A Conversio Virium member after a caning demonstration at Columbia University.

“Sometimes my friends and I stop each other mid-sentence and say, ‘Oh my god, you guys. We go to Harvard. This is so weird,’” Maria, a junior, said recently over Skype chat.

Harvard had been Maria’s dream school for years. (She requested a pseudonym, but not because she’s not proud of her alma mater.) A valedictorian of her New England public high school, she got in on the basis of a 4.0 GPA and started working toward an English major. Last year, she began looking around for some extracurricular activities to enrich her college experience. There were more than 400 student groups to choose from. Maria chose a group called Munch. Her goal was to meet new people, to explore something new, maybe to release some of the pressure that comes with trying to compete in an intimidating hothouse of rampant overachievement.

Maria is petite, with honey-blonde hair and brown eyes. They widened as she ticked off a few of the areas she hoped to explore in her free time: “Bondage, handcuffs, ice play...”

Maria is, she said, less a masochist than a submissive. “So a lot of taking orders and stuff like that,” she explained. “I’m really into the whole exhibitionist thing, semi-public places, mirrors...” In addition to educational meetings on campus, Munch members have occasionally gotten together in private to “play.” Since joining, Maria’s had a chance to explore some of her fantasies. “I’ve been hit with a riding crop, a belt, a paddle, canes, a flogger ... floggers are my favorite.”

The popularity of 50 Shades of Grey has accelerated a mainstreaming of the BDSM subculture already underway—the initials stand for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism—and the trend has been especially pronounced in our more elite institutions of higher learning. Columbia has a BDSM group. So do Tufts, MIT, Yale and the University of Chicago. Brown, UPenn and Cornell have hosted BDSM educators for on-campus seminars entitled “The Freedom of Kink” and “Kink for All.” It looks like conservatives who have long viewed the Ivy League a bastion of depravity may have a point after all.

But some young members of such groups are finding the subculture is offering them more of an education than they expected, confronting them with serious issues involving consent, disclosure, anonymity, sexual violence, guilt and innocence, crime and punishment.

While the scene’s mantra—“safe, sane and consensual”—is heard so often it might as well be translated into needlepoint, violations of these maxims are common. In the last year, hundreds of people have come forward to describe the abuse they’ve suffered within the scene. The victims are mostly women, and like 50 Shades’ fictional 22-year-old Anastasia Steele, many are also young, submissive and uncertain about their boundaries.

In December, Victoria (not her real name), a 20-year-old English major at an Ivy League school, had decided to skip reading period, apply more makeup than usual and venture on her own to a kinky meet-upshe had read about on FetLife, a social networking service for fetishists. Victoria didn’t have any experience with submissive sex, but she had been drawn to it for years; she sometimes had fantasies about dungeons or about being restrained or embarrassed, and she recalled family trips to Medieval Times having given her an unusual erotic charge.

The meeting was fun. Victoria had interesting conversations about neurobiology and religion and, of course, about kinky sex. It was near the end of the evening when a man walked in whom she recognized; he had tried to form an S&M club on her campus a few years before. Eric had a doughy, impish face and slicked-back hair, and he wore his cell phone in a carrier on his hip.

A week later the two went to a “play-party.” After some reluctance, Victoria agreed to negotiate some tentative participation, defining safe words and off-limits actions. But once the two were alone in a corner, she said, Eric put a knife to her throat and began groping her. Victoria was shaken, but she couldn’t help doubting herself. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be, she figured.

The next day, when Eric asked her to send him an email stating what had happened and describing it as consensual, she complied. “At the time, I felt like this must be normal,” she said. “Now it seems obvious he was just building up a defense.”

The BDSM scene can be violent by nature. Physical and psychological power, and the lack thereof, are at the heart of the erotic experience. As a result, sexual assault can be harder to define and harder to prove. But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Indeed, awareness of the problem seems to be growing, and controversies around the issue have been roiling the tight-knit fetish community all year.

Kitty Stryker and Maggie Mayhem were up late one night, chatting online. Both are known as sex-positive activists and celebrities within the sadomasochism world. That night, they began to swap sexual-assault stories and realized the experience was more common than either had known. The pair began collecting similar tales online, and it wasn’t long before they had amassed more than 300 anecdotes. The stories ranged from more benign assaults (unwanted groping) to tales of being drugged and raped. Many of the victims described abusers who were well-known members of the community, people who hosted parties or helped to organize the scene.

“What we found is that the abuse was systematic,” said Ms. Stryker, who regularly goes by a pseudonym. “People had these stories, but when they went to report them to community leaders, they were dismissed as drama. Not only that, but people were ostracized for reporting. It becomes clear how easy it is for an abuser to swoop in on a newbie.”

Meanwhile, Andy, a 24-year-old law student who lives in New York City, also began collecting abuse stories, publishing them directly on FetLife. Andy is something of a New York scene fixture, known for throwing massive BDSM galas that include such attractions as “glitter bathtubs” and fake-blood tableaux modeled on the TV series Dexter. A transgendered male, he quickly collected hundreds of anecdotes, many from fellow New Yorkers, some of which called out abusers by FetLife username. “I knew the people they were naming,” Andy said. “There were party organizers and influential people that users were saying had done horrible things to them,” he said. Publishing these accounts on the social network had a galvanizing effect. Every time someone “loved” a post it showed up on their feed. Soon, everyone on the site knew who was being accused of what—though they didn’t always know the identities of the accusers.

When FetLife employees caught wind of the posts, they began removing usernames. Employees warned that lodging criminal accusations against users violated the site’s terms of service. CEO John Baku then got involved, stating that he was sorry for everyone who’d experienced abuse and suggesting that victims go to the police. (Mr. Baku declined to comment for this article.) The CEO’s involvement spurred hundreds of comments from users, many siding with the site’s administrators and warning of an epidemic of false accusations. Others backed Andy, arguing that the community should police itself and support victims. BDSM is illegal in some states, and many practitioners do not feel comfortable going to the police.

