The Tartan

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year — if you’re a Carnegie Mellon administrator. The university just announced its annual cost of attendance increase of 3.86 percent, raising tuition from a measly $64,596 to a more workable $67,020. With a few thousand extra dollars per student, for thousands of students… well, I’m no math major, but let’s just say that’s a lot of money. I’d hate for it to go to waste on things like making usable websites, building an adequate number of lecture halls, or properly funding student clubs. So here’s some ideas for what the administration could do instead:

1. Build a second Donner. Everyone’s favorite dorm needs a twin for emotional support. Think about it: Donner is objectively the best dorm. Where else can you live in a triple within a blue dungeon with a view of a maintenance parking lot? Sometimes it’s nice to forget that you go to a top engineering and architecture school. Donner is the quintessential college experience — that’s why Carnegie Mellon hasn’t demolished it yet despite all the haters. Donner also deserves the emotional support from a twin after all the vitriol it’s gone through. The only question is where to put the second Donner. My top choice is to build the second Donner right on Forbes Beeler’s roof. Everyone passing by on Forbes Avenue would love to see how modern and innovative this school is.
2. Hire a security force for Farnam. Does he need one? Perhaps not for safety. But consider the coolness factor. Having a swarm of 10 buff figures wearing suits and sunglasses they definitely can’t see through would bring so much prestige to this school. Actually, let’s hire several security forces. We could artificially raise the frequency of Farnam sightings by sending security forces around the school without Farnam — but nobody will know he’s not there. Suddenly, not only is Farnam a national treasure to be duly protected, but he’s also in Tepper, the UC, Warner Hall, and the Maldives all at once.
3. Build a campus monorail. Right now, Carnegie Mellon students are in a frankly unacceptable situation where we have to use our legs to get around. Sometimes, it even takes us a whole 10 minutes to get from place to place. And we get dangerously close to touching grass when we pass by the Mall or the Cut. Allow me to propose a way to quickly get around campus without going outside — and no, I don’t mean the steam tunnels. The school should build a monorail that visits every academic building and every dorm. As a big engineering school, we surely have the expertise to do this in-house and to do it well, just like all those Carnegie Mellon websites that work 10 percent of the time.
4. Make Walking to the Sky taller than the Cathedral of Learning. Right now, there’s just one way in which the University of Pittsburgh outshines our lovely school: They have a taller building. Although we could just build a taller building, I have a more fun way for us to take the height record from our neighbors. Let’s extend Walking to the Sky so far that it’s the slightest bit taller than the Cathedral of Learning. Right now, a more accurate name would be Walking to the Eighth Floor of the Cathedral of Learning, and that’s just an unacceptable state of things. We have the weirder traditions, the more depressed students, and the actual campus that’s not just five blocks in the city — so why don’t we have the taller thing?
5. Make the bathrooms on campus consistent. Right now, visiting campus bathrooms is a game of biohazard roulette. You never know whether you’re getting a recently-renovated bright space with actual privacy or a 16th-century privy that’s even more disgusting than the one at your local Renaissance fair. The obvious solution here is to bring all the bathrooms back to their original 1900s state. Not only would this increase consistency, but it would also make campus feel more historic, satisfying everyone’s urge for us to be like those cool multi-hundred-year-old Ivy Leagues.
6. Turn the Mall and Cut into parking lots. If there’s one thing this school needs, it’s more parking. According to my research, zero percent of Carnegie Mellon affiliates have cars: I just stopped three students in E-Tower, and not a single one of them said they had a car on campus. If we took out all the grass in the middle of campus and replaced it with parking, then there would be enough parking for all. This would have the added benefit of making our campus look and feel more innovative by showcasing our willingness to adapt to technology.
7. Buy more expensive seating. The places to sit in campus buildings, although often comfortable, are just plain boring. We have black chairs, brown chairs, and if you’re fancy and in Tepper, purple chairs. But what we really need is things like the “CSCDD European Classical Solid Wood Combination Sofa Living Room Large and Small Villa Curved Sofa,” available on Amazon for only $35,184.89 per couch. (We’d be buying many, of course.) The optimal spread throughout campus is spending 90 percent on the seating budget in Warner Hall and 10 percent evenly elsewhere, naturally.
8. Turn the low area between Doherty, Wean, Gates, and Newell-Simon into a massive ball pit. Carnegie Mellon students need to have more fun, damnit! The issue is that you’re never going to get a CS major to step foot off campus. So the only option left is to bring the fun onto campus. Instead of making workloads manageable or having more university events, we could just toss millions of plastic balls into the low area between Doherty, Wean, Gates, and Newell-Simon and call it a day.