<p>as an applicant to both schools, its interesting to see how fierce the competition between the two schools seems to be....</p>
<p>But I guess more than one yalie had Harvard as his/her first choice</p>
<p>The students who write for the school newspapers are notoriously bitter on either side. They often hate their school, and hate the other one just as much. Take Ross Douthat for example.</p>
<p>I also wouldn't take the article that seriously, considering its written by Jorge W Bush.</p>
<p>Rivalries: Put Up or Shut Up By Steven Friedman </p>
<p>Ignorance, I sometimes think, really can be bliss. Being completely ignorant about a subject gives you that beautifully naive outsider's perspective that someone wrapped up in and knowledgeable about a subject can't have.
I'm so ignorant about UC Berkeley -- no, I don't go here -- that I actually walked into the Bancroft Library the other day wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed "STANFORD UNIVERSITY."
At first I thought I was paranoid for thinking that everyone in the library was giving me evil looks. But the perfect truth of Woody Allen's catchphrase, "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not after me," quickly proved itself true, as person after person pointed out to me that Stanford is UC Berkeley's mortal enemy.
This immediately reminded me of my university. Even before my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, I was continuously told that Penn's mortal enemy -- complete with our own version of the Big Game every year -- was another Ivy League competitor: Princeton University. So one day I e-mailed a Princeton friend to hear his take on it.
He laughed in his response. Even if it was over e-mail, I could still hear it. No one at Princeton knew we were "rivals" in any way, other than just playing a dinky football game against each other once a year. I realized what was up and quickly created an imaginary dialogue between our two universities and two other schools in the Ivy League: Harvard and Yale.
Penn, I've noticed, proudly declares to the world, "Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn are the four greatest universities in the world. So our only competitors are Harvard, Yale and Princeton." Princeton then replies, "What are you talking about, Penn? The three greatest universities are Harvard, Yale and Princeton. So our only competitors are Harvard and Yale." Yale then says, "What are you talking about, Princeton? The two greatest universities are Harvard and Yale, so Harvard is our only competitor." Harvard then says, "Ha! What are you talking about, Yale? We don't have any competitors..."
I witnessed this myself at the Penn-Princeton game, when Penn students chanted, "Princeton, you suck!" and the Princetonians just quietly stood there, as if to say, "Whatever you say, Penn." Later, I saw a Yalie wearing a shirt that read "Harvard sucks and Princeton doesn't matter."
And Princeton is right. They're a better school than Penn precisely because they have the quiet and honest confidence to be able to stand there and listen to us. And Harvard is better than Yale because they have enough quiet and honest confidence that they don't need to wear "Yale sucks" T-shirts. Because they believe it, they don't have to shout it.
The same seems to apply to UC Berkeley. Stanford, sincerely confident in its stature, doesn't need to scream its hatred for Berkeley from rooftops. Still, this doesn't keep them from doing the same to Harvard, by wearing "Harvard -- the Stanford of the East" T-shirts. We don't see any of these T-shirts in reverse in Cambridge, though.
The way to greatness, as Harvard has recognized, is not to tell competitors how much better you are than them. Instead, you must quietly and confidently work at being best. Harvard has internalized Margaret Thatcher's summary of such competition: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to say you are, you aren't."
