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Volume CCXXXV, Number 67    February 24, 2005 

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Dispatches from the War Fronts:

GASBAG GOES
DOWN IN FLAMES

By A. Lawrence Lowell
Yard Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – A wrong turn off course and into the gunsights of his enemies has caused one of the largest and most flammable gasbags in the history of Harvard to burst into flames.

Military strategists had predicted for sometime that the huge inflated ego of Harvard President Lawrence Summers was vulnerable to attack, but until last month Summers had continued to float high above Cambridge, seemingly untouched by the popguns being aimed in his direction.

Widely thought to be invulnerable and invincible when he was launched by the Harvard Corporation in 2001, Summers first took flak from the rich, powerful and evil alumni of the Harvard Law School in response to his effort to move that public-spirited institution from the cozy confines of Harvard Square to the wilds of Allston. For an eyewitness account of this battle, see Spy  No. 22.

Summers, forced to retreat to the skies over Massachusetts Hall, turned his attention to lesser adversaries whom he could exile to Lebensraum across the river, like the relatively poor and powerless Education and Government Schools.

This drang nach Süden was proceeding according to plan until the impossibly bloated President attempted to justify Harvard's lamentable record of hiring and tenuring women by speculating that the gals’ brains weren't wired for math and science.

Confronted with a torrent of gunfire from women and others who didn't think that resorting to pseudo-scientific eugenic explanations was an appropriate way to redress Harvard's historic hostility to female academics, the huge awkward craft attempted to maneuver to safety.

First Summers appointed a few meaningless task forces to push the whole issue out of the headlines until he had time to refit and rearm.  Then he claimed he had said nothing like what his audience said they heard.  Next his allies, curiously all white males, opened a second front, accusing Summers' adversaries of attacking not uninformed prejudice but science itself.

The stout defense of Summers' gaseous emissions as free inquiry was wonderful to behold, but left some military observers musing whether Summers' support would be as firm had the President suggested that Jews or Irishmen were genetically unsuited to serve on the Harvard faculty.  These, too, are propositions susceptible of scientific proof.

But the lumbering zeppelin ran into a hail of well-aimed heavy artillery at last week's meeting of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the technical term for the professors who are paid to ignore the undergraduates).  According to the Harvard Crimson (so who knows how much of this really happened?), the faculty members ripped into Summers for his alleged efforts to terrify and intimidate them.

As Summers began to lose altitude and burst into flames, he was reinforced by another gasbag almost as formidable as himself: Alan Dershowitz. This massive hot air weapon announced that the attack on the great ship Summers was based on Summers' support for the State of Israel. Although Hezbollah is not thought to have many active cells in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, some military analysts expected Dershowitz's counterattack to take a heavy toll.

Whether Summers will be able to right himself before crashing to Earth in a fireball is now up to the Harvard Corporation, a handful of shadowy self-perpetuating doges, who have been unavailable for comment when contacted by mere newspaper reporters.

As the skies above Cambridge are illumined by gunfire and flames, the hapless subjects of the Harvard Empire are left to cower in their dorm rooms and offices, wondering if the war will destroy everything in its path down to the scorched earth, or as it known around Harvard, Allston.