I was smoking with the boys upstairs when I heard about the whole afair

Having weathered the bar exam, gotten a headway on throwing out a year's worth of junk mail, and followed up on a couple of job leads, I decided to take a break and catch up with The Gawker.

Good thing that I did.  Last month they ran a contest for the Most Annoying Liberal Arts College. 

My alma matter lost, on a technicality.

While Sadie Lou won more votes than Wesleyan for among other things, our sleaze week:

"Did we forget to mention "sleaze week" where you can take workshops or pornography, dental damn usage and the female ejaculation? oh yes. The finale of which is the friday night sleaze ball which, my sophomore year, turned into a weird dominatrix s&m show..."

That pretty much sums up sleaze week.  I should make out a donation check right now.  But I digress.

Apparently, SLC students and alums wanted the title of Most Annoying LAC too much.  And Gawker, intending to bestow the crown of most annoying on the very school that wanted to come off as "not annoying" but enlightened and cool, decided to go with runner up Wesleyan instead.  Oh, lovely mainstream Wesleyan. 

Sarah Lawrence' nominating paragraph was dead-on accurate, actually:

"Some other defining characteristics: everyone's vegan, yet still smokes and wears leather; parties have permanently been replaced by trips to Brooklyn and lots of coke; anonymous shit-talking on livejournal is a sport. Also, it's kind of a tradition that with each entering first year class, everyone complains that the school is becoming too "mainstream" and "normal."

There was no livejournal when I was there, but if there had been...

Here's Gawker's initial list, and the reputation that pushed each college into the annoying stratosphere:

Bard: Upstate New York haven for rich, disaffected filmmakers, writers, grade-skippers and artists.

Bennington: Hippie haven in Vermont with optional grades and lots of "creative" types. (Bonus: Bret Easton Ellis went there. Then, so did Jared Paul Stern.)

Brown (honorary liberal arts college): Eurotrash and rich hipster magnet in Providence, R.I.

Hampshire: This "non-traditional" college in Amherst, MA calls itself "experimenting." Whatever that means.

Kenyon: There's not much to do here besides go drink in the Ohio woods. Also, maybe too preppy for our list, maybe.

Oberlin: Asked and answered.

Reed: They're smarter than you. Just ask. Even though they're baked. Also: West Coast represent!

Sarah Lawrence: Breeding ground of coked-up artsy heiresses and the lone faggy heir.

Smith: Lesbians and the LUGS who love them.

Vassar: Favorite of budding editorial assistants everywhere. Male population: See under Sarah Lawrence.

Wesleyan: Our instinctive favorite to take the crown, if only because if we have to hear about one more awesome party at Eclectic we might slit our wrists. Also, heroin is all fun and games until you can't get out of rehab, isn't it!

I'm amused that the old reputations haven't changed a bit in the past decade.   They really haven't.  During my time at SLC, it was pretty much understood that schools like Wesleyan, Vassar, Brown, Swarthmore, and Smith were simply not the real deal.  Students too mainstream, too heterocentric, too capitalistic, etc.  Bard students were as freaky as SLC students, but not as smart.  Reed was like SLC but for people not hip enough to make it out to the east coast.  Ditto for Oberlin. 

Of particular amusement is the comments that followed the Wesleyan's crowning:

But by trying to rig the election, didn't SLC prove that they ARE the most annoying? I challenge someone at Wesleyan to write a dissertation on this.

We don't care about your naked people. We won on a technicality and now you have to deal with 4 more years of our administration.

Please. SLC sssooooo gets the trophy. Which other school on the list went to such painstaking efforts to win this completely worthless election? It should count as a secret test of annoyingness, and we passed with flying colors.

We wuz robbed...

One of my friends goes to Wesleyan and lives in the Buddhist House. She is white and not a Buddhist. Everyone in the house is white and none of them were raised Buddhist, either. If that doesn't sum up Wesleyan I don't know what will. To think I almost went there (I opted for the slightly less annoying but still pretty stereotypical Grinnell).

Liberal arts schools are like families, and wesleyan is the liberal arts school for people who hate their families.

When I was at Sarah Lawrence, I took a sculpture class (which was incidentally taught by a women who used her own menstrual blood in her work) where my project for the semester was called "Liberal Arts and Crafts." I sat around making friendship bracelets, lanyards and getting tangled up in yarn and popsicle sticks which were intended to be shown under glass in the final class exhibition. Sadly, I was kicked out for unrelated reasons before the show, but I will always fondly remember my time at SLC. Especially the time the lesbians tried to talk me out of heterosexuality, and I sat in the hallway of the women's dorm, hands over my ears, wailing, "but I like boys!"

