The Banality of Inconvenience
It’s normally around 8:50 a.m. when I step out of Morg to grab a quick breakfast before morning seder starts at nine. Which way? Well, on most Mondays through Thursdays, Nagel’s is open straight ahead; on Fridays, Nagel’s is closed, so I head left to the caf; and on Sundays (when all YP and many BMP shiurim still meet), I often decide the only option — a stale bagel in the caf — isn’t worth going out of my way, so I skip breakfast entirely. On certain occasions when the YU Dining Club feels exclusionary by not opening any locations (such as the morning after Yom Kippur, when it was impossible for out-of-towners to have already left campus), I even turn right out of the dorm building to patronize the restaurants.
In isolation, perhaps, from a cost-benefit perspective, the decision-making process makes sense: There are certainly fewer students around Glueck or in the library on a Friday morning, and even on Sunday morning, many in-towners arrive with home-cooked breakfast in tow. And, across different university departments, the same logic holds up: How many students really use the library on Motzei Shabbos during the first few months of the semester? Only a handful of shiurim take place in the building formerly known as Furst Hall — does it really make sense to open up on Tzom Gedaliah when no other classes take place? The extra two minutes for students to get to Heights Lounge minyanim or Nagel’s through Glueck before nine o’clock when the Gottesman security desk opens is only a minor inconvenience, after all, considering the cost of paying another security guard to sit at the door. However, when these decentralized decisions are experienced together, that’s exactly what student life at YU can feel like: inconvenient.
I believe that these inconveniences arise because the administrative decision-makers treat student services with a consumerist mindset and are too removed from the daily schedule and time constraints that students face.
I am aware of the financial challenges that YU chronically faces, and I sympathize with the effort to save on unnecessary spending. However, the purpose of the cafeteria or university library is not to make money; students pay tuition and join a university community, and as part of that relationship, the university provides facilities to support students in their studies (such as a library with quiet workspaces) and general wellbeing (a cafeteria to eat and a gym to exercise and relax with friends).
One evening during the Aseres Yemei Teshuva, I walked over to Nagel’s after night seder to buy a snack and noticed that none of the usual sources of protein — premade sushi, salmon salad, or deli rolls — were stocked. Tom, the ubiquitous and affable nighttime cashier at Nagel’s, explained that Sam Chasan, the director of Dining Services, knew that not many students would be around that night and decided against fully stocking Nagel’s. When it comes to predicting the quantity that students will demand, I’m sure Sam knows his stuff, but such a calculation misses the point of Nagel’s: it exists so students have a place to buy food if they are hungry after dinner.
This mindset also underlies the library’s weekend hours. The library closes on Friday afternoon at 12:30 p.m. year-round, and this semester, the library has been closed on Motzei Shabbos as well. (After communicating with the library staff, Yeshiva College Student Council President Uriel Sussman told me that the plan was always to open the library on Motzei Shabbos starting after the yamim tovim.) The logic is sound: It’s a hassle for the librarians to come to work for only a few hours when Shabbos ends late on Saturday night, and they observed that the library wasn’t so crowded on Saturday nights or Friday afternoons during the summer months at the beginning of the semester. But, there are some students on campus Saturday nights, Friday afternoons — or even all day on Sunday and Monday of Labor Day weekend — who want a place to work quietly, and without the library open, the YU campus offers precious few locations to be productive. The penny-pinching gives off an alienating (and I’m sure unintentional) impression that the university sees its relationship with its students as primarily transactional.
I also suspect that some of the inconveniences stem from decision-makers not fully understanding the hours that YU students keep. On a basic level, the library closed at 5:30 p.m. on Tzom Gedaliah, and during the week of the Aseres Yemei Teshuva at 9 p.m., seemingly because the library staff had not realized that Wilf Campus classes were going to be held in person during the Aseres Yemei Teshuva this year. (A previous version of the schedule had the library closing at 5 p.m. every day that week, which seems to indicate that the library staff did learn of the calendar switch relatively last minute.) Similarly, it would be a simple enough fix to extend the mailroom hours until 6:00 or 6:15 in the afternoon so students can pick up packages after their class ends at 5:45 without having to race to the stairless Belfer basement between classes. It’s one thing for students to struggle to find time to get to the post office or reach outside businesses during the normal work day; the same challenges shouldn’t exist for YU services like the Career Center or Academic Advisement — all students are occupied with Undergraduate Torah Studies programming at eleven in the morning, so it’s both logical and curious those appointments are always available.
Other oddities of the YU facilities’ schedule seemingly come from not understanding how busy YU students organize their weekly routines. For example, the workout and basketball gym closes at four o’clock on Erev Shabbos, whether candle lighting is at 4:10 p.m. or after eight. Long Friday afternoons are a popular workout time for busy YU students, but an administrative scheduler in the athletics department would never have had a reason to be on campus Friday afternoons to know that.
I do not begrudge the university for trying to run a tight budget, and I certainly do not project any malicious intent that any administrator is sitting in an office scheming how to make students’ lives more bothersome. However, from a student’s perspective, the little things add up. The nickel-and-diming takes its toll, especially when the minimal savings involved betray that the institution simply doesn’t have a strong understanding of the daily routine of a YU student. In a university and yeshiva community, I hope for more.
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Photo caption: Gottesman Library building at 8:55 a.m. Two minyanim have started and finished, and Nagel’s is bustling during the breakfast rush.
Photo credit: Matthew Minsk
