Budget Plinko, Part III: Cutting the Bacon

It appears that the administration has finally let the chips fall. The budget cuts are out. Much like our friend Bob Barker, FlyBy lets you know if each cut is a winner, or worth sending home.

It's 8 AM, and you've just rolled out of bed to make it to that 9 AM intensive language class. No morning haze allowed: you will translate, speak, or spout verb forms and do it with a smile. Before 9 AM, though, you may be groggily walking through your House's tunnels to the dining hall to wolf down some combination of eggs, sausages, and bacon. Sure, it isn't healthy, but since you probably stayed up till 4 AM memorizing those verb forms anyway, health has become irrelevant at this point.

But next year, unless you're willing to trek over to Annenberg, the only hot stuff to greet the eye is going to be hard-boiled eggs--even though many 9 AM class sufferers and those athletes (who just so happen to have to wake up 3 hours earlier and be 10 times more intense) may need something a little more exciting to start the day. Without the draw of bacon and potatoes to get us up in the morning, we might as well just stay up late to do homework and grab that Red Bull--especially with newly enhanced brain breaks! All the athletes who wake up before dawn will also find it that much harder to beat Yale.

Students protested by swiping into breakfast en masse this morning in the House dining halls. But before that, almost every House list has had a massive chain about the cut to hot breakfast. Some gems after the jump:

Quincy

Lowell

2. Who cares.. people are being fired -- 'cutting proctors makes sense, but damnit cutting my morning bacon is simply barbaric!'..

3. Cutting shuttle service.. fucking sucks.. They are cutting the night shuttle service by hours. This is both a huge annoyance for quad folk AND a safety risk, given the apparently large number of lecherous Harvard men who wait in the wings on weekend nights. This is probably a lot worse than the hot breakfast cuts, though I'm sure somebody will have some stupid snarky reply about how 'THE QUAD SUCKS BRO.. BUT YUM I LOVE PANCAKES,' etc.

Mather

jump through hoops in the morning to get a crappier version at Annenberg.

Hot breakfast is not a staple of my diet because I couldn't physically eat

other things, but because it is one of the only things I enjoy eating. I

wouldn't starve if I ate birdseed, drank milk, and took a multivitamin.

Matherites and I came up with the following solution:

Take Kirkland House, kick everyone in it out of school (after they've paid

tuition for next year). Stop serving meals in that house- all meals. This

alone will save over $900,000.

We could use the House either for social space, or sell it for millions of

dollars to be used to offset the budget deficit, or hire back all of the

staff getting laid off, or provide retirement packages.

Plus we wouldn't have to deal with Kirkland.

Give everyone else full breakfast, make the shuttles run full-time, and

provide full housing for J-Term.

The opinion was also stated that instead of cutting breakfast, we should

just cut YardFest- it would upset fewer people.

In response, a few Matherites said that in all seriousness, they agreed with cutting Yardfest.

Adams

Rumors abound that the administration is planning to cut dining hall workers as a result of cutting breakfast. One cook in Adams has even pinpointed a target number: eliminating two dining hall workers from every House, either through early retirement or layoffs. How does he know this secret information? A student forwarded this email over to Adams Schmooze:

we were told today that we would suffer layoffs in september. you may have heard that yesterday evening the university notified the students on their web site that starting in september no more hot breakfast. the harvard corporation using this attack on the students intended to cut 2 workers from every hall. we need to meet to go over what we can do . we are trying to reserve a room at pbh in the yard with the help of the students this thrusday for shop stewards and activists. we then can plan a meeting with the members early next week. the students are angry we will have allies as we organize

ed childs

chief-steward local 26

please contact with ideas or info

Oh, it's getting serious. Childs stated that he got this from Bill Murphy, Director of Labor Relations, who told him the most likely scenario is the release of two workers from each dining hall.

UC President Andrea Flores even told Cabot House they should get their parents involved:

Follow the money, right?