<p>Could someone tell me what the different rivalries are between the colleges? This could be formal, informal, IM-related, whatever you know. </p>
<p>P.S. I’m in Saybrook next year [:)] and I was wondering, where does Saybrook end and Branford start? lol</p>
<p>Hey Amhara, congrats!</p>
<p>As to your second question – during the first few days, it’s difficult to figure that out, but you’ll figure it out soon. The gates between Saybrook and Branford are always open, but their courtyards are so different, you’ll know immediately.</p>
<p>1st question - Rivalries sort of depend on a number of factors and there are many rivalries. Dport and Pierson have a famous rivalry (where Pierson tries to steal Dport’s gnome and Dport tries to get it back). But Pierson and Saybrugians also have a rivalry freshman year over which side of LW is better. </p>
<p>Everyone pretty much hates JE, in my opinion, because JEers somehow always end up thinking they’re all cool, when they really aren’t. There’s a historical rivalry between JE and Branford, but freshman year there’s a “battle” b/w Stiles and JE. Every winter, Farnam puts up lights that say JE SUX and the Stilesians in Lawrance put up lights that makes fun of them. So like, they’ll make a ***** out of lights so that it reads, “JE SUX 8===D” or something.</p>
<p>
As you can see, there is a great deal of envy of JE. A bit pathetic, really.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>From what I know, all of LW is pretty bad… but which side does Pierson get? Elm Street and half of High? How does it get divided?</p>
<p>Everyone loves JE… I don’t know what you’re talking about. :)</p>
<p>I have a friend in JE and he says they definitely get some hate. Luckily I’ll be in Branford :)</p>
<p>Haha, my friend who texted me saying I am in Saybrook is in JE next year. HE RUINED THE SURPRISE! JE sux…(lol). Does Berkeley have a rivalry within itself because of the two courts?</p>
<p>I’m going to enjoy this residential college thing. :D</p>
<p>None of these are serious. Sometimes colleges will pull pranks on each other… and sometimes the top few colleges in IMs will get a little heated. But it’s hard to lose sight of the fact that they’re randomly sorted…</p>
<p>I think JE and Branford sometimes prank each other as well. </p>
<p>Berkeley does have a North Court v. South Court snowball fight at the first snowfall, but these have never been successful in my experience.</p>
<p>I imagine that the reputations and rivalries of each college wane and rise from time to time. It’s funny for me to hear that JE is the object of animosity. In my day, JE was just barely emerging from years of IM athletic neglect (it seems they took JE Sux too literally). Walking into the dining hall, one could expect to see a cloud of smoke at one end and JE definitely had a rep as an “artsy-fartsy” college.</p>
<p>However, mine and subsequent years seemed to have a higher percentage of athletes. By my senior year, we had gotten ourselves to IM respectabilty (finished third in Tyng while winning several individual championships along the way). And by Junior year, all the smokers either graduated or moved off campus.</p>
<p>Re: “pranks”. Several members of my class in Saybrook took extended involuntary leaves of absence from the college (and one guy was permanently separated from the Law School) over a “prank” that caused tens of thousands of dollars damage to the Branford dining room. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very funny, either. The main planner wound up in Bones, though, after his readmission . . . and later had a very responsible position in our nation’s security bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Where Branford ends and Saybrook begins: Harkness Quadrangle (which turned into Branford and Saybrook) has six courtyards: three little ones, one huge one in the middle, and two medium sized ones. Branford College is organized around the three little courtyards and the huge one; Saybrook is organized around the two medium-sized ones. The wall that divides the medium from the large is also the Saybrook dining hall, so Saybrook is shaped like two squares sharing one side, and Branford like three contiguous squares with two arms extending from them. Harkness Tower (Yale’s most recognizable landmark) is in Branford at its main gate on High St. The Quadrangle has two smaller towers that are in Saybrook – Wrexham Tower (on York St.), and I don’t remember the other’s name, on High St. The gates between Saybrook and Branford are by those two towers. Students actually live in them, unlike Harkness Tower – they are one of the nicest aspects of Saybrook. In partial compensation for Branford getting the sensational large courtyard, Saybrook’s dining hall has a great view of that courtyard.</p>
<p>Here is a really cool old article, with lots of pictures: [Architectural</a> record - Google Books](<a href=“Architectural Record - Google Books”>Architectural Record - Google Books)</p>
<p>A little history: the JE sucks chant comes from ye olde days of bladderball when it was a game played with verve, fire and more than a little police intervention. The JE crew tried to hoist the ball over the Old Campus fence with a hook of some sort. Memory fails as to the actual object but I remember it being a hook. They popped the ball, which was a VERY BAD THING.* Thus JE sucks, which started spontaneously that day and carried over to the football game where it was picked up full throat by the thousands of drunken WASP alums, a sight which genuinely shocked us young 'uns, who were just as drunk and often mostly stoned because 60 year old men wearing expensive jackets and women wearing pearls don’t scream such things in the usual course of the day. Not as bad as seeing them screaming “Chainsaw, chainsaw” as the world’s largest chainsaw cut a woman in half during The Game but still disturbing in memory.</p>
<p>*Traditionally, the only popping of the ball was done by the police after a substantial chase and suitable mayhem. The ball was then on occasion submitted to what was then CCL to be placed on reserve.</p>
<p>… why JE took on “JE Sux” as their own motto was that that winter, their IM hockey team was formidable – I believe they had gone the previous year undefeated. Since they were so good, they often drew a good sized crowd on onlookers to see JE defeat some hapless opponent. The JE team co-opted the previous “JE Sucks” chant and emblazoned it onto their own jerseys however in the form of “JE Sux”. I think they went undefeated again and the rest of JE intramurals adopted the JE Sux name. As I said, when I arrived in New Haven, JE’s intramurals lived out their motto. Luckily we turned it around. BTW, we frowned upon the JE Sux motto during our time there. Instead, we called ourselves the JE Spiders.</p>
