You know that school Will Smith opened up in Calabasas? The one people are saying is a big front to indoctrinate children into the ways of Scientology? Well, we here at Defamer hate to pass judgment without at least a tiny bit of research. That's why I spent a few minutes skimming the New Village Academy's website. Surprisingly, there were no classes called "Worshiping Overlord Xenu" or "Releasing Your Inner Engram." But they do really stress building robots. In fact, the Educational Philosophy section of the site mentions robots no less than 4 times!

"Red Rape is that rare sleazy pulp novel that actually lives up to its lurid cover illustration and alarmist subtitle (IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!) within the first two pages. It was a canny choice on the part of the publisher to use the popular - and in this case suggestive - civil defense rallying cry for the book's jacket slogan because it no doubt appealed to the patriotic and prurient interests of the anti-Communist pervs who purchased the book back in 1960. Indeed, the prolific author Connie Sellers* (who is a man) seems to have taken the subtitle as something of an editorial mandate and produced an 'anything goes' Soviet invasion fantasy that eclipses anything in John Milius's wildest RED DAWN wet dreams."

New York Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker John McWhorter takes a wistful look back today at God and Man at Yale, crypto-fascist William F. Buckley's seminal work on how to be an uptight Ivy League conservative. Why today? Well, there's never a bad time to speak out against the outrageous marginalization of capitalism and Christianity on college campuses, in McWhorter's view, and besides, he had a column due. He thoughtfully and eloquently fellates Buckley's 1951 plea for sticks (of morality) to be inserted in asses (of Christianity) throughout our nation's top schools. And you know—not to be immodest—McWhorter can't help but see a little bit of Buckley's controversial genius in himself:

Adweek got its hands on a leaked copy of an internal investigation from Hunter College about the school's shady Coach-sponsored PR class teaching kids how to be dishonest corporate shills, which we covered earlier this week. They say it was a bad idea! For a more detailed summary, go read the story. [Adweek]

Hunter College, the luxury brand Coach, fraudulent PR campaigns, and dishonest corporate collaboration with academia are the topics of the day today. Important topics! Adweek has just come out with a long investigative piece on a Coach-sponsored PR class at Hunter, which reeks of impropriety and dishonesty, and ended up tangling a bunch of college kids up in a fake online PR blog that makes them all look like a bunch of shady, dishonest undercover marketing hacks. "I knew a lot of hell would break loose about the class. And it did," said the teacher. Indeed. The condensed version of the whole sordid tale, after the jump.

You're a college philosophy student at NYU studying absurdism, the school of thought that says life and the universe have no meaning. What do you do for a class project? That's right: bring in a muffin full of razor blades [NYS]. In a Kierkegaardian effort that would have drawn approving sighs from Albert Camus, a student left the deadly, tasty treats on a table for the next class to find. And in an absurd twist which highlights the ultimate futility of the search for purpose, one kid in the next class started to eat the tempting razor muffin:

Hey, remember that "Black guy as the plague of darkness" Jewish children's finger puppet set that you derived so much racial and religious amusement from last week? Well Jewishstore.com must have gotten the mild whiff of bad publicity that its crazy puppet was generating, because the black man of darkness has now been magically replaced by a far more vague representation of said plague! Before and after photos of the educational puppet array, below.

"What is the point of a graduate degree in public relations?" asks an NYU panel. Well, pointy-headed academics, what's the point of anything? To fill up the time when you're not pooping. [Ad Age]

MTV, having covered every other aspect of the high school experience including the marching band, has finally made a reality series about a high school newspaper [NYO]. That hotbed of intrigue and sexual tension! As once-professional journalists as well as high school graduates, we have some bad news: the high school paper is simply not that exciting. Neither is the grown-up paper, for that matter. Newspapers are a prime example of things that produce a somewhat glamorous final product, but whose inner workings are drearily workmanlike. It's like visiting the Nike factory and being disappointed that it's populated by silent, sweating Vietnamese peasants, rather than by Lebron James. MTV's trailer for "The Paper" features kissing teens, violent arguments, pool parties, and a battle for editorship of the Cypress Bay High School student paper that "could change their lives(!)." Asdfjklasdfjkl. Sorry kids, nobody has time to read your resume anways! After the jump, the full trailer. The over-under on the number of these students who actually go into journalism: one. Probably the young Laurel Touby doppelganger

Columbia Journalism School Dean Nick Lemann pulled a hilarious oopsy-daisy the other day when he mistakenly sent his personal evaluation of himself and the future of the entire school to all his students, rather than just to his boss. It would have been more hilarious if it was forwarded pictures of Ken Auletta in a tutu or something, but whatever. Lemann basically says that, yes, we have a ton of money and we are the most elite elitist journalism institution in the history of elitism, but it's not all good because, you know, at some point kids are gonna figure out you can't make any money doing this stuff, and they'll probably go to cheaper schools, so let's figure that one out pretty soon. The evaluation is essentially exactly the same as a New Yorker article by Lemann on the current state of Columbia J-school would be, except nobody would ever pay for such a thing. For a better understanding of what Lemann means when he says "mercifully brief," the entire memo reprinted [via Romenesko], after the jump.

