Just in case the Harvard Crimson decides to nuke my comment on their “IncestFest” OpEd I thought I would share. I might just have been a bit testy.
Transgression without consequence is not transgressive. The name will stay along with the posing that it is hip, transgressive, and avant garde until incest actually resumes being transgressive in the part of America that Harvard students care about. When HR at major firms negatively flag Kirkland House residents as job candidates is when “IncestFest” will truly become transgressive. That will be about 5 minutes before it is quickly shut down.
The problem for you at that point is it will take some time for the stench to clear from your resumes boys and girls. Perhaps the faux cultural bravehearts might want to rethink “IncestFest” before things get to that.
It is not like the shareholders campaign would take that long to plan or that much money to execute. Anybody who’s read Saul Alinsky could set the plan up in an hour with time to spare. “Excuse me Mr. CEO, are the company’s recruiters at Harvard staying clear of anything to do with Harvard’s celebration of incest, the so called ‘IncestFest’?” HR, PR, and Marketing are already psychologically primed and preprogrammed to react harshly to the question.
The response rate on the fundraising letter in support of the campaign would be epic.
Further proof, as if any were necessary, that the “College Experience, is now 4 years of human reproductive biology in braille, applied zymurgy, and manufacture and use of psychotropic pharmaceuticals.
The only reason to pay a quarter of a million dollars to send your child to Harvard is the hope that the networking will see him through, or that he will marry the only child of a billionaire. Beyond that Harvard is a waste of time and money.
Is this really evidence of moral corruption, or merely a bad joke that doesn’t deserve attention?
Jonathan – A bad joke happens once. The people who did it are pulled aside and instructed on what kind of idiocy they just did, and it doesn’t happen the next year. “IncestFest” is not in its first year. This is more than just a bad joke. It’s a failure of feedback systems that establish cultural norms.