H.L. Rogers - The Rogers & Littleton Guide to Americas Douchiest Colleges

Copyright 2011 by H. L. Rogers and Peter Littleton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rogers, H. L.

The Rogers and Littleton guide to America's douchiest colleges / H.L. Rogers and Peter Littleton, Ph.D.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8118-7887-6 (pbk.)

1. Universities and collegesUnited States--Humor. 2. College studentsHumor. 3. College wit and humor. I. Littleton, Peter. II. Title.

PN6231.C6R64 2011

818.602dc22

2011006731

Manufactured in Canada

Designed by Jacob Gardner and Lynda Lucas

Illustrations by Emma Bernsohn and Jacob Gardner

Front cover photo by Jenna Cushner

Back cover photo illustration background by David E. Klutho/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

Photo credits:

Duke: Jack Morton; The Whiffenpoofs: Ty Fujimura; The Eating Clubs at Princeton: Walter Daran/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images; Harvard: Jolanta Bielat; The Gianni Versace Memorial Pi Kappa Alpha House: Comayagua 99 (Creative Commons); Semester at Sea: First Light/Alamy; Horse Country: Christopher Griffin/Alamy; The Ohio State University: Scott Nelson/ AFP/Getty Images; Pepperdine: Alex Wong/Getty Images; Cocks!: Doug Benc/Getty Images; At the Horse Shoe: Jamie Sabau/Getty Images; The Unicyclist Bro: Frances M. Roberts/Newscom; The University of Michigan Naked Mile: Bryan Mitchell/Getty Images Sport; Ole Miss: Mark Green; Can a Girl Be a Douche?: Courtesy of Will Welch; Chief Illiniwek: Clark Brooks/Ai-Wire: Ai Wire Photo Service/Newscom; Beer Pong: Chris Mackler/MacklerMedia.com; Tulane: Faith Pinar/Anzenberger/Redux Pictures; Go Bison!: Brenda Kean/Alamy; The Birthplace of Whiny Liberals: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; University of Oregon: Brian Jahn; The Retro Hippie Douches of Vermont, et al: Michael Smith/Getty Images

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TO DR. LARRY SUMMERS:

You are the wind beneath our wings.

After having spent the last fifty-three years studying, analyzing, and ranking institutions of higher learning in our series of award-winning guidebooks1, we the authors, H.L. Rogers and Peter Littleton, PhD, come to this edition with an important and, dare we say, electrifying new conclusion: Youre a douchebag.2 If youre packing up your moms Volvo and heading off to a college where the only thing more popular than saving Darfur is vacationing in Nantucket; if you are currently enrolled at an institution of higher learning; if you just matriculated and want to know why no one will hire you, even though youve been told for the last four years how superior you are to others; even if you just stumbled across this book in the college section of the bookstore, or Urban Outfitters, where you found it sandwiched between the stoners batik bedspread and The Big Book of Farts, and are now considering buying it for your friend Mike who goes to Sewanee, because you want him to know that its kind of a school for underachieving Southern douchesin any of those cases, youve got about a 97 percent chance3 of being a douche.

We dont expect you to realize this fact. (Its like the ancient Buddhist koan: If the douche knows he is a douche, can he still be a douche?) And depending on how seriously you take yourself, you might get a little pissy about us saying you are. You might take issue with our making fun of you and basically everyone you know (and also ourselves: Our alma maters are included in this book). In fact, youre probably pretty damn sure youre not a douche. Thats okay, too.

Weve drilled pretty deep on douchity, and according to our data, the fact that you were a douchebag in college wont dawn on you until six to ten years after you graduate, when youre looking through your old college pictures. Maybe you catch sight of yourself with some mutton chops that you dont quite remember growing. Or on a laptop during the phase when you thought you were starting a better version of Facebook. Or wait, thats you at the barn dance in the plaid shirt and the bent-brimmed Game hat, with a red Solo cup full of Natty Light in one hand as the flash captures two cylinders of regurgitated pizza flying from each nostril while next to you, Suzy, your date from Tri Delt, pukes through her nostrils at exactly the same time! LOL! Classic! Totally worth posting on Facebook, no?

No.

In the cold light of being thirty you realize: Man, I was kind of a douche in college. Or as one of the more famous and entitled Harvard douches of all time would have put it, Ich ben ein douchebagger.

But in case you missed it, above: This is okay. Lets go over it again. IN COLLEGE, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE A DOUCHEBAG. Thats part of the point of college. If youre not a little bit douchey in college, youre either repressing something very important or youre a scholarship kid at Harvard and youre going to be president (presidentstotal douches). Because these four years? Its your time, bro! Its your time to put your hair in cornrows during spring break, drink thirty-seven Coronas, snorkel shitfaced, and wake up on the beach in Acapulco with a second-degree sunburn. This is the moment to spend nine months writing a senior thesis about The Meaning of Haberdashery in the Films of Wes Anderson. Hell, this is the time to refer to movies as films! This is your time to dress up in a tuxedo and Chuck Taylors, and sing Shoo Fly Dont Bother Me, a cappella, with your fellow Whiffenpoofs. This is the moment to paint yourself blue, call yourself a Cameron Crazy, and shout obscene things at large men who could kick your ass; to believe that weed makes you profound and three beers makes you a better driver; to pretend you have a European accent after one semester abroad; to join a campus Republican group, wear a blue blazer, and rail against the indignities of the estate tax; to forget that you havent actually done anything in your life yet, except for graduate from high school, and instead act like you know everything. Its the time in your life to go to Wharton undergrad business school and to put a sticker in the back window of your car to make sure everyone knows that you decided to be a banker at age nineteen, or to go to Arizona State and pretend youre actually at college.

What were saying is, dont give any of that up, America (or Canada)! College is the time to embrace the douche that lives inside you.

No, young madams and sirs. The question isnt whether or not youre going to be a douchebag. That, as we now know, is a certainty. The question is: What kind of douchebag do you aspire to be?

The choices for the aspiring young douche in academia today are dizzying. At no point in history have there been so many spectacular ways to be so douchey. Say, for example, that you enjoy Spanish Mission architecture and want to major in Jet Skiingwhats the right school for you? (Rollins!) Or say youve always kind of wanted to wear ties with shorts and drink mint juleps from a Tiffany flask and date a girl who does steeplechase? (Randolph-Macon!) Or youre a righteous trust fund weenie from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but want to wear a dirty knit cap and some patched trousers while hanging around other people who are exactly the same as you and learning to make pickles? (Hello, Wesleyan? Id like to apply to be alternative.) What if you intend to lord your intelligence over people for the rest of your life, in the form of a bumper sticker? (Your best bet: the Ivy League, or at least someplace like Haverford, which sounds like it could be.) What if you worship Richard Posner (Chicago), secretly want to speak with a faint Southern accent (Emory), cultivate a woodsy beard (McGill), or can drink sixty-four ounces of Schlitz through a hose in less than thirty seconds (Penn State!)? See what we mean? Dizzying.