Originally posted years ago. The Michael J Fox Show didn’t make it.
In the pilot of The Michael J. Fox Show, Mike’s son Ian is presented as a college dropout, although Ian clarifies that he has simply prioritized making his first million before age 22. Ian lives in his little brother’s room and works on re-imagining the search engine (a project he says you can find by Googling it). What struck me about Ian is that he’s shown on his laptop, which bears a worn Cornell bumper sticker. I take that to indicate that he dropped out of Cornell even though it isn’t confirmed in the dialogue.
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| Conor Romero as Ian Henry on The Michael J. Fox Show |
I attended Cornell from 1988 to 1992, earning a masters degree in English literature. I wasn’t an undergraduate there, so I don’t know what that’s like, but the undergraduates I saw seemed much happier than my fellow grad students. To whit blogger Amanda Ann Klein got her bachelors degree from Cornell and loves Cornell so much she blogs about dressing her baby in Cornell clothing. I like her discussion of Cornell’s image in TV shows and movies, “Why Does Pop Culture Like to Hate on Cornell?” She gives a more thorough discussion of this phenomenon than I will here, so please read her post.
Unlike Klein, I strongly disliked Cornell. Granted, I was a disgruntled graduate student of which there were many when I was there. Grad students are much surlier than undergrads because getting our second (or third, etc) degree isn’t our escape from our parents and first taste of freedom. Advanced degrees are a struggle to earn a living while tolerating an ever duller and less engaging curriculum. Yes, I agree with Matt Groening that the bitterest person is the grad school dropout. Graduate school just doesn’t have the sparkle of the undergraduate experience, probably because colleges want to please the enrollees who are paying full price and aren’t as interested in the grad students who require fellowships and teaching assistant jobs.
Please read Klein’s take on Cornell to balance my opinion because I’m about to write that I wasn’t aware of experiencing institutionalized racism until I got to Cornell. That’s not to say that northern California didn’t have prejudice, but that the insults and insinuations there weren’t as blatant to me as they were in Ithaca, New York. For me Cornell felt culturally bland, socially alienating, physically isolated and intellectually claustrophobic (but before you sue, keep in mind that I was there 25 years ago and I admit that it could have changed completely by now). I was part of a small, late-1980s group of students of color that the English graduate program worked to recruit, but didn’t do a great job of supplying with the resources we needed for our foci of study. It was just never in the cards that I was going to spend the rest of my life loving Cornell as many bachelors degree alumni do.
SO! Every time I see Cornell slighted in a TV show or movie I inwardly cheer. I loved when Andy Bernard, the second-in-buffoonery-command on The Office, trotted out his Cornell pedigree and loved even more when Dwight mocked him by applying to attend. While I was at Cornell I thought of it as a two-bit Ivy League, but that was mostly because I was unhappy there. I didn’t realize Cornell was an ongoing punchline until way after I’d left it, but when I found out, I was delighted. For over a decade I had all but kept my Cornell masters degree a secret, never mentioning it except on resumes and keeping the paper degree itself in its envelope, shoved into a closet. Every once in a while my Cornell degree would escape into a casual conversation and people would wonder why I didn’t take pride in it. I could never explain, but my discomfort became justified when I saw Cornell linked to one of the biggest idiots on The Office, and even mocked by another idiot. Aha! I thought, I was right to keep my Cornell past in the closet.
The Michael J. Fox Show character who hasn’t yet finished college could very well be a part of this Ivy League-trashing tradition. I’m hoping the worn Cornell bumper sticker on his laptop really does mean he’s a Cornell dropout, although it’s possible that this new sitcom will play that joke with more subtlety, for originality and because the joke works just as well that way.
I loved my time at Connell and the friends I made there as a graduate student. That should put the rest of my life and in particular the deep unhappiness I faced at MIT into a stark context for your consideration. I do agree with you about the institutional racism and the petty prejudices on the part of some professors that I met there. Still, I enjoyed living in a tight knot small town community (read clausteophobic) where I could focus on my studies (read nothing else to do) and the stillness and solitude of the winter a in upstate New York (read: I froze my a$$ off).
The Tina Fey thing was me, too. Not unknown.
Tina Fey talks about it here:
splitsider.com/2011/03/tina-feys-two-types-of-comedy-writer-harvard-boys-and-crazy-improvisers/
I was not super enamored with Cornell as an undergraduate (I mean, I did take off 3.5 years between my sophomore and junior years and that last year, I was just not into it), but I suspect that the reason that Cornell finds itself the butt of so many jokes in TV writing is that a lot of those comedy writers come from other Ivy League schools, like Harvard, and they like to take pot shots at their old rivals.