Get drunk, Harvard

Bad news, Princetonians: According to early reports, it appears that Harvard will take over the lone spot atop the rankings next year. Yes, the Cambridge university will once again be number one as, thanks to a new policy, Harvard stormed past the Polka Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Euclid, Ohio, to become the Lamest Place on Earth.

The first of these new college-wide rudes saw Harvard administrators achieve the unthinkable. They managed to come up with a policy that is actually more universally unpopular than grade deflation. With apologies to Dave Barry, the policy was pointed out to me by loyal reader Zach Goldstein '05, and you can read it on the Crimson website. For those of you who don't have 18 seconds to spare, allow me to sum it up:

At this year's football game between Harvard and Yale, there will be absolutely no alcohol allowed at the student tailgate. Seven "Rules of the Game," as the Crimson called it, were announced via an email sent to the entire student body on Sept. 19. Rule number four is the hardest to swallow, stating that "All forms of alcohol are prohibited from being brought in to the student tailgating area ... No one entering the student tailgate area will be allowed to bring in any beverages of any kind. No one may leave the student tailgate area with an alcoholic beverage. HUPD will enforce these regulations."

The email was written by Dean of the College Benedict Gross, who pointed to the excessive rowdiness of the 2004 tailgate as the reason for the new rules. The announcement was monumental, not only as the most regulated tailgate in the history of the game, but also as the first time in recent memory that a Harvard writer has actually cited a source.

Weeks later, fresh on the heels of tailgate-gate and toppling the Polka Music Hall of Fame, Harvard announced it was considering adding a religion requirement to its core. Administrators call the requirement "Reason and Faith," which is sort of like religion, except two words longer.

"Harvard administrators hope to better equip graduates for understanding and contributing to the new 'global village,' " with the new religion requirement, according to the Oct. 24 article in The Daily Princetonian. How exactly a devout Catholic taking a course on Catholicism contributes to worldwide understanding is still up in the air, though perhaps the student is expected to "contribute to the global village" by converting it to Christianity.

There are conservative waters flowing in the Charles these days. The prohibition of alcohol? A religion requirement? Who's in charge over there, the Women's Christian Temperance Union? Before Harvard officially changes its name to BYU-Cambridge, I want to give our friends to the north a piece of advice, as one younger, albeit superior-in-every-way, Ivy League brother to another.

As the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote, "Get drunk." Get drunk, Harvard. Baudelaire wasn't necessarily talking about alcohol, and neither am I, necessarily. What I'm saying is, right now Harvard is easily the most depressing school in the Ivy League. Harvard is like that friend who just got dumped and sits on the couch all day eating Chips Ahoy and watching "Blind Date" reruns. The fun tsar, the Larry Summers debacle, the plagiarism, the alcohol-free tailgates ... Has Yale finally convinced you that you suck?

So seriously, Harvard, get out of those sweatpants and get drunk "on wine, poetry, virtue, whatever." (That was Baudelaire again. See how I put quotes around the words I didn't originally write? It's not for everyone, I know). Let's see something uplifting come out of Cambridge for once, starting with the traditional booze-fest that is (what you refer to as) "The Game." Get drunk there, and then get drunk elsewhere. Poetry, virtue, whatever.

But maybe I've gotten ahead of myself. Maybe Harvard students shouldn't drink at their tailgates. Maybe they should read and study all day. Because you know what happens when you're intellectually lazy, when you don't care about grades, when you don't study hard? You end up at Brown. Or, in a slightly worse-case scenario, Iraq. Though they do sound similar based on those three things, don't they?

No, don't listen to John Kerry. Listen to me. I have a better shot at the 2008 presidency than he does, anyway. So get drunk, Harvard. Let the Polka Music Hall of Fame and Museum retake its rightful spot at the top of the rankings. But don't just do it for the polka — do it for yourselves. Because as they say, Harvard, you should always look out for number one. Or, in your case, number two. Jason O. Gilbert is a sophomore from Marietta, Ga. He can be reached at jogilber@princeton.edu.