You know how other Ivy League schools have intensive freshman humanities programs designed to teach the respective skills of suffocating pretension and talking out of your ass? Yeah. Well, apparently, students at these places are starting to realize that these breeding grounds of eternal douchebaggery might not be so worth it after all. At Princeton, nearly half of all freshmen enrolled in HUM 216-219, the year-long, four-course freshman humanities sequence, have dropped it. According to The Daily Princetonian, 43 freshmen enrolled at the beginning of last semester, but only 26 are still registered for the course. The reasons? Most students, according to The Princetonian, are frustrated with the course’s "pace," with one student even complaining that some of her compatriots "actually liked the material so much that they couldn’t stand going over Aristotle in a day." If we found ourselves trapped in a rural New Jersey hamlet with absolutely nothing else to do, we too would want more time to hear ourselves talk about books we spent fifteen minutes reading about on Wikipedia.

A new book by Jonathan R. Cole, The Great American University, refers to the University of Chicago as "our closest approximation to the idea of a great university." Hmm. Cole also traces the history of modern American higher education back to the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876—not to 1636, which everyone knows is the year when the world officially began spinning on its axis.

Over in Palo Alto, the Stanford Student Government has been circulating a little e-flyer about "Wellness Week," whose theme, conceived with utmost originality, is "Finding Balance and Happiness." Why? Because, you know, that’s what one does in California. Find balance and happiness.  But the best part of this otherwise eye-roll inducing event is the central image on the flier—sea lions! Really! Don’t they look relaxed?

Down in Philadelphia, Penn recently announced that the papers of Chaim Potok, the great Jewish-American novelist who wrote such favorites as The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, are now all ready. Potok, a Penn alum, left his papers to the University after his death in 2002, according to The New York Times.

Speaking of The Times, it turns out that Yale may lose their free copies of the Gray Lady in dining halls. An op-ed columnist in The Yale Daily News opined about the potential loss, saying that the newspaper serves to "create well informed, broadly informed citizens." We, though, agree with the sentiment of HPRgument: "I can’t see why it should dumb down the Yalies—well, actually…"