We went to Princeton!

23rd May, 2012

Naturally, I remember the night I met my husband.  We were walking along the seawall on a lovely evening in San Diego, having met over dinner at a nearby hotel, and were exchanging all the usual get-acquainted questions. Eventually, he asked where I went to college.

“Back east,” I said.

“Where?” he persisted.

“In New Jersey.”

“Oh, come on,” he said kindly.  “It can’t be any worse than where I went to school.”

He was right on that score.  Before he went to medical school, my husband attended Cal State Los Angeles, which is a fine state college but not in the same echelon as—well—Princeton.  Which is where I went, and didn’t want to admit to him.  Not in the first hour of our acquaintance, at least.

A long time has passed since that meeting, but apparently nothing has changed—young women still hesitate before admitting to potential suitors that they went to an Ivy League college.  Nikki Muller, who graduated with Princeton’s Class of ’05, just posted a YouTube video on this very subject that’s gone viral, with over 100,000 hits so far.

The video opens with a first date scenario at a picnic table in a park:  a pretty young woman is listening to a pretentious young man, who’s telling her that his Wharton degree will equip him to be a “leader of tomorrow”.  At first, she doesn’t want to say where she went to school, murmuring that it was in New Jersey.  But after a few moments she can’t take it any more, and lunges across the picnic table to scream in his face, “I went to Princeton, bitch!”

The rap that follows is clever and very funny.  (I don’t expect to hear Proust or Baudelaire mentioned in a similar medium again, ever.)  Muller makes some excellent points about the dating challenges that intelligent women often face, and about the precarious nature of an acting career even with a Princeton degree.  The young man from Wharton beats a hasty retreat.  Clearly my husband was made of sterner stuff, because he stayed around in spite of my Princeton diploma and has been known to refer to me as his “trophy wife”.  He even marched stoically beside me in the parade at my 25^th reunion, wearing a vest made from the Class of ’74’s orange-and-black blazer fabric and a straw cowboy hat.

All this inspires me to raise a few questions.  Is it just Princeton, or do all Ivy League graduates feel reluctant to acknowledge their rarefied educational pedigree to new acquaintances?  There seems to be an aura about the name of “Princeton” that’s a bit precious or perhaps effete, even compared to Harvard or Yale.  Does the distant echo of F. Scott Fitzgerald and This Side of Paradise still resonate, or is there something more?

Theatergoers who enjoyed Avenue Q may recall that a main puppet character was named “Princeton”, and sang a wonderful song called, “What do you do with a B.A. in English?”  Other musical theater fans will remember the handsome but doomed Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific, who fell in love with the lovely native girl Liat.  The interracial romance is a key part of the plot, but when the writers wanted the perfect detail to evoke the social class disparity between the lovers, they made him an alumnus of—wait for it—Princeton.

There’s clearly a quality about Princeton University that makes it a top choice when you want to convey genteel elitism.  Maybe it’s because Princeton has the southernmost air about it of all the Ivy League schools (though observant readers have reminded me that Penn is further south geographically).  Maybe it’s the gentlemanly heritage of Woodrow Wilson, or the classic cinematic legacy of James Stewart.  There’s a harder, edgier feeling about Harvard, associated with Facebook and the Kennedys, and about Yale, alma mater of George W. Bush and the secret society Skull and Bones.

Here’s another question.  Do Princeton men share the reticence of Princeton women about trotting out their Tiger credentials?  Or do women in general feel more need than men to appear modest about their educational attainment?  There have been times when I’ve gone to the pet food store or the dry cleaners after work, still wearing scrubs, and have been asked politely by shoppers or clerks if I am a nurse.  Most of the time, I simply smile and say yes.  I think it might seem obnoxious, or make the other person feel awkward, if I were to say, “No, actually, I’m a doctor.”  I wonder how a male physician might respond in a comparable situation.

I still can’t quite imagine myself saying “I went to Princeton, bitch!” to anyone. But I’m willing to bet that after seeing Nikki Muller’s video, fewer Princeton women will find themselves downplaying that Ivy League diploma.  My own daughter is about to graduate from Princeton in two weeks.  When the day comes that Ariel meets her future husband, I doubt that he’ll spend very long wondering where in New Jersey she went to school.

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