The Crimson won’t even tell us what he actually said.
Understandably. All those little millennial snowflakes melt whenever any old, white male says something transgressive and un-PC.
But, cheer up, the alumnus did grovel and confess his Speech Crime in the end. I guess he’ll just get a bit of political reeducation, they won’t have to harvest his organs after all.
More than 70 members of the Harvard Band walked out of a banquet celebrating the group’s centennial Saturday after an alumnus joked about the group’s decision to implement a sexual harassment policy.
At the banquet, former band member Richard “Rich†D. Horn ’72 began his speech with a joke about the group’s decision to implement the policy, which undergraduates distributed to alumni ahead of the reunion. As Horn continued to speak, roughly 75 attendees left the room, according to an emailed statement by the band’s senior staff. Many of those who walked out did not return for the remainder of the event.
Horn wrote in an email that he regrets that others interpreted his remarks as a criticism of the policy, which provides band members with a formal disclosure system to report incidences of sexual misconduct, according to a copy of the policy obtained by The Crimson.
“I sympathize with the frustration of decades of Band women in dealing with sexism both in the Band and elsewhere. I strongly support the Band’s sexual harassment policy and did not mean to imply otherwise,†he wrote. “I deeply regret any implication to the contrary. This is an issue on which emotions understandably and rightly run high, and I ought to have known better. Hopefully, I will do better in any future occasion.â€
A separate speaker had also joked about the sexual harassment policy before Horn, according to the band’s staff. That speaker later apologized for his remarks, the band wrote in its statement.
After some attendees left the room, Harvard Band Foundation president Camaron “Cammie†S. O’Connor Wynn ’94 made an impromptu speech apologizing for the disruption, according to the band. O’Connor Wynn wrote in an email that band leadership, including both undergraduates and alumni, sought to address concerns about Horn’s comments both during and after the banquet.
“Attempts at humor by two brief (not primary) alumni speakers at our 100th reunion banquet touched on the Band’s sexual misconduct policy as a policy — in the sense of the necessity of censoring one’s own speech to fit with the new policy,†O’Connor Wynn wrote.
The Band’s senior staff wrote in an emailed statement that the sexual harassment policy previously caused controversy in the band’s alumni Facebook group when some alumni questioned the need for such a policy. The staff wrote that some alumni had written in the chat that the policy was “in contrast to the spirit of the band that they had known in their time.â€
Band manager Lucaian Al-Tariq ’20 sent the emailed statement to The Crimson. Drill master Reese Garcia ’21, student conductor Marcos B. Cecchini ’21, drum major and Crimson multimedia editor Mariah E. D. Dimalaluan ’20, social chair Selket R. Jewett ’21, reunion manager Jessica D. Bishai ’20, and assistant reunion manager Jessica A. Boutchie ’21 also signed the statement.
“[M]uch has changed even within the past decade,†they wrote. “The jokes that were made may express discomfort in confronting this change; older alumni may have been surprised to see just how much the structure and nature of the Band have changed over time.â€
“Both their discomfort and the reactions of the undergrads exemplify how deeply all generations of bandies care for this organization, despite its changes,†they added.
Harvard has a traditional Fall Clean-Up, in which freshman student employees arrive early to make a few bucks tiding up Harvard’s residential houses in preparation for the arrival of the entire undergraduate student body.
Although cleaning dormitory rooms and bathrooms is work, Harvard tries to put an element of fun into it as well.
For more than sixty years, Dorm Crew has welcomed Harvard first-years to campus for our annual Fall Clean-Up (FCU). Created in 1951, Dorm Crew is a student employment and leadership program that is entirely managed and operated by Harvard undergraduates. Today, Dorm Crew offers employment opportunities, leadership development, advising resources, and pre-orientation programing to more than 800 students annually. Each year, 300 incoming first-years join FCU to have fun and work hard while cleaning and preparing the dorms for student move-in. Throughout the week, students will have the opportunity to explore and engage with Harvard’s campus and community through various planned events. …
Year after year, students have found Fall Clean-Up to be a rewarding experience that offers a great community of friends and provides an unrivaled introduction to the diversity of the Harvard community, the aged beauty of Harvard’s student residences, and the vibrant life of Harvard Square. Under the guidance of our upperclassman captains, we aim to deliver a Fall Clean-Up experience that truly orients students to what life at Harvard is all about.
