Who cares about the commons?

Every Middlebury student possesses an identity in this bubble: this identity can be defined by our friend group, where we live, our major, where we are from, what extracurricular activities we do, etc. I have, however, rarely seen anyone define himself by the commons he is in, during the 3.9 years that I have been here. I suspect commons do not form anyone’s identity on this campus.

This sunk in when I got a lengthy email today regarding changes in various commons, and I immediately deleted it. Now, there are few emails I immediately delete without even opening — I cannot stand having unread emails — and emails regarding commons are the only ones I delete constantly, and I get at least 10 a week: Brainerd Dinner, Brainerd Newspaper, Brainerd Coffee, Brainerd Party, and the list goes on. This is not because I am a very busy man who does not have time to read another stupid email; on the contrary, I even read IM emails although I have never played hockey in my entire life. Rather, it is because I am annoyed at how much the commons system occupies the bureaucratic system of this College, while it achieves nothing for the students. I will go as far as saying that even the European Union is less bureaucratically redundant than our school’s commons system.

I would not complain about this if we were a school of abundant resources — but we are far from that. During my sophomore year, I would get emails every week about how our budget was failing and how we needed to trim it. The cuts affected everyone: a hiring freeze diminished the number of courses we could take, we were subjected to a different form of sausage at Proctor every lunchtime, Atwater was closed and need-blind financial aid for international students was revoked. Some cuts are ending, but it is undeniable that we are in a new normal now in which we cannot splurge, and this only makes sense given the overall state of the economy.

Yet, during this process I haven’t seen the commons system take a single hit. Every commons had their annual parties, the commons still had budgets to fund rather irrelevant projects and commons offices and houses of commons heads still occupy precious space on this campus. It is even more astonishing that this all happened at a time when housing became disintegrated from the commons, and the efforts to build something close to Colleges in the Ivy League universities came to halt due to budget restrictions. If I were to rank important institutions in this school, I would put (Brainerd) Commons to the end of that list; and I’m sure most of my friends would do the same for the commons they are in.

Which is why I argue that we should get rid of the commons system or, at least, significantly trim its budget so that they do not spend as much on activities that appeal to a very small population of this school. Middlebury has way too many institutions that need more funding: from a strictly personal point of view, for example, I owe my presence here to the availability of need-blind financial aid for international students, so why not devote more funds to financial aid for internationals instead of the commons budgets so that we preserve our ever-hailed diversity? Or spend more on academic departments so that we can preserve the quality of teaching? Times are tough, and we need to set our priorities straight. We made the mistake of starting the budget cuts from things that matter the dearest to students, leaving a bureaucratic and needless (for most students) institution intact. This must change.