Columbia students know the struggle of securing on-campus housing all too well. The process rips apart friendships, disrupts peaceful nights’ sleep, and causes stress sweats from Carlton Arms to East Campus. While getting a good lottery number is more exhilarating than doing a line, getting the room or suite you want is better than sex.
We here at the Spectador wanted to get to the bottom of this hellish process. What makes good housing so hard to obtain? Where does all of the endowment money go if not toward things like eradicating black mold in John Jay bathrooms or speeding up the McBain elevators? The answers are, unfortunately, what you’d likely suspect: admin sees housing as a big fat joke.
“For starters, we just don’t care,” claimed one administrator. “Who asked?” said another. Our reporters told them that we, the Spectador, asked, and were met with “your mom lol” in response.
“All this complaining, it seems a bit dramatic to me,” said the President of Housing Operations. “I mean, really, are you even in your dorm that much? Sure, you ‘live’ there. But you really live in the libraries and your classrooms anyhow, so that seems like a personal problem, you students being so focused on something as silly as your individual space. You can sleep when you’re dead.”
Additionally, President Lee Bollinger informed Spectador that for the first time in his tenure as University president, he is directly involved in student housing decisions. “I really wanted to go out with a bang,” he said. “I just thought to myself, ‘Damn, what is one final decision I can make, or goal I can achieve, to really cement my impact at this groundbreaking institution?’ And it seemed like putting my efforts toward further limiting student housing options was the most logical route.”
