The Columns That Haunt Us

If I ever become a “man of note,” my columns might come back to haunt me like a tricky spirit back from the dead—not to punish me, but to annoy me.

My opinions will likely change over the years, but those that I hold now as a strapping young undergraduate will remain immortalized on these pages. If a critic—or aspiring young journalist—ever digs up old columns of mine, they might find some lines I might not be as proud of ten, twenty, thirty years out.

A People’s History of Yardfest

Before we had Wale at Yardfest 2018, we had Wale at Yardfest 2010. And though Yardfest has a complicated history, some things—like Wale—have remained the same.

Before Yardfest, we had Springfest. From 1994 until 2006—when Yardfest got its name and came under the purview of the College Events Board—the Undergraduate Council planned an annual event called Springfest. The event featured a number of festivities missing today—carnival games, dunk tanks, sumo wrestling, jousting, and free beer.

Spring Breaking on the Islands

Harvard students love the islands. The islands, of course, are those little specks in the wide, warm, blue ocean—the amorphous, multiethnic set of nations we call the Caribbean. Harvard students love galavanting around the islands, lying in warm sand, and dipping their toes in turquoise blue water.

When Harvard Breaks You

I sit in the dining hall. Or it may be my bedroom, a classroom, The Crimson. I am either crying or I am not. That is not the important part of this story.

I have just spoken to a mental health counselor for the first time. I have not submitted assignments. I have missed deadlines. I do not have summer plans. I am a third-year student.

Selling Out and Fitting In

In 1994, The Crimson published a letter to the editor from a conservative student from Indiana whose freshman year had been difficult because of his political views. He wrote about having to endure “the punches, scratches and cries of ‘Die, Republican dog.’” But Jose Mauricio Padilla ’97 was not like most conservatives on campus at the time because he is Latino.

Padilla is the son of two Honduran immigrants and was the only conservative among approximately fifty “Other Hispanics,” the category the College used at the time to refer to Latinos who were not of Mexican or Puerto Rican descent. The assumption from his classmates was that, because of his race and ethnicity, he’d be a liberal. This led to, in his own words, a series of “ethno-political struggles.”