Who Do They Think They Are?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

After having just paid my tuition for the spring semester, the very exorbitant amount of $47,000 made my eyes bulge ("B-School paid $47,000 for Cable Line," February 6).

I complained that $11,000 was pricy for a tuition, but $47,000 for a cable hook-up in the gym of the Business School? Who are they kidding? That amount alone could be a before-tax salary of any number of well-paid jobs or finance desperately needed teaching fellows and tutors in financially poor College departments. More dramatically, it would pay tuition and expenses for two years for a student not on financial aid.

The Business School in the past has been often marked by excessive spending for such a small fraction of the University's population.

Shad Hall is its greatest injustice to the University community. Not only is it for less than a quarter of the student population that uses the MAC, but non-Business School affiliates can't use it, period.

Forty-seven thousand dollars could buy 20 Stair Masters and maybe slightly alleviate the halfday sign-up line for the two in the MAC.

I will grant that the Business School raises an enormous amount of financial support and donations; but so does the College, and I have yet to see such spending on ridiculous whims like a single television cable hook-up.

Could we start with house heating all winter long, not only when the temperature drops below 30 degrees? The Business School is the most discordant concerning the proposed University-wide fund raising, thereby saving such financially poor areas as the Divinity School. Maybe this mockery of University spending illuminates their reasons why.

God forbid they hear the following: "Ladies and gentlemen of the Business School, we are terribly sorry, but while you are sipping your gin and tonics, we cannot offer you CNN. There are other areas of the College that desperately need $47,000 to exist and function as elements of a top university. Money does not grow on trees." Cara O'Connell '93