Shopping Blues

YOU THOUGHT YOU were safe. Education is supposed to be one of those recession-proof industries like McDonald's and Hallmark Cards. You could never imagine one of them closing their doors. When things get really bad, that's when you need to drown your sorrows in a 49 cent burger and read a Shoebox Greeting from somebody who loves you--like your Mom, perhaps, who won't bug you about not being able to find a job or a summer internship.

Your four years of college aren't really preparation for the real world, she will attest. This is just an academic experience for the sake of an academic experience--pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

Yeah, right.

IHAVE SOME bad news for everyone trying to ride out the recession in Harvard's bastion of esoteric wisdom. The recession has hit Harvard, and at no time has it been more telling than during this Shopping Week.

We already know what cutbacks are like. We should have been forewarned at Reading Period. General Motors had to lay off 74,000 workers, but we lost a whole week. When they cut our schedule down to a measly five days, it was our sign that hard times have hit University Hall.

Who is at fault? Reagan, the Japanese, Saddam Hussein, Derek Bok? I'd say it was mostly MTV and CNN. MTV fostered our evil video generation, while CNN taught us that watching TV is sometimes more beneficial than going to class.

Harvard hasn't done much to inspire its students in this year of dire economic news. For a depressing view of the world, just look at the recruiting schedule for speakers at the Kennedy School. It reads like the sale chart at Filene's Basement--discount professors 50 percent off, former world leaders, an additional $10 off the red line price. Former presidential candidates get a free pair of socks.

So far, the Kennedy School, like half of the academic institutions in America, has offered an invitation to Mikhail S. Gorbachev--you know, the former leader of the former Soviet Union. If I were Gorbachev, I'd take my forty-dollar-a-month pension, settle into my little dacha in the Crimea and play with my grand-daughter. I wouldn't want to brave the Boston winter to explain to 24-year-old gov jocks how I failed as the leader of the world's other "superpower." Even Freud wouldn't recommend that much self-awareness.

Buddy Roemer, who lost the governor's race in Louisiana, but who isn't David Duke, recently accepted his invitation to be a fellow at the Kennedy School. The Institute of Politics only offered a speaking engagement to Duke. The former white hooder will get a nice honorarium for his repugnant propaganda, but no steady paycheck.

In the past, the Kennedy School has hosted such faded luminaries as Michael S. Dukakis and Henry Kissinger, who spent a memorable week last year doing the weather on one of those morning news shows. Who is next for a fellowship offer, John Sununu? Will he be teaching economics or public relations? Or, perhaps, ethics?

ALONG WITH the dreadful news from the teaching arena, the other effect of the recession on Shopping Period is the intense increase in competition. We get a taste of the overcrowded job market every time we try to get into a class.

As many people tried to jam into Literature and Arts B-39 "Michaelangelo" as crowded into the Science Center to see Dr. Ruth. We must have some kind of fetish for the discussion of naked bodies. Spike Lee had to move his first lecture yesterday to Sanders Theater, but that's fine since none of the people there will actually get into the class.

There is not much the University can do about overcrowded classes. In the long run, the reduction in necessary classroom space and professors will cut costs. The body heat generated by stuffing 1400 people into a room for 400 will save in energy costs and help the environment. And, with more students per class, there will be more sections (since the University has started enforcing the students per section rules).

That means more graduate students with stipends can survive the harsh winter. They will not, however, have many classes to teach once they finish their dissertations. But that's fine also, since whatever they write can be dutifully recycled in this environmentally aware society.

President Bush said in a recent campaign speech that the economy is in free fall. The state of Harvard is slightly better. We are pretty well-insulated as long as we take courses that no one has ever mentioned before. The best suggestion I can make is that students invest some of their time in the Harvard Bartending Course. It is the only career training that might mean anything once we graduate.

At least then we'll be able to drown our sorrows in some nicely mixed drinks.

Beth L. Pinsker '93, editorial chair of The Crimson, wishes she had just napped through Shopping Period