Meatless Mondays: Cancelled Due to Flawed Logic.
The kids at Kalamazoo College recently fought and earned the right to open-minded dining in the cafeteria. Due to flawed logic and a complete ignorance in survey taking, Meatless Mondays have been reduced to “meatless every now and then.”
The university had agreed to a trial run of Meatless Mondays where all the food served in the dining hall would be meat-free one day a week. The school held a total of TWO Meatless Mondays before survey results came back supposedly indicating a “lack of student support.” The results?
122 students were “opposed”.
239 students were “not opposed.”
and 3 students were “undecided.
The manager of the dining hall, Susan Matheson, determined that the students “were not ready for Meatless Mondays” and reduced the program to only a few times a quarter.
Does anyone else see a flaw in this logic? Roughly two-thirds of students don’t care if the cafeteria is vegetarian for one measly day a week and few students who are “opposed” win out?
Give these kids a break. Give the vegans and vegetarians on campus one day where they feel less like outcasts and bring back Meatless Mondays every week at Kalamazoo.
PeaceJam | Youth Conference Mentor Informational Session (WMU)
peacejam.orgCan you turn down the opportunity to work with a Nobel Peace Prize winner and impact the lives of hundreds of youth?
If you are between the ages of 18-24 and will be in Kalamazoo, MI April 21-22, apply to be a mentor and get the opportunity to meet and work with Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu!
There are few nights colder than those of a Kalamazoo winter
And even in my sweatshirt and thermal socks, there was no getting warmer. I was the only one still shivering, but then again, I get cold easily. Saturday night and the dorm, Harmon, was gutted. Nothing stirred that wasn’t already stirring: faucets improperly shut, ancient heating apparatuses turning over in the boiler room. Banshee winds brought snow from the west, from the Lake. We weren’t going anywhere.
There was no staying in my room. Too antsy, too anxious. But your room was open, as it always was. Just down the hallway. You, and your roommate too, should have both been gone, lost to some party basement, stumbling in the dark with drink in one hand, the other pressed toward the ceiling. Your ‘college girl’ dance. But you weren’t. Your roommate knocked on my door and commented on how very lonely my suite was before I’d even gotten out a greeting. She told me to make my coffee and come down to your room.
There was talk. There was chocolate and popcorn, and the lamentation of a sober Saturday. I didn’t feel that, though. You couldn’t have known, but I wasn’t feeling most things then. Or maybe it’s something of the opposite. Like every nerve was twisted with bolt-coil intensity, so that any little movement was white-hot broken glass below my chest. The only protection from that is to stay so perfectly still, to retreat altogether. But I could laugh when I needed to, smile with too many teeth, agree to quickly to the audaciousness of certain gossip.
Your roommate was tired, but the hour was late. A movie was in order with the lights low and the wind all a-choir in the eaves. We agreed on The Royal Tenenbaums, as your roommate and I were shocked to find you’d never seen it. She crawled into bed and turned over, lost before the opening credits. But you and I, we lay sprawled on the floor. Blankets beneath us, blankets on top of us, body pillows trussed up for our heads.
The lights low, the wind all a-choir. Luke Wilson shaving, then whispering, then bleeding. Your toe touched mine through my thermal socks, and you too were whispering, too quietly for me to hear. Our shoulders grazed. Again. White-hot broken glass at every brushing contact. I thought to myself, I’ve never before been so afraid of a body.
But I let you fall asleep and, ashamed for something I didn’t really understand, retreated to my own bed.
do you like kalamazoo? are you paying a lot for tuition? i'm thinking of applying there for next year
You definitely need to apply! And then you’ll at least have the option! I love it here, it’s cozy and the environment is really awesome. You make friends really easily, and class sizes are really small. Unlike other schools, our TA’s don’t teach… they just help, which is what they’re supposed to do. Classes are hard, but the teachers are really helpful, and there are so many other sources of help. There is always something going on, and the FOOD IS GREAT. I fortunately got a full-ride scholarship, so I’m not paying anything, but the tuition + room & board here is up there, I mean it is a Private school. But don’t let that stop you from applying. Come take a tour! That’s how I made my decision, once I got here, I knew it’s where I belonged. Hope that helps! Feel free to ask any other questions.
The K Complex (Part 1)
Written January 2012, Ecuador
K College students are a lot of things. Let’s start with the negatives. We can be elitist. Oftentimes, we find ourselves with a metaphorical stick up our social-justice-inclined asses. We like to over-analyze everything, taking a majority of the fun out of it.
Give a Kalamazoo College student a banana split, and they might ask you if the banana was fair trade organic and if the ice cream was from a dairy farm within fifty miles. (This is an exaggeration.)
Give a Kalamazoo College student a moon bounce, and they will ask you, “Why the fuck did you get me a moon bounce? You’re wasting my money on frivolous things that are only meant to be fun when all I want are tickets to the Nicholas Kristof lecture.” (This is not.)
And while preferences for local food and socially-conscious student activities are not at all bad, they tend to wear on the likes of us who don’t mind eating DQ soft-serve and rolling around in a moon bounce like a four-year-old without much further thought.
But these acutely aware habits come from places of genuine intelligence, compassion and critical thinking - traits that I’ve seen in every K student I’ve met. We work harder and we think deeper. It’s the way our liberal arts education has trained us. And even if I am always game for a good moon bounce, I also appreciate the value of being surrounded by people who prefer something with more substance.
For a while towards the beginning of our Ecuador trip, I got tired of hearing my own complaints and those of other students about piropos, host family drama and eating way too many damn carbs all the time. Why couldn’t we just forget about the bad stuff and appreciate the beautiful experience we have? It’s the K Complex in us. The inability to appreciate something wonderful that’s right in front of you when you know nothing is just plain wonderful.
Everything has it’s ups and downs, it’s positives and negatives. Yeah, thinking about gender inequality and racism Ecuador isn’t fun, but the fact that we’re honest with ourselves about the challenges we face here have allowed us to appreciate this experience for all that it is (not just a dulce-de-leche-coated view of the Andes and the Amazon). It gives us a more complete experience, and I would even say one that we’re able to appreciate more. We’re enjoying what’s real, not an romanticized view of what life here is supposed to be.
Sometimes K makes us so hyper-critical of things that we don’t take the time to enjoy the opportunities we’re given. We will analyze the shit out of that banana split until it is nothing but a puddle of milk on the floor. And we’ll sit on the side of the moon bounce and whine about how inflatables don’t contribute to a better society, even though we’ve been drowning in the stress of seventh-week and could probably use a good endorphine boost. (Well, maybe you’ll be whining. I’ma be all up in that moon bounce.)
We criticize this fully-packed, socially-conscious lifestyle we live for any number of reasons, but by the time that bachelor’s degree is in our hands (which, weirdly, is not that far away), that mindset becomes one of the most valuable things we’ll take away from this school.
I think it’s good to be critical of our critical thinking. And it’s great to value critical thinking the way K College students do in the first place.
Kalamazoo College
Today I decided I wanted to see if there were any awesome Tumblr-ers going to Kalamazoo College (where I’m going), so I stalked the Kalamazoo College tag a little bit. Anyway, basically this is just me saying that I’m going to Kalamazoo College next year, I’ll be a freshman (I”m also going on LandSea) and if anyone else who’s going to Kzoo happens to see this, let me know, it would be great to start school knowing someone!
