Week in Review: Identity Crisis Edition (July 18 - July 24)

Our friends at the Daily Princetonian provided an update on the Tony Kadyhrob saga: after incidents at several Mercer County campuses, the 68-year-old has been indicted on one count of second-degree attempted kidnapping and one count of third-degree luring. While many students might recognize the face, fewer are familiar with the peculiar tragedy of Mr. Kadyhrob, who suffers from schizophrenia and was overheard telling himself that he was a 21-year-old graduate of Princeton. No date has been set for the trial.We'll turn now to a less serious, much broader kind of identity crisis, one that has seized many students (or at least the internet-list-reading subset). The past week has given me pause, has forced a more careful interrogation of Princeton's essence. What are the defining values of this school?* A year ago, you might have looked around and unwaveringly answered: our douchebaggery and our preppiness,  celebrated both as discrete virtues, and also in their sublime union (see left; see also Lawnparties, the general phenomenon of).This year, you might answer exactly the same way, because neither of those two values appears to have waned in the last year. But the public recognition of them has. Despite our prominent #3 ranking on GQ's last "Douchiest Colleges" list, we are conspicuously absent from the 2011 edition. Ivy-wise, Princeton and Harvard have been supplanted by Cornell and Yale -- which might itself call for some intra-Ivy douchiness, but I'll let you fill those punchlines in yourself. Princeton did manage a tangential mention on Yale's page, serving as the "robot" foil to their "passion." (Incidentally this entire list is excerpted from the "groundbreaking new book" The Rogers & Littleton Guide to America's Douchiest Colleges. It doesn't take a Princeton douche to gawk at the fact that this book exists --  maybe we lurk somewhere in its 176[!] pages.)This news arrives just weeks after another surprising omission: Princeton was left out of The Huffington Post's "Preppiest Schools" list. Last time we were represented by this somewhat cryptic tableau of not-particularly-preppy-looking silhouettes in a random Whitman arch, but this time, nothing. This is very unfortunate because I was looking forward to an even more confusingly irrelevant photo this year.Now, our absence on this list could be chalked up to outside factors. The most plausible being the simple fact that nobody, not even devoted slideshow readers, wants to read a list of the exact same schools all over again. We might also question the credibility of the list-makers; many Princetonians could rattle off a scathing critique of their methodology (Abercrombie treated as a emblem of prepdom? potshots aimed at Mormons?). Such a critique would probably be douchey enough to ensure a place on both lists next year. Credit where credit's due, all I'm saying.*Oh, and if you were short-sighted enough to answer "academic excellence" and "career preparation" to the above question, then I guess you could take refuge in the fact that 7 undergraduates have teamed up with Lockheed Martin for some ridiculously interesting project on the "photonic neuron," or that PayScale just determined that Princeton grads rake in the highest mid-career salary of any school in the nation. But, like I said, that's only if you answered dumbly.