“The types of abuse that happen when you are new and vulnerable are happening to us now,” Andy said. It was a fall afternoon, and he was sitting in an East Village cafe, wearing a fedora, white suspenders and a black Janelle Monae shirt. “There are people in the New York scene that everyone knows are bad news, and people tell you but no one does anything about it. Since FetLife has emerged, we’ve had this giant influx of young people coming into the scene who haven’t been around long enough to hear the whispers.”

As word spread about the multiple accounts of consent violation, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) launched a survey. “We haven’t closed it yet, but so far we have 5,000 responses, and over 30 percent of them had have their previously negotiated limit violated, which I think is horrific,” said spokesperson Susan Wright. “There is still confusion between consensual BDSM and assault.”

As the debate around naming abusers wore on, FetLife stuck to its policy.

Things got more complicated when Mr. Baku himself was accused. The story came to light on the personal blog of a woman named called SinShine Love. “Let it be clear,” she wrote, “the reason John sees no problem with any of this rape apologist bullshit is because he has a foggy ass notion of consent and acceptable behavior himself. And because he personally benefits from people like me staying silent.”

Mr. Baku issued an apology for his behavior on FetLife, stating that he was drunk the night in question, though he didn’t specifically admit to abuse.

“We enforce the idea that you can say no to anything,” said Holli, a leader of Columbia University’s BDSM group, Conversio Virium. “There are a lot of young, inexperienced people that come to us for guidance and an introduction to the scene. A lot of them become easy targets for people to prey on at play parties. Sometimes young people like to say ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to everyone they encounter at a fetish party or event, but if you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ the lines about whether actual consent was given start to blur.”

Samantha Berstler, a student at Harvard who had studied the scene, supports Conversio Virium but questions the group’s willingness to admit non-students. “Why not just put a big neon sign on the door that says, ‘Vulnerable young nubile college students, many without strong support networks in the city yet, please come take advantage of them?’” she wondered.

Every time she logs into FetLife she sees the same story, Ms. Berstler added. “Someone else I know is writing that a relationship was completely abusive, and of course she was young and a college student and pretty and new.”

Consent is paramount at Harvard’s BDSM group, Munch, said the group’s leader, who asked to be identified as Michael. Right now, the university is considering giving the group its official backing, provided it adopts specific policies to educate members on how to deal with abuse. “We are working on developing standardized policies,” he said. “Right now that mostly exists with the function of an email list—anyone who joins the list gets a spiel.”

Victoria could have used the support of a good student group. After she and Eric broke up, she told her friends about the darker elements of their relationship—how he would repeatedly threaten to rape her and how maybe sometimes what he did actually seemed like rape, and how he once casually suggested he might be a serial killer. She said she had sometimes felt forced into sex acts, including electrocution and “fire play.”

Everyone agreed that this was abuse, but when she talked about reporting it, they waffled.

The NCSF has been working on new community guidelines about what constitutes consent and what doesn’t. Ms. Wright says she’s also been developing an app with FetLife that will direct members who have been abused to the authorities, as well as a new program that helps victims report to the police in general.

Meanwhile, despite FetLife’s best efforts, alleged abusers are still being publicly identified. A tech-savvy member of the BDSM community named MayMay recently developed an app that puts a yellow square around the profile photo of anyone who has been accused of abuse, along with a description of their alleged misdeeds. The yellow square can only be seen within the app, a free download.

After her breakup with Eric, Victoria sought out the help of a therapist and was diagnosed with PTSD. Eventually, she decided to press charges.

“I met a lawyer and we just picked the three most obvious instances of rape,” she recalled. “He said it wouldn’t make sense to file a report of 20 instances. I was worried that if I made the report, Eric would come attack me or kill me, and I didn’t want to put my life in danger unless I was certain something would come of it.” Victoria’s lawyer went to a friend who was a DA and asked what he would do with such a case.

Victoria was sitting in the school library weeks later when she received the email from her lawyer. The DA said he would throw the case out. BDSM scenarios are just too complicated to prosecute, he said.

One afternoon, Michael again met with school administrators about Munch gaining official recognition as a student group. Michael and two other group leaders sat and waited for their turn to be seen. Other student group leaders had arrived late and were wearing shorts. Michael and the other Munch members had worn suits. They were nervous.

The meeting was tense, but Michael felt it went well. “One of the big concerns that they had were issues of consent, and I’m proud to say we did a good job of representing ourselves as a group that takes consent very seriously,” he said. He hopes that Munch can become a leader in larger discussions about sexual abuse on campus, taking its consent-is-paramount model to the “vanilla” world. Harvard will make a determination about the group’s official status at the end of November.

editorial@observer.com

Dr. Levin, 65, said in an interview that he simply felt it was time to move on, that he planned to take a yearlong sabbatical to write a book and that he did not know what he would do after that.

The report is fascinating in the well-developed picture it delivers of a university president who was mostly—mostly—untainted by scandal. Even more fascinating is the fixation its readers have had with it.

The story, which went up earlier this afternoon, is a hit with readers. It's the most emailed (read: passed around) and the second-most viewed story right now in the NY/Region section:

Surely the stories readers "should" be more interested in is a subjective matter, but: It does say something about Times readers, mainly that one of the most stunning political corruption stories in recent New York City history is equally if not less compelling than an education bureaucratic of an elite institution stepping down to write a book.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Or at least those were the official words used about the events of April 8, when Antonio Calvo, a senior lecturer at Princeton's Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, beloved among the students, who called him St. Antonio, was suddenly exiled from the campus where he had worked for the previous 10 years.

"It's a euphemism I don't think you'll find on Wikipedia," said one lecturer, ahem, "preceptor" at Princeton.

Calvo's case garnered international attention when the maligned Spanish lecturer killed himself four days after he was told abruptly to leave Princeton. In the controversy that has surrounded his death, rumors have been floated as to the reasons for his dismissal, but the true circumstances of his suspension--and why he apparently was not given a chance to argue his case before he was told to leave--have not been made clear.

Princeton University's president, Shirley Tilghman, who has refused to divulge even the most general details of Mr. Calvo's particular leave-taking, has said only that it "came out of a review whose contents cannot be disclosed without an unprecedented breach of confidentiality." This statement, a Princeton University spokesperson told The Observer, "really is the extent of the information."

