The New York Post reports, “Heartless Harvard undergrads have mocked the brutal murder of a Yale grad student in a video for a student-run Web site.”

The humor site “On Harvard Time” features a video in which ostensible Yale undergrads sing about why they went to Yale, which is apparently because they didn’t get in to Harvard.

But, the Post reports,

One person blurts out, “What happened to that girl that got murdered and stuffed in a wall?”

The question refers to Annie Le, 24, who was killed at Yale last year, allegedly by Ray Clark III, a lab technician there.

Nice.

Here’s the video with the offending line edited out.

Even sans tastelessness, this video is sadly far from funny.

Instead, it feels more like a projection of Harvard students’ anxieties about why they went to Harvard than what it was intended to be, a spoof of Yale’s admissions videos, on the eve of The Game.

The New Haven Register features an account of the incident containing a response (via press release! Unsigned! Courageous.).

“In the video, the nationally covered incident was mentioned by an audience member and the admissions officer character promptly brushed over the question,” On Harvard Time said in its release. “Our intention was to comment on Yale’s guarded treatment of their crime problems. The humor rested in the glossing over of a significant event, and not in the event itself. The line was not meant to make light of the incident or those involved, but rather to mock the university.”

This is clearly untrue, for a couple of reasons.

One, by no account except that of On Harvard Time did Yale “gloss over” a tragedy.

Here, for example, is a news report about a concert held in Le’s memory by the Yale School of Music, to raise money for the Annie Le Memorial Fellowship Fund.

Two, the theme of the video is that New Haven is crime-ridden, not that Yale tries to cover up New Haven’s problems. (And, in any event, this was not a “New Haven problem”—the killer was allegedly a laboratory employee with a sick obsession.)

So, as apologies go, this one is pretty weak. Who will stand up and say, “It was my idea and my fault, I clearly didn’t think sufficiently about my attempt at humor and stepped over a line that I now realize was cruel?”

Finally, a small point that comes, I’ll admit, from my sense of undergraduate loyalty: While this video argues that Yale students cower inside their undergraduate colleges because the streets of New Haven are unsafe, the students involved seem unaware that just a year and a half ago, a young man was shot to death in a drug deal gone wrong inside a Harvard house.

I think I missed the memorial concert for that young man.

And, as the Crimson reported,

…administrators have remained relatively mum on the potential security flaws exposed by the incident and their response to them, citing ongoing criminal investigations.

…Despite Harvard’s silence….

Perhaps there is more transference happening here.

The Crimson appears to have written nothing about this incident.