"We're here to play basketball. It's not a spelling bee," said University of Kentucky basketball star DeMarcus Cousins when a reporter asked him about Kentucky's upcoming game against Cornell in the third round of the NCAA Men's Division 1 Basketball Tournament. Cousins turned out to be right about his team's chances Kentucky beat Cornell 62-45, ending Cornell's brief Cinderella story. To the media, Cornell was a team of lovable and hardworking nerds, the only team in the Sweet Sixteen with a player who could solve a Rubik's cube in under three minutes. To those of us associated with the Ivy League, Cornell became our big older brother: we can send them in to prove to those tough SEC teams that we are more than bookish dweebs who played RuneScape in middle school.
But for me, the most interesting part of Cornell's run was the attention it received. Cornell was the darling of the sports media. Commentators loved portraying each of the team's games as a contest between jocks and nerds, the future stars of the NBA vs. their future stockbrokers. An article profiling the Cornell team was in the "most viewed" list on The New York Times web site for several days. Sports Illustrated explained the Cornell difference by pointing out that their arena is named not after a former coach or player, but an expert in industrial fuel-oil marketing.
All this media attention belied America's fascination with the Ancient Eight. I don't think I'd be exhibiting Ivy League arrogance if I said that there is a certain aura around the "Ivy League" label. Just one year ago that is, before I started hanging out in frat basements and using "dude" and "bro" in daily conversation I, too, was a high school senior who thought of the Ivies as stuffy bastions of intellectualism and high culture. While I now know that Dartmouth students do not drink merlot and pal around in jackets with elbow patches, my friends and relatives from home have a somewhat different impression. Whenever I go home for breaks, these people will (only half-jokingly) ask me about the wine and cheese parties and whether we ever get our khaki pants dirty in the fraternities.
I have to laugh at the distorted impression many people have of the Ivy League's lofty status. As much as I want to be part of the cigar-smoking, tweed-wearing, Aeschylus-quoting aristocracy (and I'll admit it, a small part of me actually does), that is not the reality. Even the brainiest kids I know at Dartmouth enjoy bathroom humor and a good Judd Apatow movie now and again (thank goodness). Furthermore, I do not think the Ivy League has a monopoly on brainpower. Many of the smartest kids I knew in my high school are now getting great educations in honors programs at public universities for one fifth of the price my family is paying. A 1999 study by economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale showed that people who were accepted to highly selective schools but turned them down in other words, people who were just as talented as Ivy League students but without the degree earned just as much money and were equally successful as their colleagues with the more prestigious diploma.
Nonetheless, the "Ivy League mystique" still exists for many people in this country. Certain companies only recruit at schools with a top-25 ranking, as if anyone with a Dartmouth degree is automatically more qualified than a 4.0 scholarship student in the UMass honors program. Blogs like IvyGate cater to those who are not content to follow the deranged internal politics of just one Ivy. Manic Ivy-centrism still runs wild on the Supreme Court, Wall Street and most of David Brooks's columns.
I'm not a fool. I know that my school's name will give me opportunities I would not have had otherwise, and I am grateful for a remarkable education in the company of brilliant and fascinating peers. But I also know smart people at state schools and successful people who don't have an "Ivy plus" degree. So, DeMarcus Cousins, corporate recruiters and all the others who think that schools like Cornell or Dartmouth have all the brains in this country: I appreciate the attention, but there are plenty of spelling bee champions at the University of Kentucky as well.