But it is very easy to discover that it is not. The narrative that has cohered amid the administration's cavernous silence, in the hundreds of comments on the school newspaper's Web site, in the pages of major newspapers in the United States and Spain and in what Dr. Tilghman quaintly calls "the blogosphere" is this: On April 8, Calvo received a letter from the chairwoman of his department, Gabriela Nouzeilles. According to The New York Times, which was leaked a copy, the letter stated, "We have received information from multiple sources that you have been engaging in extremely troubling and inappropriate behavior in the workplace."

The letter did not give specifics about the inappropriate behavior and, reached by phone at Princeton, Dr. Nouzeilles declined to provide any. According to Calvo's friends, the complaints that Calvo was aware of before his dismissal consisted of an email where he was said to have reprimanded a graduate student, in Spanish, with an order to "stop touching your balls" (a Spanish expression roughly akin to "stop sitting on your ass"). In the second incident, Calvo is said to have told a graduate student on an office visit that she deserved a slap for failing to do her job well. These exhortations, his friends said, were not meant to be taken literally.

According to The Times, the letter from Dr. Nouzeilles informed Calvo that he was suspended with pay and relieved of his teaching duties, and had to surrender his office key and university identification. On April 12, Calvo stabbed himself in his left arm and neck.

THE story of Calvo's dismissal has exemplified an uncomfortable conflict at elite universities, where procedures of hiring and promotion are determined by a strict caste system that gives rights to tenured professors that it does not afford to those who staff its lower ranks. Even supposing Calvo committed actions that would mandate immediate suspension--something his friends and former students vehemently deny--the very process of his dismissal is striking some as unfair.

"The issue of protecting the confidentiality is a convenient dodge," said William Potter, an alumnus who also works as a lecturer at Princeton and wrote a column in The Daily Princetonian asking for greater transparency in the Calvo case. "Any fear the university had of a defamation suit died with Professor Calvo. It's hard to see whose interests they're protecting."

Calvo started working at Princeton a decade ago, when he was still a graduate student in Spanish literature at CUNY. For graduate students at CUNY, teaching Spanish at Princeton was a good way to make some money, get teaching experience with crack students and gain access to Princeton's well-stocked libraries. By all accounts, Calvo also happened to love it.

In 2007, after he finished his Ph.D. on Langston Hughes and Federico Garcia Lorca, he applied for and earned the position of senior lecturer in Spanish at Princeton. In this job, Calvo not only taught classes but also coordinated all the Spanish teaching at Princeton. Because of Princeton's mandatory language requirement for undergraduates, he therefore managed a lot of sections. He was also tasked with managing complex relationships between outside lecturers, graduate students and the tenured faculty.

It was a job fraught with politics. At Princeton, the tenured faculty has minimal involvement in the nitty-gritty of teaching students the basics of Spanish grammar, reserving their energies for more lofty pursuits. Spanish is instead taught by two kinds of lecturers: graduate students from inside the university, who have to fulfill a teaching requirement, and those, such as Calvo, who are from outside the university. In the hierarchy of academia, people in Calvo's position are at the bottom of the academic totem pole, despite their Ph.D.'s and teaching duties, something some of Calvo's professors said they warned him about when he first became senior lecturer.

"He decided to accept a job that I consider very, very dangerous, particularly for a foreign person who needs a visa that's always attached to the institution that hires you," said Isaías Lerner, a professor who served on Calvo's dissertation committee when Calvo was a student at CUNY. "That creates a sense of power in the institution that is very unpleasant."

Dr. Lerner acknowledged, however, that it's hard to turn down a brand name like Princeton, Harvard or Yale. "Those are very seductive places," he said. "You have unbelievably intelligent and very selective students who you teach." And, he added, "they loved him."

But lecturers in Calvo's position tend to have trouble with graduate students. Unlike the outside lecturers, whose primary job at the university is to teach, the graduate students often view their research as more important. Teaching is seen as a grind, and an irritating distraction.

"They cancel classes, they don't want to teach at 9 a.m., it's usually a problem," said Marco Aponte-Moreno, a friend of Calvo's who used to work as a lecturer with him at Princeton and now teaches at the University of Surrey, in England. "That's the kind of context in which Antonio was working."

In November 2010, as his first three years as senior lecturer were coming to a close, Calvo's contract came up for review, a standard procedure outlined in the university's official employment policy.

Flor Gragera de Leon, a former Princeton lecturer and a friend of Calvo's, called him in the middle of March, when she began to worry that his review process had become so prolonged. Dr. Gragera de Leon said she began hearing rumors that some people in the department were organizing a campaign against his reappointment as early as last November.

"Antonio seemed to be informed of the accusations being raised against him," she wrote in an email to The Observer. "I do not know whether he was aware of his words being 'interpreted' as sexual harassment. He certainly knew he was accused of having used that Spanish expression (vulgar language and that's all)."

As has been pointed out in the comment board of The Princetonian and in the Spanish newspapers, the likelihood that an Ivy League academic would interpret the words literally rather than in their colloquial context was slim.

"In my opinion," she continued, "if there existed such 'interpretation' of the Spanish expression in order to accuse Antonio, we can just think of absolutely malicious intentions (otherwise, complete, inconceivable ignorance)."  

On April 8, Calvo received the letter from Dr. Nouzeilles that resulted in his "abrupt leave-taking."

Ms. Gragera de Leon said the timing of his suspension was unfortunate--academic appointments in languages revolve around interviews held at the annual MLA convention in January. Having failed to interview at the 2011 convention, Calvo would have to wait at least a year if he ended up being fired from Princeton. Furthermore, Calvo would have to leave the country, as his visa was tied to his job.

"By losing his job at Princeton, he also lost the opportunity to renew his visa," said Dr. Lerner.

Immediate suspension without the opportunity to argue one's case is typically reserved for what the university calls "rare cases." Among other questions asked by Calvo's friends, former colleagues and students are why the university took months to arrive at the emergency that mandated Calvo's immediate suspension with two weeks left in the semester.

And then there's the university's commitment to silence.

When asked about what happened, Dr. Nouzeilles told The Observer only that "it's very disturbing for the people in the department," and that "there are a lot of distressed students, and that is our priority for the time being."

The students, meanwhile, are annoyed with this treatment.