Berkeley will truly triumph over Stanford the day when its undergrads stop saying how powerful they are, and instead, start believing it.</p>
<p>Here's the Harvard Crimson's Take. Seems there are plenty of nasty t-shirts on both sides:</p>
<p>Is it just Dartboard, or have the Harvard-Yale t-shirts gone over the edge, to the point that supporting ones school has simply become an expression of bad taste? At Harvard, support for the football team goes hand-in-hand with violence, sexual innuendo and ego-inflating t-shirts predicting that Yalies are bound for bankruptcy and homelessness. </p>
<p>Dartboard is all about school spirit, but she would prefer not to ride into New Haven with F*** Yale across her chest. Nor is Dartboard particularly fond of our other optionst-shirts with lewd and/or violent images all over them. One t-shirt depicts the Yale bulldog kneeling in front of John Harvard, his face at level with our mascots crotch. Another portrays John Harvard straddling a bottle of vodka. Dartboard can just imagine the devout Puritan turning in his grave. </p>
<p>Yet another shirt shows Handsome Dan covered in blood, a football impaled in his chest. Dartboard understands that football is a rough, even violent game. However, if we literally kill the enemy, there will be no one for us to play next year, eliminating the need for renting out five clubs on Boylston to celebrate our imminent victory. Who would want that?</p>
<p>Some of the t-shirts out there are also just plain arrogant. Dartboard almost bought one when she read the text: What do Harvard and Yale students have in common? They both got into Yale! The kid next to Dartboard mumbled, Well I sure didnt. Several others confessed that they too had received Yale rejection letters. Is the t-shirt meant to make us appear conceited, or sarcastic?</p>
<p>A shirt that carries a similar message reads, Well kick your ass today and fire your ass tomorrow, bearing a melancholy bulldog with a sign Will bark for fud. Even the most die-hard Harvard fan cannot deny that Eli does pretty well in the real world, for example, in running for president. As much fun as it is to believe that we are in essence, better than our counterparts at Yale simply by virtue of our being Harvard students, these shirts make us look delusional, even bitter. </p>
<p>Point for Yale!</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are all phenomenal schools. Wearing a Well kick your ass today and fire your ass tomorrow" T-shirt is just reinforcing stereotypes and showing how pompous you are. I'd like to think that Byerly's article better reflects the attitudes of Harvard students, but I know that it can't be true for all of them (as the Crimson article states).</p>
<p>This was actually a commentary that appeared in the UC-Berkeley student paper several years ago.</p>
<p>I honestly don't notice what people wear (or what I wear, for that matter) so hopefully the obscene shirts won't distract me from more important things--like studying to get the grades that secure my position as the Yalie's boss in the first place.</p>
<p>[exerpt]</p>
<p>Time for Yale to question rivalry
BY COLLEEN KINDER
Let's be honest: President Richard Levin's, GRD '74, speeches usually put us to sleep. If there was ever a moment when Levin's oration evoked a powerful response from the student body, it was in 1997, when he said two words that caused an entire auditorium of Yalies to go absolutely berserk: Harvard sucks.
You can find these words anywhere on the Yale campus. They are plastered onto bulletin boards, etched into wooden desks, and printed on t-shirts. We have made them the mantra of our college years, and by now, "sucks" follows "Harvard" in common conversation as easily as it does "Bush."
We students are not the only ones guilty of allowing Harvard to obsess our minds. The Administration seems haunted by its influence. Policies are changed not because change is long overdue, but because the other Ivies, namely Harvard, are changing theirs. These changes may be necessary to stay competitive with our rivals and to attract the best students, but no one can deny that comparison is often taken too far. We evaluate every miniscule facet of Yale life in light of Harvard; perhaps one of the most ridiculous examples is a 1998 Yale Daily News article entitled, "Harvard beats Yale in the race for two-ply toilet paper" [YDN, 1/27/98].
I have never understood why Yale feels a compulsion to constantly compare itself to Harvard. When I came to Yale, I first assumed that the Harvard obsession originated in bitterness at being rejected from the school. But I came to realize that most people chose Yale over Harvard because of genuine preference, not by default.
So if it's not bitterness, what is behind our fierce anti-Harvard sentiment? Trying to figure it out, I thought of a question someone in my hometown once asked me: "Why would you go to Yale if you could go to Harvard?" This question infuriated me, because I knew he had never stepped on either campus, nor did he have any concept of what either school had to offer. Somehow, most likely by virtue of age, Harvard has been ingrained in the American mind as No. 1. Levin, our skillfull orator, put it best when he said, "Harvard deserves its high ranking only when judged by the silly criteria of small-minded people." Yale didn't make it onto the Saved By the Bell episode when Zack Morris was being hunted down by top colleges. Harvard did (in the form of Max, dressed up in a suit and with a bad accent). Public opinion constantly second-guesses the greatness of the school we know to be the greatest. The result: an inferiority complex that manifests itself in intense hatred of Harvard.
It is tempting to counter doubts about Yale's status by tearing down Harvard's. But frankly, adopting a "Harvard Sucks" mantra makes us look lame more than anything else. It is easy to mistake an inferiority complex for inferiority. In an editorial entitled "Always Second Best," the Crimson applauded us for "proudly carrying the banner of inferiority all these years" [Crimson, 11/19/99]...</p>
<p>hate to throw this back in your face:
"When the elevator in William James Hall shuts, those on the inside are privy to a telling phrase, etched in the doors metal frame by an angst-ridden student: Harvard Sucks. Beneath that, a retort: No, it doesnt.</p>
<p>The former expression has become an anthem for Mawuena M. Agbonyitor 04, a social anthropology concentrator in Mather House. Sitting on her bed to avoid the work building on her desk, she listlessly flips through TV channels. Cold, gray and tiredthese are the words that describe her day-to-day Harvard malaise. I honestly dont know anyone who likes it here, she says. Everyone is waiting to get out."
