Tiger? Bulldog? Tiger?

So here I am at Yale, one of the twin Colossi of the North, sitting in the incredible marble and granite tower that is the Beinecke rare book library and procrastinating. Starting work again means checking the proofs of my next book, always a miserable job. Unlike Princeton, Yale doesn't offer visiting readers WiFi. So I'm spending a few minutes in reflection. I've been here for a few days, giving lectures and meeting faculty and students, and am beginning to think again about that eternal question: What is the difference between Tigers and Bulldogs?

The first thing that strikes you here is the sheer scale of the place: the immense hulks of the residential colleges, Gothic or HoJo's in style as the case may be, looming like icebergs through the seemingly eternal fog and rain; Sterling library, that immense cathedral of learning. Turn one corner and you enter a reading room more stunning than our own handsome Marquand. Turn another, and you meet two hospitable, hyper-articulate young Assyriologists, who make the whole ancient Near East come alive for you from 4,000-year old letters, inventories and contracts (and even some very ancient porn).

Then there's the buzz. Everywhere you look, politicians, scholars and scientists are giving talks, theaters are staging plays and ballets, musicians and dancers are rehearsing and resident masters are holding teas. It's exciting and bewildering to be here — like a Monty Python movie, in which you never know when 500 Mongolian horsemen are going to charge around the next corner. Comparing Yale to Princeton reminds me a little of that ancient cheesy move, "Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman," in which the main character has a close encounter with aliens and then pretty much lives up to the title. Imagine Princeton, stuffed with steroids and in your face.

The part I enjoy most is meeting former students: onetime grad students who used to come to class in Dickinson and McCosh and now teach their own classes here, and onetime undergraduates doing the same or studying in the law school and doing graduate work in arts and sciences. They seem — as John Fleming GS '63 once wrote of former students at Oxford — to find this place a wonderful intellectual playground, where minds expand with dizzying speed.

Do I envy anything? Well, yes, a little. I like the charged-up, intellectually tough atmosphere here — after my second lecture, a distinguished Yale historian and old friend literally ran down the aisle to explain to me why I was wrong. That was fun, and from what I hear, it's typical. Some former students of mine who have run sections at Yale say that they have more pop and spark than Princeton precepts. As an inveterate grump about the eating clubs, I prefer Yale's social system to ours. Yale boasts plenty of exclusive, snobbish social life — the student body doesn't suffer, any more than ours does, from a privilege deficit, but it doesn't happen in public space, at the official core of the campus, as it does on Prospect Avenue.

On the whole, though, I'm happy to be a country mouse from New Jersey. Our small scale has advantages. I get the sense — from what I see, from what students tell me — that Yale creates a more stressful and competitive atmosphere than Princeton. There seems to be a little more striving, a little less of the constant emailing, messaging and hugging that makes a day in Princeton strangely like a day in the African village where my daughter spent two years in the Peace Corps and that weaves those wonderful, tough friendships that Princeton students cultivate. Even more strongly, I get the sense that Yale has a lot of rules and sometimes enforces them in unnecessarily strict ways. Heaven knows, we have rules too, but we also have a saving ability to ignore or circumvent them when doing so will reach the right result for a student or a colleague.

And then there's the last madness, the great Princeton obsession, the white whale that lies in wait for three years for every Tiger: the senior thesis. Yale students write them too, of course. But the historians at least have set a pretty low page limit and defined them more as exercises than as the insane Princeton bungee-jump into the archival unknown. People here seemed a little surprised when I talked about the way our majors go off every year to do research everywhere from St. Petersburg to Sao Paolo — not to mention the amazing scale and quality of the best theses they write every year. I'd hate to see our expectations scaled down, and I'd hate to miss the weekly meetings at which I do my best to coach my hard-pressed seniors, every year, through what Professor Rodgers, when he was chair, used to call The Seven Terrors of the Thesis.

Small is good. It helps us know each other, and it makes it easier for us to work together and less likely to see ourselves as rivals. I love to visit Yale, but I know why Princeton is home. Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.