Letter from the Editor
By Priya Krishna, The Dartmouth Senior Staff
Published on Friday, January 13, 2012
In his speech to the Class of 2011, Conan O’Brien compared Dartmouth to its Ivy League peers by referring to it as the “cool, sexually confident lacrosse-playing younger sibling who knows how to throw a party and looks good in a down vest.” Without a doubt, Dartmouth is a unique constituent in the Ivy League. Some might even say we have an inferiority complex relative to the Big Three. We have no eating clubs like Princeton, no Harry Potter-esque residential colleges like Yale and instead of the absurd cinematic facetime that Harvard received in both “Legally Blonde” and “The Social Network,” Dartmouth gets pop culturally sidelined as “that place Nate’s dad on ‘Gossip Girl’ went to school,” or “the Superbad guys’ alma mater.” And “Animal House” — which many Dartmouth students hype up as a famous nod to our beloved College on the Hill — technically takes place at Faber College, whatever that is. Regardless, I would say that we are probably the most unique Ivy. We spend most of our evenings underground (think about it), we worship a giant bonfire one night each year and we go through ping pong paddles faster than the Chinese Olympic table tennis team. So this issue will examine Dartmouth’s place in the famed Ivy League. Are we, after all, more than just the crunchy, granola-eating Ivy for lumberjacks and other miscellaneous bros? Hey, at least we aren’t the lesbian sister who never leaves her room — that would be Brown. Happy Friday the 13th, everybody!