A official-looking flyer found at an NYU student center, telling tuition-challenged students to consider CUNY instead, was a fake. As NYU spokesman John Beckman put it, "Another satirical triumph for desktop publishing." Still, it provoked a discussion about private and public universities, especially as college tuition costs have grown about 450% since 1982-1984. Now the group responsible for the stunt writes to us. Take a look at the statement from "Students Creating Radical Change"......

A reader sent us a scan of a flier she found at NYU's student center, "It’s a flier for a NYU financial aid plan that basically tells students that can’t afford NYU to go to CUNY," and points out it's crazy that "NYU can’t give its students decent financial aid even though John Sexton flies to Abu Dhabi every other week and we keep buying new buildings all over the city." The school's tuition......

The Washington Square News, NYU's student paper, has a juicy article showing how their university artificially deflates campus crime stats by classifying 87% of its residence hall population as "off campus." The exposé sensationally notes that if you're a student who "gets murdered in Rubin residence hall, you were killed off-campus. You missed the cutoff by three blocks." Because it receives federal funds, NYU is required by law to publish its annual crime statistics, but......

Photo by Jake Dobkin. Earlier this year you voted that the I.M. Pei-designed NYU Silver Towers were, well, an ugly eyesore. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation has held strong, however, and for five years has been fighting for their rights. Well, their day has come. The buildings, and the "Portrait of Sylvette" Picasso sculpture accompanying them, have been landmarked. From the press release:The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted today......

NYU kids now have a new sticking point to convince their parents to fork over money for a deposit so they can move to Williamsburg. In a move that school officials say will divert $25 million into academic programs, NYU is scaling back on security around the downtown university. Today's Post reports that gone are overnight guards for two administration buildings--two of school's six "green buildings," spots that were kept open all night as safe......

A lawsuit against the MTA is about to go to trial surrounding the rape of a woman on a G train platform in Queens three years ago. And the victim, now 25, told the Daily News this weekend that she forgives her attacker ("I know he was sick in the head"), but not the token booth clerk at the 21st Street station, "I can't forgive those five seconds when I stared into his eyes, screaming......

Two women, both age 26, were killed overnight when they were struck by two taxis in the East Village. Police say the pair were crossing East 14th Street at 1st Avenue around 3 a.m. when they were first hit by a taxi heading westbound that knocked them into the path of the second cab which then ran into them on the eastbound side of the street. One woman died at the scene while the......

Be warned, youths with fancy-free Facebook profiles: Admissions officers at colleges you've applied to may be checking them. According to the Washington Square News, a Kaplan report says "One in 10 admissions officers viewed applicants’ social networking profiles to help in the decision-making process." And 38% of those profiles led to a "negative effect on their evaluation of the student, while only 25 percent reported a positive influence." However, NYU's admissions office says, "Our practice......

Just weeks into the first semester, students narced out an unidentified NYU freshman for allegedly selling coke from her dorm room, prompting her expulsion from the residence. That a student at an obscenely expensive university was supplementing her allowance by slinging a little yey is hardly a shocker. But what's raising eyebrows over at the campus paper is that her room was never searched, no evidence was collected, she wasn't formally charged with a crime,......

Of all the kids in this year's freshman class at NYU, it's probably safe to say that Avijit Halder is the only one who's the son of a drug addict and Calcutta prostitute who was burned to death. At age 11, Halder was one of the children featured in the Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels, about the perilous lives of children in Calcutta's red light district. The film's director helped Halder get out of the......

The Washington Square News details the sticker shock NYU students face while living in NYC and having vices like smoking and drinking. One student says, "I smoke up to two packs a day, which is probably $60 to $100 a week," while another says she buys them in bulk when she's back at home in Atlanta ($3.50/pack!). And one sophomore (underage, natch), says she tries to budget for her drinking, "For instance, if she’s planning......

The cost of tuition at Columbia and NYU has passed the $50,000 mark; a year at NYU now costs $50,182, including room and board, up 5.9% from last year. And Columbia now sets you back $51,866, the Sun reports. But according to NYU professor Amy Ellen Schwartz, it's actually a sweet deal when you look at the big picture: "What is true about understanding the college market, is that the economics are very complicated. In......

New York is in the midst of graduation season, when freshly minted scholars don cap and gown to accept sheepskins and jobs they will probably remember as their most demeaning. But first they'll have the opportunity to ingest the wisdom of their commencement speakers. Also, it's an opportunity to get on TV and be tackled by security guards. David Letterman ran a top-ten list of signs that you have a bad commencement speaker. Shockingly, no......

Preservationists and Greenwich Village community members are reporting that their efforts to stop NYU from demolishing the historic Provincetown Playhouse have paid off – to a certain extent. Andrew Berman, Executive Director of The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, tells us that NYU plans to preserve the facade and structural walls of the theater, but he says many issues remain unaddressed. Founded in 1918 by Eugene O’Neill and other trailblazers, the Provincetown Playhouse was......

Photographs by sarahheiman on Flickr (1, 2) Apparently when you run onto Yankee Stadium's field during NYU graduation exercises, you also get banned from other graduation events. William Lopez, super recent NYU film school graduate, told the Daily News he couldn't attend the "salute" to NYU film students but was still proud of his antics, "It was the best moment of my life." Well, that's what the pricey tuition is for! As video showed,......

Here's what new NYU graduate William Lopez's run onto Yankee Stadium looked like. The crowd does seem to be cheering very heartily. [Thanks, Gerritsen Beach!] Remember the Seinfeld episode where George tries to get fired from the Yankees with outrageous behavior like eating food over Babe Ruth's jersey and streaking across the field in a flesh colored-bodysuit? And for comparison, after the jump, here are videos of a fan running onto the field during......

