Speaker 1: Pushkin. The first week I arrived, I was met at
Speaker 1: the backdoor by local folks who were bringing in flats
Speaker 1: of blueberries, and it was just it was remarkable. That's
Speaker 1: Ken Cardon speaking. He's the executive chef at Bowden College
Speaker 1: in Maine. In the world of American colleges, Chef Cardon's
Speaker 1: food holds a special place. So you've consistently make the
Speaker 1: top number one spot on the lists of best college food.
Speaker 1: What are a couple of things that you think sets
Speaker 1: Bowden apart? And that's Jacob Smith, one of my producers.
Speaker 1: He went up to Maine for Revisionist History's first culinary investigation.
Speaker 1: Can you just describe what we're looking at? Here? Directly
Speaker 1: below us is a salad bar, and you'll notice in
Speaker 1: the center of the salad bar this several prepared salads,
Speaker 1: entree solids, and then you have you make your own areas.
Speaker 1: To the right and left, there's homemade soups in vegan options,
Speaker 1: there's fresh fruits and desserts, and then you'll see there's
Speaker 1: conniments and toppings, and we actually make our own peanut
Speaker 1: butter and bake our own breads, and that's all available
Speaker 1: at every meal. My guess is your college wasn't like this.
Speaker 1: Mine certaintly wasn't. And as you can see, we always
Speaker 1: have a vegan and vegetarian item on for our hot soups,
Speaker 1: and today a favorite for launch is a hot turkey
Speaker 1: sandwich and orizo and tofu salad. I worked in my
Speaker 1: college cafeteria as an undergrad, and just remembering that fact
Speaker 1: now is bringing the smell of the dining hall wafting
Speaker 1: back grease, disinfectant, aging, mayonnaise, cold fried eggs, all in
Speaker 1: some horrible combination that was the nineteen eighties. I don't
Speaker 1: think that anyone properly understood back then how crucial healthy
Speaker 1: eating was to a positive learning environment. Bodin is in
Speaker 1: a whole different class. It's like paradise. The deli special
Speaker 1: today is a smashed chickpe avocado and pesto sandwich, and
Speaker 1: we have a faro salad with asparagus and pomegan cool. So,
Speaker 1: can we take a look at the kitchen? Are you
Speaker 1: able to go back there? As you can see if
Speaker 1: you'll walk down and right here at this at this area,
Speaker 1: we're preparing fresh rosemary is one of the ingredients in
Speaker 1: tonight's dinner and they're cutting chicken, so everything really is
Speaker 1: done from scratch. It has that for us, all touch,
Speaker 1: fresh rosemary and the personal touch. But here's what I
Speaker 1: want to talk about. The food at Bowden is actually
Speaker 1: a problem, a moral problem. I don't mean this in
Speaker 1: any way as a criticism of people like Ken Cardon.
Speaker 1: He's very, very good at what he does. Jacob, my producer,
Speaker 1: is a massive foodie and he was impressed. It takes
Speaker 1: a lot to impress Jacob. No do I mean the
Speaker 1: people students in particular shouldn't eat properly? They should Point
Speaker 1: is at every choice we make, even if it's the
Speaker 1: right choice at that moment, has larger consequences, some of
Speaker 1: them unexpected and paradoxical, and Ken Cardon's amazing food is
Speaker 1: one of those things. My name is Malcolm Glaubew. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This is actually episode two of a little three part
Speaker 1: mini series I've dropped into the middle of revisionist History.
Speaker 1: It's a re examination of one of the most fundamental
Speaker 1: ideas in American life that if you have some ability
Speaker 1: and work hard, you can make it to the top.
Speaker 1: The episode before This was about a kid named Carlos,
Speaker 1: a brilliant kid, and just how many obstacles stand in
Speaker 1: the way of his making it at a south central
Speaker 1: Los Angeles This episode is about what it takes for
Speaker 1: a poor kid to get a good college degree, and
Speaker 1: strange as it may sound, campus food at a place
Speaker 1: like Boden is a big part of that problem. The
Speaker 1: best way to understand this is to compare Bodin with
Speaker 1: one of its competitors, Vassar College. Vasser is in Poughkeepsie,
Speaker 1: just north of New York City. It's a lot like
Speaker 1: Boden in many ways. They're both small, elite Northeastern liberal
Speaker 1: arts colleges. Lots of students apply to both schools. They're
Speaker 1: in the same category, but there are also some differences.
