Blue-and-White Lining

With the soiling of Harvard’s name in the national media, the Bulldogs have been quick to pounce on their vulnerable rival. “Characteristically smarmy,” is how the Yale Daily News described The Harvard Crimson on Feb. 23 in its piece, “Cantabs can benefit from Yale’s Example.”

And while we are the first to acknowledge Harvard’s problems—our decrepit curriculum, our rogue faculty, and our paltry dining hall hours—even these seemingly weighty faults cannot remove Harvard from its 370-year-old position atop academia.

Because, as always, Yale still sucks.

When dreary news seems to cover Cambridge in a palpable gloom, our New Haven brethren put the shade into perspective with drastic events of their own.

Within days of a freak car accident that injured a freshman girl near the Science Center, reports from Connecticut surfaced that Yale professor of history Paul Kennedy allegedly hit Marissa Green MUS ’06 while driving under the influence of alcohol and with a suspended license.

Although Kennedy and his colleagues have fervently denied the charges, citing Kennedy’s limp as the cause for his failed sobriety test, not even the ringleaders of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ circus—has been accused by pundits of unlawful intoxication.

When complaints brewed this fall about the utility of the Undergraduate Council after yet another failed project, the Harvard community was relieved to hear how the Yale College Council has spent a considerable amount of the past decade: lobbying for soap.

The much revered Eli Soap Committee has worked with school administrators for years trying to convince them that the pungent stench of 5,000 dirty college students hampers the school’s ability to top the U.S. News & World Report annual college report. Even though administrators finally caved in January to the $100,000 price tag of providing soap in all bathrooms, Yalies are nicknamed Bulldogs not just for their impetuousness and pudgy looks: the smell hasn’t disappeared, and neither has our title as number one.

Nevertheless, we acknowledge, at the very least Yale continues in its Panglossian hope to rise above mediocrity—trying ever so valiantly, but, alas, failing as only a true Eli knows how. Fielding a JV squad for the annual Game and using www.safetyschool.org as your home-page is not helping the cause.

So with the calls from endless commentators to “Free Harvard!” and to overhaul our University once and for all, we print these words as a reminder of true bondage: being tied to Yale—the home of the Bushes, the Ivy den of crime, the bastion of perpetual disappointment, and your alma mater for the rest of your life.