Entitlement In A Bottle

These are serious times on our nation’s Ivy League campuses. Dartmouth and Penn are dealing with their own respective crises, while Columbia invited the Iranian President to enlighten the world on the non-existence of Persian gays. Across the river at Harvard, though, they’re in the throes of by far the gravest of controversies. The University has decided to stop buying booze for undergrads.

We know. Shocking. The grisly details are thus:

Interim College Dean David Pilbeam decided to pull the plug on funding for Undergraduate Council Party Grant program, which doled out $1,750 per week in support of student revelry.

Apparently Dean Lamebeam feared the money was being used to buy alcohol for underage drinkers and resulting in general binge drinking. Preposterous. Little did the crusty Dean know, by assaulting Harvard students’ sacred right to be provided with booze from their university, he was adding kindling to a fire in the soul of every Harvard Man and Woman.

The Crimson, the Harvard student daily, has provided breathless coverage:

“Few administrative decisions have sent shockwaves through the undergraduate community like Interim Dean of the College David Pilbeam’s announcement on Tuesday that he was terminating the system of party grants run by the Undergraduate Council (UC),” declared a staff editorial.

Thankfully, the student government would not stand for this tyranny. In what the Crimson described as “an impassioned rebuke to College leaders,” the school’s Undergraduate Council voted unanimously to continue funding the party grants with the money already sitting in its coffers. (Can we dwell on this a moment? There’s something called party grants?).

In retaliation, the University has decided to freeze all UC funds. This according to the Crimson, “amounted to one of the greatest challenges to the UC’s prerogatives in the student-elected body’s 25-year history.”

This story, quite clearly, is ongoing. Godspeed Men and Women of Harvard. Godspeed.

Nota bene: The good folks at ivygateblog.com have been all over this, including posting this video of a particularly outraged chap.