6 CommentsGuest Bwogger Emma Melnikov has the inside scoop on the shock caused by the exasperating search to find a place to sit and eat your dinner at John Jay.
JOHN JAY DINING HALL, NYC: After awkwardly fumbling to simultaneously pull out his Columbia ID card and scroll through 500 photos to find his COVID-19 vaccine card, freshman Zlatan Diodutus Lyon IV finally stepped into the John Jay Dining Hall on Wednesday night, slides on his feet. With three-day-old Blue Java coffee and a mint he found at the bottom of his bag being the only contents in his stomach, he zeroed in on the kill: Wilma’s Grill. Our protagonist trekked through perilously slippery floors waxed in cherry Coke and ice, violent winds raging from the East, and powered through the thick smell of reheated clam chowder. Eyewitness reports claim to have seen angels descend from the heavens as the plate of shrimp tacos with mango salsa and a massive glob of sour cream at long last touched his fingers.
Here, my dear readers, is where our hero’s success crashes and burns harder than the 2019 Cats film. With sweet and savory victory in his hands, he stared out into a dining hall more crowded than the Friday night 1 train before 14th street. But nonetheless, the brave freshman plunged into the jungle. He scoured for an empty chair, later recounting how several students harnessed the tears of the weak and hungry to speed walk to the nearest butt-less seat. “Absolute savages. There was no mercy in their eyes. They must’ve learned how to do that in Gen-Chem,” Zlatan told our local reporters, shaking like a cicada in a bright orange shock blanket. “I’m lucky to be alive.”
Zlatan continued to inform us that when asked if the seat next to them was empty, a group of girls with plates cleared in front of them scoffed and threw a piece of panko-crusted salmon at him. “They didn’t even look up from their phones!” he cried.
Starting to give up after being hissed at by a group sitting on a window ledge, Zlatan stumbled upon a man squatting in a corner aggressively waving him over while hurriedly spooning mouthfuls of chia seed pudding into his mouth. “He told me he’d been there for over an hour and a half and handed me a message scrawled in ketchup on a napkin asking me to join the uprising against the greedy seat-bourgeoisie,” Zlatan said. “Then he screamed a quote from The Iliad into the corner as he shoved his entire hand into his pudding and reached up crying to the gods. Great guy though, we’re grabbing coffee on Sunday.”
Students from all over Columbia have reported deeply troubling encounters with the lack of seating in John Jay Dining Hall similar to Zlatan. Some have even claimed to suffer from intense muscle fatigue, darting eye syndrome, and in severe cases, death (spiritual of course). We strongly urge readers to consider getting their dinner during “off-peak hours,” even if eating dinner at 4 pm makes you prone to other elderly tendencies like calling people “whippersnappers” and texting with one finger. More to come on this developing story.
The Johnathan Jay Hall via Bwog Archives
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6 Comments
@Alum This is why the school cannot and should not increase enrollment. There is already a huge lack of space on campus that students cannot even find a table to eat or study. If anything, to improve student experience, the classes should be made smaller.
@Current Student The admissions rate at CC and SEAS last year was like 3%. That is an unmitigated moral failure. A lot of very deserving students will be robbed of a world class education if the University does not figure out how to dramatically increase enrollment.
Yes, alumni benefit from the branding exercise that is admissions exclusivity, but at the cost of literally hundreds of thousands of smart and capable students over many years. It’s the same argument you hear about housing policy. Everyone wants to solve the homelessness, but nobody wants to increase the supply of housing in their neighborhoods. It’s bullshit performative liberalism, and it is, frankly, unbearable.
We need to find a way to build new housing and dining halls, expand into different parts of the city, and provide more students with more opportunities. Closing (or further restricting) the gates at 116th and Broadway is not a solution. It is an excuse to artificially inflate the value of your degree. Let’s not pretend otherwise. I don’t know when you graduated, but I promise the admissions rate was not this low. Let’s maybe work to afford prospective students that same benefit.
@Anonymous Yeah, tell that to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford. Harvard’s class is over 100 students smaller than it was in the 1980’s. No Ivy has increased its student body more than Columbia, the one with the smallest campus. CC and SEAS were 700 in a class in 1980’s, now over its 1400. That does not include GS that has quadrupled.
@Anonymous moral? According to whom?
No one “deserves” anything.
@Anonymous There is no way to “solve” the selectivity problem by expanding enrollments. The biggest expansion that can even be imagined given the current overcrowding is perhaps a 30% growth in enrollments, and that would only move the selectivity from 3% of applicants to 4% of applicants. It’s like claiming that overpopulation can be solved by shooting people into outer space: you would need billions of rockets for that.
@Anonymous Sir this is a Chili’s