Gawker
We've consulted our poll standings—thank you for voting!—and as of this writing, the top two vote-getters for the highly coveted title of America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College are... Sarah Lawrence and Wesleyan! And it's very close; last time we checked, Sarah Lawrence had 599 votes, or 15.5 percent of the total, while Wesleyan had 536 votes, or 13.9 percent of the total. So we decided to have a SLC vs. Wes DEATH MATCH. Sadly, neither Oberlin nor Bard, two of our personal favorites, will be in the running; neither will surprise high-vote-getter Swarthmore, which overcame its write-in-candidate status to finish in a strong third place. (Congrats, Swarthmore: You're really annoying!) To help you determine once and for all which is the most annoying liberal arts college in America, we've marshalled some more of our favorite comments about each school. This will be the final poll! Cast your vote carefully!
Sarah Lawrence
"I hadn't even been at Sarah Lawrence for a month before I was called into the dean's office to discuss my cameo appearance in some freak's vision. Yes, vision. The girl claimed to have envisioned her own murder after eating a leaf that had been previously "nibbled on" by a fairy. Not only did she take this story to the dean, but the dean was concerned enough to pull me out of class to discuss this. SLC sweep, people."
"go gryphons! this might be the only competition they'll ever win."
"Definitely SLC. Never before have I met a group of people who were farther up their own asses. I think everyone who graduates from Sarah Lawrence should be awarded an honorary doctorate of pharmacology."
"Wealthy families typically have a child who is sent to an elite private school, receives a good education, and by dint of his/her natural intelligence, work ethic instilled by his parents, good grades, benefits that come with wealth, and the university preferences for legacies, goes to Harvard or Yale. That child also has a younger sibling who, with the same education and benefits, spends most of his/her time drinking, doesn't really like learning, and is known for having access to good drugs. That child goes to Sarah Lawrence, and that's why it's my pick."
Wesleyan
"When I filled out my housing forms to enter Wesleyan I had the option of writing in my personal gender expression and whether or not I minded rooming with a person who expressed themselves differently than me... this was also literally the only question I was asked as far as any roommate survey went."
"Remember when you vote: Wesleyan's hottest campus topic is whether or not to allow students to write on the sidewalks with chalk."
"I have an ex who went to Wesleyan and said that virtually all to whom he relayed this asked, "You mean the women's school?" To which he responded, "Wellesley was my first choice." I found this anecdote charming. But I'm not sure in which direction it swings the Wesleyan pendulum."
"The Swarthmore and Vassar descriptions sound JUST LIKE Wesleyan, except instead of heirs to fortunes it's children of utterly random celebrities (Richard Dreyfuss!) or former child stars (Little Man Tate!)"
"Please vote for Wesleyan. Here is why: I recently ran into a Wesleyan undergrad I went to high school with. When I inquired as to his summer plans, he said he had gotten a research grant to study homelessness in New York. This "study" included a two-week stint as - i'm not shitting you - an actual homeless person. The rich hipstard actually lived on the street for two weeks and "hung out" with homeless people, and WESLEYAN PAID HIM TO DO IT."
All right then! To the poll!
Earlier: Vote For America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College
Comments
You say "death match", but I suspect you're just toying with us and aren't actually going to deliver on your promise. Poop.
If the positive ratio of least likely to vote versus most tatooed/pierced can be a proxy for most annoying liberal arts college, the clear winner is Wesleyan.
Oooh, a blind item. . .yay! Duke wins!
I could be wrong, but I believe SLC is still the only four-year program that gives away free bandanna and a copy of Gender Trouble with every diploma.
I don't understand how this is even a contest. Both schools have roughly the same size undergraduate populations, so I think that maybe it boils down to the fact that so many Sarah Lawrence alums die shortly after graduation from coke overdoses or depression from their failed acting careers that many voters have never met one.
Don't you think Bard should win honorarily just by virtue of the fact that Chevy Chase went there?
I went to sarah lawrence and on two separate occasions had to explain that no, it isn't that cosmetology school. (the question was asked by a staten island resident and a Bayonne NJ resident, respectively)
I would like to call attention to this excerpt from the Princeton Review website:
Wesleyan students have got their [you-know-what] together like no one you ever meet. They're those ideal college kids who are every bit as intellectual and driven as any Ivy Leaguer, every bit as snobby about it as a Reed student, every bit as hip as a RISD student, and yet as crunchy and earthy as a UC-Berkeley student. It's a campus of total badass intellectuals.