"It seems that [university president] Shirley [Tilghman] is trying to paint the students asking questions as nothing but bereaved and perhaps misguided youth, but we are not," wrote a student who responded to The Observer's inquiry via email under the pseudonym "Sancho Panza."

"It's very easy for a President who has been less than forthcoming in the past week to frame a policy in a positive light without providing any documentation or pointing students in the direction of clearly set policy, if it indeed exists," the student wrote.

Other students have commented on the unequal treatment of lecturers and tenured professors.

"I think it is unfortunate that there is no official, or available, University policy regarding the dismissal of lecturers, since they have been at least as important to my personal academic career as full faculty members have been," wrote Phyllis Heitjan, a senior majoring in Spanish who had taken two classes with Mr. Calvo and traveled with him on the Princeton in Spain program.

"I am a student of foreign languages and have often had language classes with graduate students or lecturers rather than professors," Heitjan continued. "They are a very important demographic at this University, especially in language and cultural studies, and often are more engaged with undergraduate students than busy, important professors can be."

ewitt@observer.com

Simply traverse the labyrinthine corridors of Barneys, Bergdorf and Bloomingdale’s, where the all-over-the-place mess hanging from the men’s racks is enough to induce migraines: Are pink ties metro or macho this week? Should slim-fit jeans really be this tight? Why do these scruffy flannel lumberjack shirts cost $300? And what’s with all the crazy stripes and extra pockets and ridiculous eagle prints? Things aren’t any simpler inside the showrooms of up-and-coming men’s wear designers, a casual survey of which might make a discerning fellow ponder whether he’d rather look like an urban vampire (Robert Geller), a coal miner (Gilded Age) or a confused sailor (Rogues Gallery).

All of which helps explain the current appeal of American “trad,” short for traditional: an Ivy League–inflected style that’s managed to retain an old-school sensibility without seeming dated or costumelike. Trad is, quite simply, a safe haven for sartorially selective gentlemen amid the ever-growing chaos of department stores and runways.

Think Oxford button-downs (and that’s real button-downs, meaning collars that button down, not simply dress shirts, to which the term is often misapplied). Natural-shouldered blazers. Flat-front khaki trousers. Loafers. Bow ties, rep ties. Polo shirts in solid colors. Lots of madras plaid. Early Brooks Brothers. New England WASPs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Trad is sort of the antithesis of what’s happening in fast fashion right now,” said Michael Williams, 30, who obsesses over classic American men’s clothing on his blog, A Continuous Lean. “It’s like the opposite of what all the men’s wear designers are doing,” Mr. Williams continued. “It’s not fashion; it’s clothes.”

THE ORIGINS OF trad date back to the turn of the century, with the founding in 1902 of the New Haven–based men’s clothier J. Press, considered the epitome of the style. The look became prominent on the Ivy League campuses of the 1950s and ’60s, as documented in the Japanese book Take Ivy, a rare photo collection first published in 1965 that’s enjoyed something of a revival in the past year. The term trad itself is said to have been coined by the Japanese, who have also been driving the current fascination with obscure U.S. clothing brands and Americana that’s taken hold at various men’s boutiques, department stores and on a handful of blogs akin to Mr. Williams’. (J. Press was acquired by a Japanese company, Onward Kashiyama, in 1986.)

Perhaps you’ve noticed Lacoste polos, Ray-Ban eyewear, bow ties and hand-sewn camp moccasins on the streets of Billyburg?

Those who embrace the look say subtlety is key. 

“When done right, it should almost be invisible,” said John Tinseth, 52, an insurance broker and longtime traddy who’s been writing a blog called The Trad—anonymously, until now—for the past two years. He was on the phone from his West 57th Street apartment, dressed, he said, in L. L. Bean khakis and moccasins and a yellow university-stripe Oxford by Rugby.

“A guy should walk right by you and he’ll have the whole thing down and you won’t even notice,” Mr. Tinseth said. “That’s when it’s done perfectly.”

In New York, ground zero for trad is the J. Press store on Madison Avenue and 47th Street, one of the company’s four U.S. retail locations. (The others are in New Haven, Boston and Washington, D.C.)

There, you will find David Wilder, a polite 41-year-old sales associate and trad guru to scores of Manhattan males.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Mr. Wilder, who is tall and broad of build, with thin blond hair and Joycean spectacles, was toggling between register, rack and fitting room, stopping every so often to chat with familiar customers, who greeted him brightly by name.

He was trying to find a properly fitting $595 navy blue wool blazer for a young buck headed back to school at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

“I think this one’s going to be a lot better,” Mr. Wilder said, sliding a size 41-long onto the studious shopper’s shoulders.

Mr. Wilder grew up in Greenwich, Conn., “surrounded by Madras jackets and what we would call ‘go to hell’ pants, which are heavily patterned,” he said on his lunch break, over a quiche and a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale at a sandwich shop across the street from the store. “The type of stuff you’d wear to the Belle Haven yacht club.”

He was wearing tasseled Alden loafers; English-made J. Press over-the-calf socks; American-made J. Press khakis with a one-and-three-quarter-inch cuff (the trad standard); a Lewin striped shirt purchased on Jermyn Street in London (a bit racy for a trad ensemble, he said); a flat-knit solid navy blue necktie; and a natural-shouldered navy blazer by David Cenci. (His J. Press jackets were at the cleaners that day.)

AT YALE, Mr. Wilder studied 18th-century American and European history, and spent several of his summers working part time at the J. Press store in New York. “It was like working in your eccentric uncle’s genteel closet,” he said fondly. “Imagine your best-dressed uncle throwing open his closet for you to frolic around in. Like an insiders’ club for people who love the Ivy League look.”

After that, Mr. Wilder helped run a high-end personal stationery business, Therese Saint Clair, that his parents founded when he was 9 years old, and that he eventually sold in 2001.

About five and a half years ago, after a stint working as a concierge at the Delamar Greenwich Harbor Hotel, Mr. Wilder sent his résumé to the New York J. Press store on a whim. He was hired shortly thereafter, he said, and has been shilling trad style five days a week ever since.

What is the difference between trad and preppy, The Observer wondered?

