I get so tired of East Coast intellectuals having no clue about world-class universities west of the Appalachians. This resentment was already stirred up in my mind after a recent conversation I had with some friends about the Ivy League, where we tried to name all the schools in this obnoxiously elitist demarcation. We couldn’t do it and you know what? I don’t care. I don’t see Brown alums trying to memorize the ten University of California campuses.Which brings me to last night when I read this in the first line of a review of a book by William Davies King in The New Yorker:
King, a professor at Santa Barbara, has spent decades collecting things that nobody else would want…
Dear New Yorker: There is no such college as “Santa Barbara.” Just as there is no such school as “California.” The University of California at Santa Barbara is a school. Or even UC Berkeley. Or UCSB. We have many ways of writing our names that include the full and proper university titles.Minor gripe? Yes. But this lack of knowledge and attention is a symptom of a larger social snobbery and insularity that perpetually annoys me about this town.
5 comments:
It's all about class.
Is there a community college in Princeton, New Jersey, that gets confused with the Ivy League one?
Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Yale, Penn. I am from the East Coast so let me tell you, it is quite the athletic conference. Just as you couldn't name eight colleges on the east coast, why would you expect Brown alums to know the ten Univ. of California campuses? The only people who know college groups outside of their home area are: A) trivia buffs, b) College sports fanatics (who could name every team in every athletic league.)
I think it's perfectly reasonable to call UCSB Santa Barbara. Or UC-Berkeley California. (I used to be really confused when people would call the UC-Berkeley sports team the California Golden Bears, and sportscasters would be like, "Marshawn Lynch was a running back at California".) Just as University of Pennsylvania is referred to as Penn and University of Michigan Michigan.
Metonymy is a cruel mistress.
It's not okay to call them that because no one who went there, or lived within a thousand miles of there, would ever call them by those names. We get to pick what we are called.
And my point is that people not from the East Coast ARE expected to care about the Ivies, but not vice versa.
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