Area Man Would Rather Attend Harvard

Now, I’m no sports nut, but I have found it suprisingly easy to scream insults at those blustering Bulldogs every year at the Game. A little scouring of the Onion’s archives proves that even America’s Finest News Source agrees: Yale sucks.

First of all, a search for Yale yields only 44 results. Harvard? 95. We’re frequently the subject of American Voices, the Onion’s hilarious parody poll. (Here are the thoughts of David Niles, portrait photographer, on Kaavya Viswanathan: “This just goes to show there are many things a Harvard education can’t teach you, like how to use a thesaurus to cover up your plagiarism.”)

Let’s do a close reading of the following text:

NEW HAVEN, CT— A heated dispute over the relative merits of Harvard and Yale erupted into fisticuffs Monday, when Yalie William Vanderploeg, 20, struck Randolph Stephenson, a strapping Harvard lad of 19, about the face and neck in a most brutish manner. “The vainglorious braggart dared suggest that his Crimson squad could out-row us nine times of ten,” said Vanderploeg, captain of the Yale crew team. “I knew they raised them as barbarians over Harvard way, but the very gall.” Stephenson, his hair mussed from the attack, vowed that the dispute is far from settled.

The *Yalie* Vanderploeg strikes the “strapping Harvard lad” in a “brutish manner.” While the article quotes Vanderploeg’s justification for his uncouth actions, it’s pretty clear that the author’s sympathies lie with Stephenson (who, on top of his other virtues, has hair nice enough to suffer from being mussed). In fact, the article subtly invokes the dichotomy between an agrarian society and an industrial one. Observe how the arm of industry — of Yale — strikes the “barbarian” Harvard student. While “barbarian” has a negative connotation to the Yalie, it ironically underscores the ancient nobility of Harvard against a crude, modern age which prizes uncultured violence above the older nobility of the barbarian savage — the nobility of the “strapping” Harvardian.

(yeah… that was total BS. Thanks, Hist and Lit!)

Harvard students might come across as wacky overly-intellectual loons in this one. But at least we’re smart enough to deconstruct Mexican food take-out menus — and we don’t have one-sided friendships with homeless men, a la Yale.

In this article about choosing a college, Harvard sounds a bit pretentious…

Find a college that will nurture your talents. For example, if you have an aptitude for dressing up in drag, penning witty quatrains, and awarding celebrities prizes as a way to draw attention to yourself, you may want to consider Harvard.

Nevertheless, at least we get our own paragraph, unlike Yale. And the Onion shares another bit of priceless wisdom: you can never go wrong with a college advertised on public transportation.