I'm sure many of you out there are from states with two competitive state schools. Michigan State and Michigan and Florida and Florida State come to mind. Whenever these teams get together, competition is fiercer, the fan's ardor is heightened.
Harvard and Yale have The Game. Princeton thinks it's games against Harvard are The Games. Every now and again I get a Blitz from a good friend at Stanford informing me that her school has won or lost Big Game against Cal.
All of these match-ups are bitter rivalries, a naturally-occurring phenomenon that Dartmouth unfortunately does not enjoy. And I'm tired of it.
Fans naturally love to hate. Fans don't like refs who blow calls and they don't like fans of other teams, but most of all, fans hate their team's opponents. So I want us to hate Brown.
Why Brown? Here's why:
1) Historically, Brown is our political opposite. By reputation they're liberal and they graduate lots of artists while we're conservative and produce investment bankers by the truckload. Who cares if these stereotypes are untrue. Brown is supposed to be the opposite of everything we stand for.
2) Brown is like Harvard. Actually, it's nothing like Harvard, but including that argument tends to incite people's ire against Harvard. I'm hoping this specious reasoning will cause people to transfer their antagonistic feelings from the Crimson to the Brown.
3) Brown is an ugly color. This may seem a superficial reason to dislike an entire university, but there's no denying the validity of the assertion. When any Brown team steps on the field, they're dressed like a bunch of dead leaves or what can be found on the floor of a fraternity basement Sunday mornings.
4) And for that matter, who would attend a school named after a color? That's like going to a college named after a brand of toothpaste (with apologies to any such schools).
High School Senior A: I want to go to Brown.
High School Senior B: Brown? Ha, I got in early to Fuchsia.
5) Brown students suffer under no distributive requirements and don't even need a major to graduate. While at Dartmouth we're not constrained by a core curriculum as considerable as Columbia's or Chicago's, the kids in Providence don't even find themselves stuck in Philosophy classes if they like Biology or in Physics classes if they prefer to wax poetic. So we should dislike Brown both because their students are lucky enough not to have to take boring classes AND because they're not receiving the same well-rounded education we are.
6) And also, Providence is lame. Granted, it has more in the way of art and culture than Hanover, but at least Hanover isn't a puritanical and homogenous New England town.
7) Finally, Brown students think they're so cool. You know the type: preppy clothes, work boots, sunglasses on top of their heads at all times of the day and night. We don't have any people like that on our campus.
With my point thus incontrovertibly proven, I would like to move onto how to make the most of our newfound archrivalry. First, the entire student body must attend all athletic contests against our hated enemies bearing signs that read, "Down with Brown," or other such monikers.
Actually, before going on with this section of the column, let me digress and explain what NOT to do in your disgust with Brown. Don't drool at games. If you've ever seen a die-hard Cleveland Browns fan, they do that a lot at important games. Honestly, it's really unattractive. Besides, you wouldn't want to follow the lead of a Browns fan. The Browns are very close in name to Brown.
Another faux pas is throwing things on the court or field of play. You might hit a Dartmouth player.
Don't smoke. If you drop a cigarette and burn down an arena, there won't be any place for us to beat Brown.
Don't drink excessively before or during games. There are several reasons for this one. If you can't stand up straight, you may have trouble holding up your "Clowns from Brown" banner. If you can't talk straight, your clever Ivy League insults will be lost in a torrent of s's and t's.
Keep away from weapons and physical violence. It's still just a game.
Bearing these admonitions in mind, here's the remainder of how to treat our neighbors from Providence.
We must steal their school's mascot, the Bear, and hold it captive. With our collective distaste for Brown guiding the way, it should be simple to subdue and capture one of those cute, furry creatures.
Finally, we must never drop our guard, surrender our vigilance or ignore even the slightest warning signs. It's a well-known fact that Brown controls the actions of every Ivy college's Board of Trustees, and there's a rumor those Brownies aren't too happy with the way things are going over here.
