The Union Station has very recently had a minor technological facelift in the form of new electronic menus. Much like in the Biblio Café, the old printed menus have been replaced in favor of television screens that present the menu as a slideshow on loop. So far the most significant benefit to this change is that students going to the Union Station finally have something to complain about other than the length of the line.

Seeing only a small portion of the menu for ten seconds at a time is a horrible idea. What does this accomplish? It doesn’t speed up the line when people have to wait for the relevant part of the menu to come up—or to come up again because they didn’t read it fast enough. Since being read is literally the only purpose of a menu, it’s certainly not an improvement in terms of practicality. All that these new television screen menus do is look nice. Their initial aesthetic appeal catches the eye, and this is the only advantage they have over the old menus that, archaically, were static, printed images. The new menus merely exist to make the school look nicer, and the only people who especially care about this are prospective students. It becomes obvious, then, that these new menus are nothing more than a shallow attempt to make Dickinson College look flashier and technologically advanced to impress prospective students. There have to be higher priorities.

This is not a petty complaint. Was there really nothing better this money could have gone towards? How many classrooms on campus still haven’t replaced chalkboards with dry erase boards because their departments don’t have the budget? Sure, prospective students don’t necessarily see every classroom in Denny, but as a student they will be doing much more important things in that classroom than they will be in the Union Station. How many academic journals come up in searches of the Dickinson Library catalogue that Dickinson does not actually own? My apartment in Goodyear didn’t come with bookshelves, which is a baffling corner to cut in housing for college students. Who decided that where the money was needed was towards the objectively worse Union Station menus?

This is to say nothing of the ongoing cost—financially and environmentally—of the electricity used by these extravagant screens that serve absolutely no practical purpose. Putting menus on television screens is a slap in the face of Dickinson’s sustainability efforts, which conflicts rather embarrassingly with the “green” image Dickinson also promotes so heavily to prospective students. As a reminder, these are still the same prospective students—and I really feel the need to emphasize this point—that the new television screen menus are supposed to impress. But that’s fine. I’m sure prospective students will be very impressed with the typos that are currently on the flashy new menus. Dickinson’s prospective students must certainly be quite pleased to see that the prestigious $57,662 per year liberal arts college they are visiting does not know the difference between “our” and “are” on those fancy electronic menus in the Union Station.

Assuming, of course, they can actually read the menus.