America's prettiest sun-soaked research university has somehow managed to become the "Harvard of the West" without getting any of the loathing that befalls the "Harvard of the East." It's time we talk about Stanford as it is: a stuck-up temple to new plutocracy, cronyism, and greed.

Evan Spiegel, the boyish cofounder and CEO of Snapchat, is dying to be taken seriously. He rejected Mark Zuckerberg, opines like Steve Jobs, and hobnobs with media titans. But Spiegel's undergrad emails—when he began his path to Snapchat—show a different Evan. Did Steve Jobs ever joke about peeing on girls?

If money is the root of all evil, inflated venture-backed paper valuation is probably the root of acting like a Silicon Valley dick: friends say Snapchat's David Kravitz, part of the startup's inner circle, needs to do a social media disappearing act.

Fresh off of being hacked, Snapchat's logo makes an appearance at the Rose Bowl, in honor of the university that birthed it. Technically, guys, it shouldn't have eyes or a mouth, which were removed due to the startup's ongoing legal battle.

Fortune's Dan Primack reports that Clinkle, the stealth mobile startup company that raised $25 million in venture capital without really explaining what it does, has "issued pink slips to 16 of its 60-person staff, or just over 25%." The layoffs have not been in engineering, but rather the business side of operations.

Ask the brassy Stanford CS department about Clinkle, the student project that's taken $25 million in venture capital and produced nothing but a video, and they'll tell you they hate it. They hate it enough, apparently, to show the world what it looks like:

Lucas Duplan, age 22, just banked $25 million for an app no one really knows much about. Well, a few do: his investors, and a tipster who leaked us some very interesting details about the clandestine wallet app. Does the world need a new way for Yale kids to buy things?

Stanford has been a west coast corporate feeder for decades, but now tech's trendiest degree is also the school's most popular: a full tenth of the school's 7,000 undergrads are declaring in CS.