“Preppy is a little broader than trad,” he said. “It’s more eccentric, more colorful.” (All those duck prints!)

Trad’s entire purpose is to defy and transcend the whims of fashion, but inevitably some elements will be seen on the runways this week—likely during Thom Browne’s show on Sunday, Sept. 13, at his Hudson Street store (Mr. Browne got a massive plug when Vogue editor Anna Wintour recommended him to David Letterman on her Aug. 24 Late Show appearance).

Since 2007, Mr. Browne—otherwise best known for encouraging men to expose their hairy ankles—has been designing a trad-oriented specialty collection for Brooks Brothers called Black Fleece. This year’s spring/summer line was heavy on the madras, seersucker and paisley, with a predominantly navy blue, white and gray color palette. (A photo that surfaced on The Sartorialist blog in April 2006 of a silver-haired gentleman wearing a slim, short-cut navy blue blazer, a light blue Oxford shirt and dark gray slacks with an ankle-length pant hem ran with the caption: “O.K., Trads, you’re really closer to the Thom Browne aesthetic than you may want to admit.”) Like Mr. Browne, Michael Bastian, who is showing at Exit Art on Sept. 14, is a breakout men’s wear designer known to dabble in trad pieces.

“Pick up a Browne or Bastian shirt,” said Mr. Tinseth, “and you can feel the heft of it and know it was made with care.”

But a true traddy might opt for the more economical and authentic route of getting his dress shirts custom-made, perhaps by a tailor like Alexander Kabbaz, shirt maker to Tom Wolfe, Mr. Tinseth said. Likewise, a traddy would buy a J. Press suit over one made by a trendy designer.

“This stuff lasts forever, which I don’t think fashion people like because they need to sell new stuff,” said Mr. Tinseth, citing a pair of cordovan shell Alden wingtips he bought in 1986 and still wears today.

Mr. Wilder, of course, concurred.

“Traddies want something authentic,” he said, taking a sip of ginger ale. “Not something that’s a riff on something authentic.”

jpompeo@observer.com

All of which proves, if you can't stand the heat, duck under a plastic palm tree.

- Matthew Schuerman

The young man—on charges for either peddling drugs or assault, or possibly both—was wearing a black jacket. It read, simply, “Crimson” across the back. When the man turned around, he revealed a single red letter on the front left breast pocket: “H.”

Fair Harvard!

On a day later that month, another young was bobbing his cornrowed, iPod-plugged head on the No. 6 train in Manhattan. He wore a black baseball cap so big it fell over his ears, the orange brim flattened out, the single, fat orange “P” prominent. His jacket was also black, with plainly visible sewn-on appliqués: “Princeton.”

There is possibly no entity less cool, less hip, and less urban than the Ivy League. And yet young Black and Hispanic men in the city regularly wear apparel from those elite-eight schools. Are they fans of the school? Maybe they’re recent converts to the surprising Ivy League co-champion Princeton Tigers football team? Perhaps there’s a sudden inner-city interest in Harvard hockey?

Maybe not.

When asked about the provenance of his Harvard jacket, Shakeil Brown, a St. Anthony High School student in Jersey City, responded: “I don’t know,” He helpfully pointed to the back: “It says ‘Crimson.’”

A worker at a hip-hop clothing store named Morlee’s in Jersey City showed me a fitted Cornell hat ($25, plus tax) and chuckled that the kids thought it was for the Cincinnati Reds (which it does resemble). I asked him what the hat did represent. “Some college team,” he said. “Clemson, I think.”

Many men who wear the clothes seem blissfully unaware that they are displaying the colors of any school at all. It is just a well-made coat, or a hat with some cool colors and a look that matches their shoes.

The maker of the clothing is a 109-year-old company based in New York called Stall & Dean, an official outfitter for the schools. On many of their jackets found in stores in Harlem, Brooklyn and Jersey City, and hundreds of others around the country, tags inform the purchaser: “The sporting culture of the United States was incubated across all walks of life, but its formative years, it could be said, were spent on the storied Ivy League campuses of the Northeast.”

The chief operating officer and a partner at Stall & Dean, Joe Cuff, said his company has been surprised at the response. “When you get into the urban market, the hip-hop market, people are looking for something different that not everyone has.” Stall & Dean also marketed clothing pegged to Negro League teams, and the popularity of these throwback jerseys led them to believe they could replicate the success with their Ivy League line. The company began aggressively marketing their Ivy League clothing to urban centers in 2005. He would not release sales figures for the company, but said that they’ve been up significantly this year, even with the warmer weather.

About the customers’ lack of knowledge regarding their purchases, Mr. Cuff said: “In the focus groups we talk to these guys, and we’re hearing that people are wearing it because maybe in the past these doors weren’t available, and that in these days these doors are getting kicked down.”

It’s not difficult to trace when the institutions that gave us eating clubs became popular with fans of 50 Cent and Sean (Diddy) Combs. This past New Year’s Eve, the rapper Chamillionaire performed his hit “Ridin’” on MTV in a Harvard varsity jacket. A few years ago, the hip-hop impresarios Jay-Z and Kanye West could be seen in the same red letterman jacket—it has the “H” proudly emblazoned across the breast and “Harvard” on the back. And Mr. Combs has been seen sporting a blue Yale windbreaker.

In fact, Harvard, Yale and Princeton are not the top sellers, Mr. Cuff said. While buyers in suburban markets like those clothes more, the urban market’s most popular school is, surprisingly, the one in New Hampshire.

“The No. 1 seller of 2006 would have been Dartmouth,” he said. “And Cornell was very, very popular.” In the 2007 video for rapper Mims’ recent song “This Is Why I’m Hot,” a young man is completely accessorized in Cornell University gear.

On a recent bright and cold day in Journal Square, a grim center of Jersey City featuring a plethora of 99-cent stores and bodegas, Ali Williams, a worker at Blast Sport, was showing off the black jacket with the red “H” on the breast and “Crimson” across the back. “They don’t know what it is,” he said, when I asked him if customers knew they were buying Ivy League gear. “They just like the colors.”

A few minutes later, a 22-year-old named Maurice Mincey walked into the store. He sported dreadlocks, a do-rag and a crimson hat loosely planted on the top of his head. The tags were still attached.

