One morning this fall, Dartboard awoke in his Pfoho single to discover that the College administration was going to eat his library. And his basketball courts. No space in the Quad, it seemed, was immune to the new strategy of rezoning; Dartboard half-expected to come home late some night and find the left three-quarters of his modest closet occupied by a handful of confused Dunsterites, doing their best to partake in Harvard’s newest nebulous “social space.”
Of course, the twinned eviscerations of Hilles Library and the QRAC were only the latest in a long string of indignities visited upon Dartboard since his kicking, screaming Quadding last March. Dartboard’s very means of escape from the erstwhile Radcliffe dorms is an existential insult: the Khruschevan reminiscence that is the Shuttle. Confronted each morning by the Shuttle’s dingy used-to-be-crimson paint job and dimly-lit interior, Dartboard has started to feel like a washed-up actor who, on an agent’s bad advice, has taken on an interminably recurring guest role on “That ’70s Bus.”
But Dartboard is an optimist at heart, and when life throws Dartboard lemons—or a hellish exile in the depths of residential Cambridge—Dartboard makes lemonade. Suddenly, packed in with the human freight of the Shuttle, Dartboard was struck by inspiration: If the top floors of Hilles can be converted from study to College-sanctioned tomfoolery, why not some portion of the shabby Shuttle?
The mad dash towards Johnston Gate for the last wheezing ride home would become an infinitely more pleasant experience if Dartboard knew he was running for a vehicle whose hind two-thirds had been converted into the Party Shuttle, a mobile throw-down that hops all the way from Currier to Harvard Business School and back. Disco balls, strobe lights, hydraulics and a thudding sound system would banish trudge and grumble from the Quadling’s commute for good.
Of course, the gruff men and women at 5-0400 can hardly be expected to outfit the Party Shuttle with a keg, but a flask in hand will ensure that even the University’s alcohol policy won’t get in the way of a kinder, gentler, tipsier trip down Garden St.—and it will surely help get through those awful morning cores. Forget harvardparties.com: shuttletime.harvard.edu is where it’s at.
—SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON
Members Only, Quincy House
Dartboard has noticed that Harvard students fighting inequality in the real world work to correct it here on campus as well. Hence a letter by Kyle A. Gilman ’02 last spring pointing out “the naturally unequal distribution of dining hall traffic caused by geography and quality of cuisine” prompted an outcry to make sure that residents of all Houses had an equal opportunity to eat well.
Just kidding. Actually, Gilman’s letter—which made the devastating point that a student opponent of segregated dining halls was a lowbrow “Quincy House resident”—didn’t even raise eyebrows. Adams House continues to enforce the members-only policy at its opulent dining hall.
A parallel example in the real world would be an exclusive country club vigorously keeping the riffraff out—in short, a perfect villain for activist crusades outside the Science Center. There’s a difference, though. Country club members have earned their privileges, and they pay annual dues. Adams House residents got lucky in a housing lottery, and they pay the same tuition as everyone else. This tuition then subsidizes their luxurious dining hall. Indeed, Dartboard struggles in vain to think of one way that the racket at Adams, in principle, is less nefarious than the capitalist patriarchies breathlessly browbeaten on leaflets around the Yard.
Of course, it cannot be stated enough that Dartboard is also a “Quincy House resident.” Adamsians take heart: Those of us uncivil enough to talk about dining hall segregation are all part of the riffraff. Just keep flogging that in your defense.
—LUKE SMITH
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