Welcome to Cornell University, the douchiest college in America and home of the “chip on shoulder” douche.
At least that’s the interpretation of life in Ithaca by GQ Magazine’s annual “10 Douchiest Colleges in America.” This year’s article, published last week, was an excerpt from the groundbreaking book, The Rogers & Littleton Guide to America’s Douchiest Colleges, in which authors H.L. Rogers and Peter Littleton, Ph. D. mock all facets of a douchebag’s life at college, from “The Eleven Douchiest Drinking Games” to page long descriptions of well-known American universities. (The book is a must-read, seriously.)
Cornell’s “biography” draws attention to some of the typical, unglamorous facets of four years of studying in upstate New York at our school in the “Fake Ivy League Conference.” It describes Cornell’s “Douchey Affectations” to be “Wearing a forced smile that fades with each step up the frozen, wind-howling slope to classes all winter (October to May) while wondering if this is all worth it for a an [sic] Ivy League degree lots of people don’t even realize is Ivy League.”
The excerpt also highlights some of our alumni and creates an unofficial motto for the school: “I can tell you don’t respect me, you asshole.” It goes on to capture some of the all too real aspects of the mindset of most Cornell students.
“Is it because all anyone ever talks about is how people go to Cornell and then kill themselves? It’s a myth! Check the numbers! Or maybe you can’t because you weren’t required to take any Math classes at Brown!”
What the experts at GQ failed to convey, however, was how any of this bitterness translates into Cornell’s supposed “douchiness.” According to urbandictionary.com, a douche is “a word used to describe an individual who has shown themselves to be very brainless in one way or another.” Complaining about having to walk up the slope on a frozen morning doesn’t make a person a brainless. Neither does the fact that we dislike the attention drawn to exaggerated suicide numbers. And yes, we consider Brown’s liberal, coreless education is a joke.
As Cornell grad, Tony Manfred, ’11, described in his article for Business Insider, “Douchiness is bred by uniformity…But this doesn’t describe Cornell at all.”
Cornell beat out #2 Penn State, home of the “All I’ve got is college football; seriously, don’t laugh, all I’ve got is college football” douche and #3 Yale, home of the “Skull and Bones Douche. No other Ivy League schools made the list. Seven private schools cracked the list, with only the University of Florida (#10) south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Apparently, GQ believes the most brainless college students are concentrated in the Northeast.
When choosing a picture to accompany the article, the magazine’s editors used a candid photo of our mascot to convey our “douchiness,” while the blurb about Penn State features a picture explicitly mocking the school’s obsession with football. The blurb about Yale features a young man with an explicit obsession with his school, displayed with the banner hanging on his wall: “For God, for country, for Yale.” (Enough said.)
How the editors couldn’t find a picture to better capture why our institution landed the #1 spot is beyond me; until I tried to find a picture of a “Cornell Douche” online for this blog and failed. So I settled for an Andy Bernard reference. But let’s face it, Andy Bernard is probably the reason we landed on this list.
