smart

Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.

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Universities

Harvard

It is rather smug how Harvard alumni, when asked where they went to school, respond with, "In Boston."

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Yale

Although Yale has a good law school, Yale itself can feel more like a retirement community for geniuses than a stimulating university: The great Yale faculty members get tenure there decades after doing their brilliant work elsewhere.

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Ivy League

The Ivy League universities happen to be good schools, but academics has nothing to do with the Ivy League: the Ivy League was founded as a football league and still today remains merely an intercollegiate athletic league.

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Dartmouth

It's curious how, when people list the Ivy League schools, they tend to forget Dartmouth.

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Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT)

MIT's most far reaching contribution to contemporary culture is arguably the fact most of the LSD on the east coast during the 1960s was produced at MIT.

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James Madison

Although James Madison was perhaps the most under-rated President, the degree to which the history and thought of the ancient world--from Athens and Rome to the Hebrews--permeated every aspect of his life is striking: even after completing his studies at Princeton in two years, he remained on campus for one more year just to study Hebrew.

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Boston University

Boston University has worked hard to collect documentation of 20th century authors; for my personal tastes, I prefer Yale's collection of documentation of 18th century authors, and Harvard's of 19th century ones.

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University Of Pennsylvania

It's interesting how Penn thinks it has a rivalry with Princeton; this unrequited rivalry reminds me not only of Yale's perceived rivalry with Harvard, but of France's with the United States.

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Everyday Loopholes