What does the “H” stand for?

“Hot,” he said. “Hustler. Hood.”

When informed that he was wearing a cap for Harvard University, he looked more than a little disappointed, leaned on the coat rack and then shrugged. “That’s something new to me.” But he reasoned, “It’s just fashion.”

He was not wearing the matching Harvard jacket. “I’m not too much with the red jacket,” said Mr. Mincey, who is a security guard at a local warehouse. “That’s the Bloods—I’m not down with that.” In his girlfriend’s neighborhood, he explained, he often sees reputed Bloods members wandering around in the Harvard jackets.

“Well, I’m definitely concerned about that,” said Mr. Cuff, the Stall & Dean partner. “That’s not something I heard before or that it’s come up with us. That’s not the target market we’re after. Our jackets and our price points are not structured to reach that image.”

Across the street, at a place called Lord’s, the display window was crammed with red jackets of all kinds—Negro League throwbacks, Atlanta Braves windbreakers and other items. But in a corner was one red jacket that read “Harvard Track,” accompanied by the seal and motto for the school: VERITAS. It was the last one in stock, the owner told me; all the rest had sold out. Inside were green windbreaker jackets that read “Dartmouth” across the front.

Harold Soto, 18, who works the register there and owns a Dartmouth track jacket and matching hat, said that the combo nicely matches his green-and-white Air Jordan shoes. When asked about the school name, he said, “It’s like a university, right?

But if you want to find, say, a Stall & Dean Columbia University jacket at the campus bookstore in Morningside Heights, you’re out of luck. Just nine blocks north, at Metro on 125th Street in Harlem, where matching cap-and-coat combos for Brown, Yale and Harvard prominently line the walls, Columbia jackets are selling for $165.

“We don’t sell our product to the bookstores,” Mr. Cuff said. “Our price points are much higher than what you’d find at bookstores.”

It doesn't sound like he's ready to let go of the issue any time soon, despite the near-unanimous lack of support he's received for a proposal to reinstate the draft. And Rangel, a decorated war veteran, will have the ability to make things increasingly uncomfortable for his newly empowered Democratic colleagues every day that goes by without a coherent alternative position on how to deal with Iraq.

-- Azi Paybarah

Not quite schadenfreude, the Ivy League tell-all thrives on the premise that the country’s best students are no better off than the kids who ate their dust in the scramble for college admission. Unlike Kaavya Viswanathan’s ill-fated How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the two newest additions to the glut of Ivy-themed teen lit skip the race and delve right into the college years. Robin Hazelwood’s Model Student chronicles the sad life of a fashion model at Columbia, while Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl (a self-proclaimed “Ivy League Novel”) follows a bookish junior from Eli University who gets “tapped” for a secret society traditionally reserved for rich, politically connected males. Both books promise to spill the beans, and although young readers are likely to be thrilled by all the sex and swear words that come tumbling from the same bag, the authors deliver little in the way of juicy revelation.

Secret Society Girl succeeds all the same. Ms. Peterfreund’s descriptions of the ambitious Amy Haskel’s collegial life are both vivid and amusing, and although the second half of the book focuses too much on her secret society’s rather dull battle for women’s rights, Amy herself is charming enough to be forgiven. Her ceremonial initiation into Rose & Grave—modeled after Yale’s famous Skull and Bones—runs a little long, but Amy handles it with dignity and spunk, even as the boys in the club pretend to drown her inside a coffin and threaten to make her a sex slave in their castle.

Amy’s story is both witty and endearing, peppered as it is with rhetorical questions and moments when she emphatically addresses the reader as “dude.” As she discusses her dorm-room drama, her study sessions at the library, and the awkward interactions she shares at the lit-mag office with her “friend with bennies,” Amy proves herself a rather appealing girl. She constantly makes lists to better sort through her thoughts (“WAYS TO KNOW WITHOUT ROLLING OVER TO LOOK AT HIM,” from the chapter “Morning After”; “THINGS I DISCOVERED THAT CALMED ME DOWN,” from “Barbarians”), and she’s as forward about her desires and goals as she is about her disappointments. She’s tough, too: “Show me a pining man and I’ll show you a pussy,” she says in reference to a boy who’s just told her that he loves her. To top it off, Amy knows about Said and Lévi-Strauss, and although she spends most of Secret Society Girl finding her place in Rose & Grave, we learn that during her sophomore year, she tried to read Borges in Spanish.

In Ms. Hazelwood’s Model Student, meanwhile, narrator Emily Woods begins by warning her readers that the ugly-duckling-turned-cover-girl fairy tale is “total crap.” “Life doesn’t work that way,” she writes in the prologue, “and I don’t know why we ever pretend it does. After all, did Einstein ever sigh, lean forward, and earnestly confess he was once the dumbest guy in the class?” The answer, technically, is no, but few children manage to leave primary school without learning from some smart-aleck that Einstein was a lousy student.

Emily’s story, set in the late 1980’s, begins in her hometown of Milwaukee, where she spends her days studying and finding photos of pretty girls to glue onto her wall. She falls into modeling when her father, an advertising agent, puts her in a Wisconsin tourism ad wearing a hat that looks like a piece of cheese. After the shoot, a photographer tells Emily that she could be a model (she has a killer smile), and it doesn’t take long for the girl to convince her mother, an aging social activist who reads Mother Jones and calls her cat Malcolm X, to drop $1,000 on a course at the Tami Scott School of Modeling. The school turns out to be a scam—the women enrolled “were not only not tens, but didn’t add up to tens when you included the gals on either side of them”—but Emily makes the best of it. After some local jobs and a few false starts, she moves to New York, scores herself an agent and enrolls at Columbia. From there, we learn the hard way that modeling is a very boring career, in which the highs are rare and the lows tedious. We also learn that models often have eating disorders and drug problems.

