<p>
</p>
<p>JHS, it’s not just my memory. The February 1, 1976 NY Times Magazine article, to which I linked above, confirms it:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[THE</a> MISSING MIDDLE; ON CAMPUS Students are clamoring to go to Brown–o… - Free Preview - The New York Times](<a href=“http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10C15FC3D5B177B8EDDA80894DA405B868BF1D3]THE”>http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10C15FC3D5B177B8EDDA80894DA405B868BF1D3)</p>
<p>What better arbiter of such things than the NY Times Magazine? ;)</p>
<p>I actually have a vivid memory of when I first saw that article. It was at a dorm brunch that very Sunday in the Quad at Penn. Back then, the Quad was not just the preserve of freshmen, with quite a few upperclassmen also living in my dorm in the Upper Quad. Every Sunday it would be the responsibility of a different set of roommates or pair of students to prepare brunch for the entire dorm, which would be held in one of the larger rooms. There were several regular readers of the Sunday Times in the dorm (as there are no doubt many at Penn, today), and that article was a hot topic of conversation at the brunch on the Sunday when it first appeared. None of us doubted that Brown was, in fact, the hot school at the time, and I knew several people at Penn with friends or siblings at Brown.</p>
<p>In fact, it was BECAUSE Brown was already such a hot school that the likes of JFK, Jr., Amy Carter, the daughter of the Shah of Iran, and other high-profile celebrity children enrolled there in the '70s and '80s.</p>