Today we discussed how food works in the backyard of GW. Specifically, we discussed a smidge of Naomi Klein's No Logo, in which she convincingly demonstrates how public schools and uniersities have fallen to the branding demon that has infiltrated every other aspect of global life (those aspects of which are covered in other chapters in the book).

This reading provided the context for a series of articles in the GW Hatchet on recent controversies surrounding Aramark, the university's outsourced food service provider, which runs some generic storefronts in GW's Marvin Center, but also appears to be the franchise-owner for such storefronts as Burger King and Taco Bell (or Booger King and Toxic Smell, as I have been wont to call them).

Add to this scenario GW's new Colonial Cash program, wherein students are able to use their account dollars at local vendors like Au Bon Pain and Bertucci's. This is not merely a debit system to be added on to the meal plan; these dollars are part of the meal plan, and can in some cases be used on non-food items. Students, while they overwhelming approve of the system, have occasionally found themselves with a completely depleted meal plan midway into the semester.

Finding revenues dropping because of increased competition and pull from better managed and sexier places off-campus, Aramark accordingly cut hours for some venues on campus, and abruptly laid off several workers right at Thanksgiving, provoking small but significant student protests on behalf of those workers, and a series of opinion pieces in the Hatchet.

This was the context for our discussion today, which, compelling enough, brought to light the idea that with the Colonial Cash system, the university is selling access to their students as consumers, that students are both gaining and losing in this exchange, and that food because of its status as a persistent necessity and its connection to students' bodies, makes this a more contentious issue than if we were talking about books or sweatshirts, which are also controlled by an on-campus monopoly (The GW bookstore is run by Follett, much as UMCP's bookstore and many others are under Barnes and Noble control).

What is remarkable, although certainly explicable, is that not one student mentioned that they intended to change their eating habits based on this new information. I'm not sure I would either, although I might aspire to. I'm not sure if this says more about how deeply entrenched we are in this consumer culture, how inflexible we are about what we eat, or how apathetic we are (I include myself in here as well).

Perhaps one of the most compelling issues to arise here was the degree to which this called into question the very idea of the university. Klein's full chapter makes an argument that universities in general have been by and large bought by corporate interests, and GW's food court is certainly evidence of that. No more so, however, than UMCP's deal with Pepsi, the AT&T teaching theatre, Comcast Center, or, well, name it. What entities on the UMCP campus are de facto Pepsi products? Does it matter? There seemed to be some disagreement about how right or wrong this consumerist university was anyway. To what degree is the Comcast Center different from Van Munching Hall, named after the distributors of Heinekin (a well-know UM campus fact)? What came into question, and what I did not have time to explore, was whether the university was indeed a business. I cringed to hear one student (employing a common enough rationale, and who may, be reading this very entry) opine that his education was a service in a service economy, being exchanged for liquid assets. He's not wrong in the strictest sense, but I think most of us find this conception of the university a harrowing one, one that makes knowledge production a commodity in much crasser ways than we like to understand it, and one that divests faculty of a great deal of power over their own intellectual pursuits. (I'm sure my own attention GW's upside from the Colonial Cash system isn't precisely "good for business").

So, from the Marvin Center to the idea of a University in fifty minutes. It will make for a very interesting semester, one that has begun with a very interesting week.