Remember when we were the hottest? When someone decided that our emphasis on problem solving and scholarly debate warranted not only the title of Hottest Ivy but a whole four-sentence write-up in Newsweek? When our mommies and daddies, eyes bloodshot, faces burnt red on a week long pride-high, shuffled down to the Cornell Store to shell out four bucks for a crappy “We’re the hottest.” pin?
A year later? Not so hot.
Look at us now — quivering in the darkest corner of a concrete basement, our confidence shattered by a trio of gauntlets dropped by a trio of magazines, whimpering embarrassed when asked what college we go to: “Cornell.”
Ice cold.
So what happened? How did we go from the punch line of every safety school joke imaginable to legitimacy and back again? Why has the praise heaped on us by Newsweek last year soured so dramatically into a two-position slip in the US News College Rankings and the distinction of “Most Overrated College Runner-Up” and “121st Best College” by Radar Magazine and Forbes.com respectively?
I can’t answer these questions (after all I go to the 121st ranked college in the country, maybe someone from 52nd ranked Harvey Mudd College can help those readers interested in the reasons for Cornell’s descent back into mediocrity), but I can tackle one more manageable question — What the fuck’s the deal with these douchebags?
Whether it’s Jon Stewart mockingly whispering “safety school” when introducing our ILR professor or the faceless fat, greasy losers who populate collegeconfidential.com flooding the site with useless post after useless post bashing the Big Red, people pounce on the opportunity to pile on the most disrespected Ivy. There is seemingly nothing we can do about this trend. Ostensibly we have to sit here and take it like a prison bitch —quietly pretending the abuse happened in a bad dream we had — until our smart-assed critics decide that those pot-smoking hippies up at Brown are getting a little too high and mighty and we are let off the hook. Lick our wounds and call home to mommy crying that the big bad media bullies are being wreally wreally mean to us.
Or we can not. Instead of wondering why we’ve experienced such a Hillary-like plunge over the past year we can wonder how Radar Magazine continues publishing in spite of a previous failed try at making money and a readership consisting of 43 pedophiles from Jersey who skim its pages praying to come across pictures of Miley Cyrus out on the town. Instead of wondering what kind of school we need to become to redeem our image we can wonder what kind of sexless nerds working for forbes.com spend hours scouring ratemyprofessor.com trying to gauge student satisfaction in a futile attempt to shame their bosses at the real Forbes into allowing them to sort mail or check facts or do whatever other bitch work they dream of completing day after day.
Why not push back? There’s no way to objectively rank colleges, it’s all consensus, it’s all follow the leader, it’s random, a couple people in cubicles claiming to know exactly what makes a particular college better than any other. So what are we doing here?
So Radar thinks we are the second most overrated college. Awesome, but who cares? Radar is TMZ-lite. If TMZ-lite was run by a bunch of conceited brats with voyeur-fetishes who think feature-length articles about Kim Kardashian’s ass and cutesy blurbs on ego-driven actors qualify as “edgy.” Imagine dumb people trying to be smart, perverts trying to be sexually mature, bush-dwelling paparazzi giving journalism a try — this is Radar. For those of you Radar subscribers who can read (the dozen of you) realize you are spending REAL money on a magazine that’s less readable than Michael J. Fox’s handwriting. I’d keep going but Radar is due to go out of business again any minute now. So I’ll save my energy for those prude lepers who roam the halls at forbes.com.
The only thing those money-hungry Weebles at forbes.com can count is the borderline-nonexistent cash they are making off writing stories about people who actually have money. I’m surprised they can count that low. 121? What is that some sort of joke? Maybe there’s no way to prove we aren’t the 121st “best” college — but come on, we’re in the goddamn Ivy League. Even if you’re trying to make a splash and compete with US News for the I’m-enough-of-a-insecure-stuck-up-prick-to-give-a-crap-about-college-rankings crowd, at least make an attempt at legitimacy but putting all of the Ancient Eight in the top 25. We realize you want to be the kid who’s a total freak show but hides behind the “I don’t care what other people think” excuse, but a little effort wouldn’t kill you.
At Cornell we get inexplicably ragged on by people who have no business ragging on anyone or anything. Freshmen: those dumbasses you went to high school with, the ones who drooled all over you for going to a school in the Ivy League have been replaced by a chorus of annoying douchebags getting off on agitating you.
Return the favor. Give them a big fuck you back.