After the recent election, you might think that I'm about to talk about politics. Nov. 2 was a great upheaval, a polarizing election, and we need something similar here at Brown. One of the greatest issues today is the fact that people on both ends of the political spectrum do not regularly engage in discourse.
At Brown, we are often hindered from discourse by structural failings of the University. There is both an obvious cause and an obvious remedy to this problem.
Microwaves. The lack of microwave ovens is the biggest hindrance to student discourse at the University. Think about it: When graduates talk about those great intellectual conversations they had in college, they often happen in places with food, not in dorm rooms or off-campus apartments. The most time-honored and traditional way to facilitate conversation is over meals. Early Christians and various Jewish sects recognized this. They threw out Jewish dietary laws because they believed it prevented people from coming together.
At Brown, we only have space for 4,800 students to live on campus at the most, and there are 6,000 undergraduates. There is currently only one microwave located outside of a dining hall for students to use, and it is not in a very central location — the Gate (Oct. 14, "Behind the balance sheet: an inside look at BDS").
There are students living on and off campus who are off meal plan. At lunchtime, students off meal plan must either bring a cold lunch or go home to eat because there are not enough locations where they can heat their food. The conversations they might have had never even begin, because students on meal plan are segregated from those without meal credits.
And beyond microwaves, the fact that a student without meal credits cannot bring his food with him into a dining hall to eat with his friends is absurd. Those groups of students in heated conversation after fascinating seminars splinter because a few of those students can't even enter the Sharpe Refectory or Verney-Woolley Dining Hall
There are two great things about this problem: it is both easy and cheap to fix. For all the students who want to bring hot lunches and dinners, install a dozen microwaves around campus. Bring the microwaves back to Faunce and put them at all of the eateries and food carts.
The problem of access to dining halls is equally easy to solve. Instead of swiping into the Ratty or V-Dub at the entrance, swipe to enter or exit the food lines, and institute unlimited swipes for a period of an hour or an hour and a half after the first swipe. Students on meal plan will still be able to run through the line 10 times to hoard chicken fingers, and their off-meal-plan friends can join them inside.
Dining halls at Brown aren't supposed to be like the elitist eating clubs at Princeton. There's no reason why a student who attends Brown can't sit in the Ratty, even if he or she hasn't paid $4,000 a year to eat there. That is why we are all at Brown and not at Princeton.
So, Brown Dining Services, live up to the promise of the University being an egalitarian institution. Will some students bend the rules and "steal" food for their friends? Absolutely. But many students are already doing that. They are taking five takeout boxes for their friends who aren't on meal plan simply because there isn't a place for them to heat up food they brought from home. Bending rules is a given, but that doesn't mean we should punish students who choose to live off-campus by making it incredibly difficult for them to share a meal with friends.
Providing a place for students who live off campus to heat their food and eat their lunch should be a priority for the University. Not only would it facilitate the intellectual conversations we are asked — and want — to have, but it would be an excellent use of the $600 fee that students are charged for living off campus.
I bet that it wouldn't take more than the fees from about 10 off-campus students to enact the changes I've suggested. Then, instead of friends wracking their brains to come up with a low-cost way of sharing a meal together, everyone at Brown would be free to use the facilities that are supposed to feed us and bring us together.
Susannah Kroeber '11 has spent the past year off meal plan discovering the hidden microwaves of Brown University departments.
