Yesterday we documented big brother Griff's beer-throwing and sheltered ways. Today, a glimpse at Will Harsh's little brother blues—and how he compensated with white entitlement, according to a tipster/commenter and classmate:

Griff's non-refundable membership to Cottage [eating club] was paid in full when he got suspended. So some of the officers would let Will attend some meals and formals events in his brother's place until Will got banned from there.

The story goes that Will yelled "what are all these niggers doing here" one night when all the members of the Black Arts Company where there to celebrate a show they had performed. Cottage is know as one of the whiter clubs on campus so I assume that he was shocked to see so many black people there in a night. He was already on notice with Cottage officers because of an altercation he started with a bouncer early in the year.

This account varies from Guest of a Guest's version, which has Will hurling the n-word at a specific person. Unless, of course, there was more than one epithet-related ban?

Sources say Will was kicked out of two prep schools (one New England boarding school and one local private school) and was eventually forced to endure the humiliation of—gasp!—public high school.

While we're on the subject of scholarship, here's another item on Griff, which is actually quite sad:

Griff didn't walk at graduation. I was one of the students working the checkout fair and was responsible for giving students their cap/gowns. Griff wouldn't take one because he said that he would be traveling.

Sure, walking at graduation is overrated, especially if it's outdoors and you're trapped in the sun in one of those awful, heavy black gowns. But there's something profound about the scion of the university's most generous and celebrated living donor declining to walk. Was it too embarrassing? To him, or to his mother? (And, more powerfully: Why?) Or did Griff simply not care enough to move his vacation back a couple days? By his senior year, Griff may have tuned out on campus life, anyway—he had allegedly been banned from living in the dorms, including the $30M residential complex his mother built.

As for life after graduation, Griff's old LinkedIn profile (image below) lists private equity firm Solamere, founded by Tagg Romney. Tagg, of course, is a significantly more enthusiastic political son/heir. I wonder what their conversations are like.

The Whitman-Harsh camp has yet to reply to our emails, but if any of them want to set the record straight, we're all ears.

As we reported last night, Harsh — full name Griff Harsh V — was forced to withdraw from the university for a year, moving from the class of 2008 to the 2009 (thus presumably graduating last May. (The Daily Princetonian's seems to confirm the timing; the campus paper last year said ID'd him as a member of the class of 2008 but in January this year ran a correction saying he's really in the class of 2009.)

Our tipster, who lives in Princeton, NJ and says he knows the university well, says that the suspension appears academic, given Harsh's reputation as a not-so-bright legacy.

The Whitman kid does sound more like a boor than a bright light, given the party antics described in a campus magazine, which had the heir bragging that his wealth protected him from obnoxious behavior.

But the heir may have another reason for his brashness: According to our tipster, the university assigned one of the toughest guys on campus to be his roommate, the lacrosse-playing son of a New Jersey real estate developer.

The bodyguard roomie was probably the doing of Momma Whitman, who is very concerned Griff might be kidnapped, our tipster claims. Having donated at least $30 million to the university, she wouldn't have much trouble wielding influence with the housing office. Her fears would also help explain why we haven't been able to find any pics of her son on the internet, save for the tiny thumbnail above.

Genuine or not, Whitman's protectiveness over her son provides a ready-made excuse to avoid all discussion of and appearances with him on the campaign trail. Whitman can hardly be expected to answer questions about hearings and suspensions when she's trying to prevent an honest-to-God kidnapping, right? If only the Republican had some similar excuse to avoid answering questions about gay marriage rights.

Griff Harsh V was a member of Princeton's class of 2008 (among the first classes eligible to live in Whitman College, which his mother donated $30M to build) until mysterious circumstances and a disciplinary hearing forced him to withdraw for a year and join the class of 2009 instead. Perhaps the infraction had something to do with Griff's documented pigheadedness when he drinks? Quoth campus rag The Nassau Weekly:

Overheard at Charter [eating club]

Griff Harsh (Meg Whitman's son) throws beer in Guy's face.
Guy: You can't do that to people.
Griff Harsh (points at himself): Billionaire.

What was Griff's disciplinary infraction—and did Meg's money affect the proceedings? (Also: How is it possible that a college-aged heir to an internet fortune is not depicted anywhere in the whole of the internet, but for the above microscopic thumbnail? Is Griff the only human in America to whom the new Facebook privacy settings do not apply?) For the good of California: tips@gawker.com if you know. [NassauWeekly]

Lest you forget: After Skip's son and other football players were banned from performing a pep rally skit that "enforced negative gender stereotypes," Skip penned an epic missive entitled "The Tipping Point," wherein he rallied the Kinkaid School's "silent majority" of overgrown dude bros and sorority sisters to fight the lesbian leftist power. Read it here.

