FLAT CREEK, Mo. For Lloyd Huggins, long-time President of the Tri-County College of Auctioneers, the current troubles experienced by Harvard University, America’s oldest institution of higher learning, are all too familiar.
“I got a nice M.F.A. in confessional poetry comin’ up next, gonna open the bidding at five-dollar-dollar who gonna bid five-dollar-dollar . . .”
“We had a sow get loose at a practice auction last fall, broke through the 4-H kids’ concession table, it was a real mess,” he says as he wipes sweat from his brow following a grueling oral exam. “I don’t know what I’d do if I had students fighting over Gaza in addition to picking up candy bars and chips scattered all over creation.”
Huggins is referring to the resignation under fire of President Claudine Gay for plagiarism following disastrous Congressional testimony in which she offered a tepid defense of Harvard’s failure to combat anti-Semitism. The resulting controversy and her replacement by Provost Alan Garber have rocked not just the school’s campus, but also the world of academia as a whole. “While celebrating our many successes and the celebrated role we have played in American history, we must acknowledge our shortcomings,” Garber said in a letter to faculty. “We haven’t won a ‘Beanpot’ hockey tournament since 2017, so we may have to lower admission standards for reasons other than affirmative action.” Huggins, by contrast, is sanguine on his institution’s ability to deal with repercussions from the current conflict in the Middle East. “Unlike Harvard, we never had a problem with Jews,” says Huggins. “Never had one enroll, so no problem.”
Garber: “Will the owner of the 2020 Subaru Outback with Mass. plate 44KG718IOWK239 please move your car, your license is blocking the faculty parking lot.”
“We’ll have you up and faxing again in a jiffy!”
Across the Charles River from Harvard, Lou Getsones, President of the Bay State School of Copy and Fax Machine Repair in Boston, says he’s willing to help the new president of Harvard in any way he can, but cautions that the problems higher education currently faces won’t be solved easily. “Our enrollment is way down with the coming of ’email,’” he says with a note of scorn in his voice for technological advances that represent an “existential threat” to his school existence. “If the President of Harvard wants to talk about balancing his budget, we’re eliminating one full-time professor of faxology, he might want to do the same with useless majors like Physics and English.”
Long ago, I used to think it was a bad thing that I never went to college.