The difference between SLC and Wesleyan, in case you wanted to know:

I am a SLC Alum married to a Wesleyan grad. I had experiences on both campuses in the late 90's and I can tell you that Sarah Lawrence is hands down the winner. I used to visit my husband at wesleyan and long for a more "normal" college experience like he had. lesbians in flannel shirts are not annoying. gaymen in pleated skirts and matching handbags trying to run you over in thier [sic] car because you slept with a straight guy they wanted, thats annoying.

Their poor children.  Alums of various schools play the naked oneupmanship game:

Berkeley (California, not Secretaries or Musicians) had a Naked Guy who spent all four years walking around campus sans clothing, old folks nudie marches (ew ew ew), and also the "De-Cals" program (short for "Democratic Teaching at Cal" which seems a little redundant) teaching everything from Literary Allusions in the Simpsons to "Fem Sex" - all a trustifarian's little heart could desire.

Yale has Sex Week as well as a whole naked society called the Pundits, whose members saunter around (note: saunter, not streak) the library and hand out candy during exams. And not all the candy has wrappers. Sometimes it's like, a warm clammy handful of Skittles ... shudder

Brown's got a naked donut run in the libraries during reading week. Some sort of cabal of sugary food and body freedom loving Ivy Leaguers I suppose. Although I think ours was cancelled [sic] last semester due to people going to the absolute quiet rooms solely to watch the run (it's supposed to be a surprise/ spontaneous type thing).

The only reason there's an S&M club at Columbia is because the kids are all virgins, and completely terrified/fascinated with the idea sex. They talk about it all the time, nobody (excepting acts on onanism among the Butler library stacks) actually does it. Your typical State school sweat hog has fucked his way through a dozen virgins by the time her or she's 15, and is only concerned with the action rather than the concept of boinkery.

I really feel this one's pain:

"Please, please, PLEASE someone run a contest for Most Annoying Douchebag Producing Conservative Wall Street Feeder Uni.

I can't take the envy of reading about Sex Weeks, seminars on ANY aspect of female sexuality (as if it was acknowledged to exist), Buddhist Houses, naked runs, S&M clubs, pornography classes and a student body that can hear the phrase "gender politics" and not automatically think of physical castration as imminent.

I spent my college years among roommates who thought I was "troubled" because I liked to have sex, with lovers who were "concerned" over how much I knew about birth control and why I had it with me, with boyfriends who concluded I must have had sex with a lot of gay men if I suggested an HIV test for us, with women crying over possibly having lost their virginity (at age 20) and around men who would non-chalantly [sic] tell a woman they just slept with about how they would marry a virgin when they finally "got the ball and chain".

And no, I did not attend college in the 1950s, or 1850s. Just in the Bronx."

I guess getting to wear the FU sweatshirt is paltry consolation.  It does make one think, though about the alternative to a four year naked Julia Kristava fight the man post colonial structuralist LUG fest...College with these people:

Eighteen year-old republicans with new Mercedes and plastic surgury [sic]

that the commenter considered:

...way more annoying than naked Buddist [sic] picnics and recycled art.

And the winner:

My girlfriend went to Wesleyan. She keeps dragging me to house parties in Brooklyn thrown by other Wesleyanites.  I dread these parties. I have feigned leprosy in order to avoid them. I have claimed to be a Libertarian and Ayn Rand fan in order for the Wes grads to stop telling me stories about the Naked Dorm, the Naked Parties, the Naked granola station.

And finally, the true definition of an annoying liberal arts college:

Nah. The most annoying liberal arts college is the one that won't stop calling you and asking for donations.

 

Comments

[Alexis]

wtf kind of bullshit contest is this, anyway? Georgetown. Now THAT is some annoying ass shit. I can't think of a school I've been to with more irritating, uptight preppies greasing each other's palms gladhanding all over campus with their cute little pink polo shirts.

Or, how about George Washington, the most expensive school in the country for a bunch of kids who ostensibly couldn't get accepted anywhere else because they're not only functionally illiterate, but they were probably passed out drunk when the college application essay was due, but today, thanks to all that money, they are literally screaming in your face and actually touching you, as you walk down the street, while trying to get you to pledge their sorority?

[kindle]

This was awesome. I don't think SLC should have won either, I agree that trying to hard really takes the fun out of it.