Let Harvard keep its academics and football. Yale will always be first in gentlemanly club life!

Housemate Dara has a very "Bright Young Traditionalist" column in the Daily that I just got around to reading.

The argument: The ritual of conversation (it's okay for her to call it that—she's an anthropologist) depends upon each party having a role to play. It used to be that students spent their bright college years learning how to perform "gentleman" or "lady," but now that gentility and ritual have sadly fallen out of fashion (this is where her liberal street cred takes a body blow), Yale students find themselves performing "awkwardness" instead. In the absence of roles, the only role left open is "person who doesn't know how to decode social cues, much less respond to them."

She suggests that "striving for tolerance and sensitivity in every interaction" might produce a social code to replace "old-guard WASP values." I would prefer to replace them with the ethos of straight-edge punk, but there's no accounting for taste.