A few years ago, chatting with a lawyer I knew slightly, I asked where she'd gone to school. She made a brief half-grimace, half-wince, and then, as self-consciously as if she were admitting she'd flunked out of correspondence school, she said: "Harvard."
In our last issue, Dave Lieberman '03, who has a show on the Food Network, was asked by interviewer Trey Popp '97 why his online bio doesn't mention Yale. "It's not there at all?" asked Lieberman, and then confessed, "Sometimes I gloss over going to Yale because I don't want to alienate people."
Owning one's Ivy pedigree can be problematic. I worked in a fast-food restaurant the summer before college, and my co-workers never looked at me the same way after they found out where I was going in the fall. "For people who don't necessarily understand Yale, or have preconceptions about it," Dave Lieberman told Trey, "I don't want to let that come between us."
Just what are these preconceptions that fit so uncomfortably into certain circumstances (and serve so well in others -- like job interviews)? What is Ivyness, in the eyes of the larger world? Let's bring it home: what is Yalieness?
The best way to find out what the culture thinks of Yalies is to examine the Yalies invented by the culture. In ". . . But I Play One on TV," Mark Alden Branch '86 has assembled his latest survey of fictional Yale alumni. This population of ersatz Blues reveals that the real world has two fundamental impressions of us.
First, we inherited unimaginable wealth. This is especially the case for those of us born before about 1950. We are oil heirs, like Warren Beatty's character in the 1961 movie Splendor in the Grass. Probably, like Humphrey Bogart's character in Sabrina (1954), we grew up on vast estates furnished with indoor and outdoor tennis courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and specialists to take care of each. And once grown, like Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, we enjoy conspicuous consumption of fast cars, polo ponies, and women. (We're male, of course.)
In recent decades, we've diversified a little. We're not necessarily heirs to fortunes, and it's possible for us to be female, or to have attended Yale's law or art school instead of its college. But most importantly: we're overachievers. Showtime sums us up in its description of the character played by Jennifer Beals '86 on The L Word: "self-determined, alpha." We're geeks, like Topanga Lawrence on Boy Meets World. (Topanga was admitted to Yale but chose the fictional Pennbrook University.) Or we're driven, like Josh Lyman, deputy chief of staff on The West Wing, who says, "It bugs me when the president listens to anyone who isn't me."
In the wrong hands, these characteristics can turn nasty. Mick Crowley, a "wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate" in Michael Crichton's latest novel, Next, was apparently created as a revenge fantasy (for more, see ". . . But I Play One on TV"). C. Montgomery Burns, of The Simpsons, is the most evil cartoon tycoon ever conceived by a bunch of Harvard-grad comedy writers.
Fellow Yale alumni, Dave Lieberman was right. The
culture is rife with preconceptions about us. But hold your heads high. Take
comfort in the fact that you aren't really Montgomery Burns. And when someone
asks where you went to school, just answer, casually, "Pennbrook
University." 