Hot Profs!

Ivy League academics may be innovative scholars, but eye-candy they are not, as a www.ivygateblog.com poll to rate the Ancient Eight’s hottest makes all too clear.

IvyGate solicited admirers to e-mail in nominations, from which they culled six female and six male candidates whose mug shots they posted online. Even the Ivy Gate editors were a little let down by voters’ choices of Princeton’s mousey Assistant Professor of English Tamsen O. Wolff and Columbia’s unexceptional Assistant Professor of Computer Science Adam H. Cannon.

“We really wanted a range of hot,” says one of the two IvyGate editors who both requested their names not be used because of the website’s controversial material. “We wanted silverfox, tweedy professor, bullet hot...We were hoping for more of a vote for the ‘sophisticated women.’ A ‘then she unbuttoned her tweedy regalia’ kind of thing.”

What some nominees lacked in looks though, they compensated for in charm.

“There was a guy nominated from Cornell who teaches a class in gender theory or something that allows him to show porn in class. And apparently he comes in one day of the year wearing a dominatrix suit, and ‘S&M’ kind of thing,” editor number one said.

Out of the thirty-five or so people initially nominated, only three were from Harvard: Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature Svetlana Boym, and Lecturer on Anthropology Carole K. Hooven.

Both Boym and Mansfield declined to comment (disillusioned modesty perhaps?), but Hooven, while expressing disappointment over her early elimination, also told FM over e-mail that, “It was an honor to be included with such a distinguished group.”

Conspicuously missing from the lineup was student favorite Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Language Leland de la Durantaye, whom the second IvyGate editor described as looking “very much like a young tailor, very dashing.” Also absent was Chemistry 30: “Organic Chemistry” foreign hottie Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Tobias Ritter.

So what if Princeton and Columbia won—they’re dumber, their endowment is smaller, and one of them even copies our early-action policy changes. So why else would people go to another Ivy if not for the hot profs? (oh right—Harvard didn’t let them in).