On Feb. 6, Barack Obama stood in the auditorium at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis and outlined his plan for making two-year community colleges free. One reason he wants to do that: colleges have gotten too luxe.
“These days I hear everybody is looking for fancy gyms and gourmet food and really spiffy dorms,” Obama said.
Hey! Could he have been talking about us? The cafeteria in the University Center just recently started serving osso buco. The dorms in the upper floors of the center are nicer than most New York City apartments. But do we really have one of those “fancy gyms”?
Actually we have three, one each in Kerrey Hall, Stuy, and Loeb. (If you live at 13th Street, you can place a request with central housing and gain access to the dorm gym of your choice.) But for the rest of us — and here’s the rub; this part is, for lack of a better word, bullshit — we can only use New School facilities if we are signed-in guests of a student living in that residence hall, and our hosts must stay with us at all times.
Remember when they first announced the University Center? They were so excited to tell us about the “Event Cafe” (still not open, two years later), the “Communicating Stairs” (open, obviously — they’re just the stairs in the building — but what’s up with this nonsensical name?), and the Center for Student Success (again, open, on the fourth floor, but why is this a specific place? Shouldn’t our whole school be a “Center for Student Success?”). They sent email after email, a constant barrage that was aimed to excite. And it worked. They talked about the basement, which on L1 would have computer labs and on L2 would have, among other things, a gym. I was excited to get in shape. I wanted that gym.
So, when yet another email would come, I would open it, scan it quickly, and glean whatever pertinent information I could. I guess I never looked that closely, because I never noticed that the perks of L2 — the music rooms, the lounge, and, most importantly, the gym — were closed to students who don’t live in Kerrey Hall.
But then, that water main broke and the basement flooded, and L1 and L2 were ruined. So, I joined the McBurney YMCA for a reduced New School student rate of $60 a month.
A year later, on Jan. 26, after paying $720 for the privilege of using sweat-covered elliptical machines, I got another email from President Van Zandt. This one, whose subject line read “Campus and Facilities Highlights: New This Spring,” seemed like it was my ticket out of the communal locker rooms and showers. In the email, Van Zandt said the basement was open. I didn’t read it that closely. I was too excited.
I went to school that day about an hour early to check out the basement. It was still mostly unfinished and completely devoid of human life, save for one sad and bored looking security guard. I asked him where the gym was. He smirked and told me I’d have to go back up, out, and around, to the residence hall entrance. I waited for the elevator for what seemed like forever (seriously, can someone explain what’s going on with those elevators this semester?), walked out and around, and asked the security guard at Kerrey Hall to let me go to the gym. He laughed in my face and said, “No.” But now, a month later, the school is thinking about finally opening the gym to all students.
Obama’s college, Occidental, didn’t have a cafeteria like ours. Instead of bone marrow, the students ate something they jokingly referred to as “roast beast” because they couldn’t identify what kind of meat it actually was.
They did have one thing we don’t. “Let me tell you, when I was at college, we — the college I started at, Occidental College, it did have a gym,” he said. “But like the weight room was — it was like a medicine ball and you had — (laughter) — I mean, it wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t state of the art.” At least you had a gym, Barack. How am I supposed to grow up and become the President of the United States if my college doesn’t even have a gym I can use?