Princeton warns against traveling to Harvard amid ongoing political instability

The following content is purely satirical and entirely fictional.

On Monday, provost Jen Wrecksford advised Princeton students and faculty to avoid any unnecessary travel to Harvard during the ongoing political instability at the school. “As much as we’d all like to watch those clowns on the Charles tear themselves apart, it’s just too dangerous,” Wrecksford wrote in an all-campus email.

Harvard has rapidly declined into chaos over the last two months. The university president resigned in January and its undergraduate student co-president was ousted last week. On Wednesday, Harvard Police announced they had seized a cache of ski masks and night vision goggles, disrupting an alleged plot by the history department faculty to return former president Drew Gilpin Faust to power by force.

Multiple professors from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) we spoke to said that Harvard had become a failed state. Harvard’s interim president Alan Garber pushed back on this comparison. “At most, this is Northern Ireland during the Troubles,” said Garber in a written statement.

Newly-admitted students traveling to tour Harvard’s campus this week were instead put on buses and sent to nearby Tufts. The students and their families toured the Tufts campus and sat for PowerPoint presentations which showed them what Harvard’s campus would look like once things had calmed down.

The leadership crisis has required faculty members to fill interim positions.

With provost Alan Garber serving as interim president, Harvard Law dean John Manning is serving as interim provost. At the law school, professor John C.P. Goldberg is serving as interim dean, with professor Michael Klarman sitting in for Goldberg on the hiring committee, professor Martha Minow playing Klarman’s position on the faculty softball team, and professor Noah Feldman covering Minow’s role of Mama Rose in a student production of the musical “Gypsy.”

“I was born for this role,” Feldman told listeners of his podcast.

During Harvard’s presidential interregnum, the Board of Trustees has been desperately trying to find a candidate willing to take the job permanently. The University of Wisconsin chancellor who was fired for his secret porn career reportedly turned down the position, saying it would be “beneath his dignity.”

Whoever the next president will be, they will have to guide the institution through its current crisis, and boost morale for its over 20,000 staff members, 25,000 students, and 30,000 in-house attorneys.

When our reporters visited the General Counsel’s offices on Massachusetts Avenue, the scene was reminiscent of an emergency operations center after a natural disaster. Employees frantically tried to answer all of the incoming phone calls and sprinted from meeting to meeting. What we thought was the steady ringing of phones was actually a bell that rang every time the school was hit with a subpoena from congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). A middle aged man in a business suit cried in a corner while holding a box of documents.

“By our standards, this is a pretty quiet day,” said a young woman who urinated into a jar beneath her desk while dictating the terms of a legal settlement into her cell phone. “I might be able to make the 10 p.m. train.”