There has been a very minor controversy at Harvard this year, and of course, we want in. The question is: who gives the best tours of Harvard’s campus? The drug-addled Crimson Key Society or the total weirdos of Hahvahd Tours? Obviously, the answer is us. Though we’ve only given one tour before—to our foster parents on junior foster parents weekend—our competitors’ shortcomings are so obvious that we can’t help but intervene. These idiots think that just because they’re taking folks around a seventeenth century institution,- it’s fine to use tour technology of yesteryear. We have one question for these “entrepreneurs”: where are the SEGWAYS? And why bother speaking over the crowd when you can just relay points of interest via Bluetooth headsets?
Aboard our future-scooters, our tour starts at Harvard’s fourth pre-professional school, the Divinity School. Sure there are plenty of trust falls, but the Div school isn’t your garden variety bible camp. The real meat of the program lies in its labs, where religious scientists experiment with pressing moral paradoxes, like how to turn gays into straights. Scholarship proceeds in a most efficient manner: while Widener wastes trillions each year on books, Andover library gets by on a few donations from the Gideons, a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, and twenty DVDs of Battlefield Earth.
Next, we lean in the direction of our next stop, the John Harvard Statue. Unbeknownst to other tour-givers, the statue has more than three lies. The fourth fib is that John Harvard founded the school. In reality, Derek C. Bok, peace be upon him, founded it when he wrote the full contents of truth—“Ve Ri Tas”—on golden plates. Soon after that he moved to Utah, started Brigham Young University, and took his eleventh wife.
The only real statue that matters is of B-k, but the school hid it behind Emerson Hall to ease the traffic of the thousands of pilgrims that visit daily. And the likeness is a double miracle. Not only is it one of those “weeping” statues, but it is the only one in the world that actually lactates from its pure bronze nipples. We suppose it’s ironic that such an ancient man is in possession of these two potent fountains of youth, which squirt an elixir so sweet that it can instantly defeat even the most belligerent seasonal colds.
Tilting our way across Quincy Street we come upon the Barker Center. Here, students can take creative writing courses with luminaries of fiction such as Jamaica Kincaid, Steven Pinker, L. Ron Hubbard, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At this point, we will break for lunch. We usually recommend the best bacon cheeseburger in the square, the “Alan Dershowitz” at Bartley’s. Before breaking bread, we make sure to lead the group in a good ol’-fashioned Harvard prayer, so we face the B-school and genuflect five times to the gods of mammon and usury.
Of course we would find it incredibly sinful to take direct compensation from our tours. Instead we encourage our followers to increase their karma by giving alms to the shamans in front of Our Lady of Au Bon Pain and Temple CVS. But we’re no frugal Franciscans: we picked up some tips from a B-school case study we found floating in the reeds by the Charles. Once we pack the tour group back on the Fung Wah, we go around to those same illusion priests and collect tithe times three, a cool 30 pieces of silver.
God we love the infallibility of religion.
