Our School Is Better Than Your School

The advent of the Harvard-Yale game is inevitably accompanied by hold statements from Yale students who believe that Harvard is an inferior university. In the past, students here have reacted to these statements by feverishly rallying to the defense of the institution which they bitterly attacked during the months preceding The Game and which they then proceeded to attack for the rest of the year.

It has always been fashionable, of course, to view the Elis' boasts of superiority as the wounded cries of Harvard rejects. Unfortunately, Yale's claim to being Number One can no longer be dismissed so easily.

During the past two or three years, Yale, not Harvard, has occupied the front page of the second section of The New York Times, a distinction which cannot be ignored. Perhaps Harvard students, who have always been known for their intellectual honesty, should finally face the fact that Yale may, indeed, be a better institution.

Yale, after all, has Kingman Brewster, the only college president in the country who is counted, among certain circles anyway, as being one of the Beautiful People. Next to Brewster, Derek Bok pales in comparison. Brewster's eyebrows are more expansive, his sideburns are longer. At the moment, Brewster is facing yet another crisis. Yale students, angered by the 10:1 male female ratio, are demanding sex-blind or equal admissions.

Yale alumni, however, remember Brewster's pledge to graduate 1000 male leaders every year and are determined to make Brewster stick to this pledge. Expansion, the most obvious solution to the problem, is out because of opposition from the New Haven community. The situation is ticklish, but nobody doubts that Kingman will find a satisfactory answer to the dilemma, either by advising William Sloane Coffin to lead the student body in prayer, or by holding a torehlight procession outside of Mory's.

When one surveys the Harvard Faculty in an effort to find it man who is sensitive, in touch, committed, the name George Wald usually crops up. But who is George Wald when compared to Charles Reich, the man who made Consciousness III a household word. Reisk's critics, who originally charged that his book was just a fairytale, now point to the recent presidential election as hard evidence that America has not yet greened. Of course not. But after all, Reisk never told that Consciousness it would die easily.

Perhaps the Elis' greatest star in Brich Segal, the Harvard man who, it must be admitted, blossomed at Yale. Those who believed last summer that Segal's star had finally been eclipsed were once again proved wrong when Segal's smiling face suddenly turned up behind an ABC microphone in Munich, Germany. Segal had traveled to Munich to give millions of Americans color commentary on the Olympic Marathon.

As everyone who watched ABC now knows, Frank Shorter, an old Eli who was once one of Segal's students, won the 26-mile race easily. After the race was over, the irrepressible Chris Schenkel asked Shorter if he was aware of the fact that Segal had picked him to win the week before the race, Shorter said that shucks, no, he hadn't known, and he than thanked Segal for his support. Segal replied graciously that all he had really does was to make a prediction and that Shorter was the man who had run the race.

There are come people, of course, who have known for years that Yale is a superior institution. In the early 1960s, the women of the Seven Sisters put out a book entitled Where The Boys Are which trenchantly examined all the male colleges in the Northeast. After scrutinizing Wesleyan. Tufts and Trinity, ("the boy from Trinity is like the boy next door, if the boy next door is a drunken latch"), the women turned to Harvard and Yale.

They warned that Harvard people were likely to be freaks and "remember, seven out of every ten girls who took LSD for the first time didn't like it." The Yale man, on the other hand, was given the ultimate compliment. He was described as "cool." So be it.