As I reflect back on my life, that first week or two of freshman year, with the bonding with my fellow freshman Dorm Crew members, was an extraordinary stress reliever as we found out about each other and that we were all scared to death that Harvard had made a mistake admitting each one of us! I will never forget those initial few weeks in Cambridge.” —Ray Peters ’69
“I loved FCU because I met some of my best friends at Harvard and found a community that has been really important to me throughout my time in college.â€
—Sarah E. Lagan ‘19
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But the Harvard Crimson staff stroked its collective chin, and decided there was a PROBLEM here.
Oh, migod! Who would have imagined? Not everyone at Harvard is rich, some people are there on scholarship and need to take jobs in order to earn money. Everyone is not the same. It just isn’t fair!
Bedford felt out of place, just as the sight of trash in Murdock’s sink left him feeling neglected by the University. From the beginning, Bedford and Murdock felt that the University deemed them different from their peers.
It took Bedford some time to pinpoint exactly why he felt alienated. Amidst meeting other students and recovering from jetlag, he did not look around and think, “Oh, we’re all here because we’re poor and we need money.†At the time, he says he “had no conception of the†— here, his voice lowers in emphasis — “disparity that is present on this campus between rich and poor.†But shortly into his time at Harvard, he began to reconsider the way Fall Clean-Up functions: It distinguishes between the students who need to earn quick money for school supplies and those who do not.
Many of the students who end up participating in FCU would have liked to do other programs. “What turned me off about FUP at the time wasn’t what it was, but what it wasn’t. And it wasn’t a program that paid me,†Ibrahim says. “Fall Clean-Up gave me dollars, and I needed that.â€
During pre-orientation, some students can afford to do what they love. Others don’t have that luxury.
I’ve noticed the exact same problem in life after college. If you want something, if you want a home with electricity, heat, and in-door plumbing, you actually have to get a job and work to pay for all of it.
Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,†all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.â€
Never speak ill of the dead, like Harold Bloom, who told my American lit seminar that we should feel free to report his sexism and homophobia to the university president who, Bloom explained, would rather hide under his desk than fire him.
Harold Bloom was once asked why he was writing a multi-volume history of literary theory. “I can’t sleep anyway,” he said.
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In 1999, Emmy Chang of the Yale Free Press interviewed Professor Bloom, and got a good sample of Bloom talk.
YFP. In the Shakespeare book you mention that since Shakespeare, we’ve taken more after Iago than Othello’we’ve learned more from Iago. And I wanted to ask you if you thought that was Shakespeare’s fault or if it was our fault.
HB. That question’s unanswerable because we have been so formed by Shakespeare. That I think is the irony of [the Tenure Action Coalition]’the words they use are frequently words that he invented, that weren’t in the language until he coined them. I think that it was Owen Barfield who said that it can be positively humiliating for us to realize that what we want to call our emotions, turn out to be Shakespeare’s thoughts. Shakespeare is the Canon because Shakespeare is ourselves, and the answer therefore to the question of, Is the way in which we’ve imitated Iago our fault or Shakespeare’s fault, is both. I’m not sure that until you have the representation you call Hamlet, that you have anywhere, (in any language I’m able to read anyway), someone who changes every time he or she speaks, and who does it by this weird thing of overhearing oneself, which I can’t find before Shakespeare. But if you’re really going to talk about Shakespeare’s culpability’so far as I can tell, Shakespeare invented what Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, and others afterwards started to call nihilism. It’s a pure Shakespearean invention.
YFP. [I wondered] whether you think the people who say that Shakespeare has nothing to say to them’whether it’s just a question of their being unwilling to listen, or if it’s actually possible that they can’t hear.
HB. Let me tell you an anecdote. As part of the early manifestation of [the Cornell Revolution of ‘68-‘69], the black students of the university were instructed by their leadership to go into the library stacks and bring out as many books as they could carry and just dump them on the front circulation desk with the dramatic statement, ‘These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.’ And it so happened [that] I was trying to check out a book at just that moment, when a young lady dumped a huge armful of books right next to me and shouted, ‘These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.’ And one slid over to me’it was the Oxford edition of the Collected Poems of John Keats. And I said to the young lady, who scowled at me, ‘Are you quite sure that the poetry of John Keats is irrelevant to you? Have you read any of the poems of Keats?’ And she looked at me angrily and repeated, ‘These books are irrelevant to me as a black student,’ and off she marched. So. But what can I possibly say to that? That’s ideological, isn’t it? To arrive here and say that it’s your function to obliterate the best that has been read, the best that has been thought and said, in thirty centuries. They should go somewhere else. If they really think Shakespeare is irrelevant to them, why do they want to go to a university anyway? To get a union card of some kind?
