When the hippies attacked, you could see the Hennessy administration at its trademarked worst.

There was Maureen Powers, who once lectured me about traffic patterns in the quad, before admitting that she had no statistics and didn't know what the Quad looked like. (Maureen: it's square-y.) She was the bathroom monitor. She quietly read a newspaper and refused to let the hippies use the toilet, like some grade school teacher making a horrific example of the class rascal. "We are prepared to pee in our pants," one hippie wrote on Sweat Free's live blog. Thus does civilization fall.

And there was Nanci. Oh, Nanci, what a time we've had. People tell me that you think I've made this year hell for you. Considering that you've made the last four years hell for me and everyone I know, I'd say we're pretty far from even.

The police handcuffed the hippies and took photos of them, while the audience cheered and jeered. I strolled over to Ms. Howe, who was looking on from the sidelines with a bemused look on her face. Whether it was amusement or resignation or confusion, humanity must ever ponder.

"Hey, are you Nanci Howe?" I said.

"Yes." She shook my hand.

I said my name. She pulled her hand back. Smiling, quite sincere, I congratulated her on another job well done. "I didn't arrest them," she insisted. "I'm not responsible for everything bad at Stanford."

Let that be the career epitaph for all our administrators: 'It wasn't my fault.' No one is responsible for everything bad at Stanford, because no one ever tries to do anything good at Stanford. And whose fault is that? Where was the man who is supposed to bring us together? Where was our leader on this apocalyptic day that saw 11 students carted off in chains?

He had another appointment, retreating into his web of bureaucracy like a loathsome cave spider frightened by the coming dawn. Because President John Hennessy is scared of hippies.

John, you goof, be a man! Use logic! Explain to them that sweatshops, morally repugnant as they might be, are good for local economies. Maybe that's not true, but a lot of economists think it is true, and they are smarter than the hippies. Hippies do not understand economics unless it involves rainbows and fairy dust.

It's not hard to make hippies look stupid. It is almost impossible to make them look noble. But they looked like rock stars when the handcuffs went on.

In a year with at least five apparent suicides and two imposters and fewer parties than ever, a year in which the general feeling among the seniors was not "What a time we've had!" but "How much worse can it get?", the attack of the hippies was one more miserably executed operation by the Hennessy administration. What an atrocious cavalcade of dunces, guilty bystanders in the slow death of Stanford's soul. John, Nanci, Maureen, Jeff, Morris, Anne, Jane, Nate, Julie, Greg: I'll give money to Stanford only when you all finally leave my school.

Pip pip, kids. See you at the reunion.

Darren Franich wrote "Gaieties," lived in Berlin, joined a fraternity, fell off his bed onto a glass table, made friends, made enemies, partied, studied, played Smash Brothers, occasionally managed to piss off the right people, and will graduate as one of Stanford's first class of film majors. Enough for today. Email him at dfranich@stanford.edu.