A grad student at NYU's Steinhardt school, working on a project called "The New York Institute for the Humanities", recently sent friends and colleagues a letter alerting them to her group's upcoming workshops. It is a letter in which she coined and employed the wrongest analogy we've heard in, like, a week (the internet equivalent of years).
How bad are things for the beleaguered scholars of New York University? This bad:
From the mailbag, a Facebook-loving reader sends this screenshot and writes: "One of these things is not like the others... do you think there's any correlation between #4 and N.Y.U. being back in session?" Yes.
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.
Like the Great Barrier Reef, New York City has its own critters that come and vacuum up our waste. Meet the freegans! They have fun dinner parties, where they eat things from the trash and talk about the errors of capitalism, and they scurry out of their caves at night to take away that Ikea crap that surrounds the N.Y.U. dorms. Gosh, it'd be so easy to make fun of them for being so totally gross, except they're gonna be the ones to survive the apocalypse. And who'll be laughing then? And unlike the "no impact" green fools, at least they probably scavenge for toilet paper. See you in the dumpsters!
Says the person who's organizing Thursday's rally (during commencement?) in Washington Square: "Even if you don't love her, you have to admit that 45 days in one of L.A.'s most dangerous female prisons is not a fair punishment for neglecting to renew your license. This is about the freedom to do what you want vs. overly conservative judges coming down hard on anyone who likes to party." Oh, so that's what this is about! Or is it? Some N.Y.U. students would beg to differ.
According to now-former N.Y.U. College of Arts & Science Student Council President Meredith Dolgin, "the press can't seem to get anything right" when it comes to documenting the events surrounding the sudden end of her tenure last week. Know what? She's mostly correct! Dolgin got tabloid-raked through some Post-y muck for being a "renegade," "tampering with committee elections, frolicking in a pumpkin patch on the organization's dime—and helping to improperly use school funds to pay her own grandmother to speak at a symposium" in an article headlined "Student Prez's 'F' in Ethics." But on the "little known facts" page of a blog that Meredith has created in order to set the record straight, she points out that she actually got an A- in ethics. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
We have to preface this excerpt from the self-penned bio of Meredith Dolgin, who stepped down today as NYU's student council president, by reminding you that Gawker is a safe space for womyn. So don't hate her for being big-boned. Hate her for being a totally pompous ass! Oh, and for perhaps not choosing her words carefully.
Meredith Dolgin has stepped down from the presidency of NYU's student council in the wake of not one but three separate scandals! The one that directly precipitated her resignation is of course the most boring (something about the improper disbanding of an election committee.) Here are the two fun ones.
Eighteen-year-old N.Y.U.ster Rachel Helson has done some very impressive work for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation: she's about to produce her third benefit performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this time on Broadway, with all proceeds going to the charity! And she's managed to recruit some A-list Broadway talent, too, like Neil Patrick Harris and Wicked's Kate Reinders. But that's not even the most charitable part. Helson, who the Times described today as "perky" (later: "Perky is almost too mild a word"), will also be generously donating her own time on the night of the performance, starring in the production as ingenue Janet Weiss. "Students at Tisch are by nature ambitious," said Tisch dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, adding that "in terms of the scale of her ambition, this rates up there 10-plus."
Huh! Maybe it's something in the water in and around Washington Square. We can't figure out why else N.Y.U. students, last seen trying to catch fake illegal immigrants, or protesting said catching, would tolerate waits of up to 11 minutes for their skim dolce cinnamon half-caf lattes in the morning. Where the hell are we, Uruguay? Don't they pay tuition so they don't have to put up with this shit, man?
Since five or six of you are not down at N.Y.U. right now, where a zoo has erupted around the demonstration planned by the college Republicans against illegal immigration, Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley went out to catch the scene. It's just like the 60's down there! Please enjoy the folk singing.
Long despairing in the shadow of their Morningside Heights brethren, New York University students have, in recent years, made quite a name for themselves—both academically and extracurricularly! Today's announcement of an event sponsored by the College Republicans shows that the Washington Squareans have their uptown peers beat when it comes to original thought and making complicated geopolitical issues concrete.
A tipster forwarded an email that's gone around to the third-year students at NYU Law School, imploring them to vote on a "hotly debated but never settled question: 'Who are the most attractive 3Ls at NYU?'" In our experience, lawyers come in a close second to journalists on the face-for-print scale, so we're not holding our collective breath on this one. The email, however, offered some helpful advice for anyone voting:
A tipster writes:
This is fairly obviously a joke of some sort but we know how you love your douchebags, and whoever put this together has a pretty good eye for the line that separates the douche bottle from the douchebag. Also, there are a lot of pictures of shirtless guys, so, you know, bonus.
It's back-to-school time, and there's at least one lucky NYU grad student who'll be spending the week doing more than just contemplating the best angle from which to hit the Bobst library floor. A friend passed along an e-mail from the NYU History department which indicates that Shakira (in the adorable words of the e-mail, "yes, that Shakira") needs a tutor in American History for the week. This isn't exactly shocking: As USA Today reported last year,
It's been a while since we've checked in with Julia Diaco, the "pot princess" who skated on 25 years in prison for selling marijuana from her NYU dorm room by pleading out and getting probation. As it turns out, she's not just an entrepreneur: She also sings. Much like her fellow Rumson residents Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, Julia (or, as she's now known, J-Dia) wants to make her mark on the music industry. We've gone to her MySpace page to sample her wares and will just say this: Someone needs to make her pee in a cup but quick. She may not be selling pot anymore, but if these tracks are any indication, she is clearly on the pipe.
