Sometimes I wonder whether the University has declared war against personal freedoms.’ It doesn’t stifle freedom of speech, religion or petition. Nor does it seem to have a problem with free assembly or press. Rather, the University seems to deny students a far more fundamental freedoms: the freedoms of life. Ultimate freedom comes with the ability to secure for yourself the essentials needed to live, namely shelter and sustenance. A person who controls that which keeps them alive can no longer be under anyone else’s control. Unfortunately, control over shelter and sustenance are exactly the freedoms the University clamps down on. Upon entering the University, underclassmen have their ability to choose shelter taken away from them. School policy prevents underclassmen from living off campus unless they are living with family, preventing students from securing their own manner of living. Underclassmen are given a choice of which dorm to live in, but this choice does not count as securing one’s own shelter; one dorm room is the same as the next. The only real difference between dorms is whether or not they contain a cafeteria and their location on campus. Besides, even if there are differences between dorm rooms, all money paid for them goes to the same place: Residential Life, which essentially has a monopoly on housing. Without any competition between buildings for student money, ResLife has no incentive to improve dorms, or make them any cheaper. Thus, students have no choice in how much they are willing to pay for shelter, nor of what quality that shelter should be, since the free-market system does not operate on campus. The University also denies students the freedom to provide for their own sustenance. All students living in the dorms are required to buy a meal plan, which can only be used at facilities run by Dining Services, who, like ResLife, hold a monopoly over on-campus food. True freedom of sustenance comes with the ability to control what a person eats, when they eat it, how much they pay for it and how it is prepared; the Dining Services monopoly prevents students from doing any of this. Of course, students could eat off campus, or buy their own ingredients and cook in dorm kitchens (which is actually cheaper than eating campus food). But, since leftover money on student meal plans no longer rolls over to the next semester, both of these options are not economically feasible. Students have already paid to eat campus food. Dining Services will get the students’ money, regardless of whether they use it or not. If students cook for themselves all year, they are not substituting their own food for on-campus food; they are buying their own food in addition to on-campus food, since they have already paid Dining Services for food. Besides, dorm kitchens are poorly equipped and in poor repair. Kreischer’s kitchen, for example, was recently shut down by the fire department because the vent hood above the stove no longer worked. The bad condition of campus kitchens further prevents students from providing their own sustenance. I’m sure the University is stifling the freedom to control one’s own shelter and sustenance with the best intentions. The University probably feels that by taking the students’ responsibility to keep themselves alive, it will provide students with more time to study. But what will we study, I wonder? A student who learns all his professors have to teach at the expense of learning to take care of his own essential needs will go far in the academic world. Unfortunately, there’s a much bigger world out there beyond the confines of academia, in which the student will be ill-equipped to live. The University should spend less time finding ways to coddle its students so they live easily and carefree. Instead, it should provide students the ability to take care of themselves. The ban against underclassmen living off campus should be lifted, and dorms should compete with each other, giving students a choice of where they wish to live and how much they will spend doing so. Students should no longer be discouraged from feeding themselves. The University should reinstate meal plan roll-over, negotiate with local grocers so they take meal plan or encourage Common’s Marketplace’s (the campus convenience store) to actually carry cooking ingredients instead of heat-and-eat meals. Any of these actions would provide students with control over their own sustenance. The University has a responsibility to release students from its stranglehold over essentials for life, lest, when students go to live in the real world, they find themselves unable to do so.