Tracts for All Times
Various and Sundry
Since this is my last column of the semester, and since I have exhausted my supply of pomposity and nonsense, I propose to round out the year with a smattering of suggestions for smoothing certain Harvard hangnails.
First: One of Board Plus and Crimson Cash needs to be abolished. The fact that they both exist indicates some kind of scam. Crimson Cash is obviously the nearer of the two to legal tender, whereas Board Plus appears magically like a non-fungible rebate on one’s tuition. But why can’t it be used to do laundry, rather than just to buy 24 packages of Milano cookies in Lamont during spring reading period when you have a week to spend $110, as I did two years ago? Perhaps this will be shocking, but I should rather use my Board Plus on laundry than on the baked goods of Barker Café.
Evangelizing Harvard
It is now Holy Week; this Sunday is Easter; Lent is nearly over. This is far and away the best time of the year, liturgically speaking. A rather startling number of events are commemorated in quick succession: the institution of the Eucharist and of Holy Orders, the Mandatum, and the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
In the midst of all this comes the Easter Vigil on the night of Holy Saturday, which contains no historical event of its own but has the honor of hosting the first celebration of the Resurrection. And in the middle of this vigil, all those who have been preparing to enter the church are finally received with whatever sacraments they lack.
What’s In A Rename?
This weekend I had the extreme misfortune of being in New Haven, and the shock of the experience, no matter how often I visit, is never diminished. Indeed the freshness of it, the absence of any inoculation, made me rehearse in my mind my various previous trips, and a Yalie’s offhand mention of Grace Hopper College brought me to February 2017.
That was when, one Saturday afternoon as I was hastening to Union Station to escape back to Cambridge, Yale announced that this name would serve thereafter in place of Calhoun College, which had lately been causing protests on account of the eponym’s vigorous defense of slavery.
I Hate These Teams
The general public prefers when it can to think in teams. To keep an account of every person or idea is difficult, so as a matter of convenience it helps to put them into groups whose members all share certain traits: New Yorkers walk quickly, Republicans dislike the welfare state, scholastic theologians are highly technical. This is in no way an illegitimate impulse, for usually issues have sides on each of which the participants are agreed on a few basic points, vary though they may in the details.
The defining features of these teams can vary in specificity, as do the levels of the biological hierarchy from domain to species. What Southerners, for instance, have in common is much broader than what the West Coast Straussians have. In discerning what the teams in a given argument are, the trick is to cast a net of the correct size.
Dysfunctional Gen Ed
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if it is broke, don’t just rearrange the useless debris and then tell us it’s fixed.
The College has flagrantly violated this second dictum with its recent revisions to the General Education requirements. Everyone knew that the previous system was flawed because there seemed to be no reason why certain classes counted and other classes did not. One expected, therefore, that the new system would increase the ways in which to satisfy the requirements.