Doors of Howe

The latest punishment for violating the Stevens Honor System has been doled out: a student, Jeremy Wilkerson, has been sentenced to opening the notoriously heavy leftmost front door of Howe. Doesn’t sound so bad? Well, here’s the catch: the door closes whenever the Wilkerson opens it. And then he has to reopen it.

Many students have decried this punishment as not only cruel but unconstitutional, citing the Thirteenth Amendment, which bans hard labor. When asked for his opinion, the President of the Honor Board said, “It’s just a door. How hard could it be to open?”

After polling over 100 students, this correspondent found that students, on average, report that they somewhere between agree and strongly agree (slightly leaning towards strongly agree) with the following statement: “the doors of Howe are heavy.” One student who asked that we keep his identity private called the doors “really heavy.” This task, by all appearances, takes a Herculean feat of strength.

Defending herself against claims that Honor Board members are “mercurial tyrants,” Sarah Hong, an Honor Board representative for the class of 2020, said, “I don’t know. I always thought of myself more as an Athena type of girl. Maybe Aphrodite on a good day. I prefer the Greek canon, anyway.”

Wilkerson admitted that he thought that he “kinda deserved [the punishment],” which was slated to last “for all eternity, I think.” He received the punishment for getting caught sharing a Chegg account with two friends. Wilkerson was offered a plea deal on the condition that he reveal the identity of his account-mates, but he refused. His honor, ironically, has since been lauded by students and faculty alike, and even President Farvardin reported that he was proud of finally having a student who was “not no snitch.”

Wilkerson said that it “sucks” whenever the door closes, and that now he “understand[s] how Syphilis [sic] felt” whenever he (the mythical figure, not Wilkerson) watched his boulder fall back down the hill. “That’s what I get for flying too close to the sun,” he said, heaving the door open for the 818th time that day.

Officer Bryant, the campus police officer stationed in the lobby of Howe, reported that while he was happy that Wilkerson was learning his lesson, he was also upset because the student was completely disregarding the “Please Use Revolving / Doors To Maintain / Lobby Temperature” sign.