Eventually, Ms. Hazelwood starts giving Emily cocaine to help keep her awake during the endless photo-shoot scenes, but she forgets that most readers will have to get through them sober. Sadly for us, Emily works constantly, and although she’s ostensibly enrolled at Columbia throughout most of the novel, the reader only hears about it when she gets her grades at the end of every semester. The college only seems to exist so that Emily has something to fight about with her worried mother—and someplace to drop out of when she decides to focus on her career. Ms. Hazelwood’s point, obviously, is that modeling leaves no room for a proper adolescence, but it’s unfortunate that Emily’s career overwhelms the novel, leaving little room for her experiences as a college student. The combination of those two lifestyles could have been entertaining, and the pun in the book’s title suggests that it should have been Ms. Hazelwood’s main focus.

Compared to the radiant Amy Haskel, Model Student’s Emily Woods is a piece of wood, with no interests and no ambitions beyond magazine covers and (maybe) a diploma. That aside, the two girls are quite similar: Neither strays too far from the archetypes we know so well from teen fiction and film. As they hyperactively deliver their confessions, Amy and Emily sound frightened and skeptical of the worlds they attempt to penetrate, but gleeful and self-consciously wise as they let their readers in on the secrets they have learned. The top may look better than the bottom, but the girls who narrate these stories want to set the record straight: The drugs up there are just as dangerous as the ones down here, and the men no less cruel.

These two books are mostly hawking old news, seldom pulling the curtains on anything less predictable than runway anorexia and nasty corruption within the old boys’ club. Quentin Compson drowned himself in the Charles River for our sins, and all we can muster, it seems, is a minor cocaine habit and some careless sex. Secret Society Girl remains readable (thanks to Amy), but Model Student collapses on Emily’s brittle, bony shoulders. If these two books reveal anything, it’s that modern Ivy League intrigue is not so intriguing after all. And so, in the grand tradition of the exposé, the bubble is burst.

Leon Neyfakh (Harvard class of 2007) is majoring in history and literature.

Not quite schadenfreude, the Ivy League tell-all thrives on the premise that the country’s best students are no better off than the kids who ate their dust in the scramble for college admission. Unlike Kaavya Viswanathan’s ill-fated How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the two newest additions to the glut of Ivy-themed teen lit skip the race and delve right into the college years. Robin Hazelwood’s Model Student chronicles the sad life of a fashion model at Columbia, while Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl (a self-proclaimed “Ivy League Novel”) follows a bookish junior from Eli University who gets “tapped” for a secret society traditionally reserved for rich, politically connected males. Both books promise to spill the beans, and although young readers are likely to be thrilled by all the sex and swear words that come tumbling from the same bag, the authors deliver little in the way of juicy revelation.

Secret Society Girl succeeds all the same. Ms. Peterfreund’s descriptions of the ambitious Amy Haskel’s collegial life are both vivid and amusing, and although the second half of the book focuses too much on her secret society’s rather dull battle for women’s rights, Amy herself is charming enough to be forgiven. Her ceremonial initiation into Rose & Grave—modeled after Yale’s famous Skull and Bones—runs a little long, but Amy handles it with dignity and spunk, even as the boys in the club pretend to drown her inside a coffin and threaten to make her a sex slave in their castle.

Amy’s story is both witty and endearing, peppered as it is with rhetorical questions and moments when she emphatically addresses the reader as “dude.” As she discusses her dorm-room drama, her study sessions at the library, and the awkward interactions she shares at the lit-mag office with her “friend with bennies,” Amy proves herself a rather appealing girl. She constantly makes lists to better sort through her thoughts (“WAYS TO KNOW WITHOUT ROLLING OVER TO LOOK AT HIM,” from the chapter “Morning After”; “THINGS I DISCOVERED THAT CALMED ME DOWN,” from “Barbarians”), and she’s as forward about her desires and goals as she is about her disappointments. She’s tough, too: “Show me a pining man and I’ll show you a pussy,” she says in reference to a boy who’s just told her that he loves her. To top it off, Amy knows about Said and Lévi-Strauss, and although she spends most of Secret Society Girl finding her place in Rose & Grave, we learn that during her sophomore year, she tried to read Borges in Spanish.

In Ms. Hazelwood’s Model Student, meanwhile, narrator Emily Woods begins by warning her readers that the ugly-duckling-turned-cover-girl fairy tale is “total crap.” “Life doesn’t work that way,” she writes in the prologue, “and I don’t know why we ever pretend it does. After all, did Einstein ever sigh, lean forward, and earnestly confess he was once the dumbest guy in the class?” The answer, technically, is no, but few children manage to leave primary school without learning from some smart-aleck that Einstein was a lousy student.

Emily’s story, set in the late 1980’s, begins in her hometown of Milwaukee, where she spends her days studying and finding photos of pretty girls to glue onto her wall. She falls into modeling when her father, an advertising agent, puts her in a Wisconsin tourism ad wearing a hat that looks like a piece of cheese. After the shoot, a photographer tells Emily that she could be a model (she has a killer smile), and it doesn’t take long for the girl to convince her mother, an aging social activist who reads Mother Jones and calls her cat Malcolm X, to drop $1,000 on a course at the Tami Scott School of Modeling. The school turns out to be a scam—the women enrolled “were not only not tens, but didn’t add up to tens when you included the gals on either side of them”—but Emily makes the best of it. After some local jobs and a few false starts, she moves to New York, scores herself an agent and enrolls at Columbia. From there, we learn the hard way that modeling is a very boring career, in which the highs are rare and the lows tedious. We also learn that models often have eating disorders and drug problems.

Eventually, Ms. Hazelwood starts giving Emily cocaine to help keep her awake during the endless photo-shoot scenes, but she forgets that most readers will have to get through them sober. Sadly for us, Emily works constantly, and although she’s ostensibly enrolled at Columbia throughout most of the novel, the reader only hears about it when she gets her grades at the end of every semester. The college only seems to exist so that Emily has something to fight about with her worried mother—and someplace to drop out of when she decides to focus on her career. Ms. Hazelwood’s point, obviously, is that modeling leaves no room for a proper adolescence, but it’s unfortunate that Emily’s career overwhelms the novel, leaving little room for her experiences as a college student. The combination of those two lifestyles could have been entertaining, and the pun in the book’s title suggests that it should have been Ms. Hazelwood’s main focus.

