University President Lawrence H. Summers had announced his resignation. Shock waves and disbelief reverberated around campus, but not in Dunster E Entryway. There, a group of eight sipped champagne and celebrated victory.
The scene was one of sublime Schadenfreude Tuesday night, as Radcliffe Union of Students Co-Chair Dara F. Goodman ’07 and friends toasted the announcement of Summers’ resignation. Laissez les bons temps rouler!
It looked like your average 21st birthday, or a rendezvous between friends to celebrate a job offer. Until you started listening to the party chatter.
“Down with the king!” one male Summers-hater shouted, as the revelers tossed back plastic flutes of cheap bubbly.
Another gleefully chimed in. “Harvard presidents last for decades,” she said. “This guy must have been pretty bad to last for five years. That’s like five minutes in Harvard time.”
It takes a lot of chutzpah to host a party in honor of someone’s departure, but host Goodman (she was quick to correct FM for saying “hostess”) has her reasons. “Larry Summers is not someone that I want to represent me,” she said. “He’s not someone that I want to represent Harvard, not someone that I want to represent the seal, Veritas.”
But Goodman did not only spit bile about Summers. At one point, she managed to get in a back-handed compliment to the Man. “At least his case of foot-and-mouth disease is not as bad as the nation’s president,” she said.
Unlike at President Bush’s typical rallies, however, there was a dissenting voice. The usual liberal-feminist coterie of Summers-haters was challenged by a lone Summers supporter who wandered in from across the hall.
This brave soul was buttoned-up in a simple ensemble he might have purchased at the Gap, in contrast to the alterna-duds others were sporting. Abstaining from the bubbly, he light-heartedly mocked the celebrants with a sarcastic take on a protest chant overheard at an anti-Summers rally. “Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Larry, Larry, go away!” he shouted.
“Larry spits the truth, yo,” he added.
–Daniel J. Mandel
