In Aug. 2009, GQ ranked Brown University the No. 1 douchiest college in America, and Yalies felt that justice had been done at last. After masquerading as the hippie Ivy where students don’t lose their humanity to ambition, Brown had finally been exposed as, in GQ’s words, the “home of ‘The Peace Sign on my Mom’s 7 Series’ Douche.’” The triumph was huge.

“I’m so glad Brown got first,” reacted one Morse sophomore. “Brown really is a bunch of douchebags.” Could it be that this ranking rubbed us the right way because it came one month after Emma Watson broke Yale’s heart with her decision to study at Brown?

We were all so chuffed to hear that Watson was seriously considering Yale. We could have bragged to our friends that not only were we academically top-notch but also attracted cool British celebrities. So when she turned us down for Brown, we were reminded that Brown still held the title for the coolest Ivy. “I feel like it was a blow to our hipster cred,” says Evan Coates, TC ’12.

Brown’s claim to cool extends beyond our competition for famous students. As Jonah Quinn, SM ’12, puts it, “Brown is the only good school where people have nice kicks.”

For the Spring Fling Committee, Brown’s equivalent—Spring Weekend—was held as the referential cool show. The argument against any artist who was good but considered too alternative for our audience was that Yale was not Brown. In 2008, when Brown booked MIA, Vampire Weekend, and Lupe Fiasco, Yale ended up with Sean Kingston, Jimmy Eat World, and The Roots. But with this year’s successful line-up the committee got confident. A cheeky post on the Spring Fling Facebook page declared we’d booked MGMT before Brown, and therefore Brown was “straight posing.” The Brown Daily Herald retaliated online and the quarrel was picked up in YDN’s Cross Campus. The last shot from the Bullblog: “James Franco could take out Emma Watson any day.”

The Emma Watson and Spring Fling affairs brought our resentment against Brown out into the open. But does this rivalry with Brown go further back? What if we’ve replaced our football- and academic-based feud with Harvard for a competition of coolness with Brown?

Our rivalry with Harvard is historic. Pranks, athletics and other traditions have kept it alive throughout the years. Looking back in the YDN archives, one can find an endless series of snide attacks against Harvard students. An article in the seventh issue of the YDN mentions the following sign hanging in a Boston jewelry store: “‘God helps the man who helps himself, but God help the man caught helping himself here.’ A double barrel shot gun hangs just by. The extra need of this, it is said, arises from the frequent visits of Harvard students.” The rivalry continued even during the radical ’60s and ’70s. Marguerite Yates, SM ’75, recalls, “In the ’70s when vocational training was a taboo subject in the liberal arts, Yale was proud to be purer than Harvard. It was believed that Yale had less graduate professional schools, and more of the doctors and lawyers from its medical and law programs went on to become professors rather than money-grubbing professionals.”

But does this rivalry still stir the same passions today? “I don’t know anyone who cares that much, except maybe athletes because they have to,” says Hind Kalkhuta, MC ’11. In an age when grades are a taboo subject and YDN guest columnists advocate the suspension of funding for athletics, few avenues remain for the rivalry to play out publicly. When comparing Yale and Harvard, Yale students often write Harvard off as a terrible place for parties. At The Game it seems we care less about our defeats on the field than about our superior tailgates. A former rivalry of academics and athletics has given way to apathy and alcohol.

Yet, as our rivalry with Harvard fades away, we find a worthy opponent in Brown. Yale is becoming a cooler place to be. Ten years ago, the university’s name might have evoked Mr. Burns from the Simpsons or an unflattering quote from American Psycho. This evolution is felt more strongly within our walls, where we push the avant-garde of merrymaking with floating dance parties and watch homegrown YouTube celebrities on Oprah.

Up in Providence, Brown is matching our trend toward coolness with a steady improvement in academics. Brown’s admissions rates dropped in the past decade, from 17.1 percent in 1998 to 14 percent in 2007 to 9.3 percent in 2010. From 2005 to 2010, Brown’s US News & World Report rank rose from nineteenth to sixteenth. As the two schools become more alike, we have more to fight over. Illustrious faculty and football games are swapped for celebrity students and Spring Fling line-ups.

If these trends explain the resentment against Brown, then it looks like we’ve chosen ourselves a worthy opponent. Is Brown going to replace Harvard as the defending champion in this new contest? Well, at the end of the day, whoever chooses Yale over Brown chooses 36 credits required for graduation instead of 30. With this trait we Yalies inevitably align ourselves with our friends in Cambridge. Steven Winter, PC ’11, a native of Providence, sums it up: “On our fun side we like to think we’re more like Brown, but we definitely still have that over-achieving typical Harvard mentality.” Besides, Brown is just a bunch of douchebags.