For the uninitiated (and/or our international readers), January 20th is the day President-elect Barack Obama officially completes his transition into the White House. Coincidentally, it’s also the day we kick George W.’s ass to the curb and begin the long, arduous process of burying him underneath the annals of history. Win-win!

On that day, millions of Americans—young and old—will gather around their television sets to watch history unfold before their very eyes.

However, if you’re from Harvard, don’t expect to see anything other than the back of your disgruntled classmate’s head, because you’ll both be stuck taking finals—thanks to Harvard’s antiquated, backwards, pseudo-Communist academic calendar.

The Crimson reports:

Over 2,000 undergraduates are set to sit for exams on January 20 for almost 40 different classes. Several of them who hoped to go down to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration have had to make different plans.

[…] On November 18, the day after he saw the final exam schedule, Jason Y. Shah ’11 formed the Facebook group “Petition for Make-Ups of Harvard College Exams on Inauguration Day 2009,” and within a week, the group grew to over 250 members. That day, working with Shah, Tanuj D. Parikh ’09 created an online petition of the same name. The petition now has almost 600 electronic signatures.

Fun tidbit, everyone: This Jason Y. Shah character was an intern at OTR over the summer.

It’s good to see he took the lessons in patriotism and free speech that we taught him and put them to good use.

Bravo, son. Make Papa proud.