Word: touring
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...toured the campus, we heard the superstitions, the campus firsts, the college history. I maintained low profile. I noticed a dangerous pattern developing, however: there we some things I just had to giggle at. A giggle isn't the normal tour noise--a well-oiled tour guide can time the laughs, the oohs and the aahs--so needless to say I caught a few suspicious looks as we turned the corners of the pseudo-Gothic buildings and walked up yet another hill...
...giggling at the culture of the Ivy League Tour Lies. They aren't exactly lies, but rather selective descriptions, the sort of speech that gets people to buy the things they never needed, and, in its supreme form, to buy things they didn't even want. In the college world, these are large, impersonal classes at any level that you somehow feel privileged to join. At Harvard, Yale or any of these places, the grim reality of a 700-person introductory class with the professor far in the distance and a group of relatively unresponsive TF's becomes an unfortunate...
...unfamiliar section of the tour script, by Harvard standards, was the social scene speech: Greek life engaged "only" one third of the campus, we were informed, "so you can see that it doesn't control it." This seemed a particularly strange part of the shpiel, though the high-school students seemed to absorb it with no noticeable resistance. As a Harvard student I am by no means an expert on fraternity and sorority life, but if you could get a third of the Harvard students to do anything it would cause significant ripples. The closest examples would...
...tour seemed what one could expect until we reached the athletic fields, and there my education began. "Harvard is our big rival in all the sports," I was informed, "though especially in hockey." He related how opposing teams got frozen fish and newspapers thrown at them on the ice, and how this was all great fun, especially against Harvard, and that a win against Harvard can make any team's season. Harvard's football, soccer and hockey teams always draw the crowds to help Cornell prevail, he said...
...answer was my tour: comparison is at the heart of the high-school senior's reality. Yet is Harvard necessarily the best point of comparison? Cornell has a lot to brag about that Harvard cannot touch: a coeducational policy that stretches from its founding; a healthy mix of pre-professional and liberal arts students, including hotel-school students; and a rural environment with beautiful gorges, waterfalls and tracts of forest. There is a proud ROTC heritage here and a supercomputer, a distinct architecture and the continued imprint of Ezra Cornell's educational ideals. Frankly, Cornell...