In August 2021, Biden’s political fortunes fundamentally changed. To those in the administration, it became clear that this late-summer snafu—just two hundred days into his presidency—would mark the end of his “honeymoon period.” The polls show that Biden’s approval rating hasn’t recovered since.
When the president decided to pull out of Afghanistan that August, he likely did not anticipate the impending logistical nightmare nor subsequent public backlash. Ending an unpopular war that cost taxpayers trillions should improve any president’s popularity. But in execution, the withdrawal was no “Wilmington Cakewalk.” Instead it was a “Kandahar Doozy,” proving irreparably consequential to his popularity and his presidency. One could say that prematurely pulling out ended Biden’s honeymoon.
God-Prof. Blitzstein once told me that “the nouns change, but the verbs stay the same.”
And so today President Claudine Gay faces a similar dilemma, brought on by yet another administrative and logistical nightmare: there are simply too many Monday-Wednesday classes. Students are spending countless hours meeting with both advisors and peers to search for classes that do not overlap.
One 25-year-old duper-senior (double-super senior) said he “has not seen anything like this” in his seven years as an undergraduate at our institution. Rumor has it that SFFA (Students for Forthright Agendas) will be filing a case in the Fifth Circuit.
Even the naysayers must concede that in scope and scale, President Biden and President Gay’s fiascos have remarkable similarities: at the time of the withdrawal, 8,000 U.S. personnel were stationed in Afghanistan. There are currently 7,000 undergraduates at Harvard College. Biden’s withdrawal caused C-17’s to scramble over the skies of Kabul; Gay’s blunder caused students to scramble for classes. Biden’s pull out occured around day 200 of his presidency; Gay’s scheduling apocalypse roughly 200 days after she was announced as Harvard’s president. “Joseph Biden” and “Claudine Gay” both have 11 letters.
While we don’t yet know the full fallout of the FAS’s scheduling catastrophe, we do know what happened to President Biden’s political fortunes after the Afghanistan withdrawal. And the question on everyone’s mind: will the same happen to President Gay?
Chuck Stone ’69 writes satire for the Independent.