FRANKENSTEIN U. — They Swore It Was Just One Employee

by Vito Haeckeler, C-of-C-C Man-on-the-Street

*****Ask the Asphalt*****

You ever notice how it’s never Harvard that did it—it’s always someone at Harvard? Same castle, same lightning bolts, but the lab coat maybe gets to keep his tenure after he serves his time.

Former Harvard Morgue Manager Pleads Guilty To Trafficking Stolen Human Remains

Let me back up. You know that scene from the old Frankenstein movie—the black-and-white one, with pitchforks, torches, the whole village stomping up the hill? They didn’t wait for peer-reviewed studies. They saw the lightning, they heard the screaming, and they figured: time to ask questions in person.

That movie scared the hell out of me when I was five. My cousins dragged me to the original Frankenstein—the 1931 one, directed by James Whale. Thought I’d be fine. I wasn’t. It wasn’t the bolts in the neck or the lumbering walk. It was the face. That face. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I know them now: uncanny valley.

The stitched-together body didn’t scare me—what scared me was how wrong the eyes were. Not dead, not alive. Not angry, not kind. Just off. A mirror that didn’t blink right.

I guess I was ahead of my time in sensing it. The monster’s face—patched together from human parts but still inhuman—set off some primal alarm.

And yet, here’s the kicker: in the book, Mary Shelley made him a soulful creature. A sympathetic being full of longing and pain. She was a teenager when she wrote it, and the book’s pitched as the first great science fiction novel—but really, it’s about feelings. Grief, abandonment, craving for connection. It’s Gothic emo with a scalpel. More hormones than hydrogen. Less lab coat, more broken heart.

But nobody remembers that part when Harvard’s selling actual body parts.

Last week, I AImagined a photo that felt like déjà vu with a red hat on. A bunch of modern-day peasants—hard hats, camo jackets, yellow gaiters, some holding up pitchforks like it was 1815 and not 2025—marching on Harvard Medical School. Why? Because someone there was just convicted of selling human remains. Real story. Look it up.

An ex-Harvard Medical School morgue manager admits his role in the theft of human remains

Now, Harvard says something like:

“This was the independent work of a rogue employee and not reflective of our institutional values.”

Yeah? And I suppose Dr. Frankenstein was “moonlighting,” too.

Let me put it to you like this:

If your school’s basement smells like formaldehyde and there’s a price list for femurs, maybe it’s time to audit the ethics department.

But this isn’t just about one grotesque scandal. This is about what Big Education has become.

You remember the phrase—Big Oil? Big Pharma? Big Tech?

Well now we’ve got Big Ed. And it runs the same racket: promise salvation, deliver servitude. They convinced a generation that the only path forward was a six-figure college loan—offered at seventeen, signed in blood.

They teamed up with Big Finance to snooker kids into debt peonage, stamped it with university seals and utopian slogans, and smiled as the interest compounded.

And now? The jobs they promised would help pay those loans off?

Well, some of those are quietly being taken over by—you guessed it—AI.

I talked to a guy outside the Dollar General next to the parking spots designated for the Amish buggies(watch your step)—used to teach community college English. He said,

“I told my students to be critical thinkers. Now the software does that part.”

It brought to mind that twisted subplot from Adaptation—Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay, but his fictional twin brother Donald imagined the part where a literature professor moonlights as a serial killer. His method? Slowly slicing off body parts while spouting postmodern theory. His name? The Deconstructionist.

A parody, sure(?)—but now it feels like syllabus prophecy.

Here’s the point, straight from the curb:

When people feel like institutions have become morally unaccountable mad labs—where ideas override ethics, where education becomes predation, and knowledge gets sold like meat—they don’t wait for nuance.

They storm the hill.

And maybe that’s messy.

But maybe it’s also the last instinct left when polite society starts stuffing heads in boxes marked “Property of Harvard.”

—Vito Haeckeler

Man-on-the-Street, Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

“If the people are the ground, I’m the seismic report.”