By Shea Stevenson
Recently, the part of the cafeteria in Boylan Hall that serves food was barred and, in its stead, there is now a vending machine in Whitehead. I hear it’s a nice vending machine. There is now no place to get coffee (just coffee) on campus, nor the campus pizza (which was pretty good, I thought!), and this new situation calls to mind the fact that, even at its post-lockdown zenith, this cafeteria was an evident shell of its former self.
The food section, tucked into its corner, had about twice as many stalls as they had vendors. There’s still that sign that says there’s a Starbucks inside, and there simply is not. Until this semester, there was construction happening on part of the room, so sometimes, you’d be serenaded with power drills and hammers. Now that the construction is done, there is a semicircular area in the middle of the cafeteria (more stalls for vendors that do not exist), which looks nice but is empty, aside from one mini fridge that stands padlocked full of water bottles.
Now that there is no tenable meal-food in the Boylan Hall Cafeteria, what’s left? Is it at least a pleasant place to sit? Sort of. There are worse places in the world to set your bag down. The gumball machine is cute and I like that parts of it seem modeled after some mutant all-American diner.
That being said, what on Earth is happening with the color palette of this room? If you’re reading this and you’re in the cafeteria, please take a quick look up and around. Salmon walls and floor, but some parts are red (why? Our color is maroon, I guess?), and some of the radiators and accents are black (not all), while the pillars are each a different pastelle tone of blue, yellow, and green (like they were erected at a different time under a different art direction). And last but surely not least, the transparent royal blue plastic space dividers finish triangulating a color palette that, if you look at it long enough, all cancels out and winds up blank. Plus, the booths are hard wood. I imagine that’s easier to clean (thank you, janitors), but if they were padded at all, I would be cutting this place a lot more slack.
As a CUNY student, I am used to playing it as it lays with regards to facilities being less shiny than one might imagine. Sometimes, though, you have to step back and ask how much you deserve because usually it’s more than what they’re giving you. I don’t want a fancy vending machine, I want a cafeteria! It’s weird that we don’t have a functional cafeteria here. A lot of schools have more than one functional dining hall. And I don’t just want cafeteria pizza. We ought to have some decent meals here – why not?
All of this is to say that with the closing of the vending section of the cafeteria, the wheel has fallen off the spoke. Even if they open it again next week, the fact that it’s so rickety in construction to begin with is disturbing and illuminates the fact that even when it was open, it was far from enough. But what can we do? Who can we blame?
Ever the optimist, I do imagine that the people in charge of Brooklyn College would like us to have a nice cafeteria and are doing what they can with what precious little they are given, even though it often does not feel like it. Thus, as one might imagine, it comes back to the funding from the state. With the modern institution of the American college engineered to lock millions of young adults into a lifetime of servitude-debt, CUNY (having once been free, being currently comparatively cheap) are at every turn strangled of their support. In the eyes of the state, Brooklyn College is a defective debt trap.
Until CUNY gets its due, and general funding for education is increased exponentially (a CUNY New Deal if you would), the cafeteria will probably continue to be bad. We will probably continue to not have enough paper towels in the bathrooms. We will probably continue to keep the coolest gate into the school closed (between Whitehead and Boylan, with the functioning bike pump (I know!), and baroque cast iron gate). It’s not like the city doesn’t have the money. We deserve the bare minimum: food and a nice place to eat on campus.