By Sabrina McCutchan

Visitors who spend more than five minutes walking around Duke University are sure to encounter evidence of the campus’s commitment to the environment. Buildings have motion-sensor triggers for their lighting systems to preserve energy. Where there’s a trash bin, there are usually several recycle bins nearby. The buses that run between campuses have stickers on their sides declaring their commitment to use low-grade, high-efficiency fuel. And then, of course, there’s the Smart Home.

Spend ten minutes walking around Duke University, however, and a few other things come to light, like empty computer labs, or showers in dorm bathrooms that run water without patrons because the handle has gotten stuck, or massage chairs in the basement of dorms.

The university is exceptionally conscientious, it seems, in terms of its spending on everything besides… well, spending.

Take, for instance, the vents outside of the Bryan Center. These vents periodically emit a light mist, presumably with the intention of giving students a means to cool down on a hot day. While this is a nice idea, it leads one to wonder why these vents are a better investment than, say, installing air conditioning in dorms. Surely students spend more time in their own homes than they do on the plaza outside of the Bryan Center.

One might also references the massage chairs in the basement of Bell Tower. They are available for use by all students, but the dorm in which they are housed is a fair distance from the main quad on East, making it inconvenient for most students to access them, and in any case a mere two chairs cannot possibly cater to the entire freshman class (that is, assuming we make the rather questionable assumption that massage chairs are needed to cater to students in the first place). The upshot of these considerations is to suggest that the chairs have far less utility than their installers expected.

A basic massage chair model costs anywhere between $2,000 and $4,000. That money could have been invested elsewhere, perhaps in new temperature control handles in some dorm shower stalls. Sometimes these handles become stuck, and because Resident Life and Housing Services (RLHS) is not available 24 hours a day to perform maintenance, if this happens at night or on the weekend water might be left running continuously over the span of several hours. This incurs a sizable cost for the University, not to mention its environmentally-unfriendly effects.

Duke also does an exceptional job of providing its students with advanced technology and information access; for example, there are numerous computer labs scattered around the campuses. Not all of these labs, however, are situated in accessible places. Lilly Library might boast highly visible media rooms and a regiment of desktop computers in its foyer, but fewer students know of the computer lab in the basement of the West Duke building, or the one situated in Brown.

Is it really beneficial to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lab with twenty computers that, on average, is utilized at half of its capacity or less? Or, more importantly, is it really necessary to have two such labs?

The more time spent on campus, the longer the list grows: expensive projectors in classrooms that only host one or two classes a semester, sprinklers that don’t shut off after it rains, Solo cups for Tailgate because the student body cannot manage to clean up after itself. Why is Duke spending money in these areas instead of, say, installing air conditioning in residence halls? Or offering more scholarship funds? Or investing in a dining plan that offers three meals a day?

News reports discussing financial difficulties at Duke have been appearing in various publications since at least as early as May of this year. The University has proposed several budget-cutting measures, many of which include reducing its number of employees.

Given the preceding observations, however, is it any wonder that Duke is in trouble? Global financial issues certainly have not improved the situation, but Duke’s fiscal behavior is also responsible for issues currently facing the university. A little more fiscal responsibility would go a long way.

We can live without the massage chairs.