It appears that the administration has finally let the chips fall. The budget cuts are out. Much like our friend Bob Barker, FlyBy lets you know if each cut is a winner, or worth sending home.
It's 8 AM, and you've just rolled out of bed to make it to that 9 AM intensive language class. No morning haze allowed: you will translate, speak, or spout verb forms and do it with a smile. Before 9 AM, though, you may be groggily walking through your House's tunnels to the dining hall to wolf down some combination of eggs, sausages, and bacon. Sure, it isn't healthy, but since you probably stayed up till 4 AM memorizing those verb forms anyway, health has become irrelevant at this point.
But next year, unless you're willing to trek over to Annenberg, the only hot stuff to greet the eye is going to be hard-boiled eggs--even though many 9 AM class sufferers and those athletes (who just so happen to have to wake up 3 hours earlier and be 10 times more intense) may need something a little more exciting to start the day. Without the draw of bacon and potatoes to get us up in the morning, we might as well just stay up late to do homework and grab that Red Bull--especially with newly enhanced brain breaks! All the athletes who wake up before dawn will also find it that much harder to beat Yale.
Students protested by swiping into breakfast en masse this morning in the House dining halls. But before that, almost every House list has had a massive chain about the cut to hot breakfast. Some gems after the jump:
Quincy
yes, let's take away harvard students' breakfast food and then, to make up for it, give them NONFOOD!
i'm just glad they didnt cut those free advising fortnight teeshirts from the budget that would SUCK
Lowell
Cutting a real breakfast is like saving on a clothing budget by buying shiny new sneaks but going shirtless, or cutting vehicular costs by filling up on premium gas while refusing to change the oil, or slimming down a office budget by cutting all paper while beefing up the highlighter order.
1. It's hilarious that the majority of people participating in this conversation are graduating and should therefore be outside enjoying the beautiful weather, instead of worrying about hot breakfasts that you wouldn't be eating regardless.2. Who cares.. people are being fired -- 'cutting proctors makes sense, but damnit cutting my morning bacon is simply barbaric!'..
3. Cutting shuttle service.. fucking sucks.. They are cutting the night shuttle service by hours. This is both a huge annoyance for quad folk AND a safety risk, given the apparently large number of lecherous Harvard men who wait in the wings on weekend nights. This is probably a lot worse than the hot breakfast cuts, though I'm sure somebody will have some stupid snarky reply about how 'THE QUAD SUCKS BRO.. BUT YUM I LOVE PANCAKES,' etc.
Mather
They are taking away a staple of my diet, or, more accurately, making mejump through hoops in the morning to get a crappier version at Annenberg.
Hot breakfast is not a staple of my diet because I couldn't physically eat
other things, but because it is one of the only things I enjoy eating. I
wouldn't starve if I ate birdseed, drank milk, and took a multivitamin.
While discussing the budget crisis over dinner this evening, a few fellowMatherites and I came up with the following solution:
Take Kirkland House, kick everyone in it out of school (after they've paid
tuition for next year). Stop serving meals in that house- all meals. This
alone will save over $900,000.