Speaker 1: Vassar is a little bigger and edgier, a lot more
Speaker 1: dyed hair and tattoos. Boden is smaller and preppier. Boden
Speaker 1: also has more money, not a lot more, but enough
Speaker 1: that it matters. And then there's the issue of food.
Speaker 1: How's the food ad vasor would you say food? It
Speaker 1: could be better? You know, there's always room for improvement.
Speaker 1: The salad bar always makes me kind of sad like
Speaker 1: one time I was eating like a spinach kale stir
Speaker 1: fry that was prepared and I may or may not
Speaker 1: have found like an industrial size staple in it. The
Speaker 1: president of Vassasar College is a woman named Katherine Hill.
Speaker 1: She's an economist by training. Tall, gracious, distinguished, a touch
Speaker 1: of gray, what you would expect from an academic leader.
Speaker 1: We met in her office on the Vassasar campus, which
Speaker 1: is full of lots of Gothic graystone buildings and creaky
Speaker 1: oak staircases, huge double sash windows, ancient rugs, all very
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. Before she was at Vassasor, Catherine Hill was
Speaker 1: at Williams College, about two hours north at Poughkeepsie. She
Speaker 1: was the provost. While she was there, Princeton dramatically expanded
Speaker 1: its financial aid, and suddenly every liberal arts college in
Speaker 1: the country felt it had to examine its policies as well,
Speaker 1: and we had to figure out what we were going
Speaker 1: to do in response to Princeton announcing that they were
Speaker 1: going to move away from Lands. So Hill teams up
Speaker 1: with another economist and starts digging around in the data
Speaker 1: from the admission's office. A colleague of mine, Gordon Winston
Speaker 1: and I asked the question, do we know what we're
Speaker 1: actually asking families to pay to come to Williams. So
Speaker 1: we'd always assumed that we were doing just, you know,
Speaker 1: a great job with talented kids from all different economic backgrounds.
Speaker 1: And what we found out was that we were asking
Speaker 1: students from lower income quintiles to pay an awfully high
Speaker 1: share of their family income to come to attend. And
Speaker 1: we were also finding out that we weren't getting many
Speaker 1: not surprisingly, Yeah, you know, I think we were finding
Speaker 1: that we were asking families in the bottom forty percent
Speaker 1: of the income distribution to pay, you know, about fifty
Speaker 1: percent of their family incomes pre tax. He'll saying that
Speaker 1: at that time, if the family of a poor, smart
Speaker 1: kid wanted their child to go to Williams, that'd have
Speaker 1: to spend half their income on tuition half. That's why
Speaker 1: there were so few poor kids at Williams. So while
Speaker 1: she's at Williams, the school starts making its financial aid
Speaker 1: a lot more generous, then He'll becomes president of Vasser.
Speaker 1: Vasser was an institution that was committed to these kinds
Speaker 1: of issues, and when we looked at the actual data,
Speaker 1: it turned out that compared to some of our peer schools,
Speaker 1: we in fact, weren't all that verse either in terms
Speaker 1: of socioeconomic diversity or racial diversity. So she decides to
Speaker 1: change Vasser's priorities. Students from the poorest families in the
Speaker 1: United States get a small five thousand dollars grant from
Speaker 1: the federal government called a PELL grant. He'll decide she
Speaker 1: wants to accept way more PELL grand students advassor so,
Speaker 1: what are you spending on financially? We're spending about sixty
Speaker 1: million dollars sixty million, yeah, and when I started in
Speaker 1: six it was about twenty five million. Oh, I see,
Speaker 1: So it's basically it's about double And we have about
Speaker 1: twenty three percent PELL grant recipients, which makes us, I think,
Speaker 1: the highest amongst a very large group of schools and
Speaker 1: the lowest income kids and peal. When you started, what
Speaker 1: was it, I think I read eleven percent when you started. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not even sure we were tracking it,
Speaker 1: but it was in the low teens. That was ten
Speaker 1: years ago. Since then, Hall has discovered two things. The
Speaker 1: first is exactly what we talked about in the last episode.
