As for us Harvard folk?
“With their tweed jackets and sickening chants of ‘safety school,’ the Crimson faithful are the epitome of Ivy League smugness.”
Awesome.
Two thoughts, immediately, spring to mind.
The first is that rioting and destruction—ironically once my primary recommendation to the H-Club for improving the quality of Harvard fans—apparently aren’t going to win you any popularity contests with GQ.
The second, of course, is that as an overall cultural institution, we sure are getting it right now.
The former talk about sports and Harvard was once how our graduates were invading Major League Baseball, led by Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta ‘95, Red Sox Director of Player Operations Peter Woodfork ‘99, A’s Assistant GM (and Billy Beane’s right-hand man) David Forst ‘98, and recently-promoted Marlins VP and Assistant GM Mike Hill ’93.
Lately, however, we have Maxim magazine, that venerable friend to all college students, devoting the entirety of its “Circus Maximus” spread to the prank Yale students pulled on our eighty-year-old alumni at Harvard-Yale.
The result—an egregiously Photoshopped but no less effective photo of the Crimson side of the stadium spelling out “We Suck” with colored pieces of cardboard—spread the anti-Harvard gospel for all the rest of America to see. (Way to just miss that detail, GQ.)
But this? Tweed jackets? “Sickening” safety school chants? Smugness?
To the best of my recollection, I have never even worn tweed, nor have I seen more than maybe two students at a time ever wear said material at any of the sporting events I’ve ever attended.
And as for the safety school chants—which are, when you really think about them, simply just shouts of “You suck” with a modicum of truth behind them—I’m glad GQ has decided that they’re on the level of the racial and cultural oppression invoked with every swing of the Tomahawk Chop.
And anyway, they’re typically only yelled at other Ivy League schools like Cornell and Yale, all guilty of the exact same crime at one point or another.
As my friend Juan Maldonado, a Boston College sophomore, pointed out by chanting “REACH SCHOOL!” at Yale while visiting for The Game, most Harvard fans simply don’t shout “Safety school” at the teams of good, non-Ivy Division I athletics programs. It’s just fact.
And smugness?
Please.
GQ can come back and insult us when their acceptance rate is finally under 9.1%.
—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Fridays.