Though unsuccessful in their attempts to claim the Ivy League title against Harvard in The Game, Yalies made waves before a variety of media outlets seeking to profile one of the nation’s most tradition-rich events: the annual Harvard-Yale tailgate.
Even more disputed than the skill of Yale and Harvard’s football teams might be the intellectual prowess of their students. The O’Reilly Factor, a Fox News program, dispatched correspondent Jesse Watters to Cambridge, Mass., to quiz tailgaters on current events like ObamaCare and unrest in Ukraine.
When asked about the recent Jonathan Gruber controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act, one fan confidently asserted, “I take Ubers every day,” mistakenly referencing the popular mobile ride-sharing service, instead.
One Harvard student admitted a lack of knowledge on the subject, despite saying that he studied global health at the university, and, ultimately, only one Yale student correctly identified Gruber as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a key developer of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform policies.
“Head to head, Yale won,” Watters said at the conclusion of the segment.
Bloomberg reporter Patrick Huguenin explored another area of the tailgate — the sometimes lavish nature of its participants — in an article titled “Creatures of the Harvard-Yale Tailgate: A Photographic Survey.”
The collection contains 38 photos features “Artifacts,” physical remnants of the tailgate, and “Species,” Yale and Harvard students in costume, with the writer describing each photo using imaginative captions like “Modus Elegansus” for a photo of a Yale fan dressed exclusively white cashmere.