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• Michelle Legro

  Yale on the Lido Deck

  Tags:

  amateur theatricals,

  that's why we chose fail,

  The New Yorker,

  Yale

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  Last spring I had the pleasure of visiting Nantucket for the first time, just as the island was shaking off the low-season. Most of the shops were still closed and I needed a warm pair of socks, so I ducked into the famous toggery on the main street. Wandering through a sea of madras, bow-ties, and tiny embroidered whales, I came to a startling conclusion, eighteen miles off the coast of Massachusetts. This, I thought surely, is where irony goes to die. Then two weeks ago, I, along with the rest of the world, saw the now infamous Yale recruitment video.

  Around the office it went, some of us only able to stomach thirty seconds, other holding on to their lunch for a good two minutes, all of us sending it to every person we knew who had gone to Yale in the past fifty years, until there was only one person in the office who didn’t know of its existence. Then the New Yorker called, asking our illustrious editor, Yale ’56, what he thought if it, forcing poor Lewis to sit down and watch all sixteen minutes of ear-crushing glee, more than any of us could stand. He lit a cigarette, and soon enough he lit another.

  Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’ ” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No, they’re not.’ And I was depressed.”
  
  “Yale started as a very intense, orthodox, Protestant school,” Lapham said, taking a longer view. “It felt that Harvard was falling away from the true Puritan faith. Yale would produce magistrates and preachers. That was its original purpose.” He faulted the new video not for its failed attempt at Sontagian camp but for portraying the university as a kind of summer camp for élites. “It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

  Afterwards, he came out of his office exhausted, declaring the student performance a better fit for a cruise ship. We could make that cruise ship, I thought. With each deck a different college theme. It would be called the Ivory Tower, and it would sail each intersession from Cambridge to Oxford, with “That Why I Chose Yale” playing every night on the Lido deck, the Hasty Pudding show headlining in the Diamond Lounge, and a scrappy Varsity Show chewing the scenery somewhere on Q-Deck. Let a new age of boat-related hubris commence!

  February 9, 2010
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