Speaker 1: There's a ton of smart, poor kids out there you
Speaker 1: can easily double the number that you accepted a school
Speaker 1: like vasser and not compromise your academic standards. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: the first thing, the good news. Then there's the bad news.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of schools said, okay, so yeah,
Speaker 1: they're out there, let's see if we can find some
Speaker 1: and recruit more. I think over time, I've come to
Speaker 1: realize that the main constraint, despite commitments on the parts
Speaker 1: of schools to do this, the reality is if you
Speaker 1: take a talented, low income kid, you've got to offer
Speaker 1: significantly more financial aid. And every dollar that you spend
Speaker 1: on financial aid is a dollar that you don't have
Speaker 1: to spend on something else, and that is ultimately the
Speaker 1: real challenge. Tuition at Vassor, including room and board is
Speaker 1: sixty two thousand dollars a year. You let in some
Speaker 1: poor kid for free, you're out somewhere a range of
Speaker 1: sixty two thousand dollars. Give me an example of the
Speaker 1: kind of trade offs you've had to deal with because
Speaker 1: you wanted to increase your financial aid package. It would
Speaker 1: be spending more to renovate old dormitories and bathrooms. It
Speaker 1: would be better food in the dining hall. You know,
Speaker 1: many of those things are really good things, and you're
Speaker 1: always making trade offs. Yeah, in the margin, did you
Speaker 1: catch that better food in the dining hall? Right after
Speaker 1: my producer Jacob went to Bowden to check out their food,
Speaker 1: he went to vasser. How often do you eat there?
Speaker 1: About twice a day? Jacob is talking to a sophomore
Speaker 1: advassor named Amanda. So, lunch and dinner usually I do
Speaker 1: like a quick breakfast in the dinner because breakfast is
Speaker 1: notoriously their best meal. And what about dinner? Which dinner
Speaker 1: look like a pretty terrifying Sometimes it's weird. It oscillates
Speaker 1: between Sometimes they have really good ethnic food. Actually they'll
Speaker 1: surprisingly put together a very good meal, and then there's
Speaker 1: other nights where you get there and it's kind of
Speaker 1: like pasta a very sad like meat sandwich thing you're
Speaker 1: not really sure about, and like pizza you should I
Speaker 1: end up with soup that night. It's yeah, what would
Speaker 1: you say? Are like the most common complaints about the
Speaker 1: food from students usually lack of variety of taste. Also,
Speaker 1: some people it's kind of gross to talk about, but
Speaker 1: like claim it really gives them indigestion, Like they're not
Speaker 1: happy with the quality of the food by indigestion. Do
Speaker 1: you mean it has like a laxative effect. Is that
Speaker 1: the complaint because I've heard that elsewhere. Yeah, that's one
Speaker 1: hundred percent. When I'm talking about if you could step
Speaker 1: in and make like sweeping changes to dining ADVs or
Speaker 1: what would you change sweeping changes? I mean my thing is, like,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm kind of spoiled because I'm from California,
Speaker 1: so I'm used to just a higher quality of food
Speaker 1: in general, because like the salad bar always makes me
Speaker 1: kind of sad, like or like the nights where they're like,
Speaker 1: we have guacamole and it's like literally just like this
Speaker 1: pasty disgusting, like just you know, they've obviously just purate
Speaker 1: some like unripe avocados. Vassar has terrible food. Boden practically
Speaker 1: has a Michelin star. Two otherwise almost identical schools that,
Speaker 1: on this one measure couldn't be more different, and why
Speaker 1: because Bodin doesn't spend nearly as much on financial aid
Speaker 1: as Vassar does. Now, I don't want to single out
Speaker 1: Boden as some kind of moral villain. There are lots
Speaker 1: of private colleges in the US that do a far
Speaker 1: worse job than Boden at educating low income students. But
Speaker 1: just listen to these numbers. Twenty three percent of Vassar's
Speaker 1: undergraduates are on PELL grants. That is, they come from
Speaker 1: the poorest part of American society. At Boden, just thirteen
Speaker 1: percent of students are on pelgrants, so just over half
Speaker 1: as many as at Vassar. The New York Times does
Speaker 1: something called an Access Index, which measures how good a
Speaker 1: job a college does at opening its doors to low
Speaker 1: income students. The way the index works, an average score
Speaker 1: is one. If you do better than average, your score
Speaker 1: is greater than one. Among all American universities and colleges measured,
Speaker 1: Vasser comes in eighth with a score of one point
Speaker 1: three six, behind only the University of Florida and the
Speaker 1: big schools in the University of California system. It is
Speaker 1: the most open and accessible private school in the land.
Speaker 1: Bowden fifty first at one point zero five, just above average.
