Lunch

NICOLAS KEMPER, MARCH 1 ’16

Between the courses of Environmental Design and Intro to City Planning, second year students in the architecture program have mandatory classes from 11:30 to 1:20, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, effectively excluding them from the weekday lunch.

This scheduling innovation bars them from participating in the rich range of lunches, colloquiums, and other events happening across the university during this time. It also bars students from using lunch – for those with families at home normally the easiest time to meet – to better know a professor or visiting critic, as Equality in Design has done through its brown bag lunch series. Most of all, this dearth of lunches makes it very difficult for students to work with each other at reasonable hours, as this schedule leaves no consistent free period in the day for the scheduling of meetings.

I am not making a hardship complaint here: there is nothing particularly intense, difficult, or even rigorous about having students eat sandwiches in class. It just seems silly, wasteful, an indication that those setting our curriculum seem to lack a vision about what students want to achieve here. Not to mention almost intentional: of the 590 minutes of mandatory non-studio classes second years have each week, 440 of them, or 75 percent , are scheduled over lunch (Incidentally the third years’ only required course, Architectural Practice and Management,  is also during lunch). Is this a secret campaign against Atticus?

The School of Management understands the power of lunch. They bar any class from meeting between 11:30 and 1: 00. Why don’t we?