Quick free association:
Rhodes scholar. Academic All-American. White House fellow. Miss America.

Looking at Ivy League graduates, who (usually) doesn’t belong?

Miss America might seem like the exception, but that could change this weekend as Lindsay Casmaer (College ‘05) attempts to bring the title to the Ancient Eight. The reigning Miss Missouri, she’s in Las Vegas right now, doing… pageant things… in advance of Saturday’s competition, televised at 8 p.m. on TLC (You can see a short video interview here, read Lindsay’s travelogue here, and vote for her here.)

Our school’s filled with diversity, but admit it: pageantry and Penn in the same sentence is a bit surprising. As it happens, Lindsay didn’t come to Penn as a pageanteer but began competing last year — hoping to pay back student loans — so if you doubted whether West Philly attracts former Little Miss Sunshine types, you’re probably right.

But why is it surprising to think Miss America could be a Quaker? Every few years, some Ivy Leaguer’s in the competition, and a parade of Harvard-associated women have walked across the stage in recent years.

Is it because we assume that pageantry is for the less studious… or because Ivy Leaguers are known for brains and ambition before beauty?

Avoiding an answer — as Ivy League attractiveness is a really, really touchy issue — I do feel like a creepy old guy just raising the topic.

But Jim Saksa’s column last semester brought back debates we heard as undergrads. The column investigated a “particular complaint … : the girls here are revolting,” with Saksa noting how a suspect website called College Prowler also was critical of Penn’s women, before concluding that everybody needed to look in the mirror.

The column also reminded me of an anecdote I heard when applying to college a decade ago: an older friend’s memorable attempt to warn me off Stanford. Apparently, Playboy magazine had surveyed the nation’s undergraduates - and of all U.S. schools, Stanford was ranked “in the bottom five for worst-looking women… but at the top for best-looking men,” he claimed.

But funny thing, that Playboy survey. Visiting schools, talking to college guys, I kept hearing about it - first confided to me from a Columbia frat boy, then a U. Chicago tour guide, and so on. (Always with their women among the nation’s least attractive, their men among the most. The only constant was that all students at the Colorado School of Mines needed a mandatory makeover, ASAP.) Wondering how so many schools could have such different-looking students, using my high school news credentials, I called Playboy and got someone on the phone.

Verdict: it’s an urban legend - the mag just informally ranks “top party schools” every 15 years or so.

Still, whether as a decade-old anecdote or an issue raised by a DPcolumnist, it’s clear that this zombie idea — that brainy men are surrounded by unattractive women, at our nation’s best colleges — has yet to die. But it’s a stupid notion that’ll get a lot more dubious if Lindsay Casmaer has a really good weekend… and maybe then we can focus on the important things. Like how much worse Penn’s dining halls are compared to everybody else.

Tags: attractiveness

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Ivy League, Penn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.