Miscellaneous arguable comparisons, random precedents, and nostalgia

It would be hard to imagine a better weekend for Harvard against Yale. Harvard's football team beat Yale, for the seventh year in a row. Thanks to an upset win by Dartmouth over Princeton in snowy Hanover, Harvard wound up sharing the Ivy title with Princeton. (Please, don't even think of complaining that Harvard cheats. After losing five years in a row, Yale hired 4 of Harvard's football coaches and has kept right on losing.) Dick Friedman '73 has a nice piece about the Harvard-Yale game of 100 years ago, when Charlie Brickley drop-kicked five field goals to beat Yale, 15-5. The Harvard-Yale rivalry is at once legendary and inexplicable. The two places could hardly be more alike. I imagine that pretty much every Yale student could equally well have wound up at Harvard and vice versa, but for some throw of the dice in the respective admissions offices. Walking in the crowd to the Yale Bowl, I was surrounded by cohorts of students who were, in aggregate, indistinguishable from each other except for the color of their clothing. They were all mixed together – pretty much every Harvard student has Yale friends from high school and every Yale student used to go to science fairs with people who wound up at Harvard. As colleges, they are two peas from the same pod, their similarities far more notable than their differences. Yale has Colleges and Harvard has Houses. I'll happily entertain the notion that Yale might be a better run place than Harvard and that the educational experience might be better. I have no idea how you could get an impartial assessment of that, but I'm well aware that Yale is superb and Harvard could be a lot better than it is. And yet Harvard seems to keep coming out on top. Six of the thirty-two Rhodes Scholars are Harvard students this year; three are Yalies. The Harvard team has won the William Lowell Putnam mathematical competition three of the past five years; the last time Yale placed in the top 5 was in 1991. Harvard was the North American champion in the international programming competition in 2012. There are 42 Harvard alumni in Congress; 19 Yale alumni. Maybe the legislature would work better if the numbers were reversed, but for some reason Harvard grads get voted in at twice the rate of Yale grads. Right or wrong, it's one of the reasons why I am so insistent that we take moral education seriously. What we teach and model for students makes a difference to what will become of the world. This is not (just) a game. We are friendly rivals, but we are certainly competitors. In fact, there are lots of things on which we cannot cooperate, on pain of antitrust action. I remember how stunned I was back in 2001, when Neil Rudenstine stepped down as president, to read this quotation from him in the Boston Globe:

Some students have pressed him to use the larger endowment to eliminate student loans, a move Princeton announced to fanfare in January. But Rudenstine was dissuaded by a phone call from a group of nervous college leaders. "Please," pleaded one Ivy League president with a billion-dollar endowment, "don't follow Princeton. You'll kill us." [Patrick Healy, March 2, 2001]

Er, that is not the way the free-market system is supposed to work. We fight each other and, in theory at least, the competition is good for everyone. And Harvard keeps winning. My sense is that over the past thirty years or so, Harvard has become more iconic. It used to be that Yale jokes were funny; now they are either mean, or confusing (sorry, I don't get it – why isn't the question "How many Harvard students …?"). A Harvard student made a hilarious (and yes, in places mean) spoof of a Yale campus tour. This is the same fellow who got himself elected president of the Undergraduate Council as a joke – at least in part by promising students better toilet paper. Something I did fifteen years ago, actually! The Yale Daily News has a curious article contrasting Prince