Coyote Blog

Harvard has a new president.  Good freaking luck.  That job chewed up someone I respected (Neal Rudenstine) and someone who tried to reform the institution (Larry Sommers).  I would rather try to bring good government to Haiti than try to run that dysfunctional organization in Cambridge.  Premiers of the Soviet Union had less power than the Harvard faculty wields.  I am one of many Harvard graduate students I know who appreciate the education we got but hate the institution.  My Princeton roomie Brink Lindsey helped start the NOPE campaign – Not One Penny Ever (to Harvard).

If you want a taste of why, below the fold I have included an excerpt of a chapter from my book BMOC (still at Amazon for those who have not used up their Christmas gift certificates yet).  This chapter is pretty autobiographical, except for the part where the character is, you know, a girl.

From the end of Chapter 8 of BMOC:

Susan
looked around her small apartment in the nightmare that was the
Peabody Terrace apartments, a pair of Harvard-owned hi-rise
apartments located across the river from the business school.  Susan
was convinced that these apartments were part of a 1950’s Soviet
plot to undermine America’s youth.  The building design was right
out of East Berlin, with its all cast concrete construction.  Even
the interior walls were concrete, giving it the warmth and ambiance
of a World War II German pillbox.  Her tower had an elevator, but it
only stopped on every third floor, a cost saving measure also
borrowed from the East Germans.  Of course, her floor was not one of
the stops. 

She had
dithered about whether even to apply to Harvard, and had applied in
the last application group, after most of the spots in the school had
already been filled.  She was not actually accepted into the school
until well into June, leaving her just about dead last in the housing
lottery.  Only a few foreign students from strange, lesser developed
countries she had barely heard of were so far back in the room queue,
which helped to explain why her entryway was always choked with the
smell of bizarre foods cooking using unfamiliar spices.  Her walk to
and from school involved crossing a lonely and poorly lighted
footbridge, which was, coincidently, the coldest spot in New England
on most winter days.

Whenever
she walked into her building, she had difficulty fighting off a sense
of despair and loneliness, even despite her generally sunny
disposition.  The building was that depressing.  To make
matters worse, she had spent most of the winter fighting with the
Harvard administrative departments over the temperature in her room.
She had complained nearly every day about the cold, and knew things
were bad when frost started to form on the inside of her
windows.  A worker from building services had finally come by, but
instead of a toolbox he brought a thermometer, which he placed in the
center of the room and just stared at for five minutes.  Then he
picked it up, looked at it, and declared that the room was fine.

“Fine?”
she had screamed.  “How can it be fine?  It’s freezing in here!”

“Mam,
the thermometer says 54 degrees.  State law says we don’t have to
do anything unless it falls below 50 degrees,” observed the housing
guy.

“State
law?!  Who gives a shit about state law?  What about customer
service?  What about the sixty grand I pay to this university?”

But she
had gotten nowhere, at least until she started putting the oven on
broil with the door open to try to keep the room warm.  Once the
building services folks saw that, with all the implicit fire and
liability dangers, her radiator had finally been fixed.

Looking
around the cold and depressing room, she decided she definitely did
not want to be here now.  She wanted to celebrate her new job, not
stare at four bare condensate-dampened concrete walls.