Harvard University became a minor laughingstock last spring when they announced that, due to budget cuts resulting from a precipitous fall in endowment, they no longer had the financial resources to provide hot breakfasts for students. A recent New York Times article entitled “Leaner Times at Harvard: No Cookies” (here) highlighted Harvard’s draconian budget cuts, like no more cookies at faculty meetings and no more free warm-up suits for athletes. But it’s the loss of hot breakfasts that has become the symbol of Ivy League deprivation. Says the student body president, “Students generally feel that if you come to Harvard, for what you’re paying, you should probably have the right to a hot breakfast. They want to preserve the things that are at Harvard that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Actually, a hot breakfast isn’t always a right. I always feel that if I go to a $220/night Hyatt hotel, for what I’m paying, I have the right to a hot breakfast, but I have to pony up another $19.99 to hit the buffet the next morning. Yet the $79/night Holiday Express offers a free, hot, all-you-can-eat breakfast. Similarly, I went to UMass Amherst (the collegian equivalent of the Holiday Inn Express) and we had hot breakfasts galore! Everything was hot, even the yogurt. So, it seems that the right to a hot breakfast is, inexplicably, inversely correlated with wealth.
Harvard student athletes who practice in early-morning are particularly upset (here). One swimmer complained that the breakfast changes were especially “limiting to vegetarians, who will have to rely on hard boiled eggs and cheese as their only sources of protein.” Exactly what were the vegetarians eating for breakfast protein before the cuts? Baked beans and steaming hot tofu? Another swimmer speculated that the lack of hot breakfast “may negatively affect Harvard’s ability to recruit student athletes.” Hear that, Harvard? Penny wise, pound foolish. Harvard may lose all its athletic talent to Yale! (I hear that at Yale, every morning after practice, the swim team spit-roasts a poor person.)
According to Harvard, the elimination of hot breakfast will save the University $900,000, primarily through the cost of labor (here). So there’s about a dozen former dining service employees scrambling to find new jobs instead of scrambling eggs for Robert Joseph Harrington Watson III’s omelet. Finally, some actual pity is welling in my heart.
But… isn’t it sort of comforting to know that the recession is affecting all echelons of society? From the family of 5 living in a hotel room because Dad lost his factory job and fell behind in the mortgage, to retirees forced back into the workforce by decimated net worth, to the upper-class under-privileged richies at Harvard hunkering down over bowls of Cheerios, we’re all in this together!
