Don’t you always feel like such a pretentious bitch, so full of conceit, as you walk by the big tour group snapping pictures on the Arts Quad? I do. I can’t help it, despite my best efforts to avoid this conceit — this feeling that even though they’ll get in, they haven’t done it yet! And I have. Yes I, with just a wee bit of help from the private school and the fancy tutors, have arrived!

So it’s not like I’m so cool. But the school — apparently the school is quite cool. According to the Cornell Online Unbelievable Propaganda Hotline (COUGH) — which is also called the Cornell Chronicle — Cornell University was recently ranked the “Hottest Ivy.” By Newsweek, so you know it’s true.

But I’m afraid we’ll have only conceit if we take this Newsweek award home without a little critique first. Before we party (and we will party) … we shall think!

First, the article has a disclaimer that “hotness” is of course temporary and subjective, and “hotness” really just means that people are talking about the school.

Hottest Ivy: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

The sketchy reasons given: that it’s a land-grant school, Hotelies are supposedly getting educated and Skorton is cool. Well, the land-grant is 150 years old, I’m skeptical of the Hotelie bit and, I mean, Skorton is cool, but … really? That’s why?

Another problem. Newsweek confuses itself about which is really the hottest Ivy. Follow me here:

1) Harvard College is also hot. “Hottest,” in fact, “for rejecting you,” which sounds more like an article in Cosmo (and could pass for as much). True enough, you do have a 90 percent chance of getting rejected from Harvard! And if fickle college romance teaches us anything, it’s that you always want what you can’t have — this is almost a cardinal rule — and that makes Harvard pretty damn hot.

2) Princeton University is “Hottest for liberal arts,” which is a pretty big deal! Possibly, just possibly, a bigger deal than our school president playing the jazz flute (or was that Ron Burgundy?)… Princeton, at least according to Newsweek, is a hotter Ivy.

3) Considering 1) and 2), it makes no sense that Newsweek could actually consider us the hottest Ivy. Which begs the question: What do they really think of us?

It gets worse. Consider Newsweek’s other categories:

Hottest on the Rebound. Guess. Think really hard about it. They had a hurricane. Cue Jeopardy music … Tulane! Yes, Tulane is rebounding.

Hottest for Free Tuition. Cooper Union. It has free tuition.

Hottest Mega-University. Yes, we’re now making up words. UCLA. It’s big.

You get the point. Also, stay tuned for Newsweek’s next big story, “Hottest Website that has Faces in a Book, and it’s invented by Mark Zuckerberg.” Do I sense a conceit here? Just a little nugget of conceit in this charade, this ex nihilo production of the category, and, then, miraculously, instantly, the winner?!

It seems the point of the article is merely that college is hot in general. Well, no! Not quite. College is so hot that you should buy lots of Kaplan products to get in. (This may explain the mysterious tag “Kaplan College Guide” on the online version of the article.)

I guess that’s not how I’d like to be hot.

College is hot, of course! In fact, despite what the true cynics (read: people from Northern New Jersey and Long Island) say — that Cornell girls are ugly — I would maintain that there are many girls at Cornell who are quite hot. Like my housemate Rosa, who, bachelors, is single, and looking quite good. And this is why we’re hot. To quote a wise rapper dude, “We’re hot ’cause we’re fly.” Though I’d be wary of telling another school, “You ain’t cause you not,” because that honestly makes no sense. (Seriously. That should be edited out of the song for Profane Stupidity or some other made up category of censorship.)

But wasn’t Newsweek really talking about girls anyway? Or was that Playboy, who did the hottest “Girls of the Big Ten” or something like that?

Playboy, at least, was original, in creating its own cultural idiom — this newly conceived “girl.” You know, the completely commodified piece of airbrushed gloss. The sex goddess, only in your dreams, whose ubiquity is the only explanation I can think of for Newsweek’s dubious choice of the word “hot,” of all others, to describe a freaking university. If you want to sell it, you must sex it up real good.

The irony in the university turning into a Hot, Sexy, Feminized Product is two-fold:

1) The universities are where all the Marxists still hang out. The commercialization of the universities drives said Marxists absolutely mad, and they (we?) have no possible recourse against the all-powerful capitalists who buy and sell — what agonizing irony! — their anti-capitalist literature.

2) There’s nothing new about objectifying women, but the idea is pretty funny when one remembers that it’s not just any Cornell you’re calling hot, but Ezra Cornell — you know, with the big beard. It’s too bad he died before 1892, when he apparently could have bared it all for an Abercrombie and Fitch centerfold.

And where are we Cornellians in all this? Tacitly consenting in our hotness.

I feel like we’re the smart girl in glasses who won the beauty pageant because the judges, like, “dug the smart glasses look” and then we fell for it and wore the sash all the way home!

Before we pass the next tour group walking around, we ought to take off the sash, take a good look at our hot Cornellian selves, and ask: Does the conceit come from Newsweek? Or does it come from us?

Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks will appear alternate Fridays this semester.