really. [BW]

Bard College, the liberal arts school located 120 miles north in Annandale-on-Hudson, "puts the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts,'" according to the 'Princeton Review.' It has a 600-acre campus and nearly 1500 undergrads. This is their story—as told by a student who would like to be known as Stephan K. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.This week, we learn that college is an incredibly cruel place, particularly when people are having sex in shared dorm rooms.

Squash: it's a vegetable, a verb, and a gay racket sport. So it's only natural that it's apparently huge in the Ivy Leagues. Which makes it the secret to gaining admittance into those terrible schools, according to last Sunday's Times. Because "a high percentage of the nation's most prestigious colleges field teams," obnoxious parents seeking an edge for their kids are now forcing them to play the elite, expensive game. "'Squash is "hot" right now,' said Kenny Scher, the executive director of the New York-based Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association, which organizes leagues and tournaments." Just like it was seven years ago, the last time the Times wrote this piece.

Good news for middle-class and upper-middle-class children lucky enough to have been admitted to Harvard! That elite university is dramatically augmenting the amount of financial aid it gives such students—for example, a family making $120,000 would have to pay about $12,000 in tuition. But not everyone can afford to follow suit. "Only a handful of universities have anything even remotely close to Harvard's financial resources, and it was not clear how many could afford to follow. Yale tersely said in response only that it was planning an announcement next month on expanded financial aid." Burn! [NYT]

Meet Mohammad Usman, the only male student at Wellesley. The 19-year-old Dartmouth attendee is taking a semester a-broad at the traditionally all-women's college, according to the Daily News; the paper seems to think that he's boning all 2,300 of his fellow students. Which seems unlikely to us—don't they all just sleep with professors or go off in search of Harvard Business students to eventually form power marriages with? But, according to this classic Rolling Stone story, he probably has to fight them off. "'I thought it would be really fascinating,' Usman, 19, told yesterday's Boston Globe. 'I want to try new things.'"

Bronx student only male on all-female Wellesley campus [NYDN]
The highly charged erotic life of the Wellesley girl [JayDixit.com]

The one creepy old dude in your undergrad creative writing course? Maybe it's Nike founder Phil Knight, who's secretly been attending classes at Stanford, learning to bare his soul through fiction. Knight isn't enrolled at Stanford, but $105 million donations have a way of opening doors.

Fastest way to ensure that your Ivy League college newspaper's office rent undergoes an exorbitant administration-mandated raise over the holidays? Assemble an entire issue containing practical tips for how to survive the next four booze-soaked years of your life as a Dartmouth College undergraduate and make sure it comes out the week before your admissions office sends out early acceptance letters. [The Dartmouth Online]

There's one thing dorky-sexier than Barack Obama: An iPod Touch, the $300 toy that 20 percent of New York University students would trade for their vote in the next presidential election. Downside: Anyone who wants an iPod that bad is clearly a wimpy latte-sipping liberal, meaning that Giuliani just needs two hours at that fancy New York Apple store to rule the country. Upside: Anyone who'd answer a poll like this is better off watching some video than talking to me.

Breaking news! People who drink Red Bull and vodka are rapists and friends of drunk drivers! It's been proven by science. Researchers at Wake Forest surveyed 4,300 students on their drinking habits, and of the 2,900 who didn't lie about their sobriety, 700 admitted to using energy drinks as mixers. Which led to even more bad decisions!

Lazy-student-targeting fast food delivery site Campusfood.com is offering a huge $1 dollar-off promotion for the latest probably readable-but-kinda-crappy film adaptation-ready Nick Hornby novel. It's called SLAM and it's about teenage parenthood and, uh, Tony Hawk. If you and like 40 friends order soon you'll save enough to get yourselves some Plan B!

Slam [Campusfood.com]

Three Bard students—two freshmen and a sophomore!—were arrested when police found them in possession of "nearly 1 pound of marijuana, half a kilogram of a partially refined but yet-unidentified hallucinogenic drug, hashish, hashish oil and a portable drug-processing lab similar to the kind used to manufacture methamphetamines" just two months into the school year. "If there's any message that comes through from this ... [it's] that we are here to provide an education and a safe and healthy atmosphere for students here at Bard," said a college spokesman. Okay! Either that or: Bard is a school where you can totally brew up a batch of rave drugs. [Daily Freeman]

Harvard's Pennypacker Freshman Dorm is undergoing a scabies epidemic! Scabies—you might know it better as "mange"—is when tiny tick-like critters embed themselves in your skin and lay eggs and give you a terrible rash that you can easily spread to your friends and neighbors by, say, "sharing a bed." This weekend the disgusting little mites were found nesting in three students, so the administration rounded up all the hall's residents and handed out topical cream and demanded they shower for once. Of course there will still be weeks of itching and infestation, even after the treatment, but on the plus side the health office is maybe doing everyone's laundry for free.