Plus Yoko Ono and Linda mcCartney went there. The only school with two beatle wives? thas pretty obnoxious. Additionally, I had classmates named cascade, ophelia, odelia and a girl who called herself feather.
our ace in the hole? Alumna Bea Arthur.
They are both annoying. But since Wesleyan turned me down and I had to attend Columbia instead, they'll always be the worst liberal arts college in my book.
Wesleyan has 2,805 undergrads to annoy you, while Sarah Lawrence has a mere 1,306. Technically, that would make Sarah Lawrence students 2.15 times more irksome.
And thanks to that liberal arts education, I had to ask someone how to figure out that ratio on a calculator.
Wesleyan calls itself a "University" when it's just a 2,800-person undergraduate college.
So yeah, let's say Wesleyan for the win.
@procrastinator, esq.: Tsk, tsk Procrast, we've got a great Graduate Program in Ethnomusicology, which gives us the university cred!
Bea Arthur is the ace in no one's hole. Don't bring that classy lady into this.
@Schadenfrau: er- believe you mean wesleyan is 2.15x more annoying than SLC. sorry, all the math at my antithesis of a liberal arts college has given me a pavlovian response to math problems and things involving excel.
If you firebomb two buildings on campus in one month and deface the African-American cultural center with racist graffiti, but show your support for the maintenance staff by kidnapping the Wesleyan University president to support a living wage for part-time janitors, you just might be annoying.
@BK_KT:
Yes, Wesleyan used to be known as "The Singing University."
You're not really helping your case.
@j_dot: No, I think she meant was this:
If Wesleyan and Sarah Lawrence are equally annoying,
and Wesleyan has 2,800 students, while Sarah Lawrence has but 1,300;
then the annoyance coefficient of the average Sarah Lawrence student is 2.15 times that of the average Wesleyan student.
Oooh, a fight to the death! It's a shame they can't both lose.
@k-pow: "...are every bit as intellectual and driven as any Ivy Leaguer, every bit as snobby about it as a Reed student..."
Perhaps the reason we're voting for W students is that they behave this way without having the chops to back it up.
By the way, The Princeton Review should reverse snobby and intellectual in that description. The thought of the Ivy League calling Reedies snobs is pretty damn funny.
No one has heard of the place. There's no serious prestige in getting in. Reed students are the first to admit that they are too screwed up to have gone anywhere else. They are poorly socialized intellectuals fit only for working in academia or a coffee shop which is different from being ambitious Ivy League snobs.
Yeah. Why am I saying they? Do you want foam?
All I know is my brother had to write an essay to get into the "naked dorm" at Wesleyan because it is, apparently, such a hot property. Also he was reprimanded for writing "he" instead of "ze" in a paper. By a professor. Wes wins.
@VenusCloacina: i stand corrected!
WHY AREN'T THE DOUCHEBAG PRODUCING LIBERAL ARTS SCHOOLS ON HERE!
Trinity, Hamilton, Colby?
"That child also has a younger sibling who, with the same education and benefits, spends most of his/her time drinking, doesn't really like learning, and is known for having access to good drugs. That child goes to Sarah Lawrence, and that's why it's my pick."
This is so dead on! I dated this rich chick who happened to be the youngest, druggiest of her two sisters and of course she went to Sarah Lawrence.
I have also partied with the students there and couldn't understand how they passed any of their classes.
Sorry, but Wesleyan rules. All my friends and I loved it. And I personally believe we're not douchebags. I'd love to know what the Gawker community would say is a not-annoying college. I'm drunk as I write this, but still.
Thanks, math nerds! Whip-its popped, my brain cells dropped.
That Wesleyan picture makes me think of your Anderson Cooper story.
Objection: How in the HELL did Grinnell not make it onto the original poll?
Mark Ebner
Bard College, '82
Member Emeritus, The Bard College Gentlemen's Club
(former roomate of Eric Schaeffer)
[www.hollywoodinterrupted.com]
As a female Weselyan grad, I have to be fair and say YES, it is the most annoying liberal arts college.
If you weren't dirty, crunchy, hippie-like womyn, or girls that shaved their heads bald in protest of patriarchy, or a "LUGS" (lesbians until graduation) who went right back into their Laura Ashley dresses on graduation in order to ride back home to tony NY suburbs in Mom's mercedes, or picking the Middletown goodwill clean for ironic pantsuits, or raging heroine addicts...then you were me and my friends-probably viewed as outcasts on campus but "normal" in the rest of the world.
I certainly don't regret the great education I got there, but I sometimes regret not having any "college was soooo fun" stories to remember.