According to multiple sources, the first person to forward Skip's letter to wide audiences was former NFL lineman Ray Childress, who, true to stereotype, came down on Skip's and the football team's side:

From: Ray Childress
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 21:50
To: [redacted]
Subject: Letter to Kinkaid Board of Directors

All,

Skip McGee has written a wonderful and courageous letter to Kinkaid's BOD after Friday's pep rally disaster. By allowing the personal opinion of faculty members to dictate student conduct creates a disturbing precedent and, at the very least, the extent of the power should be made very clear to students and parents alike. It's a dangerous situation that needs to be addressed...and fixed. I ask each of us to echo such letter and let our view be heard in volume! [emphasis mine]

The Best!
Ray

A surprising number of parents used their work emails for forwarding Kinkaid gossip, including an oilman who wrote, "No wonder we lost, they ruined the pep rally." An associate at Bracewell & Giuliani (law firm of famed infirm Rudy) gave Childress an Amen: "Thy praises high I love to sing..."

A Kinkaid insider described the school's grim new climate to friends:

diversity at kinkaid is at a standstill. the activities that we had planned with the laramie project have been canceled including the show's preview, the talk back after, and the documentary that we had been working on. it also means that the school wide reading of the lorax by dr. seuss has been canceled because its too lefty. ... angry students are just as much of a problem as angry parents.

Among the emails to go viral in the aftermath was from the saga's young hero, Andrew Edison, the student body president whom Skip suspected of sabotaging his son. Noting that "Mr. McGee was kind enough to dedicate an entire section of his manifesto to me personally," Edison wrote:

In our junior year of English at Kinkaid, we learn about Aristotle's appeals or means of persuasion as applied to the art of argumentative writing. They are Logos (logic), Pathos (emotion), and Ethos (credibility). ... In regards to the pep rally, I understand his logic and his feelings of frustration with how the situation was handled. However, after reading through the substance of his final section entitled "Conclusion," he left me seriously questioning his ethos.... His indefensible remarks about the sexual orientation of faculty are undeniably bigoted and homophobic. The solutions that he offers... [constitute a] heinous call for a witch hunt...

Skip McGee, you got served—by an eighteen-year-old. Finally, Kinkaid's Board of Directors solved the problem the way stick-up-their-butt rich people always do: Creating a bureaucratic organization that will ultimately cede its dirty work to a paid professional.

[T]he Board of Trustees will empower a task force, comprised of parents, current students, faculty and staff, alumni, and trustees, to look more deeply into the issues and criticisms that have emerged in the past ten days. The school will hire a consultant, a known professional with a reputation for objectivity and successful experience, to assist with this work.

Once we have identified and hired a consultant for this work, we will ask the consultant to read all the letters, emails, and other communication we have gathered...

Hey, I know someone qualified for this position! Kinkaid Board of Directors, you know where to reach me. Updates from Kinkaidians on the Skip McGee's Culture War of Fun and Fury Peace Process will also be welcomed with open arms.

Look at this scientific evidence: A census, by our broke government. What did they find? Declining property values, increasing divorces, more people living in smaller spaces, immigration's slowing, less health insurance, blah blah blah.

Typical! Any jerk could have just surmised these things without going to the trouble of doing a census, which probably cost lots of money we don't have, btw. Oh look, "The search for employment is forcing more couples into long-distance relationships." Big surprise! Tell me something else I already know! Glad I took the time to skim professional newspaper websites while drinking Diet Mountain Dew so I could learn this amazing information! Rather than just already knowing it by common sense, which I did!

Maybe the media can find a fairy tale-level morality play about rich and poor people to write about? Ah yes: In China the rich kids ride around in their fancy cars running over the poor kids and they don't give a whit until the poor kids have had just about enough and the whole is ready to explode, like, I don't know, let's say a powder keg.

Boy yea we never heard of that one before, except on like Saturday morning cartoons, forever. An even older story: the recession-inspired descent into alcoholic despair. "Stephen Valand, 23, and Erica Shea, 25, quit their jobs earlier this year to start the Brooklyn Brew Shop, which makes gallon beer-brewing kits sized for New York City apartments." You're too young to be beer-soaked winos, Brooklyn creative underclass. Give it another five years at least.

[I'm just kidding I love these recession stories, that's how I write this column! Are you kidding me? Keep up the great work! Pic via.]

Ahem:

His father is Terry McDonell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, and he grew up in the kind of gilded New York household where Joan Didion, Jay McInerney and George Plimpton were drop-in guests. His godfather is Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, who bought Mr. McDonell's first novel, "Twelve," when Mr. McDonell was just 18. He heard news of its acceptance while cruising home in the carpool from Riverdale Country School, where he was president of the student body.