...
According to Anna Franekova 05, the weight of this malaise crushes the liveliness of her peers. I met up with a Harvard friend in Prague and its incredible how different she was in a different environment, she says. There are too many people who are happier on the outside.
...</p>
<p>..."Yalies seem to have their priorities straightas the motto says, For God, For Country, and For Yale. Indeed, Yalies proudly sport the Yale insignia on backpacks to boxers, and not just at the GameYalies bleed Eli bluethey submit with pleasure to the cult of the bulldog.</p>
<p>Yale University seems to operate under a more balanced equation.</p>
<p>How do we solve our problem, fair Harvard? Perhaps #1 can learn something from #2."</p>
<p>We could go on for ages, the point being both schools will have articles where they assert that their school is better, and they'll also have articles where they assert their school is worse. I wouldn't put much stock in it.</p>
<p>The T-shirts are made and worn for the annual football game. Harvard pretty much ignores Yale most of the rest of the year. But at football time everyone competes to come up with the best shirt. This year my daughter sent me one produced by the Harvard Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan orchestra. Printed on the back it has two full verses and choruses that are meant to be sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General." Here is the first verse and chorus:</p>
<p>"You are the very model of a sophomoric safety school,
Sir Sullivan and Gilbert too would scoff to think that Yale were cool,
They'd sing the praise of Harvard and would know The Game historical,
And as concerns our victory, the question's just rhetorical;
In all things we excel, we are Utopia, Un-Limited,
We needn't have a Jury Trial to judge that you have half a head.
We are the gods in truth, you are just actors imitating us --
Grand Duke to out Mikado, you are a flop, there's no debating us!</p>
<p>New Haven has more crime than all the barons of old Ruddigore,
It's uglier than Katisha and Ruth, a fact you can't ignore,
In short, in every other way, including application pool,
You are the very model of sophomoric safety school!"</p>
<p>As a Harvard-Yale game T-shirt a couple of years ago, I suggested a simple, yet pointed message on the back: "84.3%" ... with nothing else. The Yalies would have known what it meant!</p>
<p>I give up, I simply give up! :)</p>
<p>"Yale is like a waiting list to Harvard, only with a football team."</p>
<p>The Yale Daily News is forever bleeding; it is covered in the crimson blood of another school. Over six issues of the News (from Oct. 15-22) there were seven front-page articles concerning Harvard University, a somewhat well-known institution of higher education in the city of Cambridge, Mass. .. Why is this the case? Because it's Harvard.</p>
<p>Last Friday's article about a new college ranking demonstrated empirically what most of the world believes: Yale is perceived as one of the top two universities in the United States, but Harvard is first. The study examined the preferences of high-school students who were accepted into the top colleges in the nation (that is, it studied high-school students like we were). As The New York Times said of the same ranking, "The degree of Harvard's dominance [is] staggering."</p>
<p>... In the game of public opinion, Yale's team may fight to the end, but Harvard will win.</p>
<p>...What I ask you to consider is what we as human beings can learn from Yale's situation. We have matriculated at the mathematical limit of perceived institutional greatness; we are forever approaching perfection but never arriving at it. As the eternal runner-up, it is Yale that represents what my 11th-grade English teacher would call The Human Condition.</p>
<p>In the "Iliad," the battles between humans are always more fascinating than the battles between the gods. Why? Because the gods are perfect in their immortality and as such cannot be figures of empathy. But even Achilles, the closest thing to a god as possible, is nothing more than a sad creature who eventually must accept his mortal fate along with the rest of us wretched humans. What is Yale if not Achilles, a tragic hero of incredible greatness, a being so close and yet so far?</p>
<p>Thus Yale affords us an optimal understanding of the two extremes of humanity: We perceive our awesome dominance over (almost) all else, but humbly recognize the existence of One above us. Thus is life; how good things get is never how good we would wish them to be. This is what gives us our humanity, what makes moderately sized blobs of flesh and blood such as ourselves so fascinating. It's the tragedy of human existence, and the sooner we can appreciate it, in Yale and in ourselves, the better off we will be. And if not, we can always look down on Princeton.</p>
<p>Why bother to discuss the rivalry when you can see it in bizzare fashion demonstrated on the boards?</p>
<p>Let's all spread love and understanding by joining Facebook group "Harvard Students for Yale" (pop. 20).</p>
<p>I still need to make a facebook account. Which brings me to ask, when do we get our e-mail addresses from the university? I just sent in the little postcard-thing that says I will be attending blah blah. Would we all just get them after May 1st?</p>
<p>You get your email address in June.</p>