Oh well.
Former friend of mine went to Sarah Lawrence. She got Grace Paley as her freshman advisor. After one meeting, she dropped GP because Paley "wasn't interested enough in my personal educational experience." Game, set, match.
@markebner: thank god someone from Bard is representing. I'll never forget that double-team with you and Eric in that asian chick's van (Diane something?) It makes me want to go snort some heroin and write a poem about nothing.
@SHESAIDWHAT: Reedies are only good for coffee shop positions or grad school? I'll have you know that of my fellow class of '05 mates, one works for 1-800 GOT JUNK, one moves pianos, one drives a day care facility van, one wastes comnpany time on sites like this (uhhh), one designs flyers for a community theater. Our mark on the world is far and wide. SLC because it's the only school that could have a 60-40 Girl to Guy without anyone noticing.
@EyesRolling: don't forget the illustrious Barbara Walters! she should be enough to put us over the top. Go Gryphons!
if wesleyan doesn't win i'm transferring to NYU.
@PomPom:
I suppose she was expecting enormous changes at the last minute.
Spoiled brat.
As an Am_erst Grad I'm tempted too recruit my fellow alum to bury Wesleyan, but in the "little three" we all know who doesn't count as a genuine rival. That being said Wuck Filliams.
*to
I've only had sex with one junky Sarah Lawrence poetry program drop out, because that's all it takes to blacken one's ovaries, become totally asexual and never talk to a man again.
"Ca-CAW" *Flies away*
ClydesMuse: You say you'll never forget, but, honestly, there was no Schaeffer-Ebner double team in the back of the van. But now that you've brought it up, let me clear things up for you: That "asian chick" was actually a well-adopted Burmese war baby, and she was fucking esteemed art professor Jim Sullivan in the back of her van on the night in question.
Avoid the black tar heroin.
Mark Ebner
Bard College, '82
[www.hollywoodinterrupted.com]
Wesleyan: Architecturally dishonest and proud of it! Have you seen their library? Also, during a student leftists invitational/workshop the topics were "Responsible Investing: Profit!", "The ACLU & You", and "There Are Other Penalties Besides the Death Penalty, Ya Know?" Real fuddy duddy stuff.
i found it kind of a toss up based on the comments. mostly because being trans inclusive and gender sensitive is not annoying, but that business about being paid to be homeless is pretty amazing.
however, and i haven't followed this from the beginning, so maybe someone has mentioned it, sarah lawrence has the added pretension of misleading pretty much everyone as to their location. it's pretty easy to do in that part of westchester county, because the postal delivery lines do not correspond with the actual town borders. (the public school systems lines are drawn in still other ways so kids living in one part of a town will end up at a highschool in a totally different town. also it all seems kind of random). so anyway, slc has a bronxville -address-, and bronxville is just the sort of waspy upper middle class place slc's desired student body would be drawn to, but it is actually in yonkers, which just doesn't have the same place-to-open-the-countries-most-expensive-college cache.
Two words: cunt club.
Wesleyan gets my vote.
-BM '05
@MarkEbner:
the what? huh? oh yeah, right.
whatever. Four years and all I got was this lousy...
My office hired a Welsleyan grad and she had RAGING BO, used to cut herself when she was depressed, and told all of her dates about her dorm lesbian experiences and wondered why the boys never called back.
I've never been a Wesleyan crusher.
Simple, fun-spoiling tiebreak: list the annoying alumni from each school. Longest list wins.
As an SLC alum (and no, my family is not rich), I am voting for Wesleyan. To be fair, that story about the guy who got the grant to pretend to be homeless would have put it over the top anyway. The rich kids from SLC that I knew, who slummed it in the East Village pretending to be homeless, did it without grants. They panhandled for money they didn't need on their own dime!
I think well of most schools, but cannot withhold facts! A Wesleyan parent told me the following story: a campus group called the Gay Student Leaders performed a cheering and gymnastics stunt at a Parents' Weekend barbecue. The moves included simulating sexual acts including cunnilingus. Small children, a few grandparents in addendance. Cross my heart I heard this from the parent.
But I still heart liberal arts colleges.
For what it's worth, Paul Auster's daughter (not the sociopathic boy who was complicit in the clubland killings in the early 90s) goes to Sarah Lawrence. Keeping in mind that both mother and father have PhDs from Columbia would seem confirm the excellent education, shitty study habit hypothesis... I know nothing about Wesleyen other than its reputation for Sapphic hijinks... My vote goes to SLC