So that was his upbringing, and now he is a young literary success. His first novel was about "the downward-spiraling adventures of some druggy New York private-school students over Christmas break." His third novel—on sale Wednesday!—"ingeniously combines elements of a le Carré or Graham Greene-like international thriller with a campus novel set at Harvard, from which Mr. McDonell graduated in 2007." Yes, of course.

He has already published "a brief memoir" of his time at Harvard (well, it was published in France). That time, it seems, was colored by a certain "detachment" from the escalation of the war in Iraq—a war arranged and waged by Ivy Leaguers, you see! Conflict! (He also published a second novel, about, according to Wikipedia, "a 19-year-old Harvard student who is deeply affected by time he spends in Bangkok working as an intern reporter.")

The movie version of his first book (the one about private school kids taking drugs) is filming now, in the West Village. Batman Forever auteur Joel Schumacher is directing it! "It's sort of like Margaret Mead," Joel Schumacher says. "For Nick to have written this at 87 would be staggering. I keep asking myself how could he know all this at 17?"

See, fancy, expensive journalism schools are basically like overdraft fees and lottery tickets—a way to raise free, unlimited amounts of money from dumb people. And you needn't provide anything in return!

And also, this is why journalists are terrible at covering money and finance.

I think it's fair to say that going to journalism school increases your chances of getting a job in journalism. If J-school graduates are almost by definition financially naive - if they weren't financially naive they'd never have spent so much money on J-school - then maybe J-school is only serving to increase the number of innumerates working in journalism. Which is a sobering thought.

Ok, but why are financially literate writers not only shitty at but also generally uninterested in actually explaining things clearly to us dumb lay people? (Besides you, Felix!)

He's especially angry that his political views have been caricatured. He says he's conservative fiscally but is a social moderate ("I support civil unions").

Unrelated: Stam's hero is fellow Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn.

The Summit Series, an event for Internet entrepreneurs under the age of 36, is gearing up for a third get-together, this time in Aspen.

Rowland, the founder of Hilary Magazine and New Faces, a modeling agency, was one of the few women who went to the last Summit Series, a phenomenally ill-timed November junket in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for some 60 Internet-industry second-raters who partied and drank in the midst of an economic meltdown. (One attendee, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, came straight from laying off 8 percent of his workforce.)

The event was supposed to be off the record, with no names released, no photos posted, and no mention made of the event's existence. But Rowland, a very attractive blonde with a decidedly unattractive penchant for name-dropping, issued a press release and posted photos of the event for her vast number of Facebook friends. The summit's stated mission was the exchange of ideas and the promotion of charitable works. Perhaps that happened! But if so, Rowland's photographs did not document it:

Among the people Rowland exposed: Drop.io founder Sam Lessin, the son of a Wall Street banker who took 19 of his closest friends to his dad's vacation home in Cyprus, where they filmed a video of their frolics. The clip leaked and the event, promptly dubbed "Camp Cyprus," became an infamous example of the Web 2.0 set's irrational exuberance. In other words, Summit Series Mexico was only the second money-wasting event Lessin, whose startup is hardly setting the world on fire, got caught attending.

And that's the problem that the Summit Series' organizers are now facing. Rowland has proven that they can't keep the event private, and the likes of Lessin surely don't want to be caught out as wastrels a third time. Elliott Bisnow, the event's founder, is also trying to cajole invitees to the four-day Aspen event to pay $3,000; past events were free save for airfare. (Here's the full text of his emails, including an amusing followup to beg for ticket purchases.)

I suppose Bisnow could disinvite Rowland. But there will always be someone willing to barter privacy for a little taste of fame. Isn't that what the Internet was made for? With all her experience, Rowland should know that better than anyone.

We grabbed that picture of a Summit Series participant engaging in tug-o-war while the world burned from the personal blog of Summit Series organizer Elliot Bisnow. It is so explosive and revealing that we promptly received a takedown notice from the photographer, James "L." Duggan. Sorry, James!

The Crimson, in a staff editorial, sums up the case so far and then wonders about the "troubling implications" for students in the Ivy Leagues who may wish to abuse and harass inexperienced professors in the future. You might get sued!

The litigious threats are among a recent spate of well-publicized incidents in which conflicts that have failed to find mediation in the classroom have spilled into other realms, like the Internet or the courthouse. Like the Horace Mann case, featuring vicious Facebook groups aimed at high school teachers, Venkatesan's move to a lawsuit and book deal represent a failure of reconciliation within the classroom. Student-teacher arguments are nothing new, of course, but these escalated clashes still suggest a lack of mutual respect and an inability to resolve disagreements amicably. Venkatesan would have done well to bring her grievances to a university administrator before searching for an attorney.

