Dear Ms. Greathead,
So I picked up last Friday’s copy of the Argus the other day, and your column [“Stranger Things Have Happened: WesleyaNYC: Simply the best, Better than all the rest” (Argus, October 31, 2003)] caught my eye. I’m hoping that you were aiming for sarcasm with that one, and that I’m just not getting the joke. Maybe it flew over my head. But you came off as just a tad too serious for sarcasm.
For the record, I can understand your “New York is the Center of the World, We live in a The City Centric Universe” idea, because I’ve bought in to it time and time again. I was born in Manhattan, lived in Brooklyn, moved out to New Jersey as a kindergartner, and spent a good long time wrestling with a geographic identity crisis until my accent showed up. And it really only tends to do that when I get pissed off. In fact, as you read this Wespeak, try to do so in a Jersey accent.
That said, I’m gonna venture to say that I can understand where you’re coming from. You don’t have to be from New York City to call it The City, to imagine it as the most important place on Earth. Still, it’s that kind of thinking that has given some of us a bit of a swelled head and a whopping case of New York City snobbery. Not that I’m pointing fingers or anything. But when you extend your City vs. Midwest/South/Pacific Northwest/West/Southwest, “we’re the greatest and the rest of the world has an inferiority complex” logic to Wesleyan—well, that’s when I start talking like I’m from Jersey.
You seem to be buying into that “bubble on a hill” idea, where Wesleyan occupies an almost mythic place in the imagination of people who don’t go here. Okay, there are about 3 thousand of us, a couple of thousand more alumni, a few billion or so non-Wesleyan people in the world (including the “immigrants handing out fliers” that “true” New Yorkers ignore with such breezy nonchalance—wait, correct me if I’m wrong, but can’t immigrants be New Yorkers too?)…Yeah, we here at Wesleyan must really be the center of the universe. As much as I’m sure those billions of people orbiting around us would appreciate your concern for the absence of Wesleyan in their lives, what with the boredom, lack of ironic fashion sense, and complete un-talentedness this absence implies, I still have to wonder—where do we get off saying that we’re better than anyone else? School pride is one thing, self-righteousness is very much another.
And last time I checked, the world we live in extends way beyond the New York metropolitan area and the privileged space of elite private colleges. Your column would suggest that you think otherwise. But of course, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong here. I’ve spent most of my life on the wrong side of the Hudson River, haven’t I?
Respectfully yours.
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