Gawker
Hello there, liberal arts college grad! Until we started doing this monumental search for annoying colleges, we had no idea so many of you lurked among us, spreading your pansexual, drug-experimenting, free-thinking ways so insidiously! When this all began, we were just looking for a college we could generically insert into posts that made fun of Williamsburg residents, since Oberlin was getting tired. In our search, early favorites Bard, Vassar, and surprise write-in Swarthmore (general impression: everyone's really smart, but still really annoying) all soon fell to the towering giants of Liberal Arts College Annoyingness: Wesleyan and Sarah Lawrence. And that's where our death match came in, and why we've finally decided to bestow an honorary degree on one, very special, Liberal Arts College. It's one that is near and dear to all of your hearts, we're sure. And that college is...
Not Sarah Lawrence! We've consulted the poll, and yes, Sarah Lawrence technically beat out Wesleyan by (at this writing) 1873 to 1733 votes (or 51.9 to 48.1 percent). And it's true, Sarah Lawrence is really, really annoying—this comment seemed to sum up some of the reasons why:
We have a love your body run every september in which people who choose to (never the ones you hope) run naked around the quad while spectators have cocktail hour on the lawn. Did we forget to mention "sleaze week" where you can take workshops or pornography, dental damn usage and the female ejaculation? oh yes. The finale of which is the friday night sleaze ball which, my sophomore year, turned into a weird dominatrix s&m show that was so alarming it caused me to go to my room and shudder until dawn. Oh an the next day we had Mayfair—a little kids carnival for children from the neighborhood. SinisterOh, wow, that's pretty annoying. But! Whatever! We're invoking executive privilege, and awarding the crown to Wesleyan, which we have to admit was probably our personal favorite all along, except maybe Bard, which we continue to find really freaking annoying. Not that personal preferences had to do with any of this. Really. No, it was the email that we learned was circulating, like a case of herpes at an SLC orgy, among Sarah Lawrence alumni:
I'm a student at Sarah Lawrence College. Uh huh, that one. The person you assume is posting this. I think Scary Larry should win for one simple reason. I have received emails from groups of students and alumni, spanning four decades of attendance, in the last 24 hours who are proud to be in the running for America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College. That's right, they are psyched about the possibility of winning. Yes, Sadie Lou has a long tradition of rebelling for rebellion's sake. This is no exception. Sure there are other countless reasons why SLC should win, most of which I am too ADHD to remember, but this is the reason I like the best. We'll wear this title with pride. This is why us liberal artsy brats so richly deserve to win the contest you've entered us into. Thank you.Oh NO THEY DIDN'T. We're calling this one for Wesleyan, on account of electioneering, voter fraud, ballot box stuffing, probable cache-erasing, and any other dirty election tricks we can think of. Really, Sarah Lawrence? Let's just hope Barbara Walters (SLC '53) doesn't find out about this.
So, congrats, Wesleyan. Your graduates will forever be known not for their naked parties, or their stints in a alterna-frat, or for chalk, but rather for beating out Sarah Lawrence on an annoying technicality to be named America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College. We'd like to be the first to offer you the complete library of Hélène Cixous, this funny hat, these vintage thick-rimmed glasses, and this lease on a McKibbin Street loft as your prize. But we can't. You'll have to live that horrible life on your parents' money all on your own.
Cheers,
Gawker
Comments
I have it on good authority that Harvard has both a naked run and pornography workshops for women. I'd expect that most schools for rich kids do. So I'd call it a 100-way tie.
irigaray is totes more annoying than cixous.
The name Bard just felt right for this contest. I too settled for Wesleyan when that dream died.
@obonobo: I think they do. Yale has Sex Week as well as a whole naked society called the Pundits, whose members saunter around (note: saunter, not streak) the library and hand out candy during exams. And not all the candy has wrappers. Sometimes it's like, a warm clammy handful of Skittles ... shudder
But by trying to rig the election, didn't SLC prove that they ARE the most annoying? I challenge someone at Wesleyan to write a dissertation on this.
We don't care about your naked people. We won on a technicality and now you have to deal with 4 more years of our administration.
There's a difference between wanting to be annoying and being truly annoying. Think of the difference between the cast of Williamsburg! and and the residents of Williamsburg.
