A Cattle Ranch Is Doing What the Ivy League Can’t
- sciart0
- May 20
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "When I was in college in the 2010s, some of my classmates would go to the dining hall, take their meals to their dorm rooms, eat and then dispose of everything that was left — food scraps, ceramic dishes and stainless steel utensils — in the dorm trash cans. It wasn’t like we had to wash the dishes ourselves. We were just supposed to walk them a few yards back to the dining hall and stick them on a conveyor belt that took them to the kitchen.
This behavior was the exception, not the norm, and I never did it. But I thought I understood the thinking behind it.
The cost of dining hall dishes was not even a rounding error in the university’s huge budget. No one suffered from their loss. The action landed without ripples. Like, well, a plate in an overstuffed trash can.
It was the same sort of thinking that powered much of campus life: The point of your college education was to serve you — your knowledge, your résumé, your personal growth. Anything that could be done faster, more efficiently, should be. If you couldn’t pick out a specific individual harmed by your actions, you were probably OK. You had no obligations to the school. You were there to feed on the university, to feast and to grow fat like one of the cows in Pharaoh’s dream. The university was, in this way, a sort of model for the world."