Admissions officers reveal what anyone who's ever applied to college already knows. Those interviews don't mean jackshit: "It would be a rare interview faux pas that could disqualify an applicant, such as wearing a bathing suit to the interview, saying the school is only a fallback option, displaying bigotry, or admitting to patricidal fantasies, the admissions officers said. Catastrophes aside, they said, an interview bears little or no say in the race for top-college acceptance." Sorry, kid! [NYS]

Hey, have you tried to walk down Third Avenue above St. Mark's lately? I say "tried to" because it is almost impossible. The strip is swarmed with seventeen year olds, walking six abreast on the sidewalk and talking very loudly about, usually, Facebook or dialectical materialism. Or, if it's late at night, being comically caricature-of-drunk. Or, if it's early in the day, walking a few steps ahead of their parents who are carrying their boxes, as if this will trick passerby into thinking that they and the older people who look just like them are unrelated strangers. Like the first rubescent leaves in Tompkins Square Park, the NYU hordes are an early harbinger of Fall in the East Village. Unlike the leaves, however, they are so fucking annoying.

Hippie school Antioch College to close because it's run out of money, probably because none of their alumni become investment bankers or lawyers. [NYS]

CONFONZ — Lo, and below him, he saw the valley. Above him he saw the smog filled skies, and in his hand he found a broken bottle of bourbon, half drained and bloodied. Where had this bottle come from, and why was the humble Conference Fonzerelli stumbling around on Microsoft's Mountain View campus? And, for the love of Allah, why are all the urinals here one foot off the ground? Is this Paris? Japan? Does Microsoft employ lots of little men? Yes, gentle reader, the ConFonz is in charge of Valleywag today, and the fun has only just started. After the jump, the ConFonz goes to college.
Back in the day, Carnegie Mellon university made its name in robotics. When you're competing with MIT for math dorks, and Stanford for programmers, it's tough to find a geek niche. So, when CMU decided to build an arm of its computer sciences department in the Valley, it wasn't the most readily expected news. Where would students of this new program go in order to buy deep fried hot dogs? What about being beaten up by Pitt frat boys? Those poor Pitt boys would have to fly for six hours to dispense geek beatings.
As it turns out, CMU is only in the bay area to hold conferences. Silly little conferences, sponsored, thus far, by Microsoft and UC Berkeley. The first of these was at Microsoft's campus on Monday, and it included everything you'd expect from the event.
Dozens of professors discussing software as a service? Check.
Small-time CEO's trying to confirm that these professors are right? Check.
Press, snorting and guffawing at how out of touch the professors are? Check.
Microsoft's Craig Mundie explaining how the professors are wrong, and laying out a roadmap for how Microsoft will max out all CPU's everywhere, no matter how many cores or how fast the clock speeds are? Check.
But the real shocker of this mini-conference is the fact that all of Microsoft's men's rooms in its Silicon Valley campus include dwarf urinals. Does MS employ multiple little people? Usually, these things are installed haphazardly upon the hiring of a dwarf. But it would seem that Microsoft is prepared for that eventuality, and that people working here tend to have splash-back marks on their immaculately pressed khakis.

Sure, we'll jump on that dogpile. If you glance at the Fox News "iMag" video dumping ground, you'll see a clip labeled "Campus Hook-Ups" under the "Back to School" category. Apparently this video has gotten various MSNBCers quite hot and bothered, and one can read a textual paraphrase of the naughty bits on HuffPo. In a nutshell, the clip advises new college students on how best to bang their way through higher education, albeit in the most vague, general, and obvious ways. For this, Fox is getting roasted, since it seems inappropriate that the conservative network should espouse free love with such straightforward vigor. All we can says is: Where's the fire? It's minor-key amusing that Fox is encouraging extramarital sex, but this clip is hardly less offensive than, say, "Dorm Room Makeover!". Plus, they do trot out some highly insincere advice about drunk-fucking, which can result in the postcoital walk of shame, illustrated above. They also suggest "dating" alternatives to bars, such as bowling alleys (which have bars, and with good reason). "Try different activities besides just the drinking thing." There are different activities?

Having been an awkward adolescent and an only slightly less awkward young adult, we understand the difficulties facing today's youth when it comes to their bodies. There's so much societal pressure to be perfect, and the internet is only making things worse. So when the Times decided to take on the evergreen issue of the "College 15," that extra weight a lot of students put on in their first year away from home, we were really excited to see that they chose a photograph of a regular college student, someone we could relate to, an average girl just struggling in her own way with the personal demons of a bar raised too high.

Speaking of "sensitive rockers," on June 8, as you may have heard, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo finally finished his coursework and graduated from Harvard. Ten days later, as you also may have heard, he married his girlfried, Kyoko Ito, in Malibu, Calif. In honor of both these simchas, we're happy to present an artifact that nicely combines the two. It's so much on our usual beat, but we've recently come into possession of an essay, titled "A Mad and Furious Master," Cuomo wrote for a Harvard English class in October 2004. It comes from a reliable and Cambridge-connected source who assures us of its provenance, and said source is exceedingly trustworthy on such matters. Want to read about the bespectacled singer's desire for a mate, his fondess for massage-parlor handjobs and internet porn, his self-imposed two years of celibacy, and the frequent wet dreams caused by said celibacy? Oh, it's all there. There's a sample after the jump, plus the whole thing as a Word file.