Speaker 1: If you want an example of a school that does
Speaker 1: really badly in the New York Times Index, New York
Speaker 1: University NYU is a point six five, which ranks that
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty six, which is appalling. Now, why
Speaker 1: does this matter? We don't want all schools to be
Speaker 1: the same. What's wrong with the system Where one school
Speaker 1: spends its marginal dollar on gathering the most interesting and
Speaker 1: diverse group of undergraduates possible, and then another school spends
Speaker 1: its marginal dollar on artisanal cheese. It shouldn't matter, right,
Speaker 1: But if you dig into the way the university system
Speaker 1: works in the United States, you discover that it matters
Speaker 1: a lot. Boden and Vassar are connected. I'm back at Vassar.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in a small conference room in the main
Speaker 1: administration building. In front of me is Robert Walton, Vassor's
Speaker 1: vice president of finance. Vasser might be the home of
Speaker 1: the edgy and the tattooed, but that's not Robert Walton.
Speaker 1: He's a numbers guy, white hair, carefully trim beard. He's
Speaker 1: got the school's budget open in front of him. So
Speaker 1: if we look at our total budget sort of what
Speaker 1: we actually spend, it's about one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: million dollars, And if you think about it in just
Speaker 1: big groups, about two thirds of that are fees that
Speaker 1: we collect from different sources and about a one third
Speaker 1: of that budget comes from the endowment. Yeah, now the
Speaker 1: tuition bucket. How does that break down? You know, we
Speaker 1: are like many schools like us. We have sort of
Speaker 1: a barbell effect. That's a slightly inelegant metaphor, but it works.
Speaker 1: We tend to have a grouping at each end, those
Speaker 1: who have a full ability to pay and those who
Speaker 1: have low ability to pay. The math looks like this.
Speaker 1: There are two thousand, four hundred and fifty undergraduates Advasser.
Speaker 1: A thousand of them are on the wealthy end of
Speaker 1: the barbell. They pay full tuition or close to it.
Speaker 1: That comes to sixty million dollars a year in revenue.
Speaker 1: The rest of the students at the other end of
Speaker 1: the barbell pay about half that much. They're the ones
Speaker 1: receiving some kind of financial aid. There's way more of them,
Speaker 1: but they contribute much less to the bottom line. So
Speaker 1: Vasser makes up for that lost revenue with money drawn
Speaker 1: from the endowment. I've grossly simplified matters to the point
Speaker 1: where if Robert Walton hears this, he'll cringe. But that's
Speaker 1: basically how the finances Advasser work. A couple of questions
Speaker 1: before you went, you made this shift, which was what
Speaker 1: roughly ten roughly two thousand and seven, happened midyear. Sort
Speaker 1: of social heart. That's Marian Begaman, Vasser's head of strategic planning.
Speaker 1: She's sitting next to Walton formal business suit. What would
Speaker 1: your percentage of full pay have been back then? In
Speaker 1: the earlier era, roughly we were around eighty now seventy
Speaker 1: five to eighty let's say, seventy five to eighty percent
Speaker 1: of students paid full tuition back then. This is an
Speaker 1: important point. The barbel used to be heavily weighted on
Speaker 1: the high full paying end and have almost nothing on
Speaker 1: the other end. When President Hill transforms Vassar a decade ago,
Speaker 1: she basically switches that. She replaces hundreds of full paying
Speaker 1: students with students who pay very little. As a result,
Speaker 1: Vasser goes from a place that quite comfortably supported itself
Speaker 1: on tuition revenue to a place that has to rely
Speaker 1: really heavily on its endowment to make the numbers work. Now,
Speaker 1: Vasser is wealthy enough to pull that off. It all
Speaker 1: adds up, but barely. They have no wiggle room. So
Speaker 1: the one thousand kids who pay full tuition, Vassar needs
Speaker 1: every single one. Without them, everything falls apart financially. I
Speaker 1: asked Walton, what would happen if the number of full
Speaker 1: paying students dropped? If even fifty of that one thousand
Speaker 1: went elsewhere, that would be bad. That would be bad.
Speaker 1: No wiggle room. Okay, Now about the endowment once again.
Speaker 1: Bodin College is a good comparison. Bodin starts twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: with an endowment of one point four billion dollars. They
Speaker 1: make a healthy return on that, which they divide up.
Speaker 1: A quarter of it goes to pay for financial aid,
Speaker 1: three quarters of it goes back into the endowment. That
Speaker 1: three quarters incidentally comes to one hundred and twenty million dollars.
