"And that!, my friends, is how you make George W. Bush weep."

If you haven’t heard of it already, Yale’s Admissions Office recently released a new video called “Why I Chose Yale.” Here it is.

Insane, right? Some blogs have called it “Why I Didn’t Choose Yale,” others are scratching their heads as to why this was created, and, naturally, Yalies are up in arms about it over at the Yale Daily News.

All that said… It is kind of cool, as far as university-created videos go. It’s incredibly well produced, obviously took a lot of effort to put together, and is, well, kind of enjoyable, in a way that most college admission videos aren’t. For those of you who’d rather not sit through the 16 minutes of High School Musical-inspired camp, here are some of the highlights:

• Everything looks good. Seriously, put the video on mute and just see how nice Yale’s facilities are. (Residential colleges have their own gyms? What?)
• Brian Williams completes a rhyme at 6:45. Damn. It’s cool.
• At 6:15, a professor sings over a really awful “hard rock” guitar riff. It makes me uncomfortable.
• 9:49 starts the worst part of the video, with the “academic” section. Imagine if all those people who brag about their internships and majors got a chance to sing their boasts over a cheesy guitar-and-strings pop riff with verses like, “Last year I spent the summer abroad / I helped to monitor a foreign election / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection” and “I came to Yale from across the world because I wanted a global education / Now I’m bringing cleaner water to the countries that need it through the H20 Africa Foundation.”
• Just read the above point again, because it’s hilarious and so gruesomely corny, and not in the way that Yale intended. It’s more like intellectual masturbation, set to awful music.

So, you’re thinking, Yale made a video that’s effectively tarnished their storied reputation with a level of self-congratulatory kitsch unseen in the Ivy League’s long history. Big whoop…