If you attend Harvard, a rat may poop in your backpack. “The next morning, my roommate — after we first saw the rat — the rat got into her zipped backpack, with a zipped pouch inside with snacks, and then shat in her backpack,” recounts a student quoted in the Harvard Crimson. She’s not alone:
When Kaitlin M. Caughman ’27 woke up in her Massachusetts Hall dorm one morning last December, she found an unexpected visitor in her bed. “I roll over to go back to sleep, and it’s on my bed. I come face to face with the mouse,” Caughman said. “Less than a foot from my face.” Caughman immediately began to take preventative measures such as cleaning and discarding food — but has still seen “upwards of six or seven” mice in her room this semester. Ahead of midterm exams, she’s resorted to sleeping in friends’ dorms for several nights to avoid rodent-related disturbances….Though several freshmen said they have seen mice in their dorms since early last fall, many said they noticed an increase in recent weeks.
Soham Gupta ’27 said he found a rat upon returning to his Canaday Hall dorm after spring break. “I open the door to my bathroom, and then a rat comes out of there, basically scurrying out,” Gupta said. “I did not shower that night.”
Hollis Hall resident Diane Sun ’27 awoke to “squeaking and the sound of crunching” just before making her first mouse sighting after spring break. Sun and her roommate took action, throwing away food, filling in holes with cardboard, and covering their room in peppermint oil. Their countermeasures were unsuccessful.
“The next morning, my roommate — after we first saw the rat — the rat got into her zipped backpack, with a zipped pouch inside with snacks, and then shat in her backpack,” Sun said….Despite an increase in traps and student efforts to mitigate the issue, several freshmen said they continue to see rodents in their dorms. Canaday resident Noah G. Plattner ’27 said none of the traps in his suite were effective, barring one “traumatic” catch.
“One of the traps worked partially, so it injured the mouse and she crawled under my roommate’s bed, and my roommate had to finish her off with a bottle of mouthwash and he just slapped her until she exploded — disgusting, traumatic, actually just horrendous,” Plattner said. Plattner has also seen mutilated mice in other students’ traps. “I came to my friend’s dorm, and she was like ‘Oh, do you want to see the half rat?’ because the trap had snapped the rat in half….
A Harvard library book was bound with human skin.
In other news, a Harvard fellow faces a long prison sentence for trying to overthrow a genocidal regime.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay was forced to resign in December after most of her meager published work turned out to contain plagiarism. As Tech CEO Steve Mur notes, she was guilty of “50 pretty clear-to-the-eye examples of plagiarism which would have gotten students kicked out, including ones that at least two original authors feel was academic plagiarism.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported that there were “dozens” of instances of plagiarism in Gay’s academic work, even before a January 1 report revealed additional examples of “duplicative language without proper attribution,” as Harvard’s governing body euphemistically referred to Gay’s misconduct. Harvard’s progressive student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, defended Gay “until the end, writing on Dec. 31, ‘President Gay Plagiarized, but She Should Stay. For Now’”.
