As seen in the Washington Square News.
In the Ivy hierarchy, the University of Pennsylvania is a little lost. For starters, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report place Penn in the murky space behind Princeton, Harvard and Yale, but arguably ahead of Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell. Being stranded in Pennsylvania doesn’t help either – as the southernmost Ivy, it’s a little hard to feel a part of the crowd. If Harvard is the Ivy family’s overachieving big brother and Cornell is the whiny runt at the end, Penn is the quiet one in the back, pushing up its glasses as it finishes its chemistry homework. Plus, there’s that whole state-school-name-confusion that they’ve got to deal with (which we at NYU understand all too well).
It sure ain’t easy being boring, old Penn.
In contrast to the vibrant Philadelphia culture surrounding it – and I’d know, you’ll find “Philadelphia” stamped on my birth certificate – life on the Penn campus is so dull that the best and most shocking bit of news that campus rag, The Daily Pennsylvanian, could come up with as a funny spoof of regular news coverage in this year’s edition of their annual joke issue was a 10-hour elevator shutdown in one of their dorms. Er, “college houses.”
Published last week, the article explained how those modest (yet inventive!) Quakers trapped in the lift created a Facebook group titled “Help! I’m stuck in the High Rise elevators!” to MacGyver their way out of the situation. Spearheading the imaginary effort was an alumnus who, afterward, pledged $50,000 for further investigation into the problems.
$50,000 for a broken elevator? We should be so lucky!
The solution was clever, indeed, but the story is a completely believable one at Penn. So it’s no surprise that one of the most thrilling stories this week at Penn was, well, fake.
Once again, this little piece of journalistic genius got the little violet cogs in my brain going. Penn might be boring as hell and might have to make this shit up, but extracting money from alumni stuck in elevators ain’t a half-bad way to build up the endowment. Think about it: Penn has an endowment of almost $6 billion – paltry compared to Harvard’s $29.2 billion, but still three times as much as the roughly $2 billion NYU’s got tucked away in a gilded treasure chest in the Washington Square Arch. If they can sucker 50 grand from an alumnus for kicking it in an elevator for a few hours, why can’t we?
Just think about how many elevators NYU has!
To keep our “perstare et praestare” on and surpass Penn’s endowment, we should do just that: have a series of high-profile, big-ticket dinner extravaganzas all over campus, invite those generous trustees and alumni, and rig the elevators to kick out just as they’re fumbling for their checkbooks. Just picture it: Trustee chairman Martin Lipton is headed to the Rosenthal Pavilion on the 10th floor of the Kimmel Center for some kobe beef and a glass of rosé when the elevator just plain quits. “Harumph! We’ll never beat the Ivies at this rate! Better write a check to get these fixed.” Bam – $1 million down, a few thousand more to go.
At least it will work better than kidnapping and ransoming their children. Maybe.
We can start with the elevators in Carter Hall, 194 Mercer and the Bronfman Center and work our way up from there. Plus, no other Ivy can match our elevator prowess (make room for a friend!) – so trapping alumni in elevators for cash is a strategy that can exclusively put NYU ahead. We won’t be No. 34 on those pesky rankings anymore!
And since we have hundreds of thousands more alumni than any Ivy, it could be a pretty lucrative tactic. At that rate, we can change that $2.5 billion goal we’re shooting for into at least the $4 billion goal that Stanford, Cornell and Columbia have pledged. Maybe more.
That, my friends, is playing with the big dogs. Watch out, Quakers! We’re on your tail with our underdog moxie!
Andrew Nusca is a former news editor, spitting Ivy bile every week. Tell him where to shove it at opinion@nyunews.com.
Take one from UPenn: elevator traps
As seen in the Washington Square News.
In the Ivy hierarchy, the University of Pennsylvania is a little lost. For starters, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report place Penn in the murky space behind Princeton, Harvard and Yale, but arguably ahead of Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell. Being stranded in Pennsylvania doesn’t help either – as the southernmost Ivy, it’s a little hard to feel a part of the crowd. If Harvard is the Ivy family’s overachieving big brother and Cornell is the whiny runt at the end, Penn is the quiet one in the back, pushing up its glasses as it finishes its chemistry homework. Plus, there’s that whole state-school-name-confusion that they’ve got to deal with (which we at NYU understand all too well).
It sure ain’t easy being boring, old Penn.
In contrast to the vibrant Philadelphia culture surrounding it – and I’d know, you’ll find “Philadelphia” stamped on my birth certificate – life on the Penn campus is so dull that the best and most shocking bit of news that campus rag, The Daily Pennsylvanian, could come up with as a funny spoof of regular news coverage in this year’s edition of their annual joke issue was a 10-hour elevator shutdown in one of their dorms. Er, “college houses.”
Published last week, the article explained how those modest (yet inventive!) Quakers trapped in the lift created a Facebook group titled “Help! I’m stuck in the High Rise elevators!” to MacGyver their way out of the situation. Spearheading the imaginary effort was an alumnus who, afterward, pledged $50,000 for further investigation into the problems.
$50,000 for a broken elevator? We should be so lucky!
The solution was clever, indeed, but the story is a completely believable one at Penn. So it’s no surprise that one of the most thrilling stories this week at Penn was, well, fake.
Once again, this little piece of journalistic genius got the little violet cogs in my brain going. Penn might be boring as hell and might have to make this shit up, but extracting money from alumni stuck in elevators ain’t a half-bad way to build up the endowment. Think about it: Penn has an endowment of almost $6 billion – paltry compared to Harvard’s $29.2 billion, but still three times as much as the roughly $2 billion NYU’s got tucked away in a gilded treasure chest in the Washington Square Arch. If they can sucker 50 grand from an alumnus for kicking it in an elevator for a few hours, why can’t we?
Just think about how many elevators NYU has!
To keep our “perstare et praestare” on and surpass Penn’s endowment, we should do just that: have a series of high-profile, big-ticket dinner extravaganzas all over campus, invite those generous trustees and alumni, and rig the elevators to kick out just as they’re fumbling for their checkbooks. Just picture it: Trustee chairman Martin Lipton is headed to the Rosenthal Pavilion on the 10th floor of the Kimmel Center for some kobe beef and a glass of rosé when the elevator just plain quits. “Harumph! We’ll never beat the Ivies at this rate! Better write a check to get these fixed.” Bam – $1 million down, a few thousand more to go.
At least it will work better than kidnapping and ransoming their children. Maybe.
We can start with the elevators in Carter Hall, 194 Mercer and the Bronfman Center and work our way up from there. Plus, no other Ivy can match our elevator prowess (make room for a friend!) – so trapping alumni in elevators for cash is a strategy that can exclusively put NYU ahead. We won’t be No. 34 on those pesky rankings anymore!
And since we have hundreds of thousands more alumni than any Ivy, it could be a pretty lucrative tactic. At that rate, we can change that $2.5 billion goal we’re shooting for into at least the $4 billion goal that Stanford, Cornell and Columbia have pledged. Maybe more.
That, my friends, is playing with the big dogs. Watch out, Quakers! We’re on your tail with our underdog moxie!
Andrew Nusca is a former news editor, spitting Ivy bile every week. Tell him where to shove it at opinion@nyunews.com.