1. For the duration of Days on Campus, which is when I learned that John Jay’s interior looked like Hogwarts, reality was not strong enough to make me think that Columbia was anything other than paradise on earth. The people were brilliant, the setting superlative, and the architecture gorgeous, such that when it actually came time for a meal, the fact that the food would prove more difficult to swallow than my tour guide’s party orthodoxy was immaterial. Putrid sloppy joes mixed with wilted lettuce sat on my tray as I scanned the Great Hall for any Emma Watson doppelgängers. Finding none, I settled down next to a kid who looked more like Severus Snape.
“Hey there,” I said.
“Hey,” said he.
“Thinking about coming here next year?” I asked.
“I also got into Dartmouth,” he replied.
“Why don’t you go here?” I hazarded idiotically. “New York might be, uh, a more stimulating environment than Hanover.”
“No,” he replied with a clarity of vision that would take me several more months to develop. “Not at all.” But this was April 2006, I was still in high school, and I was going to one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world. Dartmouth? As if.
2. I took the red-eye from Seattle one late August night and got to New York in the morning. On two hours of sleep I somnambulated to Bed Bath & Beyond to get bedclothes, Van Am Quad to get refrigerators, and John Jay to get food. While slopping suspect pizza onto my plate, I noticed yet another salient difference from Hogwarts: if you want an illustration of how the income disparity in Manhattan rivals that in Namibia, walk into the John Jay galley circa 7 p.m. and observe the future lawyers, doctors, and business executives of America teeming around hapless janitors and heaps of hot-held mystery meat. Not to be outdone, I joined the throng, deliberately picked a random table to sit at (which was acceptable protocol for another month, until people stopped pretending they had friends and started actually making them), and made small talk with Christy from Connecticut and Harvey from Harvard-Westlake about high school, majors, and SAT scores.
3. After a fall semester as academically rigorous as taking the minimum up at City College (I had Frontiers of Science, music theory, 21 credits, and a shitload of free time), I found myself surprisingly busy in the spring. And now that the GameCube was firmly established in the Carman 11 lounge, I had better ways to pass the time than sitting alone for lunch in the dining hall, watching the walls close in on me. It was thus that take-out became my default means of eating: plastic containers filled with mixtures of omelets, muffins, and Lucky Charms. But for no reason whatsoever, you couldn’t get these containers on the weekends, so I resorted to blowing my parents’ money on a soggy sandwich, a bag of chips, and a Dr. Pepper (assuming they weren’t out).
4. When my friend and I maneuvered our way into the fashionable address of East Campus as sophomores, we pledged never again to submit to meal plans. But my roommate was seduced by the siren song of Housing and Dining—a Howler of an e-mail, so to speak—and it was thus that we found ourselves back in that mausoleum as upperclassmen, his card with 48 more swipes until it was exhausted. We ate our food, then smuggled five plates, 10 forks, a dozen spoons, and a number of knives out in our bag, destined for our East Campus kitchen.
Conclusion. Columbia became a residential college when it provided an ample amount of housing at market-competitive rates, but Housing and Dining has yet to do for Dining what it has for Housing. Like the dorms of yore, John Jay accommodates and can accommodate only the people who are forced to live there. Even if it is true that the University loses money on its first years, cutting costs by, say, shortening the New Student Orientation Program, instead of foisting a costly and limiting dining plan upon them, would make much more sense.
I still don’t understand why, given a choice, people go to John Jay—the food is foul, the ambience unpleasant, the cost somewhere between HamDel and Sezz Medi. The convenience externality is matched by myriad restaurants, and the social benefit disappears far before your two-term term expires. Yet I have friends who still blow 14 dollars on a bowl of cereal and a New York-grown apple. These same friends would never buy a sandwich at Milano for themselves, let alone me, and yet they swipe me in without a second thought, probably because their parents pay for it: adding meals, like funneling money into your newly useful Flex account, is a common and justifiable parental swindle.
But the rarity of this practice and the expendability of the swipes show how small the real value of a John Jay meal is, and this in turn shows how inefficient and nonsensical the University’s system has become. Renovate it, like a dorm, or close it: the time I got my money’s worth by taking cutlery along with my meatloaf was the only meal at John Jay that I do not regret paying for.
Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College junior majoring in English.
Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat runs alternate Thursdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com