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.)