Columbia granted me four years as an undergraduate, and, in exchange, it asked for my soul. I have spent at least half a decade of my life working to be offered this deal, so I gladly gave it. This is by no means a piece expressing regret that I accepted the bargain offered by Alma Mater on the Hudson Shore. I do, however, have a few choice words to say about the very fine print—the meal plan.
As a freshman, I have no choice but to be on the meal plan. I understand this. While I often resent that my meals do not roll over from year to year so that I may have the experience (for lack of a better word) of dining in John Jay at my leisure, Columbia University Housing and Dining’s binding contract with my nutritional intake was part of this deal. I appreciate that this university is a business as well as an institution of higher education, and while I am a student and an intellectual product of my college, I am also engaged with it financially.
I can also recognize that I did not come to Columbia to sleep. Yes, I try to take care of my physical and mental health, but as I type this with laryngitis and a substantial knoll of work ahead of me, I find it necessary to remind myself that there are plenty of places I could be if I wanted to relax and take it easy for four years. The toll is part of the bargain, and I readily acknowledge that.
What really irks me to no end, however, is not the injustice of Housing and Dining or the labor-enforced fatigue but the fact that the two seem to have found each other and come together in unholy matrimony as a way of exploiting a loophole in my agreement with Columbia—there is a discrepancy in the cost of coffee at different venues on campus.
Yes, this is a trivial matter in the grand scheme of things. However, charging less for coffee—that fair nectar that is often the only thing standing between Columbia students and total collapse—at Cafe 212 than at the cafe in Butler seems both slightly misleading and a bit unfair. To paraphrase Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a student studying at Butler must be in want of caffeine, which comes in the form of a beverage that cannot be brought into the library from outside sources, sources which may be cheaper. Sound fair?
Furthermore, Butler, which is pricier than some of the other food and beverage establishments, has a campus monopoly on hazelnut. What message does this send to future captains of industry? Have there not been congressional hearings for the cornering of markets?
The most frustrating part is that there isn’t any competitor to turn to as a means of forcing Butler to lower its prices or to make 212 carry hazelnut. I am dependent on these venues because I am a Columbia student with a Columbia course load and dining dollars that Columbia made me buy.
It is not as if, however, I can actually use those dining dollars everywhere on campus. The Avery cafe—one of the loveliest places to meet, eat, and drink on campus—only accepts “real” money. While I can certainly appreciate only wanting actual currency as opposed to that which really only has any worth within our own personal ivory tower, I am frustrated that I cannot use the fake currency—currency that I was contractually obligated to purchase—wherever caffeinated beverages are sold.
I know that, in today’s economic climate (to use a global context) on a beautiful spring day with finals approaching (to re-enter the campus bubble), there is something remarkably insignificant about everything I’ve discussed here. I realize that. As with the meal plan and my own lethargy, I appreciate the necessity-driven cause. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here, and for this I don’t normally make unnecessary complaints about things that seem so small. Every day, I think about how lucky I am to have made that deal with Alma.
I’m not asking her to honor more than her part of the bargain. But at times when my life-blood (coffee) is concerned, I wish that she would help me—in this one, hazelnut-flavored way—to fulfill my part.
The author is a Columbia College first-year. She is an associate editorial page editor.