—
I officially kicked off mymission to get Laura rescinded from Harvard. First, I conducted some research into past instances of universities rescinding students’ offers of admission. The most common reasons were that the applicant posted something unsavory online, they were found guilty of academic dishonesty, or, in extreme cases, they committed a crime.
I came up with a plan. I would register a blog titledMusings of a Freethinking Columbia Student. For the author bio, I would write “Columbia senior & nonconformist thinker.” I wouldn’t include a name. Otherwise it’d appear too obvious that she was being framed, as obviously Laura would not write a politically controversial and perhaps cancel-worthy blog series under her real name. At the same time, I needed the blog series to still be traced back to Laura; otherwise, that would defeat the whole purpose of the project. I decided I would include details abouther life here and there in the body of the blog posts, just few enough personal details that someone like Laura would think that no one could trace it back to her, but just enough that a fastidious readerwouldbe able to narrow down who she was if they cared enough. And knowing what I had written for the content, there would certainly be someone on campus who cared enough.
There was another problem: if I wasn’t careful, the writing could be traced back to me, and everyone would discover that I was setting her up. Or worse, they would think thatIwas the neofascist, not her. Laura was basic and unworthy of Harvard, but she wasn’t stupid; when Harvard inevitably saw the blog post (because I would anonymously send it to them), she would deny that she had anything to do with it, and she’d probably hire some computer guy to trace the IP address of the actual creator. I was using the Wi-Fi network for Columbia students, which required me to log in with my ID and password. I admit I didn’t know much about computers, but I imagined that someone could trace the content back to me. To play it safe, I couldn’t enact any step of my plan on my personal laptop.
I remembered that some of the libraries on campus, like Butler, offered desktop computers for public usage. You needed to sign in with your student email address and password, but there were often people who would forget to sign out. I remembered this because one time some guy forgot to close out his porn. I could simply use someone else’s account, and with enough other evidence, it would appear that Laura was the one who had used that person’s account.
The next Tuesday I entered Butler and walked to the row of public computers on the third floor, ready to sit down at the first one that still had a browser window open. But to my utterdismay, all of them showed the log-in screen. No one had forgotten to log out. I almost screamed. I could feel my face turning red, hot tears of frustration welling up in my eyes.
But once again, I wasn’t ready to give up. I sat at a bench near the public computers, pretending to write an essay on my laptop, as I waited for someone to use one of the computers. About half an hour later, a short blond guy arrived and plopped down in one of the chairs. He looked vaguely familiar, like maybe he had been in one of my seminars freshman year. He was the type of person who looked simultaneously very young and very old: balding but with a baby face and a slightly protruding belly. He was wearing a button-down shirt covered with a V-neck sweater.
He took his laptop out of his bag. The screen was cracked down the middle, a streak of rainbow on each side. He repeatedly pressed at random on the keyboard but the computer didn’t react. He logged in using one of the public computers and pulled up a Google Doc. He spent the next forty-five minutes typing. I was too far away to read the paper he was writing, but close enough to keep an eye on his movements, waiting for the moment he would get up. I was tired and dehydrated, and I felt a headache coming on. But I couldn’t go home now. I couldn’t lose this opportunity.
He got up from his chair, and I felt a sudden elation that faded when I realized he was only walking a few steps to the printer. Regardless, I had an idea. I sat down at the computer next to his and typed in my ID. Then, I typed random characters into the password box. I pressed submit and the system responded with an error message. I made sure that by the time the blond guy came back, I was staring at the screen with anobviously frustrated expression. When he sat down, I swiveled to look at him, as though surprised by his sudden presence, even though I had been tracking his movements in my peripheral vision the entire time.
“Oh, hey there,” I said.
“Hey,” he responded. He too looked surprised by my presence. Or maybe he was just surprised that I was talking to him. Usually Columbia students didn’t chat up strangers at random.
Now that I was close, I could see the dark circles under his eyes, the dullness of his skin. One time, my laptop had also broken the same week I needed to write a paper for class. I knew he probably wasn’t in a great mood; at the same time, that meant he would empathize with another person in a similar situation.
“My laptop just broke, and now for some reason this computer won’t let me log in. I’ve tried resetting my password multiple times and it won’t work.” I gestured to the laptop, which still showed the “wrong password” message. “Do you know if you’ll happen to be done soon? Is there any chance you could stay logged in so I could just quickly finish my essay? It’s due tonight and I’m desperate, otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”
The man brushed back his hair and gave a loud sigh. At first, I thought he was bracing himself to reject my request, but fortunately, that wasn’t the case.
