Davidson is a small liberal arts college, not a large private research university like Harvard, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, Miami, Tulane, Wake Forest, etc.
So I’d say Williams or Amherst is the Davidson of New England or Davidson is the Williams or Amherst of the South.
I’m not going to weigh in because I went to one of the schools and never liked it when we were compared to Harvard. If I wanted to go to a copy of Harvard I would have at least applied to the original.
I will say that Tulane is the Vanderbilt of Louisiana and Johns Hopkins is the Emory of the Mid Atlantic states.
I don’t know the answer to this question, but it reminded me of a book called “Replay”. In it, the protagonist is a student at a university that considers itself the Harvard of the South. I think it was in the Atlanta area, but I don’t remember the name of the university.
Boston University is a great school too. They have nothing to be ashamed of except they picked the wrong place to to build a campus if they wanted to stand out. You don’t want to be the third highest rank school in the neighborhood no matter how good you are in absolute terms.
Tulane is a whole lot more similar to Boston University than it is to Harvard. The demographics, range of programs and approach are about the same. Both attract very talented students that tend to come from rich families and have the talent to do almost anything once they get out but a fun lifestyle during the college years is important too. I don’t think Harvard or MIT have the same fun factor (especially the latter).
Reminds me of the time, about thirty years ago (which gives you an idea of how long Sabato’s been a go-to guy for quotes), when the Cavalier Daily’s annual April Fool’s parody issue ended every story with “Larry Sabato had no comment.”
I am not sure how you got that from what I said but I can rephrase. Harvard is an excellent school overall with unparalleled name recognition but there are lots of other great schools as well. Out of about 3,000 other colleges and universities, Harvard is a titan and usually near the top for most of their programs but rarely in the absolute top slot for any particular one because the U.S. has so much competition in the higher education market. Most of the top competitors to individual programs at Harvard are also famous schools but you will sometimes see some relatively unknown school beat it in some particular area just because there are so many of them fighting for the top slots.
I was thinking of that phrase more in military terms but I admit that it doesn’t have the same connotation if you have Asian beauty salons on your mind when you hear it.
At my undergraduate college (New College in Sarasota, Florida), we sometimes joked that it would be an insult to refer to it as the Harvard of the South. There were claims that in early publicity brochures it was so referred to, but I looked through all of them and never found any of them that called New College that name. There was one that referred to it as the Oxford of the South though. At one point the student council jokingly voted that the motto of New College should be “There’s a lot more to running a starship than answering a lot of damn fool questions” and that New College should henceforth be referred to as “the Harvard of the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport Authority Area.”
We were insulted by referring to it as the Harvard of the South because it made it sound like New College was just a college that required high SAT scores and very good high school grade point averages. To us the important thing was the experimental academic system. There are no grades, just written evaluations. There are contracts for each term. There is a required senior thesis. Students can create their own courses. There are required independent study projects: