Yale Students Avoid 'Most Impressive' Competition, Win Award For 'Most Self-Important Snowflakes' Unopposed

Don't try identifying the "most impressive" Yale Law School students, 'cause they're ALL awesome....

Sometimes Yale, you know, Jesus Christ. You guys have a laudable committment to intellectualism and free thinking, but sometimes — to explain this in terms you’ll understand — the relentless egalitarianism mixed with a thinking man’s skepticism reveals a reflexive sense of superiority even as you try to appear post-classist.

In the common tongue, I mean to say that you Yale Law School types are just as crappy and elitist as any other ivy, and that’s never more obvious than when you pretend not to be.

And I can prove it. Another publication was trying to do a fluff piece on “impressive” Yale law students, which is stupid. But the Yalies decided to organize a “boycott” of the fluff piece through their listerv, which is somehow even more self-important and douchey….

So Business Insider wanted to do one of their slideshows, this time about the “most impressive” students at Yale Law. They did one about Harvard Law a while back — because to the untrained eye, Harvard is the best and Yale is some school in Connecticut :).

The pieces are dumb, but whatever. People read dumb stuff on the internet. I just wrote a post about a guy doing backflips at graduation, so I’m not here to judge.

Anyway, the Yale listserv — and for this post I’ll be calling it the listserv instead of “The Wall,” ’cause some of you Yalies are about to graduate and it’s time to get used to the real world again — kind of went nuts when the BI reporter started calling around asking for subjects:

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Word has it that a reporter from Business Insider is contacting various YLSers, looking to collect names of the “most impressive students” here to write an article about Yale parallel to the one she wrote about Harvard here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-impressive-harvard-law-students-2013-3?op=1

My own belief is that this article is noxious, and that a good method of replying if you are contacted would be to inform her that we are all equally loved and special here, and there is no list of the “most impressive.” Or perhaps we could negotiate with her to just do profiles in various interesting and wonderful YLS students, instead of taking the angle that These Are The Best, which is what she is doing – her Harvard article introduces them with “Here are the most impressive students at Harvard Law School right now.” Or you could just submit all of your friends.

I just thought it would be good for people to be aware that this kind of article is being prepared, if anyone has any comments.

Le f***ing sigh.

I get that the articles are stupid, or “noxious” if you will. I get not wanting to participate. I wouldn’t have participated. But Jesus, does everything have to be a hippie commune of collegiate diversity?

“[W]e are all equally loved and special here.” “[P]erhaps we could negotiate with her to just do profiles in various interesting and wonderful YLS students, instead of taking the angle that These Are The Best.” Could y’all just give it a rest for ten freaking seconds? You are not all special, you are not all loved, some of you I’m sure are not even liked. And while I can see how a lack of traditional letter grades might confuse the issue, some of you will end up being “the best,” and others will end up being massive disappointments. It’s okay. The world needs disappointments to make achieving potential have meaning. Cf. Who Is Yale Law School’s Most Disgraceful Graduate?

The listserv exchange continues:

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We could also launch a multi-salvoed barrage of calls to Business Insider’s offices asking who their most impressive journalists are there. Because, you know, we only speak with the best of the best…

Another tack: suggest that if they want people to answer their requests with a list of awesome students of all stripes (which is what the Harvard list seems, from my glance, to be), respond by saying that any such article must be framed entirely differently, in a “spotlight on interesting people doing cool stuff” kind of way.

I think we should boycott the article. There are no “Ten Most Impressive YLSers,” and any article of that sort would just be a shameless attempt to leverage the YLS brand into page-views. Perhaps we could come up with a list of fictitious people in the style of The Onion to pass along and see if she publishes it.

It’s like watching Care Bears hump, isn’t it?

Come on guys, you go to Yale Law, you are going to get “noxious requests” from time to time. Don’t they teach you how to ignore and move on in New Haven, or does giving somebody the virtual finger literally have to be discussed in committee?

Oh, and as for Business Insider, they don’t give a f**k. They’re not common traffic sluts, they’re professional pageview prostitutes. They can “leverage the YLS brand into page-views” with or without the consent of the holier-than-thou brigade. Here’s yesterday’s headline:

Yale Law Students Refuse To Participate In Most Impressive Students List

You see what they did there? The post has generated more than 33,000 pageviews.

Dude, I understand that getting into Yale is a matter of utter splendiosity, and being in a small community of like-minded, non-competitive intellects gives you a constant magnawesomegasm. You don’t have to play ball if you don’t want to.

But here’s the thing that you probably didn’t learn in middle school because nobody wanted to play ball with you: denigrating the ballgame gets you nowhere. Play, or don’t play, but nobody wants to hear about how you could have joined in, but decided not to because it’s beneath you.

Frankly, that’s some stuff a Harvard Law student would do when talking about how they “decided” not to go to Yale.

Yale Law Students Refuse To Participate In Most Impressive Students List [Business Insider]

Earlier: Who Is Yale Law School’s Most Disgraceful Graduate?