Ten Thousand Men: Nostalgia and Brand Loyalty

As I approach my fifteenth college reunion the power of nostalgia draws me back to those younger if not happier or more carefree times, and when I heard that the endowment of the alma mater had topped 25 billion dollars I whimsically slipped my class ring back on my finger.

Well it seems that I am not the only one pondering the state of the College these days, as Malcolm Gladwell reports on the Ivy League in the New Yorker. I could only smile when he reported the response of a fellow alum when asked where he had gone to college:

There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did. Wherever there was one Harvard graduate, another lurked not far behind, ready to swap tales of late nights at the Hasty Pudding, or recount the intricacies of the college-application essay, or wonder out loud about the whereabouts of Prince So-and-So, who lived down the hall and whose family had a place in the South of France that you would not believe. In the novels they were writing, the precocious and sensitive protagonist always went to Harvard; if he was troubled, he dropped out of Harvard; in the end, he returned to Harvard to complete his senior thesis. Once, I attended a wedding of a Harvard alum in his fifties, at which the best man spoke of his college days with the groom as if neither could have accomplished anything of greater importance in the intervening thirty years. By the end, I half expected him to take off his shirt and proudly display the large crimson “H” tattooed on his chest. What is this “Harvard” of which you Americans speak so reverently?

Having just gone to a wedding where my college crew was out in full force, the sentiment seemed particularly vivid. My classmates stand out the most in my memory and whatever formaula that Haravrd used to choose us, it has served me well in life. I have called it the gift that keeps on giving or compared it to Tide. Tide may not be the best detergent, but everyone has heard of it.