“Oh god. I’m in the same boat. My laptop broke today too.” He opened his laptop and turned the cracked screen toward me. “Fortunately, my log-in actually is working; otherwise I would’ve pulled my hair out. Anyway, happy to help. I just need like ten more minutes and then you can use it. Does that sound good to you?”
“Absolutely.” I thanked him and started doing some reading while waiting for him to finish.
Ten minutes later, he started packing up his backpack. “All yours,” he said. “Best of luck.”
—
His name was George. Whata nice, trusting person, George. But too trusting, it appeared. He hadn’t even bothered to log out of his email account, which was how I found out his name. George Reynolds. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve snooped some more, but I had more important tasks to complete.
I registered a new blog under a burner email and cleared the web browser history. I had already written the first post I would publish toMusings of a Freethinking Columbia Student. This was the one part of the plan that I had to do ahead of time on my personal laptop. To account for even the tiniest chance that someone would get access to my computer or to Google Drive and trace the draft back to me, I first uploaded a blank Word doc to a flash drive, then I wrote the blog post in that Word doc. I even turned off Wi-Fi while working on it so it wouldn’t accidentally sync to the Cloud without my knowledge.
The essay was a racist, antisemitic, and kind of sexist right-wing diatribe fashioned as serious intellectual thought. I knew that Harvard employed some professors with sketchy beliefs, so I needed to push Laura’s viewpoints a step further than what they still considered acceptable, far enough to justify a rescinding of her offer. At the same time, I couldn’t push them so far that people wouldn’t believe Laura had written these, or have them think they were meant to be satire. Of course, it wasn’thard to think of ideas. I just repeated the standard arguments from the academic papers and essays written by these ultra-right- wing thinkers, except elucidating their shitty beliefs by stating them bluntly rather than through dog whistles. In other words, saying the quiet part out loud.
The first blog post was titled “The Attack on Judeo-Christian Values at Columbia University.” The post started out innocently enough, tracing the origins of the term “Judeo-Christian” and detailing the commonalities in the moral teachings between Judaism and Christianity, praising how these values contributed to the Enlightenment, the rise of “rational” thinking, and the subsequent military and economic success of the “West.” Then, the post took on a more sinister note. “Laura” argued that the people who subscribed to postmodern ideas like multiculturalism, gender equity, and moral relativism were destroying the principles that made America exceptional, and that these very people were taking over college campuses, especially Columbia, which had always been a haven for left-wing activists but was now turning into a truly degenerate force that could undo democracy and capitalism and turn all of Gen Z into America-hating, gender-nonconforming, communist, Marxist idiots. Of course, nothing I had written so far was sufficient for my end goal; sure, if this got out, Laura would be treated as a pariah on campus, but Harvard probably still wouldn’t do anything out of a commitment to free speech or whatever.
The second half of the essay was where I really took it up a notch. The blog post argued that in order to reverse the brainwashing of these young, impressionable minds, Columbia should stop accepting students of color, with the exception of those who could prove their allegiance to Western civilization and thought.Columbia should also only accept naturalized citizens of the United States, as even a white student hailing from a more left-leaning country like the Nordics could infect the campus with ideals that may decay the Judeo-Christian foundation on which the school and country had been founded.
Of course, all of these arguments were bullshit, but I edited the content of the post many times to ensure it struck the right balance between extremism and believability. Now I just needed to also ensure that the readers, students infuriated by the contents of the piece, would successfully trace it back to Laura. I dropped in clues like “This semester, I’m taking a class called…” using what I knew about her course schedule, which I determined by cross-referencing her whereabouts with the course catalog. I wrote, as the author, that I hailed from a wealthy suburb of New York City and lived in the East Campus dorm. Also, I dropped in facts that only a Columbia student would know so no one would think the author was only a troll pretending to be a student. In the next two blog posts, I would drop in more details about the author. It would appear that the author was starting to get more careless, revealing personal information that would lead to her downfall. When caught, Laura would say that she couldn’t have authored the post; she had been a staunch liberal all her life. But that was also easy to work around. I simply included a paragraph about how the author was secretly a conservative, but always posted in support of liberal causes on social media so that she would fit in with her friends and peers.
But before I could upload the second and third blog posts, a security guard was tapping on my shoulder.
“Library closing. Sorry. You have to leave,” he said.
“But this library is open twenty-four hours.”
“There is always an area open at each hour of the day. That doesn’t mean every area is open every hour of the day. This area closes at eleven.”
“Can you just give me five more minutes?”
He pursed his lips and looked at his watch. “No, sorry. My shift ends in thirty and I need to wipe down these tables before then.”
