Slowly catching up: Jillian’s post last Monday on Ivy League groupthink reminded me that if you think the Onion has grown soft and shallotlike, there’s a great workaround: just browse the daily papers produced by little ‘Leaguers. Building a better Onion’s a snap. Here’s a sample:
From The Daily Princetonian:
99 percent of donors from Princeton give to Obama: The 1 percent? A visiting lecturer and a janitor.
Vassar’s honor, Princeton’s . . .: Anthony Grafton, the great Princeton historian, doesn’t finish the headline above this piece — perhaps out of fear of intemperance. As he reports:
After World War I, Princeton had its own army ROTC artillery unit, with horses to pull the cannon and a course on hippology on the books for the hundreds of students who joined it. After World War II, Princeton’s administration planned for a future in which every able-bodied student would eventually serve. In the age of the GI Bill, Princeton joined its sister schools in educating hundreds of its own who had left to fight — and a good many other veterans who didn’t come from wealthy families or private schools and owed their educations to government and university support. It was the least that America and its professors could do to help those who had fought and to honor those who died.
Nowadays, Princeton and most of its immediate competitors don’t see things quite the same way. Most of us haven’t joined the Yellow Ribbon Program that helps recipients of GI Bill support to pay for their education. And most of us haven’t managed to attract more than a handful of veterans as undergraduates. More than one school refuses to report how many veterans it counts among its students (much as they used to do in the days of quotas when they lied about the numbers of Jews and Catholics). Princeton has just one American veteran enrolled as an undergraduate this year.
So, a better headline: “Veteran’s Day parade arrested for jaywalking.” (It wasn’t always thus. Next month’s the anniversary of the Battle of Princeton. Compare and contrast, as they say.)
The Harvard Crimson:
The Switch to Gmail: “Yet another inconvenience on the plate of the Harvard student.” Gmail’s like math, man.
Yale Daily News:
Harvard Sucks: the elegant title of an editorial written by the future occupant of the Gail Collins Chair of Anti-gravitational Polemics.