A couple people sent me this, asking whether I felt “my value as a human being was dropping.” Now my reaction as one of “Man, did these people ever miss the entire point of the exercise. Oh, that explains it, marketing people.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a reason I went to Cornell, which I have to think is common to a lot of us. We don't go there because it's an Ivy League school. We go because it's a good school that happened to end up in the Ivy League. And we happen to like the fact that we have an ag school, and a public component. It doesn't make us uncomfortable, it helps us cut through the pretense a lot faster than any vintage hoodie could.

More than anything, I look at these guys, and realize they're not grasping why Cornell works. They've tried to pick between two things: being an Ivy, and being a bigger state school. Cornell is the realization that that choice doesn't need to be made. It may have only been an accident of our motto, but we've done pretty good by it.