A Lubavitch Hasid with ROTC training—principal of a nearly all-black and Hispanic Bronx junior High? It's so crazy it just might work. And, according to the New York Times, it has! Shimon Waronker has been the principal of JHS 22 in the South Bronx since 2004, and the formerly dangerous and failing school has seen something of a revival, with students suddenly attending class and injuring each other with slightly less frequency. And all Waronker had to do was fire half the staff and run his school with occasionally illegal efficiency (the fact that public schools do not have the authority to send children home for not wearing uniforms has not deterred him). He won over his critics, including one mother, who, upon learning of the hire, asked herself: "Wow, we're going to have a Jewish person, what's going to happen? Are the kids going to have to pay for lunch?" New York's racial tensions are always good for a laugh! Of course, the school is still "one of 32 in the city that the state lists as failing and at risk of closing," but if it worked for Gabe Kotter, it'll work here. [NYT]

Today's LAT sits in on UCLA's new TV Development course, where Tomorrow's Showrunners (at least the ones who aren't learning the business by experiencing firsthand the severe consequences of botching a lunch order for a grumpy writers' room) develop series ideas and get practice pitching them to a panel of Real Television Executives, who lend some of their precious time on the remote chance they'll hear an idea they can later steal and rush into development. The wide-eyed students, who have not yet had their souls devoured and shat out by the industry, are still brimming with adorable optimism over the possibilities of the grand medium and the valuable connections they'll make during the semester:

More from that quiet Ivy school uptown:

Yesterday morning a bevy of chief marketing officers were taking part in an Advertising Week discussion entitled "Catch and Release" at the McGraw-Hill auditorium in midtown. Simultaneously, a few blocks south, a vast number of McGraw-Hill employees were being "released" from their jobs. Estimates suggest that the textbook publisher terminated approximately 300 people, including editors, production types, and administrative assistants. As for the "catch" part: around one hundred of these folks can keep their jobs if they accept the "opportunity" to move to the bright lights of cosmopolitan Columbus, Ohio. So if you're working in the creative industries you can expect a flood of resumes from desperate former employees who, if nothing else, know how to make sure that minorities and the handicapped are presented attractively in your publication.

This fellow is Andrew Beran, an adjunct professor at NYU, Pace and Marymount. According to ratemyprofessors.com, he's the 10th hottest professor in the country and the top hottie in New York. Given that Beran teaches math, you have to remember that this is all relative — but, um, is this the best we can do? If the University of Texas can have someone like hipster-scientist-prof Sam Gosling on board, surely New York's institutions of higher learning could boast of a lust object who doesn't wear loafers.

New Observer owner and veteran 25-year-old Jared Kushner is a Harvard graduate (and in our hearts, aren't we all?) but, according to his counselor at Frisch Yeshiva, the lad was more likely rolling joints by the train tracks than he was leading the Quizbowl team:

An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal profiled the seamy world of textbook publishing; a world where all is not as it appears. Turns out that in some misguided, knee-jerk liberal attempt to, uh, sell more books, publishers are presenting a world more diverse than it really is.

In the continuing theme of Fake Writer Day, this one's a stretch: certain passages in Daniel J. Boorstein's high school history textbook A History of the United States are identical to those in another textbook, America: Pathways to the Present, which was written by multiple authors. The catch is, the big names on the books' spines aren't necessarily responsible for everything in the text, as textbooks, with their constantly changing editions, are mostly written by a slew of uncredited writers. So while Boorstein and the big names from Pathways likely did not plagiarize, there are writers beneath them who may very well have lifted passages or "internalized" words from other texts. If a hip teen packaging company were involved, it might not be that unlike the case of Kaavya Viswanathan. And if those 1000-page textbooks were used for anything more than a doorstop, this all might matter.

On Saturday, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert delivered the commencement address at Knox College in beautiful Galesberg, Illinois, earnestly telling students to say "yes" to opportunity and avoid cynicism. And while they do face a tough job market, the Class of 2006 could very much benefit if the entire southern border of the U.S. was protected by "a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles." Colbert's closing wisdom, however, rang the most true:

The guts, the glory, the silent consonants: nothing compares to the bloodthirsty competition of a spelling bee. Last night the Scripps National Spelling Bee had its first primetime, live airing on ABC, and New Jersey's 13-year-old Katharine Close took home the dorkily awesome crown. Her winning word was "ursprache," beating out 14-year-old Finola Hackett, a Canadian girl who blew it all on "weltschmerz." Stupid girl, but that's justice — this is our national spelling bee. Get your own, America Jr.