Martin Lomasney was a Boston politician credited with coining the phrase “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”
“Harvard Men’s Soccer Team Is Sidelined for Vulgar ‘Scouting Report’” (nytimes) suggests that this lesson was not absorbed by the recent crop of Harvard undergrads. (The article also shows the sloppiness of the New York Times. The Crimson article on which the Times article is based says that it was Google Groups that got the young men in trouble; the Times reporter conflates this with the (generally private) Google Docs.)
Has anything like this ever happened before in Cambridge? Yes, but it was at MIT and the students did not make their documents public inadvertently. Susan Gilbert and Roxanne Ritchie, who lived in my old dorm (East Campus), actually did have sex with 36 men (unlike the Harvard students who considered the possibility) and then wrote “Consumer Guide to MIT Men” with full names, and it was published in a 1977 issue of a campus weekly (MIT Museum nomination page).
A common thread uniting these events separated by 35 years is that both were the fault of men. In the case of Harvard it was the fault of men for writing the report. In the case of MIT it was the fault of a man for publishing the report (the women who had sex with 36 partners and wrote about them were put on probation; the male editor was suspended).
[Separately, now that these Harvard guys can’t play soccer, will they get so bored that they crack open a book and study?]