The Dartmouth-Harvard Relation: A Spatio-topical Analysis

Several days ago Jake Baron X put forward the following while engaging in a debate about class size, in response to an accusation of misusing statistics:

“If you don't have statistics to make a point, you have anecdotes. In other words, you have nothing at all. Any anecdote you can give Harvard can give better.”

To be honest I’m not sure this is true; if the Harvard students I know are any indication, they are by and large every bit as uninteresting as we are. However, the fact that Baron invokes the opposition at all is significant to me. I believe that if we take Jacob’s statement in conjunction with the recent alumni debate in the pages of the D (sadly offline due to the redesign) regarding Dartmouth’s ideological relationship to Harvard, we can begin to construct a modern history of the dichotomy along a freshman-alum axis.

It is important to note, however, that this dialogue itself represents just one segment of one of the humankind’s longest historical narratives, extant at least since the dawn of written communication. Consider (the presumably late) Professor H.H. Horne’s late-19^th-century essay “Harvard and the Dartmouth Man:”

“If Harvard is the Athens of American institutions, Dartmouth is the Sparta. If idealism is the note of one, realism is the note of the other. Harvard is the haven of the true, Dartmouth is the haven of the useful. Harvard's is the gospel of Matthew Arnold; Dartmouth's of Carlyle…The one is the thoughtful observer of life, the other the vigorous liver of life.”

And so forth, for 1500 words. Clearly Prof. Horne felt compelled to situate the binary as in some sense dominating the entire history of intellectual development in the West. It is important to note here that Prof. Horne was almost assuredly not writing metaphorically. Ample archaeological and ethnological evidence suggests that Dartmouth and Harvard, thousands of years before their manifestations in the physical plane, gave rise to symbologies which are incalculably important to civilization.

Consider the following relief from Abydos, ca. 2600 BC:

Translated, the middle sentence reads, roughly,

“Yes, Kahotep got his acceptance tablet yesterday… He’s going to Dartmouth; of course he got in at Harvard too, you know, but we’re… just not sure how we feel about Boston.”

Most striking about the inscription in question is the fact that the icons representing the respective universities remain fully intact and recognizable thousands of years before the schools were even founded. We can therefore posit that the academic prestige of the institutions, far from being awarded from a somewhat arbitrary first-come-first-served sort of process, is actually so innate and essential to the universities that it predates them. To invoke one is to invoke the other, and together they mutually constitute the bedrock of human understanding and achievement. It is no coincidence that hieroglyphics, one of the earliest known forms of what can be formally designated as written language, is iconic in nature; before Dartmouth and Harvard were founded they did not have proper names, and as such had to be alluded to pictorially. In this way, the language of hieroglyphics was in some sense created in order to encode the concepts of Dartmouth and Harvard before they were even technically concepts.

In the fifth century BCE, Jewish mystics living in the shadow of Mt. Sinai began to adapt the still-nascent ideas of the Sefirot to spatially situate the Ivy League colleges, as well as (we assume) Stanford and MIT. Only four remain (Dartmouth, Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia); this could be for one of two reasons. Either the positions of the remaining four (and, it can be assumed, Stanford and MIT) have been lost to history, or the mystics never bothered, having already resolved the dilemma which had presumably led to the creation of the thing. Note that Dartmouth takes the place of Binah (the heart, the mother) while Harvard lies in Chokhma (wisdom, insight).

Thus Baron’s analysis represents a staggeringly important venture, critical to ancient and modern conceptions of the College and indeed reality. He is the latest in a long line of explorers, boldly investigating this profound, profound, profound issue.

Unrelated note: I don't think it's worth doing a whole point on Zeke Turner's thing today, but GOOD GOD.