The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/)
The leadership of Cornell Dining and Campus Life Enterprise Services was surprised and disappointed to read the recent Guest Room column, “Dear Cornell: You’re Breaking the Law and Students Are Going Hungry,” featuring opinions and allegations signed by some of our valued partners and other community groups.
Years ago, I was asked to be a part of The Cornell Daily Sun’s “Humans of Cornell” project, riffing on Humans of New York.
Some are surely immune to it by now, but most food service workers can remember the first time they had to chuck pounds upon pounds of perfectly edible food into the waste bin while on the job. The same holds true for students and full-time workers at Cornell Dining. Its a sort of collective trauma that countless workers share. While such superfluous and unthinking waste is tragically commonplace across private food providers across the country, in recent years we have seen legal interventions come into effect that should result in dramatic reductions in food waste. The NYS Food Donation and Food Scrap Recycling Law, which took effect Jan.
Some of us don’t know where we’ll be next year and even for those that do, whether it’s a job or graduate school, our everyday lives will probably be drastically different from what we’ve known for the last four years.
Even at graduation’s door, I am finding out more about what I could love further.
Cornell can be cacophonous. There is so much going on at all times, so many dialogues and conversations, that it’s easy to feel like your voice doesn’t matter. But it does. Find your version of The Sun, a place where you know that your voice matters.
Every graduating senior knows some version of my story at Cornell. The class of 2023 is unique, and unified, in our trials and triumphs through COVID-19. We alone have seen the before and after. We are the class that watched Cornell fall apart, and we are the class that rebuilt it — preserving and restoring the traditions, cultures and communities that make this place worthwhile. For once, I write not to break news in The Sun, but to express generational solidarity. Our class, despite all odds and administrative difficulties, saved Cornell.
in the end, I decided it was time to look forward, rather than look back.
The powerless student body has been victim to horrible housing conditions, insane prices, and predatory leases they cannot escape. Cornell offering upperclass students veritable housing is a godsend, although extremely overdue.
Underachieving has given me the space to experience my life in college authentically instead of conforming to the role of a cookie cutter, picture perfect student.
We carry with us some part of those who shaped our lives in any way, and I am happy to have known her, just as I am happy to know those who also shaped my life at Cornell and elsewhere.
