The cannon at the top of the hill, we often joke, is pointed at Harvard. If only those poor suckers knew that if push came to shove came to bombardment with civil-war-era weaponry, we'd have the high ground and would mete out swift academic justice to any who dared challenge us.
The result: Tufts gets humorously recognized as the school that thinks it's as good as the Ivies, and Harvard continues to be unaware of our presence.
Last Saturday I had the privilege of someone swiping me into the Harvard dormitories to have a drink with some old friends. As I walked through the pristine campus, by the impeccably dressed students smoking obnoxiously large cigars, past the dining hall that looks like something out of a Danish manor, I kick aside the one piece of trash I can see on the ground. It's the Harvard Crimson, their equivalent of the Daily. The headline: "Roll Over, Columbia." The score of the football game the headline referred to: Harvard, 55, Columbia, 7.
Struggling to maintain my composure in the face of such suffocating perfection, I quickly put down the paper, tucked in my shirt, and headed up to my friend's dorm. He's an old friend, and the evening proceeds smoothly. I do the college thing, consume my fair share of alcohol, schmooze with some buddies and then pass out.
Ah, but Harvard! Center of the universe! And, the primary source for Tuft's case of academic and institutional penis envy. It's hard to be a growing university when the apex of perfection lives down the street. They're Division I, we're Division III. They're ranked No. 1 in the U.S. News World & Report ranking, while we're No. 27. We're broke, while their endowment rivals the combined GNP of several Latin American countries.
There also happens to be a large population of students at Tufts whose first choice was America's "finest" universities. It doesn't help any of us to look down the street and to see what we're missing.
But fear not, Jumbos -- for I will once again take up the flag of one-sided rhetoric and claim that Tufts is, without a shadow of a doubt, better than Harvard.
Four years ago, when deciding where I might find enlightenment for a cool quarter-of-a-million dollars, I admittedly shot high with high expectations. But Harvard was not one of the institutions I applied to, simply because it was an institution, in more ways than one. While some rare critics may decry the idea that Harvard is the center of the universe, it's an unfortunate social construct that is hard to escape from. In fact, some who get in become so obnoxiously self-entitled that it voids the honor of being there in the first place.
For example, at a party this summer in Boston, I was casually introducing myself to people I didn't know. I'm from Denver, and so naturally, that's where I said I was from. Others at the party were from Portland, Atlanta and Houston. But then, these two suave dudes introduce themselves as being from Harvard.
Unless you exited the womb inside the wrought-iron gates of that institution down the way, saying "Hi, I'm Person X and I'm from Harvard," is as pretentious as it is a complete load of crap. You might get some slack if you were conceived there -- I won't debate that. But at what point does the college you go to supercede the place you were born or lived? Even if you happened to have spent your childhood growing up in the crap district of Podunk, Nowhere, and Harvard is the single best thing that's happened in your life, then there is still absolutely no justification for it.
And what the hell is the Crimson? That's how Harvard refers to its sports teams, e.g. "The Crimson rallied for two touchdowns in the fourth quarter." At what point did they decide they didn't need an "s" at the end of it? It's your school colors; we don't refer to our football team as The Baby-Blue-Brown. I'm glad that we have a selfless pachyderm as our mascot rather than something I can pull out of a box of crayons.
For all its academic superiority, there have been scandals of grade inflations, rumors about how TA's can't grade someone below a B, and the singular oddity that if someone is truly doing subpar work, they are given a semester off to "rethink their priorities," because it apparently doesn't do justice to Harvard's image if your GPA isn't above a 3.0.
Which is again, all the more ludicrous seeing as people still pay to go to Harvard, despite it having enough money to finance a small war. People pay to be part of an institution that plants seeds of egotism that strangle good sense, chose to call its sports team by its team colors and requires you to excel at your own expense.
The thing about Harvard is that it's just the best at everything -- and let's be honest -- we all hated that kid in high school. So why are we so desperate to emulate them? We've got plenty of reasons to be happy with our own school, so let's not squander them wishing we were somewhere else.
And to all my Harvard friends, none of you were the basis for this article. It's just very easy to pick on number one.
