Just weeks before U.S. News & World Report inevitably ranks Yale third in its annual list of America’s best colleges, a disturbingly accurate new list in August’s GQ gives Yale the bronze in another category: douchiness.
The list, an excerpt from a new book on college douchebaggery, ranks America’s 10 douchiest colleges. Only Cornell and Penn State top the Old Blue in the douchey rankings. Also douchey are Stanford (number four), Brigham Young (number 6) and MIT (number 9); infinitely douchey Princeton and Harvard are nowhere to be found.
In ranking Yale third, the list’s authors, H.L. Rogers and Peter Littleton, also pegged the University as douchiest in the “Where’d You Go to College” conference:
Are you extremely interested in being on the inside, in being wherever the most exclusive place in the world is, but also a little embarrassed about that desire? Was your dad in the CIA? Welcome to Yale.
Beyond the douchebag label, we’re upset that the authors managed to peg Yalies so well. Whenever we are asked where we go to school, we do indeed answer with the Northeast, Connecticut or New Haven — the Y-world is taboo. Whenever Dean Mary Miller gives a speech you are bound to hear about passion and amazingness, along with the requisite dose of Mayan art.
We take issue, though, with the idea that all Yalies want to be president. Plenty of us want to be on the Supreme Court, running Silicon Valley or starving in Brooklyn! Additionally, only a handful of Elis actually dress like they are “reading history at Oxford in 1946,” and our “outspoken pride in New Haven” generally amounts to a declaration that “it’s a city, and it has problems like any other city.”
But we shouldn’t be bitter, the douches at GQ tell us, for “It’s college—a certain amount of douchebaggery is acceptable. Desired, even.” Okay then, let’s celebrate! Who wants to get some Claire’s cake and then head to the Lizzie for tea?