<p>Silliman and Timothy Dwight (TD) colleges have – or at least used to have – something of a rivalry. Neighboring each other on something that might be described as the southern hinterlands of the central campus, they sort of have an attitude of “Fine, if the other colleges don’t want to play with us, we’ll just play with each other.” There used to be a lot of impromptu sporting events (ultimate frisbee, volleyball, etc.) held between the two.</p>
<p>In days of yore, there was the annual “Tang” Cup competition between the two, held every spring. For some reason there was a time when Silliman and TD would come in last in the intramurals competitions between colleges (the winner of which was awarded the Tyng Cup annually). So Silliman and TD created the Tang competition, which one of them would have to win because there were only two teams. “Tanging” itself involved having long chains of students swig 8oz beers in succession and seeing which chain finished first. Teams would undergo arduous “training” sessions in the week before the competition.</p>
<p>When the drinking age was raised in CT in 1983, the Tang Competion moved off campus to the DKE fraternity, where it has been held ever since, I think.</p>
<p>Does Berkeley have any rivalries?</p>
<p>Excuuuuuse me, mancune, but in the mid-70s at least there were far more than two Tang teams (and I still have my very spiffy 'Brook Tang t-shirt to prove it). At least 7-8 colleges were regularly looking for “matches”, which were usually two teams head-on-head best of three or three teams round-robin or timed. Silliman clearly had the best team then, but we beat TD a few times. The Silliman team was very jocky – lots of varsity rowers. The Saybrook team was a winning hodge-podge: one future MD/PhD who ONLY drank in Tang competitions, and was probably the best Tang-er on campus, two drug dealers, the varsity football captain (sometimes), a future Supreme Court clerk.</p>
<p>We probably had a “meet” every other month or so, and one practice per month. Practice could be very, very punishing, especially early in the year when people were trying out for places on the team. Everyone recognized that it was impossible to be effective after a certain point, and managing your consumption so that you peaked at the right time was an important part of successful competition.</p>
<p>It was ten men (always men, although some colleges including ours had a smaller women’s team, too) to a team, kneeling along one side of a long table (sometimes with another team across the way). Everyone had 2 8-oz. glasses of beer in front of him. The first guy would drink and slam his glass down, which permitted the second guy to start, etc. down the line. Number 10 – the “corner” – had to drink two glasses in a row, and then the line would go back ending with #1. Judges would award penalties for starting too early, “wets” (leaving beer in the glass, or spilling some), and “gross wets” (pretty much what it sounds like). Basically, a quality team would have a clean time of something under 30 seconds. In theory, an all-star team might have been able to break 20 seconds, or at least come close, but no one ever tried to put together an all-star team.</p>
<p>Positions mattered. Corners were like goalies – specialized skills, a little nuts – and were expected to drink both their beers in under 2.5 seconds. The fastest guys – the divas – were #1 and #2 – they could reliably down 8 oz. of beer in .8 seconds or so without wets, and they could take full advantage of the extra recovery time between glasses. The weakest drinkers, in the 4-5-6 slots, would try to stay under 1.5 seconds per glass. 7-8 were very difficult positions – the equivalent of stolid defensemen; 9 was the corner-in-training. Doing this more than three or four times a night was an even worse idea than doing it at all. (Especially since it required at least a couple of warm-ups to get up to speed.)</p>
<p>As it is, no. Berkeley doesn’t really have any rivalries. But again… all of these ‘rivalries’ are not very serious. As in… most people don’t pay attention, at all.</p>
<p>Also, there’s such high student turnover that the reputed ‘character’ of a college, and its supposed rivalries, come and go pretty fast. Incoming prefrosh shouldn’t take any of this too seriously. Basically, you get to decide what your college will be like when you’re there.</p>
<p>Woooow this was quite informative. I don’t even know what college I’m in yet so I don’t know where my loyalties lie!</p>
<p>rosy: I can practically guarantee you this: whatever college you’ll be assigned to, you’ll be 150% convinced that it’s the single best residential college in existence and that all the other fobs should just be quiet and worship your college’s greatness – since it should be in evidence to all.</p>
<p>(and so will most of your other 1249 classmates feel the same about their colleges too)</p>
<p>JHS-</p>
<p>Thanks for what probably is the most exhaustive description of the Tang phenomenon that exists anywhere in any format!!!</p>
<p>Now I was at Yale in Silliman in the 90s; by then Tang was a DKE event and one which I personally avoided direct participation in as I possess only a normal human gullet. Now word around Silliman was always that Silliman and TD had originally had proprietary rights over this game, sort of a consolation prize for our humiliating banishment from Old Campus. This seems to be supported by this clip from the infallible YDN:</p>
<p>[Yale</a> Daily News - Tang allows even Tyng Cup losers to taste victory](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2006/04/21/tang-allows-even-tyng-cup-losers-to-taste-victory/]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2006/04/21/tang-allows-even-tyng-cup-losers-to-taste-victory/)</p>
<p>“The game itself was born out of trying times for Silliman and Timothy Dwight colleges, Tang’s only original participants. Year after year, they could be counted on to finish at the bottom of the Tyng Cup standings. In response, they created a game at which they might excel…Tang quickly gained a following and a reputation, and soon a tradition was born.”</p>
<p>It’s very touching that you still have your Tang t-shirt from the 70s. I do hope you’ve put it through the wash once or twice, though!</p>
<p>No mention of Morse and Stiles anywhere… hmmm…</p>