Objects in mirror may be smaller than they appear. (http://jmvidal.ece.sc.edu/)

When we last left our hero, he was en route to the Ivy Leadership Summit at Columbia University and had not yet taken to referring to himself in the third person. He was wondering just what this mysterious summit had in store, and perhaps more importantly, where his beloved cell phone charger was.

On the subway ride from Pennsylvania Station (which, logically, is in New York), I noticed that NYC’s MTA uses swipe cards that are vastly more convenient than SEPTA’s coins. This, of course, is because SEPTA is the worst public transit company in the universe.

Once at Columbia, I was struck by the beauty of its campus. Rather than going for yet-another-gothic-Yale-knockoff (which is in itself a counterfeit 20th century imitation of Oxford and Cambridge), Columbia’s campus was built in a majestic neoclassical style reflecting the Classical aesthetic ideals of beauty and through unity, symmetry, and rational perfection. Their 32-acre campus simply felt bigger than Penn’s 269-acre (not including the postal lands) sprawling hodgepodge of randomly interspersed buildings. Not that I don’t like Penn’s campus–I just like Columbia’s more.

But let the record state that Columbia sucks at partying, at least near campus.

Am I forgetting something? Oh right, the conference itself.

Actually, I was actually pleasantly surprised that this conference about the environment didn’t turn into an orgy of unshaven granola-eating elitists. The various panelists and speakers were engaging, the debate over fossil fuels in the present and future was lively but cordial, and much to my pleasant surprise in academia, the topics and responses were all…rational. The topic was not “let’s blame George W. Bush for global warming/Iraq/eating babies” or calls to abandon industrial civilization and live in trees, but rather discussions on how to make things better within our world: Ethanol. CO2 capturing. A possible return to nuclear. Hybrids. Fuel cells. And homage to the concept that is music to my ears and the ears of every Wharton student…”the market.”

Perhaps the best sign that the discussion was worthwhile occurred when I overheard the Brown students (who by and large perpetuated their stereotype of unreconstructed hippies) complaining that the panelists just weren’t hippie enough. Sorry, Comrade Brunonian, but when you ask stupid hippie questions, you get the Ivy League smackdown. Of course, in the end it is probably best that you didn’t like Columbia, because odds are you ain’t getting in for grad school.

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