meadesport asks:
>What about Wesleyan?<
Caught somewhere in the middle. LAC fans, whether they admit it or not, aren't necessarily looking for "a smaller version of Brown", or "NYU's country cousin" as some others have portrayed Wesleyan. They like the relative safety of snow-bound villages and gated communities where they can live out their fantasies of exclusivity. If you pay attention to the subtext of many of the threads like this one they tend to harp on certain common themes: the small number of applicants chosen, and the remoteness from anything even faintly resembling an urban area.
OTOH, if they happen to be drawn toward research universities, including many, if not most, of the Ivies, Wesleyan's considerable virtues are apt to be lost on them. They include, but are not limited to, its hot-house atmosphere of many, myriad individuals and talents sharing one contiguous campus and faculty; the domestic, almost rustic, scale of much of its architecture; its head-of-the-pack championing of "learning for its own sake".
In other words, it's Wesleyan's off-center blend of 'hipster idealism" or "urban preppiness" that tends to keep it just off the conventional wisdom's radar screen, IMHO.
