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.
