<p>This thread dates back to 2005. The OP has probably graduated from college now. I doubt anyone is still listening.</p>
<p>im not sure if it is any more but, brandeis was a major hippie school in the 60’s</p>
<p>ive heard american university is also very hipstery and much easier to get into than schools like brown, nyu, wesleyan, etc</p>
<p>and latfh.com is the best siter ever!!!</p>
<p>and by hipsters, i mean they have the full spectrum of “alternative kids”:
punks, indie kids, artsy freaks, folkies, geeky cute vegans, dirty hippies, mods, ya know, the whole nine yards</p>
<p>american university kids are also pretty politically-inclined, but less book smart than nearby gwu</p>
<p>Boston University. If I see one more hipster girl I might puke.</p>
<p>Wiki’s definition: </p>
<p>“… middle class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local or brewing beer, listening to public radio, riding bicycles …”</p>
<p>Um… I love how everyone just names off all the liberal schools and somehow they are classified as hipster, why can’t people just be who they want to be without some stupid soup can label stapled on their foreheads? Just because you you go to a school with a majority of liberals doesn’t make you a dirty hippy, a hipster, a rebel, a free spirit, or whatever you guys are all talking about…</p>
<p>I agree that the term “hipster” is thrown around a lot, and perhaps too casually. But I don’t think posters intend to slap a label on anyone’s forehear; mostly applicants are looking for kindred spirits.</p>
<p>Certainly, the fact that a school has a certain rep - - hipster, jock, geek - - doesn’t mean that all students fit the mold or that they are in lock-step together. It just means that those elements are very visible on campus and they are a signif influence (but not the sole influence) on campus culture/style.</p>
<p>People are not all alike, and neither are schools. We need words to describe the various features of schools to help students find the right ones. ^ Hipster, jock and geek are general terms to help steer students to what they might like and not like, except for students who are simultaneously hipster, jock and geek (trying to imagine… 
).</p>
<p>It’s an interesting term, “hipster.” I see it a lot on CC and in publications describing colleges but I’m never quite sure I know what it means as used in its contemporary sense. Sometimes it’s used as a pejorative, sometimes merely descriptive, but it seems to be used to describe several different phenomena. </p>
<p>Some people say “hipster” is derived from the “hep-cats” of the 1930s, people who were “hep” to the jazz scene, drugs, and perhaps other edgy elements of urban African-American culture. By the 1940’s “hep” became “hip,” “hep-cats” became “hipsters,” and by the 1950s these included “beat” writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg; very definitely urban, edgy, avant-garde, rejecting mainstream culture but at the same time trend-setters in their own right, overwhelmingly from white middle-class backgrounds but “hip” to urban black culture (see Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”), anxious to cultivate an alternative vernacular and edgy lifestyle of their own as an “authentic” alternative to the oppressive conformity that surrounded them. Most definitely not “hippies”; that was a very different generation, and a different kind of rejection of mainstream culture.</p>
<p>I guess the reincarnation of the term “hipster” in the last decade or so is meant to capture some of the urban/edgy/avant-garde/defining-the-latest-wave-of-“cool” aspect of 1950s hipster culture, though this time with either a forward fashion sense or incorporating a retro look—and to that extent, some would say, more concerned with appearances and poses than the Beat Generation. (Though even there, one senses a good deal of posing). That said, though, I don’t know if I’d know a contemporary “hipster” if I met one. Some of this seems to describe my own D and some of her friends, though I’m sure they’d reject the label as inauthentic and/or “just a pose.” But then, maybe that (inauthentic?) search for authenticity is itself a major motive force behind hipsterism.</p>
<p><a href=“https://beta.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html?page=17[/url]”>https://beta.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html?page=17</a></p>
<p>Any search for authenticity that involves recourse to a vacuous aesthetic will be damned from the start. The irony that undergirds the hipster “movement” bespeaks a sort of hip nihilism that runs counter to the earnestness of previous youth movements. The article posted above considers, rightly I think, the emergence of the hipster to indicate the “dead end of western civilization.” Nietzsche’s last man comes to mind. Good article, though.</p>