By: David Seddon
March 17th, 2022
Note: This article is a work of satire and opinion.
There exists a serious problem plaguing the hallowed streets and walkways of our MSU campus. Though we may try and ignore it and go about our daily lives, the dark reality of the situation is becoming too dire to simply look away from. And I, as a die-hard altruist and empath, feel the need to speak up and draw attention to this topic.
Every day, when I head to the dining hall, I see groups of tired and overworked employees struggling to keep up with demands while obviously understaffed. I am forced to think back to the time when MSU was so desperate for dining hall staff that they asked professors to volunteer on weekends. And there’s one question that runs through my head:
Why?
Why are we wasting all these resources on things unrelated to sports?
Let’s be honest here, MSU only cares about sports—as they should! Food is boring and less important; that’s why all of our workers left. And learning sucks, as everyone knows. There’s a reason why the MSU Bookstore presents you with sports merch before you see a single book. What’s important, and what brings in those dollar bills, is sports. It’s about time MSU doubled down on this obvious truth, rather than wasting time, space and valuable resources on lesser things.
Now, the obvious question is what to do with the space currently being used by dining halls and classrooms. The equally obvious answer is to bulldoze all these useless buildings and replace them with dorms for future athletes, new stadiums, more training facilities and museums to honor all the talented sports stars.
Of course, MSU still has to pretend to maintain its reputation as an educational institution.. However, the sports emphasis doesn’t have to be sacrificed if we use our resources intelligently. We can simply use these new stadiums as classrooms in between games.
Some might worry about staffing these new stadiums. A stadium requires many workers, from janitors to cooks and concession stand cashiers—you can’t just expect a stadium to run itself! However, there’s an obvious solution to this, lying in the number of professors MSU currently has on staff.
MSU can simply require these professors to volunteer their time to our new stadiums as workers. This brilliant, well-thought out solution solves the worker shortage in a way that keeps MSU from having to spend money on workers—money that could be better spent on sports.
It is possible for MSU to further incentivize professors to volunteer their time by making it clear that professors who volunteer the most time each week will earn the privilege to use the stadiums for classes. Strangely, asking people with full-time jobs to volunteer their free time for services the university could solve is met with some criticism. But with these extra incentives, they should all be motivated to properly contribute to this wonderful institution.
There’s one last point I want to bring up, and it’s something I’ve already alluded to: our dining halls. Now, this sports solution can already fix our dining hall crises, but there’s another issue that isn’t addressed as commonly as I think it should be. Our dining halls just aren’t making enough money.
A “silver dining hall plan” only costs a student $3,134. We could easily charge people $20 per meal if they had to get them at concession stands. At three meals a day, for 15 weeks, we’d earn roughly $6,300 per student a semester. The fact that there’s such a large market going unaddressed right now really speaks to MSU’s lack of proper management right now.
With all this in mind, it is now time for us to part, dear reader. I hope that the reasons laid out in this short article are enough to convince you of the importance of this change. I further hope that you will join me in championing this bright future into reality.
Note: This article is a work of satire and opinion.
David Seddon is a second-year undergraduate student with a major in professional and public writing and a minor in Chinese. A big fan of fantasy and sci-fi, David can often be found playing games, reading books or working on his own self-published books in his free time.