YFP. You said before that we read to learn to talk to ourselves.
HB. I am not, as you know, a Shakespeare scholar, just an enthusiast…I assume that reading Shakespeare with the whole intensity of your being and with your awakened mind, with all of you, it’s bound to be a kind of training in consciousness. I assume that that is as good a way of awakening that [inner] spark, of lighting it up, or of making that pneuma, that breath, come faster, and stronger, than any other. [It] doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, [but it] certainly [makes] you a more capacious soul than you were already. I really feel that I can teach a more or less receptive and sensitive Yale undergraduate how enormous a work Shakespeare’s Hamlet is… You can teach people’you can open them to wonder. To more wonder. Which is what Shakespeare is for. I talked [in Shakespeare] about awe as being the proper response. Maybe the really proper response is wonder.
“[The old man] is a good friend of mine. He is a disabled Vietnam veteran and confined to a wheelchair. The audio was taken from a video from the Berkeley free speech protests. Despite being in a wheelchair, he stood up to a bunch of young agitators that tried to push him around and pour bottles of water and called him unamerican.”
The entire media Left is clutching its pearls and shrieking with outrage over this sill “Kingsman” parody video showing Trump slaughtering his media enemies. I thought it was kind of fun in a pleasantly transgressive way myself.
Hey, libs, isn’t “transgressive-ness” one of the absolutely best artistic values? If it is important that we fund putting the crucifix in a bottle of the artist’s urine and making a statue of the Virgin Mary out of elephant dung, doesn’t that mean the makers of this video deserve a huge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts?
Loved ones at an Irish funeral for Defense Forces veteran Shay Bradley were shocked — then delighted — when they heard the voice of their late friend calling out from his coffin.
“Hello, hello — let me out!,†they heard on Saturday at Bradley’s funeral in Kilmanagh, Leinster, as his casket was lowered into the ground.
The pre-recorded message continued, “Where the f - - k am I? Let me out, let me out. It’s f - - king dark in here. Is that the priest I can hear? This is Shay, I’m in the box. No, in f - - king front of you. I’m dead.â€
A video of the posthumous prank, posted to Twitter Sunday, shows mourners laughing and crying as Bradley’s voice began to sing, “Hello again, hello. Hello, I just called to say goodbye.â€
The footage has gone viral with more than 500,000 views and over 16,000 likes.
Friends and family said the good-humored officer and father made the recording because he knew he was dying of a “long illness bravely borne†— and wanted “to make his family laugh rather than cry at the funeral.â€
[P]ieces of some 100 Viking swords and spearheads dating to the middle of the tenth century A.D. were found in two caches placed about 260 feet apart along a remote Viking trade route near Estonia’s northwestern coast. Archaeologist Mauri Kiudsoo of Tallinn University said the bits of broken weapons may have been cenotaphs, or items left as a monument to warriors who had died and were buried somewhere else. The surviving sword parts provide enough information, however, to know the weapons included H-shaped double-edged swords. Eight nearly intact type H swords and fragments of 100 more have been found in Estonia alone.
The fragments were found in two closely located sites in a coastal area of north Estonia, in the territory of the ancient Estonian county of Ravala, late last autumn.
The finds consisted of dozens of items, mostly fragments of swords and a few spearheads.
Mauri Kiudsoo, archaeologist and keeper of the archaeological research collection of Tallinn University, told BNS the two sites were located just 80 meters apart. The swords date from the middle of the 10th century and are probably cenotaphs, grave markers dedicated to people buried elsewhere.
The reason why the swords were not found intact, Kiudsoo said, is due to the burial customs of the time. It is characteristic of finds in Estonia from the period that weapons were put into the graves broken or rendered unusable.
While the Ravala fragments constitute the biggest find of Viking-era weapons in Estonia, more important according to Kiudsoo, is the fact that the grips of the swords allow us to determine which type of swords they are. They have been identified as H-shaped double-edged swords. This type of sword was the most common type in the Viking era and over 700 have been found in northern Europe.
Kiudsoo said that by 1991, eight more or less intact type H swords and about 20 fragments had been discovered in Estonia but the number has risen to about 100. The overwhelming majority of the Estonian finds have come to light on the country’s north coast, which lies by the most important remote trade route of the Viking era.
Sword Pommel, XI-XIII century from Läänemaa, Estonia.
Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.
In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:
[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …
The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.
The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.
