Yale

This is getting too easy. Four years, four Harvard wins, the last two blowouts. We like to chide Yalies from our end of the rivalry. We Cantabrigians are smarter, more accomplished, less furry than our cousins in New Haven. But over the years we’ve come to expect at least a baseline of competence. Now, Yale has failed at even giving us a good football game to watch one Saturday in the year. The time for kidding around has passed.

Consider the final score, 35-3. Yale did not even get a whiff of the end zone turf in four quarters of play. Save for a second-quarter field goal, the game would have been a complete shutout. Yale’s offense crumbled against a resolute Harvard defense, while the Crimson’s Clifton G. Dawson ’07 broke the Ivy League record for rushing yards in a season against a limp Yalie defensive line. This is the first time since 1922 that Yale’s graduating class has not seen a victory over Harvard at least once. Makes you think twice about Nietszhe’s whole ubermenchen thing.

Let’s be honest: University President Lawrence H. Summers and his son during halftime were throwing the ball better out there than Yale was. The most impressive part of Yale’s performance was its halftime show, some kind of postmodern interpretive riff on the James Bond classic Octopussy. And something about a ship.

Yale is clearly falling behind. Like a wounded dog pulled behind the ancient Stoics’ proverbial wagon, Yale limps towards the inevitable gnashing its teeth in a desperate and futile attempt to change its fate. But no matter how much Yalies bark and howl about Harvard’s tailgates—which, despite the Boston Police Department’s best efforts, had enough sauce to warm undergraduate revelers all morning and afternoon—or their supposedly superior—read: sweaty and pathetic—social life or their New Haven bunker mentality that they confuse with school spirit, they are still tugged farther and farther down the path of failure with their little buddy Princeton.

Indeed, with Harvard’s bumper crop of plaudits rolling in, it seems Yale’s status as a safety school for kids who didn’t have the scores, the grades or the clean arrest record to get into Harvard is becoming even more obvious. The Times Higher Education Supplement just ranked Harvard the best university in the world. Continuing to sow the seeds of mediocrity, Yale scored, you know, a respectable eighth. Even Stanford, famous for resembling the world’s biggest Taco Bell, managed to score higher.

Now, you can argue with the methods of the survey all you want. But Yale’s incompetent academic flailing of late is universally imminent—like a pantheistic god, just one that sucks. Every fiber of the Yale’s physical and metaphysical existence is tinted with the fluctuating incandescent glow of never quite being good enough.

The Staff, however, would not be responsible if it did not offer a solution to Yale’s woes. A backwards, tribal excess, Yale cannot be allowed to muddy the pristine waters of American academia any longer. That is why the Yale Corporation should make the prudent business move in our increasingly globalized world and outsource sucking. Set up a Yale in Malaysia, pay your professors in grams of lint and watch the profit margins soar. Yale might even be able to compete with Harvard’s endowment, but only if it could teach its “students” to sew knock-off Harvard hoodies on the side. In any case, Yalies currently huddled behind New Haven’s neo-gothic would end up at the same place: working the milkshake machine at that Dairy Queen off I-95.