In one of her many epically unfunny columns, Coulter calls out fellow Cornell graduate Olbermann for going to a fake Ivy. Her reasoning? Olbermann majored in communications at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences within Cornell.
Coulter, unfortunately, attended Cornell, a fact that everyone regrets. She was in DG, a house whose members, for the most part, would only talk to football players. Or lacrosse players, if the football team was under .500.
Per usual, she deliberately obfuscates the facts. Cornell, like literally billions of other Universities across the country, is subdivided internally into many different colleges, like the College of Engineering, or the College of Arts and Sciences. While it is true that each college has its own admissions standards -- and most of those standards are indistinguishable between the colleges -- everyone can, and is encouraged, to take classes in the other colleges.
There are differences, sure. The bulk of your classes are taken in your college. If you're a New Yorker, you will pay less than an out-of-stater in four of the seven colleges, due to Cornell's land grant status. And if you were in the hotel school, you're making more money than everyone else.
But that's pretty much where the differences end.
In his response, Olbermann says that Cornellians never rag on the other colleges.
That's the biggest lie I've ever heard. We rag on the other colleges all the time. But it's a good natured ribbing.
In fact, the hotel school takes the brunt of the ragging. This is, however, largely wrong-headed.
The more time you spent at Cornell, the more you realized that the Hotel School had awesome classes. Half the senior class takes Intro to Wines, which is by far -- and I am not kidding -- the most useful single class I took at Cornell. Then they had cooking labs with the best chefs in the world. Another class was casino operations. Why I never took that was beyond me.
And last but not least was the slaughterhouse class. In that one, they taught you how to butcher a cow, how to skin it, how to bleed it, and how to prepare it. The test consisted of the teacher asking you to cut him a flank steak, and a skirt steak, and a t-bone, and so on. And the grilling after the test was done, I'm told, was awesome.
Yes, you think it's gross now, but when society falls apart due to the Greatest Depression in the next few months, these are the people who will know how to still have prime rib.
I, meanwhile, will starve while trying to figure out how to open a can.
But I digress.
Coulter is an idiot. This is a truism. But Olbermann's response is more than a little childish. He boasts that he graduated in seven semesters and then pulls out his diploma and points at it repeatedly, much like a 16-year old points to a hickey to show his mates that he and Sally did, in fact, spend seven minutes in heaven.
But the man has a point. Cornell does not have seven colleges, some of which are in the Ivy League and some of which belong to special ed. Ann Coulter would have you believe that the Arts Quad is shrouded in Ivy, and transitioning from there to the Ag Quad is like walking into the dank and depressing darkness of the projects (That would be the low-rises on North).
ALL of Cornell is in the Ivy League. Some of the most accomplished people I know are communications grads from the Ag School. The vast majority of Cornellians are damn proud to have gone to Cornell, and, unless you're a hotelie -- where the school's reputation earns you the right to make that extra distinction -- nobody who ever graduates from Cornell will, at a cocktail party, go through the trouble of specifying their college at Cornell.
Except maybe Andy Bernard.
4 comments:
She's not just a bitch but she's also wrong- she claims Kurt Vonnegut as a Cornell grad, but didn't he drop out to enlist in the army and get an honorary degree later?
She's kind of wrong about that.
Cornell claims Vonnegut '44 as a grad, even though what you said is true. He did drop out. Cornell claims him like Occidental College claims Obama.
At the newspaper, we're even more shameless about it, and use him to recruit. He did work as an editor at The Sun for two years, and held the same position that I held 60-some years later. He says it was the best time of his undergrad experience.
For what it's worth, he did speak at our 125th anniversary gala in NYC a few years ago. It was the most rambling and incoherent two-minute speech ever produced by man.
I swore you went to college.
As the daughter of a Cornell Aggie, I have to laugh at Coulter. Also, McGill claims William Shatner the same way as Cornell claims Vonnegut (we even unofficially named our Student Union after him because officially it cannot be named after him 'til he graduates, donates a shitload of money to the school, or dies... I wonder what's likely to happen first).
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