Okay. Let's confess. I did a year at SUNY Purchase (in ..73-74, horrors.)Flunked out, worked, then finished at night school at Marymount Manhattan, slogging through temp jobs galore. (even survived moving back home.) And had a (reasonably)good time and got a good education to boot. anyone else want to own up to a low rent non name but happy college experience?
Thanks for the [sort of] shout out Doree! Oh, and I totally voted for Wesleyan all along - as a native of Connecticut I truly believe that the title of most annoying liberal arts college should reside in-state.
My cousin went to Wesleyan. Now she's married to a cardiologist, runs a nonprofit, and may be the most well-adjusted person in the family.
I imagine she isn't welcome at the reunions.
My best friend from high school went to Wes. He was the nerdy Phish technocrat who laid awake at night listening to his amorous roommates fucking.
He now works for Merriam-Webster as a dictionary editor.
One of my friends goes to Wesleyan and lives in the Buddhist House. She is white and not a Buddhist. Everyone in the house is white and none of them were raised Buddhist, either. If that doesn't sum up Wesleyan I don't know what will. To think I almost went there (I opted for the slightly less annoying but still pretty stereotypical Grinnell).
I didn't attend either institution but I know enough alumni from both to constitute a significant statistical sample. And I concur with your findings; The Wesleyan grads maintain a more lasting and robust annoyingosity.
Sorry, Wesleyan's Wikipedia entry doesn't contain the blood-pressure-inflating phrase " most students are well informed about the intricacies of gender politics." It actually has a semblance of a Greek system, rather than a network of vegan cooperative housing. Oberlin still wins, in my heart.
At least the quirky sexual excesses of Columbia are picked up by Ann Coulter and used as more evidence that liberal academics are morally bankrupt Christ-haters. What did you do to shock Fox viewers today, Wesleyan?
Of course SLC got the most votes.
They have more of us Chicagoans than Wesleyan.
And unlike Florida or Ohio, we know how to count votes!
Even from those whose addresses seem to be a cemetery!
@slinkimalinki: Sorry, Kristeva beats them both.
@Gregory_of_Nazianzus: The only reason there's an S&M club at Columbia is because the kids are all virgins, and completely terrified/fascinated with the idea sex. They talk about it all the time, nobody (excepting acts on onanism among the Butler library stacks) actually does it.
Your typical State school sweat hog has fucked his way through a dozen virgins by the time her or she's 15, and is only concerned with the action rather than the concept of boinkery.
McKibbIn. how could you miss it, it's on here: [en.wikipedia.org]
@ljnd2: Amateurs. Alenka Zupančič.
my bard roommate was actually really offended when i told him about this whole "most annoying lib arts school" poll. i'm sad i didn't get to see him cry. i mean he's a fucking tour guide for them... i wanted tears!!!
My girlfriend went to Wesleyan. She keeps dragging me to house parties in Brooklyn thrown by other Wesleyanites.
I dread these parties. I have feigned leprosy in order to avoid them. I have claimed to be a Libertarian and Ayn Rand fan in order for the Wes grads to stop telling me stories about the Naked Dorm, the Naked Parties, the Naked granola station.
Last year a good friend invited me to dinner to convince her high school senior son "R____" to choose Wesleyan over SLC, Reed, Kenyon et al.
I have known R___ since he was freakin' 8 years old. I watch him ignore his parents pleas at dinner. Then I went to work. It was like being the anti-counselor. The more I ignored R___, the more he wanted to know what I thought of certain schools. I shot from the hip.
about a certain former women's college :
"Aw, that school is a union busting bastion of rich kids with opium pipes."
about a certain school in the Pacific Northwest:
"Yeah, you'll wake up one day in the quad on mushrooms dressed in your aunts baggy panties with hoof marks branded on your ass."
about a certain school in CT:
"Dude, the guy who created Buffy went there...do you know the Buffy musical episode with Hinton Battle? *sings "Let Me Rest In Peace"*"
about SLC:
"Man, I gotta be honest...you will meet a girl at orientation...by the end of 1st semester, both of you will become THE WORST KIND OF LESBIANS. And then one of you will do prison time alone."
about a school in Minnesota:
"Sorry, they have to import colored people to that hood...and they won't have any pineapple near the cereal bar...just maple syrup."
He wound up going to Wesleyan.
I think I am going to Hell.
I am distraught and in my cups that this contest has come to an end! I have spent the last 4 days guffawing in my office, and then covering it up with a cough, over the high-sterical recounting of college shenanigans. Cant you just make this a weekly thing? To get me through bummer Mondays and summer Fridays?
