Not only yale, but it was the ivy league college I visited last. I got the feeling that ivy league kids are somehow very FAKE. Like everything they do is for a show. And they congratulate themselves for being mediocre. And politically correct. They are all so similar too. This is just the vibe I got from visiting, touring, and watching. I was not too impressed. A little disappointed that not even the “best” colleges are havens of the bright young people. Does anyone else feel this way?
Yes, “ivy league kids” are “somehow very FAKE,” but if you go to Wesleyan or Chicago, you will find that everyone is substantial. This epiphany, of course, will be transmitted to your mind through a providence from the empyrean, or through the school’s water supply, by sheer coincidence a banal expression off the tritest banalities, a product (or should I say “recapitulation”) of a fumbling and unoriginal, dare I say sublunary, intellect, and if you think that your pronouncement is a coherent statement of anything, you would be better-off elsewhere, and good luck at that “elsewhere,” which I hope is a haven for such dichotomies and generalities. Verily, I agree more everyday with Nietzsche’s intimation that Socrates and Jesus Christ are among the most destructive figures in Western history, for they increased profoundly the human faculties and tendencies for bad argument and moral hypocrisy.
Or am I wrong, and you are not another fool claiming that the “best colleges” are full of specters and many (all) of the other schools are havens or sufficient abodes for free spirits? It seems to me that if one is not a hypocrite and a scoundrel, and he is concerned with the “mediocrity and homogeneity” of “the top” colleges, he should at least not go (or “have gone”) to college at all.
This is too funny. The OP conjures a gross caricature of an Ivy Leaguer, then POOF, he appears!
Thank you, I try! No one else seems willing to take on the role of Mr. Parody.
Though posting again doesn’t say much for my self-control, I feel the need to explain the joke (my joke), because my last post sounds like a capitulation. The explanation creates an opportunity for fifty more misreadings, but… So be it.
So, I lay at the waters of Babylon (the recliner) and wept for my fallen Zion (an abode, not a “box of wormseed” as a cynical and jaded humanist might say, but a home, which Ivan Turgenev or the authors of the Four Huts might have accepted as reflections of the denizens’ personas, a home in this case for such Tolstoyan paradigms of simplicity and earnestness as Count Pierre Bezukhov and Hadji Murat, Pozdnyshev being the antiparadigm), and I decided that I don’t want posterity to misunderstand me. Thus, I explain myself, and you can believe or disbelieve me at your pleasure. In asserting the essential sameness of schools, I am not congratulating anyone, least of all myself, quite the contrary. (My constant allusions to literary texts are, I think, self-effacing rather than self-promoting, self-deprecating rather than self-congratulating.) For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call this “sameness” equality. The belief in “equality” would seem at first glance to be the gatekeeper at the door of Political Correctness, but I imagine that my mordant comments on Nietzsche’s view of how Socrates’s and Jesus’s propositions have been corrupted by succeeding generations belie the opposite of political correctness, a lament for the decline in aesthetic and moral standards that modern-day Democrats have wrought and enabled with their “tolerance” for all perspectives (John Locke has an interesting spiel on the barbarities of the word “tolerance”). Also, you might surmise from the details I put into these posts that they are wholly jocular but wholly sincere, theatrical and exaggerated but “real.” (N.B. I haven’t even said that I attend one of the schools of the East Cost athletic conference.)
In short: my post caricatures “an Ivy Leaguer,” but it’s really almost opposite to the OP’s caricature.