President Bok said he hoped to convince both parties to agree to a cease-fire until talks could be held in the neutral territory of Boylston Hall. But because none of the scientists could find the building, the fighting continued.
"You guys in Biology think you're so quantitative. Bah. When's the last time you made a trigonometric substitution to solve a Gaussian wave packet without resorting to numerical methods?" said Weld Professor of Very Large Objects Barry Ahnn '57.
"Physics is a dead end professionally, you whiners," retorted Cabot Professor of Formaldehyde Arthur O. Pod '49. "It's the graveyard of academic careers."
Pod added, "The Physics Department is Der Spiegel Biology, because it confuses excellence with things German in the same manner as people who buy Der Spiegel from Out of Town News, although admittedly with less unction."
"What are your graduate students going to do when all the forces get unified, huh? I hear there's some openings at McDonalds for people who don't mind daydreaming for eight hours while engaged in sweaty and unimportant labor," shouted Wigglesworth Professor of Wiggly Animals Mike O'Kondria '63.
In a recent letter to The Crimson, a noted Sociology professor commented on the conflict: "You would think that Harvard professors would have something better to do than engage in this trivial interdepartmental bickering. We cultural relativists in the social sciences are much too mature for such banal jealousies. We recognize that all academic disciplines have their proper place in this institution."
Cease-Fire Arranged
After sustaining heavy casualties, the two warring departments finally agreed to an uneasy cease-fire when they realized the flare-up might drive impressionable first-years into a humanities field or--worse yet--chemistry.
Professors from both departments offered public apologies. Plasm and Spin issued a joint statement which read: "Hey, after you get tenure, it gets kind of monotonous around here. We were just trying to liven the place up."
Although William H. Bachman '92 concentrates in Physics, he feels no personal animosity toward Biology concentrators--except for the gradegrubbing pre-meds who screwed up the curve in Physics 15a.