Oh, Harvard and your “wit”! At Harvard’s Housing Day — where freshmen are assigned their houses for the rest of their undergrad careers — Leverett House was associated with t-shirts joking about September 11. As an email from Leverett’s faculty advisers, exclusively received by IvyGate, calls the shirts:

fake Leverett T-shirts [...] making a connection between our towers and 9/11.

The Harvard Housing Day website reads:

Each house has its own limited-edition Housing Day t-shirt (or sometimes better… get them polos, Dunster!)

The Housing Day t-shirts for Leverett — or fakes distributed by a rival house, it seems Leverett is claiming? — drew a comparison between Leverett’s Towers (one of which is pictured) and the, um, Twin Towers. Wow, topped even Yale’s “pussy” t-shirts this time, Harvard! Is this the legacy of the Lampoon — humorless, arch referencing of national tragedy? Parody is funny, but this is just boring and predictable. Say the administrators:

But we are also proud of the Leverett House Committees and students who have, year after year, produced shirts that have been clever but not tasteless, and funny without poking fun AT anyone.

There’s that Harvard spirit! The full email from Leverett administrators, after the jump.

We are very sorry that for some of you, the fun of this wonderful day was marred by a stupid and tasteless hoax in which fake Leverett T-shirts were distributed making a connection between our towers and 9/11. We have had many students at Leverett over the years who were touched deeply by the 9/11 disaster.  It would have been obvious to anyone with even rudimentary morals and decency that this immature hoax was cruel and inappropriate. Obviously, Leverett students and staff had nothing to do with this.

It is also worth saying that we have nothing directly to do with our actual Leverett shirts. We are simply proud to wear them.  But we are also proud of the Leverett House Committees and students who have, year after year, produced shirts that have been clever but not tasteless, and funny without poking fun AT anyone. That is indicative of the spirit of Leverett House.

We hope to see you all this evening at our Community Night dinner and the revels that will follow at 8pm.

Chief, Coach and Lauren

Leverett Masters and Resident Dean