The historic – but not landmarked – Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village could be the next building to make way for NYU’s ongoing expansion, which will devour six million square feet of space in New York in the next 25 years, if all goes according to plan. The theater is widely regarded as the birthplace of 'Off Broadway.' The local community board is open to NYU’s proposal (see renderings here), but some preservationists are trying......

"About halfway through, I bit in and felt something hard and crunchy." That’s what NYU senior Benjamin Jarosch declared after eating part of a found muffin, and he wasn’t talking about a walnut: his innocuous-looking blueberry muffin was stuffed with three razorblades. Jarosch and his buddies had discovered the muffin, along with four others, wrapped in tin foil, upon arriving in the classroom. It seems they were left over from a previous class and were......

The total annual cost (including room and board) of NYU has gone up 65% in the past decade and next year it will reach an all-time high of $50,182 – a 5.9% increase from last year. The Washington Square News notes that the university is cash poor, drawing 60 percent of its resources from tuition. In an attempt to soften the blow, NYU plans to increase need-based aid to "more than $150 million" total. This......

If more NYU kids were like John Waters, the university’s downtown super-saturation would at least be a bit more colorful. In a recent interview with Details, Waters took a nostalgia trip back to his NYU days, when he, uh, did a lot of tripping: Back then you weren’t very interested in school. Who lasted at NYU longer, you or Woody Allen? I bet Woody went longer, because I think I was there from September to......

On the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting, NYU officials announced yesterday that the university is "exploring installing an unprecedented security system involving an electronic remote lockdown system that would shut down classrooms and entire buildings" in the event of an emergency. If it pans out, this would be the first of its kind at a school, allowing officials to bolt classroom doors and building entrances, as well as reach staff and students through......

For three years straight, NYU has dominated the annual Princeton Review "College Hopes and Worries" survey, coming in as the #1 “dream school” for college-bound students. But now NYU’s reign of dreams has turned into a humiliating nightmare, as the 2008 survey shows the university plummeting to the #4 slot, bested by Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. Columbia University also took a hit, dropping down two slots from last year to #7. Is attending college in......

ART: In 2002 Hamburger Eyes xeroxed some pamphlets for what became the first of the crew's photography magazine. Since then "Hamburger Eyes has become an elegant yet underground periodical combining the documentary approach of National Geographic with the hit-‘em-hard sensibility of a late-night tagger." Tonight, in conjunction with the Spring 2008 release of their first book, The powerHouse Arena will display a selection of photographs (one of which is pictured) by the magazine's masterminds......

Besides killing Mom ‘n’ Pop stores and displacing low-income residents, the rapid gentrification seen in some New York neighborhoods may be flushing the city’s famous working class dialect down the terlet. A group of linguists interviewed by amNY say while predicting the future is impossible, there has been a dilution of that classic working class accent familiar to the world through movies and TV shows (here’s a good example of Archie Bunker’s New York speech......

Eldridge St. Synagogue, by AllWaysNY at flickrToday on the Gothamist Newsmap: an overturned bulldozer on 65th St. and Metropolitan Ave. in Queens, vandalism to an NYPD vehicle at Newkirk Ave. and 31st St. in Brooklyn, and an armed robbery on 47th St. and Lexington Ave. in Manhattan. NYU is opening a foreign annex school in Abu Dhabi in a bid to expand intercultural awareness. No gays, Jews, or anyone who's visited Israel allowed, please.......

Photograph by Jake Dobkin Later today, the city will discuss whether the I.M. Pei-designed Silver Towers should be landmarked. The Observer reported that NYU announced its support today, a reversal from an earlier position over three years ago. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation pushed for landmarking the complex, located between Bleecker and Houston Streets and LaGuardia Place and Mercer Street, a few years ago, calling it "an innovative modern design by I.M.......

The Lost Beach, by vanshnookenraggen at fark Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: Falling debris at East 11th St. and Ave. C in Manhattan, a propane truck explosion in the area of 172nd St. and Townsend Ave. in the Bronx, and a water rescue at 96th St. and the FDR Drive off Manhattan (brrr!). The Javits Center is only 21 years old, but it leaks like a sieve. So in addition to the expansion of......

In the territory immediately surrounding NYU, and therefore Washington Square Park, fine dining isn't always the first thing to come to mind. Instead, there's Mamoun's for late-night falafel, the Dosa Man, or the Dessert Truck – great for meals on the cheap and meals on the go. But on nights when you feel like you deserve a glass of wine with dinner, have a downtown date, or just crave a real sit-down meal, the......

Photograph of a Giants fan in Times Square by Johnia! on Flickr After the stunning Giants' Super Bowl win, people cheered like they hadn't seen a Super Bowl victory in 17 years! Throughout the city, folks were stumbling onto streets, chanting the names of players and even getting arrested. A thousand people flooded Times Square, reportedly jumping on cars and sitting on top of phone kiosks, but the Post says no one was arrested.......

Untitled, by Brunocerous at flickr Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a missing child on Bivona St. in the Bronx, a scaffolding collapse at Clifton Ave. in Brooklyn, and a bomb threat at 9th Ave. and 53rd St. in Brooklyn. The Fed lowered interest rates again - Bernanke is totally freaking out! NYU reaches an accord with neighbors regarding continued expansion. We won't have to start referring to New York as NYUC. Stuyvesant High is......