<p>lol dartmouth’s motto is DEFINITELY the craziest!<br>
light and truth—> uh, wat bout it? lol</p>
<p>I was at a Penn tour last week, and they said the crest was a combination of William Penn and Benjaming Franklin’s coats of arms. The dolphin (I know it doesn’t look like one) is Franklin, the dots are Penn I think</p>
<p>Harvard’s is truth. Yale’s is LIGHT and truth. It almost seems as though the Yale/Harvard rivalry goes back to their very beginnings. Yale probably was like, “AHA. We want to be like Harvard, except we’ll add in LIGHT just to make ourselves different!”…and then Harvard got angry, and the rivalry ensued. Red vs. blue, football games, etc.</p>
<p>Anyway, just my thoughts.</p>
<p>I guess you have all heard the story of why Penn wears the red and blue?</p>
<p>no, actually i havent… why? does it have anything to do with harvard and yale?</p>
<p>Supposedly it was a sports meet between Harvard, Yale and Penn, some hundred years ago. Harvard and Yale asked what colors the teams from Penn would wear, as they did not have a school color. The Penn leaders replied, “We shall wear the color of the teams we beat!” And thus both red and blue.</p>
<p>“Laws without morals are in vain” is cool.</p>
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<p>Yale got off the ground in large part because of the efforts of Cotton Mather, a Harvard graduate and son of a Harvard president who was disgusted by what he saw as the Godlessness of Harvard. He’s the one who recruited Elihu Yale to donate to a rival institution which would be more strictly Calvinist and stick to its theological mission, which would stand in contrast to the doctrinal liberality of Harvard. Hence the Hebrew on the crest.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if the Penn story is true, but the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) wears red and blue inspired by H & Y.</p>
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<p>Princeton!</p>
<p>Why do you think I am biased about my nominations for best crest? :p</p>
<p>It’s not “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness” it’s, “A voice crying out in the wilderness.” It sounded weird because you phrased it awkwardly. And furthermore, it’s a biblical reference, so it’s really not that strange. I agree that the Dartmouth crest is pretty craptastic though. I don’t know who came up with it, but it must not have been his best day.</p>
<p>At one point Penn changed the motto to “learning without morals is in vain” but they changed it back to “laws”</p>
<p>(random trivia)</p>
<p>Wait, how is Dartmouth’s motto a biblical reference?</p>
<p>Yale’s dominates because it has hebrew on it. It translates to:</p>
<p>and simplicity light
sea …sea</p>
<p>the and is before the simplicity because hebrew goes from right to left. so it’s light and simplicity (tam is simplicity in hebrew, emet is truth). i have no clue why it says sea at the bottom of both of those.</p>
<p>From having “quotas” on Jews to putting Hebrew on the shield…man, the Ivy League has come a long way</p>
<p>my favorite ivy leage story about judaism:</p>
<p>some president of harvard said that harvard shouldn’t admit Jews “because Jews cheat.” when someone pointed out that, say, WASPs cheat, he replied “stop changing the subject.”</p>
<p>but yeah, I’d assume that it was always there. the pilgrims chose between hebrew and english to use as their national language while they were on the mayflower.</p>
<p>And people think Lawrence Summers is bad…</p>
<p>why do all the ivies have shields?</p>
<p>Probably because Cambridge had one.</p>
<p>Why do the states have shields? Why does the US have a national crest?</p>
<p>Simple answer, that is what you had. It is like the logotype of today - every major enterprise (and at those times family) had to have one.</p>
<p>Where did it orginated from? Seems like when US was created (1777), sheild were already extinct since they had guns. So why would they still use the shield logo? I would understand old countries like France and Britain using the shield but US shouldn’t be using it, from a historical perspective.</p>