Harvard or bust? A record-breaking 30,500 students have applied for admission to the Harvard class of 2014, a 5 percent increase over last year, the university said Thursday.

A Yale Yule Ball. The Freshman Class Council announced that the Freshman Screw on Jan. 23 will have a Harry Potter theme. Last year, the FCC changed its “Gone With the Wind” theme to “A Midwinter Night’s Dream” after the some students protested.

Stephen Colbert said on the air Monday that $20,000 was a small price to pay for the alleged Skull and Bones artifact that will go up for auction in New York next week. “Yes, it’s a bit gruesome,” he said. “But you should have seen where they stuffed the ballots before the guy died.”

A feast for the eyes. New Haven-based Chabaso Bakery, Atticus Bookstore Café’s bread supplier, won a silver award for its food packaging at an international graphic design and advertising competition.

Moment of silence. Thursday morning, history professor David Blight spoke to students in his “Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877” course about the crisis in Haiti following Tuesday’s earthquake. Blight quoted Frederick Douglass’s 1893 speech at the dedication of the Haiti pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair and asked students for 20 seconds of silence to reflect on the disaster.

Next stop: world domination. Steven Kryger ’10 notified Yale Debate Association members Thursday that the team rose to third place in the world rankings after a meet at Koc University in Istanbul over winter recess. The next World University Debating Championship will be held in Botswana in December.

This weekend, Bass café patrons will get some activism with their lattes. For the third year, civil rights-era film footage, taken from the 1987 documentary, “Eyes on the Prize,” will play on the public television in the Bass café throughout the day Saturday and Sunday.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1979 Tulane University professor Andrew Antippas was sentenced to one year in prison for transporting stolen Yale maps across state lines. Antippas was apprehended in Chicago in the spring of 1978 after he sold five maps — worth $20,000 — to a Yale alum.

Correction: Jan. 19, 2010

An earlier version of this Cross Campus erroneously reported that the Black Student Alliance at Yale protested last year’s Freshman Screw theme. In fact, while BSAY held a discussion about the proposed “Gone With the Wind” theme, the group did not formally oppose it.