NOTE: Thanks to a reader’s comment, I have updated this post to correct the misspelling of the name of McGeorge Bundy.
While chugging along on the cross-trainer and trying to keep my eyes off the fatuous face of Wolf Blitzer, blown up all-too-large on one of the monitors that dot the walls of my gym, I began to muse on the graybeard working out next to me. He’s a regular, a guy around 50, and handsome. In fact, he knows full well that he’s handsome—in modern society, men have become just as vain as women; the only difference is that they aren’t as good as women at pretending they aren’t vain. Oh, and he always wears a Harvard T-shirt.
After 30 minutes, 286 calories and a lot of ruminating on men, women, looks, age, vanity and college T-shirts, I reached the apodictic conclusion that my fellow urban fitness fanatic looked ludicrous wearing his Harvard T-shirt. Why is this, I wondered. After all, practically every man and maybe half the women huffing and puffing in the gym wear T-shirts with words printed on them, and many of those indicate a college or university. Outside my gym, any ride on a subway will treat you to a veritable parade of college T-shirts. The problem doesn’t rest in the college T-shirt, I finally figured out, but in who does the wearing.
While undergraduates blamelessly own and wear T-shirts announcing their schools, postgraduates ought to avoid them. And there are three college T-shirts that can be worn post-graduation, in public, only on pain of abject humiliation: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
For undergraduates, wearing their schools’ T-shirts is a nice, chummy bit of collegiate tribal spirit. It represents a healthy sense of belonging to the college, and, as such, contributes to an agreeable, low-level, on-campus buzz of college pride, community consciousness and participation in campus life. For postgraduates, however, wearing college T-shirts is a different matter. It imparts a slightly doofussy look, usually implying something along the lines of “How ‘bout dem Wildcats!” T-shirts on grownups say, “I haven’t quite gotten a life yet.” The only exception is when the wearer has a kid going to that school.
If you went to Purdue or Bryn Mawr or Georgia Southern or Howard or Harvey Mudd or Johnson State or Saddleback College or any school other than H, Y or P, you get a bit of a pass. (You also get a bit of a pass if you’re a woman who’s an alumna of H, Y or P—after all, you’re still pioneering.) In most of these instances, your T-shirts convey a cheery, “Hey, you may not know it, you may not have even heard of it, but this is a damned good school!” The shirts don’t say, like the H, Y, or P T-shirts worn on the chests of aging masters of the universe always do, “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not.” (If you get this reference, you’re too old to be wearing any college T-shirt whatsoever. Sorry.)
Isn’t it enough that Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates rule the world, and rule it rather badly? (Do the names Bundy, Rostow, Bush, or Alito ring a bell?)
This is O.K. As Jimmy Carter (alumnus of the Naval Academy) famously said, “Life is not fair.” But hold on. It is fair. If you did graduate from Harvard, Yale or Princeton, and more than 18 months after your graduation you’re still into wearing your college T-shirt, you’re as pretentious as ol’ Wolf. If you don’t know it, that woman sweating it up on the treadmill next to you in the gym certainly does.