Compared to the radiant Amy Haskel, Model Student’s Emily Woods is a piece of wood, with no interests and no ambitions beyond magazine covers and (maybe) a diploma. That aside, the two girls are quite similar: Neither strays too far from the archetypes we know so well from teen fiction and film. As they hyperactively deliver their confessions, Amy and Emily sound frightened and skeptical of the worlds they attempt to penetrate, but gleeful and self-consciously wise as they let their readers in on the secrets they have learned. The top may look better than the bottom, but the girls who narrate these stories want to set the record straight: The drugs up there are just as dangerous as the ones down here, and the men no less cruel.

These two books are mostly hawking old news, seldom pulling the curtains on anything less predictable than runway anorexia and nasty corruption within the old boys’ club. Quentin Compson drowned himself in the Charles River for our sins, and all we can muster, it seems, is a minor cocaine habit and some careless sex. Secret Society Girl remains readable (thanks to Amy), but Model Student collapses on Emily’s brittle, bony shoulders. If these two books reveal anything, it’s that modern Ivy League intrigue is not so intriguing after all. And so, in the grand tradition of the exposé, the bubble is burst.

Leon Neyfakh (Harvard class of 2007) is majoring in history and literature.

They looked puzzled. The eldest answered, “Fight them? But we are not soldiers. I am an engineer, my brother is a doctor, my cousins are businessmen.”

“In America,” I explained, “if we were invaded, everyone would fight.” And I thought with some pride about my father and uncles, who had enlisted in World War II and returned with decorations.

A year later, in Baghdad, I met impressive young U.S. soldiers, including reservists with arty regular jobs and guys who’d enlisted because it was “the right thing to do.” American culture, I told myself, was built on the idea of the citizen-soldier.

Lately, I’m less sure about my boast, and reading AWOL has made me worried. This passionate collaboration between a Marine wife and a Marine father sharpened the sense I’ve been getting of a growing divide between civilian and military values, a divide symbolized by the controversy over the ROTC on elite campuses. Wasn’t the alleged reason for student opposition—the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—a screen for deeper, less admirable feelings? After all, how many openly gay executives are there at the corporations that recruit freely on these same campuses? And how many of the campus protesters would be comfortable with bunkmates who flirted with each other? How many really cared about gay rights at all?

What the opposition to ROTC is really about may be something that AWOL co-author Kathy Roth-Douquet points out: In current civilian culture, “feelings matter most, our personal choices and beliefs are sacrosanct …. Military people don’t—can’t—make personal choice central.” And hand in hand with this division between civilian and military morality goes the disappearance of the concepts—and practice—of honor and duty in civilian life. A growing number of people from “good” families—maybe especially people from them—seem to have no restraint on their behavior, no acts they would shrink from because, well, they’re dishonorable, and no acts they would undertake, unpleasant as they may be, because duty requires it. The authors of AWOL have a phrase for it: “the underdevelopment of character in the upper classes.”

As Ms. Roth-Douquet points out, members of the military don’t fight because they relish combat, but because service is “a gift to the country, to fellow soldiers, an attempt to use your training to fulfill a task that the country has asked you to do.” The popular idea that career soldiers enjoy fighting is doubly false, because it “makes it okay for other people not to do it.” It’s about duty, not fun. Frank Schaeffer’s son John wrote home from boot camp that “by the end of his training, the Marine next to you is more important than you are.” That spirit of intense camaraderie is not fostered by, say, a two-year internship in investment banking, which is how many of our brightest graduates begin their professional life.

AWOL’s co-authors come from the media elite: Frank Schaeffer is a professional writer and veteran of the film industry, and Kathy Roth-Douquet, a Bryn Mawr grad and lawyer, has worked as an advance woman for Democratic Presidential candidates and in the Clinton White House. Both are whole-heartedly infatuated with military culture. Mr. Schaeffer was dragged kicking and screaming into military life when one of his sons surprised him by enlisting after high school. (In the last five years, he has published two successful books about his dialogue with his son, Keeping Faith and Faith of Our Sons.) Ms. Roth-Douquet married a Marine pilot on active combat duty.

Together, the authors write fervently about the need to address the widening gap between civilian and military values, which they believe stems from the avoidance of military service by the American elite. While our elites pay lip service to the “important job” enlisted men are doing, they never imagine their own children joining them. “If present statistical trends continue, we are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress … will have served or have any children serving.”

Prior to Vietnam, many if not most members of the upper middle class served in the military. “In 1956, 400 out of 750 in Princeton’s graduating class went into the military …. [I]n 2004, 9 members of Princeton’s graduating class entered the services, and they led the Ivy League in numbers!” Today, it’s hard to find policymakers whose children serve; once, it was the rule rather than the exception. Once, heroism in war was eagerly covered by the media; as AWOL points out, there’s a deafening silence about the bravery of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The authors take issue with the view of many in the career military that the volunteer army is the most efficient, and that class imbalances in the military are no different from class imbalances in Congress or in Ivy League schools. They also find the Army’s emphasis on material incentives wrongheaded. “The idea of reducing patriotic duty to a matter of personal choice, job options, and perks on the one hand, while tacitly writing off Americans who can afford to ignore the bribes on the other, seems to us to spell trouble.” The recruitment incentives cheapen what was always going to be a bad bargain. Military service shouldn’t, in fact, be seen as a bargain: It’s a sacrifice. Honoring selflessness is the way to get more people to be selfless.

AWOL offers some solutions to the problem. For example, the government should make efforts to recruit from elite colleges; should make ROTC a floating scholarship; and should even offer soldiers a full scholarship to any private or public institution that they can get into after four years’ service. Mr. Schaeffer and Ms. Roth-Douquet also recognize that the media could have a big impact in encouraging the privileged to serve, simply by what they choose to cover and how they cover it.

The authors present an imaginary rewrite of a New York Times editorial lambasting the volunteer army. The mock editorial ends with this:

“The all-volunteer force is not serving our country well. It is allowing the most privileged Americans to do in our country what Europeans have been accused by Americans of doing for the last fifty years: hiding behind the American military while profiting from it, yet contributing little to our common defense …. In that spirit, the New York Times has invited recruiters to meet with those of us at the paper who are physically and age-qualified to serve.”

Can you imagine?

Ann Marlowe’s The Book of Trouble: A Romance (Harcourt) was published in February.