Skunks, bugs, and bombs: Cantab year in review

It has been quite a year for Fair Harvard. Alumni like Bill Gates and John Lithgow have flourished, while Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones have floundered (did anyone see U.S. Marshals?). On the home front, Radcliffe College considered seceding and Harvard maintained the largest endowment of any university in the country.

But what about the scandal and hearsay that Harvard doesn't want you to know?

The following "news" items were culled from Harvard newspapers, random gossip, and various items found in the trash outside President Nelson Bok's private residence.

Harvard stinks

We get squirrels, they get skunks. This September, Cambridge students found something new to complain about when a bevy of skunks invaded the sacred realm of Harvard Yard, putrefying the pristine (if hot) campus air. Students rallied around their computers to protest the "nature-fication" of the college on Internet newsgroups.

Fuzzy white streaks were seen all over the campus, particularly in the dumpsters near each residential building. "A lot of people upstairs were studying, and they were suffocating in terms of the smell," a resident of Conant Hall eloquently observed.

To add insult to injury, the diabolical skunks planned their invasion to coincide with the Fri., Sept. 18, visit of South African President Nelson Mandela. "We don't want Nelson Mandela to think Harvard stinks," cried one paranoid Cantab. Too late.

Harvard blows (up)

Cantabs showed their darker side in 1998 by wantonly destroying everything in their path. Between Jan. 10 and 11, Cambridge firefighters responded to at least three fires. One was an electrical short started by a fridge which was probably protesting the tub of General Tso's chicken that had been left in it for a month.

The cause of a backyard fire could not be determined, though firemen did find a broken bottle, a rag, and a burned skunk carcass on the scene.

A chemical explosion rocked Converse Hall in early May, sending three post-doctorate students to the hospital for minor injuries. The victims were taking a chemicals inventory when a bottle burst in one researcher's face and shattered glass and caustic liquid onto the other two. The most serious injury? A punctured ego.

Harvard leaks

Nighttime emissions proved less welcome than usual for Harvard science majors this October, when three separate chemical spills forced evacuations of laboratory buildings.

The first spill caused a small fire when a student knocked over a container of the flammable liquid tetrahydrofurane onto a hot stove. He confessed to being "surprised" by the fiery reaction, to which his professor replied, "You're flunked."

Three weeks later, another chemical spill occurred at Harvard Medical School. A few days after that, a phosphorous acid leak forced evacuations of three science labs.

On the lighter side, postal workers at Harvard Yard Mail Center rejoiced February 18 when a window burst in the early morning, spilling gallons of rainwater into the basement and giving the Center a new excuse for giving students their packages a week late.

"It was just like in Titanic, with the water rushing down the hallways," said a facilities manager in one of the worst pop culture references of the year.

Harvard sucks...

...at democracy. Harvard students botched their student council elections on several separate occasions this year.

Due to "glitches" in a voting program created by the Harvard Computer Society, December 1997 Undergraduate Council elections were confounded when the program claimed some undergrads were not registered students and refused to let them vote. This October's election had to be repeated when the program reported incomplete results due to another set of bugs. Council representatives admitted that these fiascoes threatened to turn a merely disreputable institution into a total laughingstock.

The vast majority of Cantabs also did their part to trample over our representative governmental system by refusing to vote at all. Participation rates were as low as two percent in the residential houses. One student declared the council "a living joke," despite having been elected to the legislative body. (No kidding.) He stated that he would resign from the position immediately and work to create a monarchical system at Harvard.

Graphic by Karen Rosenberg.

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