According to the 2008 edition of U.S. News &
World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges,” the
College remains stagnant at its ranking of 33rd
among national universities granting doctoral
degrees. Upon looking around campus, it is quite
evident that such a low mark is fully merited.
When I leave my room in in the morning to go to class, the first thing I see is the hall public posting board. But instead of reading advertisements for educational lectures by preeminent scholars or cultural events stemming from the College’s diverse population, I see so much Greek that I momentarily forget I am at an anglophone university.
Such-and-such is throwing a highlighter party; so-and-so’s weekly shindig beseeches your presence in cowboy attire.
It is quite obvious that the nature of social life at the College is to be partially blamed for the school’s modest rank. Rather than participating in underage consumption of alcohol and illegal consumption of marijuana, students at the College would do well to imitate those at higher-ranked colleges.
To achieve the ranking of an elite private university - or even that of the College’s unofficial rival, the University of Virginia, ranked 10 spots higher than the College - students should go to classes, study all day, and come home to a glass of vintage Chardonnay and some caviar. More advanced students can try a few lines of cocaine and a few swigs from a handle of Grey Goose.
Beer, after all, is for common people.
Collars should be popped with the gusto and zeal of the haute bourgeoisie. Female students should tote designer handbags that match their eyes and don a string of Mikimoto pearls.
Students at higher-ranked institutions are being groomed every day to become successful, rich, even famous adults. Life after college, in whatever cushy job they desire thanks to daddy’s supreme networking, will be but a subtle change.
Dorms without air-conditioning would be a laughing matter at third-ranked Yale University, where students can go to any of the 26 libraries on campus to study and gothic architecture houses leather sofas and stacks of newspapers and international magazines for leisure reading.
Had Yo-Yo Ma and John Roberts - a sampling of the smiling faces to greet me from my Harvard view-book - chosen to attend the College instead of second-ranked Harvard University, it is almost certain that Ma would be busking for enough quarters to buy a sandwich in the dingy subway of some metropolis. Likewise, Roberts would be filing papers in the office of some lawyer privileged enough to receive all the perks of an Ivy League education.
It is not that the College cannot provide its students with ample intellectual moxie to succeed in life. The College just needs a severe injection of class. The lifestyle currently impregnated into the souls of students at the College is not conducive to the amount of success that earns you a place in the college view-books sent to interested students.
At this point, those students brimming with Tribe Pride will bring up the laundry list of the College’s famous alumni: Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Marshall, among others.
However, many seem to overlook the fact that there were only a handful of colleges to choose from as Jefferson and company filled out their 18th-century Common Applications. Harvard probably could not give presidents-to-be south of the Mason-Dixon line ample financial aid to warrant a trek up to Massachusetts.
There are, of course, the few anomalies - the lovely Glenn Close, the humorous Jon Stewart, the bureaucratic Robert Gates, the esteemed Rector of the Board of Visitors Michael Powell - but their success ought to be attributed solely to luck or, in Gates’ case, a Ph.D. from Georgetown.
Students at the College just need to accept that there are 32 schools better than the one we attend.
If anything, we should thank the College for making us accustomed to the small, shoddy, humid apartments in which we will live and the cafeteria-style mush we will eat twice a day at
local soup kitchens.
Jake Robert Nelson is the Opinions Editor for The DSJ. His views do not necessarily represent those of the entire staff.