Well, considering that she's also suing the University for sending her secret racist codes while spelling Gattaca or something, that might not have worked out so well. But, as in the Horace Mann case, the important lesson here is that if you're a rich little brat you can still get away with being a dick to authority figures and generally come out fine.

Sometimes it can be sad to be newsworthy. Sorry, Charlie!

Oh, but what about school head Thomas Kelly, the guy who fired Andrew Trees and Mr. Janice Minn? Turns out, he's a bit of a schmuck.

Tom Kelly was selected to run Horace Mann by the school's board, over the protest of the school's staff. He came from a public school background, and had done admirable work with mentally handicapped kids, but he also allowed a construction companies to dump their toxic garbage all over school grounds.

Here are the dumps in question. Kelly justified this by pointing out that the companies were nice enough to place brand-new athletic fields on top of the landfills. Critics counter that these fields will give the kids cancer and also they are illegal. The State of New York closed the fields and the taxpayers were stuck with the bill for cleaning them up.

Here's a fun factoid: the toxicity of the fields was revealed the same fall that Kelly started at Horace Mann. Then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a Horace Mann alum. His wife Silda is on the board of trustees—and was on the search committee that picked Kelly.

Spitzer only sued one of the three towns that took the cancerous construction garbage through illegal no-bid contracts. It was Eastchester, not Kelly's town of Valhalla. Take from that what you will!

In 2006, the Valhalla field finally reopened, mostly safe for use. Mostly.

The soil was analyzed for PCBs, pesticides, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and volatile organic compounds. Most chemicals for which testing was performed were not detected in the soil, according to the DEC. But of the chemicals that were detected, most fell below state safety guidelines.

Levels of PAHs above state guidelines were found only in sample TP-7, which was the soil taken from the steep slope on the western side of the athletic field, facing Columbus Avenue. In that sample, the DEC acknowledged that levels of PAHs exceeded state guidelines, but concluded that "routine exposure to soil on the slope is probably unlikely." The agency noted that the District should maintain the grass cover on the slope to further reduce the potential for exposure.

(During Kelly's Horace Mann tenure, the school got artificial turf for its athletic field, which is not located on top of a cancerous dump.)

The Alligator Sunglasses Lady

This mysterious lady is a Horace Mann trustee. Her daughter started the offensive Facebook group that caught the attention of history teacher Peter Sheehy. So, naturally, one day she marched up to Sheehy and teacher Danielle McGuire (the target of the Facebook group) and had an insane argument with McGuire about how the teacher invaded the daughter's privacy and read daughter's secret journal by browsing the public Facebook group the daughter started. Then alligator sunglasses woman accused the teacher of calling another kid a Nazi, which almost got the teacher fired, even though it didn't happen. So—let's meet Alligator Sunglasses Lady!

Her name is Wendy Siegel. She's on the right. Her husband is Stephen B. Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage for CB Richard Ellis.

"Jeffrey Robbins"

This is the little boy who harrassed Danielle McGuire for being a liberal who tried to talk about minorities in class, which upset young Robbins very much. He accused McGuire of calling him a "Nazi" and even claimed to have a tape. Of course, he didn't. His personal hero is Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn, though one wonders if he knows about the closet queer thing. The spoiled little shit also ended up class president! According to a tipster, the charming young Upper East Sider has two doctor parents, got early acceptance to Columbia, and recently "cancelled a meeting of the women's issues group at HM because he didn't like them." Here he is in the Horace Mann yearbook!

Confidential to Columbia: this kid? Really?

This week's Horace Mann controversy involves Facebook. Students were using the semi-public, pseudo-private space to attack their teachers. And even though seeing a teacher running errands is a perverse (and often etc.) experience, Horace Mann teachers are people, too, and were quite offended to be called "bitches" online.

Of course, parents, who are paying over $29,000 a year to send their precious and precocious little tykes to Horace Mann, were equally offended by the teachers' touchiness. Facebook is private space, they claimed. And we're not paying you to have an opinion, we're paying you to get our kid into Yale. And in the fall out after Academy X, the satirical novel about an unnamed private school by Horace Mann teacher Andrew Trees, parents were also annoyed that Trees got away with publicly mocking the school while students (customers) were getting chastised for "blowing off steam" online.

And in the end, the kids could do whatever they want. They kid who started the most offensive Facebook group was recently elected class president. That should help his chances with Princeton. The school itself had no comment through their P.R. agent.

(Another option for concerned parents is to not send their kids to a school with a P.R. agent.)