Space Occupants

Life in Harvard Yard has progressed greatly since the “Occupy Harvard” fiasco “came to an inglorious end,” as Professor Jacobson put it in his post commenting on Free Harvard‘s hilarious video of “Occupy Harvard” being blown away and carted off by Harvard workers as junk.

A little over a year ago, the portion of Harvard Yard directly in front of the John Harvard statue featured a motley collection of plastic-covered structures. I am pleased to be able to report that a much classier structure now dominates the Yard.

Yesterday, in the aftermath of a major snowstorm, some enterprising students erected a fort constructed entirely of snow and vast numbers of empty beer bottles.  And unlike “Occupy Harvard,” which despite its name was often left unoccupied (see the 2011 posts on this blog), these students actually manned the fort!

You be the judge of whether the replacement of the “Occupy Harvard” structures with a beer-bottle fort is an improvement.

Here is a blown-up portion of a photo posted on this blog on December 18, 2011 (full photo here), showing the “Occupy Harvard” encampment in front of the John Harvard statue (looking east to the statue):

As always, for a full-screen version, just click on the photo.

Here is roughly the same view yesterday, of the front of the beer-bottle fort which now dominates the Yard in front of the statue:

And just to add a bit of color and context, here are a few other photos of the fort, and of the students working on it, taken from various points around the compass.  They did a better job, and seemed to be having a lot more fun on the project, than the “Occupy Harvard” students ever did!

Update (Feb. 13):  Many thanks to super-blogger John Sexton for covering Harvard’s new beer-bottle snow fort, in a post on Breitbart.com in which he makes this apt comparison:

There won’t be any signs touting anarchy, praising communism or offering dire warnings about the dangers of Monsanto. No marches full of rich hipsters chanting slogans against the rich. No tedious general assemblies. No leaders of the “leaderless movement” camped out in a warm building nearby. No public urination or dumping of human waste. No scuffles with police. No fist fights, no stabbings and no camp security warning people not to involve police. No sexual assaults. Women need not build a separate beer-bottle-safety-fort nearby. And I suspect no one involved will be using spare bottles to make Molotov cocktails. In short, no Occupy.