'BLO' IT RIGHT BY 'EM: Bleak Times at Harvard, Indeed

Things just aren’t going well in Cambridge.

Spring break is over. NYU recently beat Harvard for first in a list of “Dream Schools” published by the Princeton Review. You totally forgot the obscene, profanity-filled acronym you memorized to help you with theropods on your Dinosaurs midterm. And let’s not forget that thing that happened with President Lawrence H. Summers, a man whose name I only want to see in print again if it is followed by the words “has decided to give Pablo Torre a million dollars.”

By the way: if you were here in the year 2002, you apparently took a survey and said that you were less satisfied than other college kids with your “undergraduate experience.” Thanks a lot.

If someone said I was just bitter, though, he or she would only be half-right.

It used to be hard to be cynical. Just a few weeks ago, I was enthralled by the NCAA Tournament, what with lovable, thefacebook-able players like Kevin Pittsnogle taking center stage. Major League Baseball, fantasy baseball, and Yankees-Red Sox were also all on the verge of detonation, meaning I would soon trade insults with various students I’d never met. Harvard’s acceptance rate even dropped to an all-time low. Certainly, such are the things that life is made of.

But recently, something happened which pushed me over the edge.

GQ magazine recently selected their list of the ten schools with the most obnoxious college sports fans in America to coincide with the finals of the NCAA Tournament. On the list? Duke, West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio State, WashingtonState, Minnesota, Florida State, Vanderbilt, Colorado, and—you guessed it—us.

If only I did not believe that capitalizing entire words and alternating many exclamation points and question marks were bad journalistic form.

It’s not that I think GQ is necessarily wrong with their selection.

Most Ivy League schools could fit the bill, simply for not having many fans at all, be they basketball or otherwise.

Really, I’m more baffled at how we made it into a list with such big-name company.

All of the aforementioned names except Duke, Florida State, Vanderbilt, and Harvard made the list for reports of lighting things on fire, excessive property damage, and senseless rioting.

Fans of the perennially successful Blue Devils made it on for being intolerably “annoying,” “geeky,” and “loud.”

Vanderbilt made it for supposed “student-fan apathy,” an unacceptable trend given that they’re in the perpetually competitive SEC.

Florida State made it on for inventing the crowd-rousing and at-times maddening Tomahawk Chop.

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.