@oudemia: ah, but iragaray has the whole "woman constantly touches herself" thing, which totally works with the topic at hand.
@slinkimalinki: Yeah . . . the speculum of the other co-ed . . .
One more time for good ol' Wes! We won! We won!
And then it's fight for old Wesleyan
Never give in!
Fight til the end, when
Might and Right shall win!
So keep on fighting
Til victory crowns everyone
And then it's Fight, Fight, Fight, Fiiiiight
For Wes-ley-an
GO WES!
Please. SLC sssooooo gets the trophy. Which other school on the list went to such painstaking efforts to win this completely worthless election? It should count as a secret test of annoyingness, and we passed with flying colors.
@badgorilla: I was so tempted to post that earlier...
Congrats Wesleyan! You're the Dillinger of annoying liberal arts colleges!
@DieDieDie: Pffft. Plenty of play at Columbia though much of it is now gay. Once they gentrified the neighborhood beyond recognition (RIP Morningside Heights, 1968-2002) and set up latte vendors in Hamilton Hall, the kids stopped copping furtive feels in Butler and instead started having actual sex on Frette sheets in their new dorm rooms, where the thick lacquered layers of paint covered the walls previously stained with the eviction notices of the middle-class.
Since no one has really done this so far, here's a list of some notable Wes alums. And btw, I'm totally crabby about my alma mater winning this.
Jets coach Eric Mangini
Bill Belichick
Red Sox asst. general manager Jed Hoyer
School of Rock/Good Girl writer/actor Mike White
Michael Bay
Brooklyn Industries owner Lexy Funk
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman
Lemony Snicket (Dan Handler)
Dana Delaney
TV newsguy Andrew Siff
Johnny Temple of rock band Girls Against Boys
Smokey Fontaine
PCU/Last Action Hero writer Zak Penn
Joss Whedon
Robert Ludlum
Stephen Trask, composer/lyricist of Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Dar Williams
Randall Pinkston
@goldsoundz:
I, too, mourn Bard's having been kicked out of the running. I mean, neither Wesleyan nor Sarah Lawrence had Steely Dan write a song about them.
But... what if they had? What would the titles be?
@Phyllis Nefler: Brown's got a naked donut run in the libraries during reading week. Some sort of cabal of sugary food and body freedom loving Ivy Leaguers I suppose. Although I think ours was cancelled last semester due to people going to the absolute quiet rooms solely to watch the run (it's supposed to be a surprise/ spontaneous type thing).
@Gregory_of_Nazianzus: Brown was the original Ivy League debauchery on Fox News school.
Please, please, PLEASE someone run a contest for Most Annoying Douchebag Producing Conservative Wall Street Feeder Uni.
I can't take the envy of reading about Sex Weeks, seminars on ANY aspect of female sexuality (as if it was acknowledged to exist), Buddhist Houses, naked runs, S&M clubs, pornography classes and a student body that can hear the phrase "gender politics" and not automatically think of physical castration as imminent.
I spent my college years among roommates who thought I was "troubled" because I liked to have sex, with lovers who were "concerned" over how much I knew about birth control and why I had it with me, with boyfriends who concluded I must have had sex with a lot of gay men if I suggested an HIV test for us, with women crying over possibly having lost their virginity (at age 20) and around men who would non-chalantly tell a woman they just slept with about how they would marry a virgin when they finally "got the ball and chain".
And no, I did not attend college in the 1950s, or 1850s. Just in the Bronx.
Most Annoying Technical School now, please?
"Sadie Lou?"
That's gotta be the most fucking annoying nickname for a college ever!
Unless Wesleyan has an equally annoying nickname -- like, say, "Lil' Wezzy" -- then SLC should have had this title locked up based on that nickname alone.
Vassar DID have a unicyclist team, a nudie poker night and a croquet club that modeled its parties after "Heathers."
Then there was that whole "doorway-to-hell-in-Main-Building's-basement" thing. Demonic attacks, strange lights, walled-up rooms, the whole works.
No naked donut people though.
My cousin went to Wesleyan. Now she's married to a cardiologist, runs a nonprofit, and may be the most well-adjusted person in the family. I imagine she isn't welcome at the reunions.
Nope, she's probably right at home at reunions. That's the glorious thing about Annoying Liberal Arts Schools everywhere-- their students go from being "oh look how annoyingly unconventional I am" to marrying an orthodontist and living in a McMansion with 2.5 kids and within 15 years.
