Monday, January 08, 2007

Why I hate the Ivy Leagues, #247


My love/hate relationship with Ivy League schools is officially over: I hate them.

I mean, come on!! How much stupider or more pretentious can you get??? Naked parties to relieve stress? Rebelling against having to get dressed up to go out? "Ooh, look at us, we're so progressive, ooh, we're so evolved, and anybody that thinks it's lame is such a square!"

The Pundits, founded in 1884 as a society of “campus wits,” have a history of rebelling against Yale tradition, often through elaborate pranks. They organize six to eight covert naked parties a year, which attract anywhere from 30 to 300 people to off-campus houses, neglected rooms in classroom buildings and even small libraries on campus.

“It’s one of those things people feel they need to do before they graduate,” says Megan Crandell, a senior who estimates that she has been to a half-dozen naked parties during her time at Yale. “The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”


Uh, yeah, okay Megan, yeah, I'm sure you're really sophisticated. Give me a fucking break and go live in the real world for, like, 30 seconds, and then talk to me about being fucking sophisticated.

Students invited to a party at Columbia last year got this e-mail message: “Compadres, join us in refusing to comply with a culture that tells us to hide our body, to be ashamed of its scents, secretions, curves, and hair, to conceal those parts that have been dealt sexual connotations.”

Oy. Sometimes I'm really glad I didn't go to a regular college at the regular time I was supposed to. I don't know why this article made me so mad.

2 comments:

bh said...

i'm not defending the ivy leagues but i don't think their college kids are any more likely to be "stupid and prententious" than anyone else's; to wit, at my college there was an entire class devoted to the reading of a single book ("Gravity's Ranbow"), as well as a small movement to have more classes on the novels of James Joyce (i would have much preferred naked parties).
Also, how many college-aged people have you (including yourself and friends) ever heard refer to the evils and ills of "society" that only they truly recognize and can solve? I'm sure that, even though you may be too old and too well-socialized outside of the college to realize it, your classmates sound at least as foolish as these ivy leaguers.

bryan

bh said...

in case it was not clear, i made the above comments as someone who did go to a non-ivy leage college at the regular age, and as someone who was also stupid and pretiontious while i was there and for some time afterwards. i did take the Gravity's Rainbow class, though i did not advocate for more Joyce classes.

bryan