October 2008 – Page 2 – Innermost Parts

Thank you to Tim for posting on Brandeis dining, specifically Aramark’s waning contract.

The good news? A Brandeis student campaign has already begun to seize this opportunity and reform our food services. There has been much discussion about switching providers, presumably to a rival corporation such as Sodexo or Compass Group. However, as Tim mentioned Aramark’s ties to Brandeis will be extremely difficult to sever. This is not necessarily a bad thing: Aramark has already made positive changes at Brandeis, such as compost, and has gone even further at other universities. John Hopkins, NYU, Baylor, Penn State, and Vassar, for example, have sustainable dining programs that we can demand as well. Aramark, with its record of health, labor, and environmental violations, is actually rumored to be quite receptive to student demands. I have confidence that a well-organized group of campus activists can succeed in a series of reforms.

And so I introduce…Brandeis Coalition for Food Service Reform

View the categories we plan on addressing after the jump.

Continue reading “Change Aramark Now: Coalition for Food Service Reform”

You know what Brandeis needs? A great big geodesic dome. I only figured this out recently, when I noticed just how downright hideous the entrance to Brandeis is.

Let me explain my brilliant reasoning. Currently, what do visitors see when they arrive at our dear university? Why, they see a tiny, scruffy little Branvan shack. It looks like this:

I mean, really. What kind of impression does that send? It doesn’t seem like a proper way to introduce our university to newcomers. We need an entrance that says “Hello, I am Brandeis! I am a grand institution. Come and learn from me.” Our current one is more along the lines of “Hello, I am Brandeis. My buildings look like hovels.”

No, what we need is some kind of imposing monument. And I can think of nothing better than a huge geodesic dome. No other type of building has quite the majesty of the dome. Our school’s level of dome-age is currently dangerously low, and the situation needs a-fixin’. Below, I have constructed a genuine simulation of one possible variation of this genius idea:

Bam! Dometastic! And to those of you say “Wow, that’s incredibly badly photoshopped,” I say this: “Hah! How very wrong you are. It is incredibly badly MS Paint-ed.” Actually, come to think of it, my genuine simulation doesn’t really give you a sense of what I mean. It kind of looks like a glass igloo. And if Eskimos lived in glass igloos, they could never get naked comfortably. I’m really thinking of something more along the lines of the big freaking Epcot sphere. If we had the Epcot sphere, we would be telling every other Boston college that Brandeis means business.

I’m serious about this. Our entrance is ugly. And domes are great. Come on, wouldn’t it be amazing? Share your thoughts.

Continue reading “On The Need For A Greater Quantity Of Geodesic Domes”