@luckyjim: Naked... donut... Finally! Proof of the source of Cosmo's sex tips. I knew the feminazis were to blame. The only explanation for how bad those tips are is that they just don't want men to enjoy sex at all.
Amen to Wesleyan. My brother went there and turned into a self-rightous douchebag. His friends were some of the most obnoxious, pompous and unfriendly people I have ever met. I, too, opted for an annoying liberal arts degree (Grinnell), but at least left with a hardened liver and the ability to spellcheck my papers. (And that bastard had better grades, not that I'm bitter...)
BTW, 9,867% in support of Weaselyan (oops, sorry, did I misspell?) for the win. I know some brilliant, crazy freaks from SLC. I know some obnoxious, pretentious narcissists from Wes. QED.
(No idea whether being an alum of The School-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named makes me extra authoritative or utterly wrong.)
I find it pretty abhorrent that SLC can have it's coveted title taken away simply because we [a] coveted the title and [b] managed to raise all known computer and internet possessing students and alums to take part. We are just that annoying.
And honestly, it's way more 'out there' than any of the comments have described. Marx, Moog, Adderall, and Built By Wendy dresses prove a lethal combination. You have to see it believe.
Bard forever, baby. How can a school with Music Program Zero not win this contest?
Berkeley (California, not Secretaries or Musicians) had a Naked Guy who spent all four years walking around campus sans clothing, old folks nudie marches (ew ew ew), and also the "De-Cals" program (short for "Democratic Teaching at Cal" which seems a little redundant) teaching everything from Literary Allusions in the Simpsons to "Fem Sex" - all a trustifarian's little heart could desire.
It also cost a hell of a lot less. Stupid rich kids.
Sarah Lawrence can't get their shit together to give pre-Facebook alumni email addresses, and you expect us to believe they orchestrated a campaign of massive proportions to stuff the ballot box? Please.
@bite.me: Don't forget Barrington and the Wine and Cheese parties (read: punch laced with acid and copious public nudity).
Oh, and we named our homeless: Rare, and the Hate Man.
Here's the weird thing: I went to UC Ber
Here's the weird thing: I went to UC Berkeley--over STANFORD! MY.GOD>-- and had my parents ALL freaked out by THAT choice. And none of this shit went on there. We had, like, a naked GUY (recently hung himself in jail--BTW, he was a ater polo player so none of us were complaining, though one lesbian group did. Fucking lesbos, ruin all our fun every fucking time!) we had an heiress get kidnapped like, a hundred years before I got there. We had the Bubble Lady (nothing kinky or attractive, just a woman in a poncho who blew babbles everywhere she went) and a Polka Dot Man (rumored to be a physics PhD who ranted in Sproul Hall about the aliens in the fountain water and in the ketchup at Top Dog). We had a guy in a van with conspiracies all over it, including that Nixon actually killed John Lennon. but NOTHIN compared to this shit.
I thought I was going all batshit liberal psycho crazy on my Reagan loving dad. I feel ROBBED.
@RollsRoycehead-on:
"this unicycle ride's getting boring"
"shut up or i'll put the seat back on"
@tuffgirl: honeybunny, your list is beyond belief annoying.
gotta say also that, i concur, berkeley bears no resemblance WHATSOEVER to a liberal arts college. i can't think of less of a hothouse liberal artiste experience than walking among the masses across sproul.
i lurved my liberal arts undergrad days at a teeny tiny school too small to be more than a blip on the gawker radar. sure we were annoying: we had a literal rat races complete with betting, a joyce party where we recited our favorite passages from the skinny bespectacled dude; in REALITY, i loved it there. anyone else out there? helloooooo?
Doree, could you please run the next presidential election? So I don't have to get up to go vote?
@lizzybennet: I went to Oxford, where we were all too pissed to find the means or creativity through which to be obnoxious.
I still hate Brown and Bard like poison. But then again I never had roomates from Wesleyan or "Sadie Lou."
@lizzybennet: This is Gawker. Nobody here cares about California or its so-called educational system. You might as well be talking about far Cathay or the kingdom of Prester John...
@Clevertrousers:
If there's douchery to be exposed whether it's East Coast style or California bred, this Manhattan Media subject wants to hear about it. And ah, oh yeah, I went to Berkeley so lay off Cal.