Californians Just Don’t Get the Ivy League

by Max Wasserman | June 22, 2009 at 9:00 am

0310_james_franco_sleepingIn the new “Thinking Big” blog on The Atlantic Online, blog writer Conor Friedersdorf wrote a post about his thoughts on New York and the East Coast–having grown up in California before moving east for graduate school. Before relocating to New York, most of the East Coast existed only as an idea to Friedersdorf, with one major eastern presence being more theoretical than even peppermint unicorns.

My own final abstraction was the Ivy League, a group of institutions I knew nothing about for most of my life save the fact that Harvard and Yale were among them. As late as age 26, when I began looking at Columbia University for graduate school, I never thought of it as being in the Ivy League, nor did I put Brown, Princeton or the University of Pennsylvania in those categories. I’d scarcely heard of Cornell or Dartmouth until I moved to the East Coast.

Before all you Ivy League alums start writing hate mail to Conor Friedersdorf–and in the case of Princeton grads, order an air strike on his house for grouping your alma mater with “the other five”–be aware that it is not a singular notion. In fact, there’s an entire state that doesn’t grasp the concept of obsessing over elitism. Read the rest of this entry »

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