Picture the perfect waffle. Sitting on your plate, it is a golden lattice, decadent and gorgeous and dribbling with butter and real maple syrup. Every part of your waffle serves a function, the evenly spaced squares allowing for a crispy outside and a tender inside.
Now imagine another waffle. This one is different, because right in the center of it, someone has smacked it with a hammer and written their name. This waffle is not as good as your first waffle! The syrup goops up in the middle! The waffle falls apart when you try to move it! Even though the waffle looks prettier, the waffle is worse for those experiencing it.
Obviously, I’m referring to the new Dana waffle makers with the SLU logos, and to the credit of whoever designed them, they look great. However, they are emblematic of a larger problem we have here at SLU: the constant face-lifting of our campus at the apparent expense of other, more real problems.
The waffle-makers are perhaps the most innocuous example of this trend around campus, but there are plenty of others, like the new photographs that now adorn the walls of Dana or the baffling flagpole next to the Student Center that was raised last semester. Like the waffle-makers, none of these things are inherently bad, but all appear quite unnecessary, especially when there are so many examples of more pressing problems that students face every day.
Take my home of the Outing Club. The house is infamously dirty, and the blame for that is certainly somewhat the fault of students past and present. However, other problems are certainly not, like the lack of sprinkling systems in case of a fire, or the heating system that requires an open window to maintain a reasonable room temperature, or the plumbing from the bathroom that, no matter how often is fixed, always leaks sewage into the double below.
Even if we are to look for a superficial, less dire flaw, we can look to the paint on the house that flakes off in chunks. I know these problems are not limited to my house, as my stint in Rebert taught me similar lessons about heating and my classmates routinely talk of such things.
I know these issues of financial allocation are not limited to groundskeeping issues, as our dining center workers are paid far too little for their critical work that literally feeds thousands of people and too few of our professors are guaranteed continued employment due to the nature of their contracts.
I could not be happier to be a Laurentian and it is through this institution that I have been granted travel opportunities, learned things I know I will use every day for the rest of my life, and made some of my greatest friends. However, just like a waffle, a university is better if it does not add any unnecessary frills.
The frills SLU has recently acquired seem to ignore many student and stake-holder needs, so groups like these should be granted greater participation opportunities in decision-making around SLU.
Just as a waffle is held together by the integrity of its squares, a good university is held together by the inclusion of all its members, from students to staff.