Speaker 1: So to put it another way, Boden had one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty million dollars cushion last year. What I've just
Speaker 1: described explains how endowments at elite universities keep getting bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger. They earn way more in their endowment every
Speaker 1: year than they need to balance the books. This is
Speaker 1: a bit of an aside, but here's a really extreme
Speaker 1: example of the endowment cushion. Princeton. They start twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: with twenty point six billion dollars in the bank. Let
Speaker 1: me repeat that, twenty point six billion dollars in the bank.
Speaker 1: They make two point one billion on their investments. Over
Speaker 1: the course of the year. After they've covered their costs
Speaker 1: and paid for all their financial aid, they had seven
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars left over, And after you add in
Speaker 1: all the other money they raised, Princeton ends the year
Speaker 1: with an endowment of twenty two point seven billion dollars.
Speaker 1: Princeton is a perpetual motion cash machine. There is literally
Speaker 1: no way they can ever run out of money. If
Speaker 1: they wanted to build a half a billion dollar dormitory
Speaker 1: with marble staircases, mahogany floors, and solid gold bathroom fixtures,
Speaker 1: they could pay for it at a petty cash still
Speaker 1: bank two hundred billion dollars. That's wiggle room. By the way,
Speaker 1: given that fact, you might wonder why anyone would ever
Speaker 1: give money to Princeton. Good question. I have way more
Speaker 1: to say about this subject. That's what next week's episode
Speaker 1: is about. But let's go back to Vasser. Things are
Speaker 1: a lot more complicated there. They have about a billion
Speaker 1: dollars in their endowment. That's less than Boden, but for
Speaker 1: Vaster to cover their expenses, they need to take out
Speaker 1: significantly more from their endowment than Bowden does, so they
Speaker 1: don't have the same kind of cushion. Last year, In fact,
Speaker 1: Vasser had a bad year and they ended up withdrawing
Speaker 1: more than they earned. You can't keep doing that year
Speaker 1: in and year out and survive as an institution. No
Speaker 1: wiggle room. So what are Vasser's other options? Well, they
Speaker 1: could get smaller. One of the reasons Boden is in
Speaker 1: such better shape is that Boden has only eighteen hundred students.
Speaker 1: Vassaer is more than a third larger. If Vasser were
Speaker 1: Bowden's size, then suddenly they have six hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: fewer students to subsidize with their endowment. If I said
Speaker 1: to you, completely hypothetically, I want you to run this
Speaker 1: college in such a way as to maximize the amount
Speaker 1: of financial resources available, would you shrink the student body?
Speaker 1: In a perfect world, that would be the technique I
Speaker 1: would prefer. That's Vassar's VP Robert Walton. Again, Note that
Speaker 1: he says in a perfect world, but of course that's
Speaker 1: the last thing Vassar would ever do. It would be
Speaker 1: totally self defeating. The whole point of Catherine Hill's transformation
Speaker 1: of Vasser was to try and educate as many poor
Speaker 1: smart kids as possible, because America has a huge problem
Speaker 1: with not providing opportunity for poor smart kids. If you
Speaker 1: cut six hundred and fifty spots, then you're part of
Speaker 1: the problem. Again, I'm a physical conservative, but she's convinced me.
Speaker 1: We don't pay any taxes in terms of to the
Speaker 1: fads of the states, so we are a tax subsidized entity.
Speaker 1: So one would logically conclude then if you have a
Speaker 1: large endowment, you really have an obligation to provide a
Speaker 1: public good, not just to educate the rich. This is
Speaker 1: something people always forget. Universities don't pay taxes. We subsidize them.
Speaker 1: You and I. When Princeton makes that two point four
Speaker 1: billion dollars return on their endowment, they don't pay a
Speaker 1: dime of capital gains taxes on it. And Walton's pointing
Speaker 1: out something really really crucial, which is that if you
Speaker 1: get that kind of subsidy from society, you're supposed to
Speaker 1: give back. Cutting six hundred and fifty spots is not
Speaker 1: giving back. All right, how about this cut back on faculty,
Speaker 1: bigger classes? No, no, no, that also defeats the purpose.
Speaker 1: The whole point of the Vasser experiment is to give
Speaker 1: students of all backgrounds the best possible education. If you
Speaker 1: make the education worse in order to pay for the
Speaker 1: students who need a good education, then you'll write back
Speaker 1: where you started from. The point of Vasser is that
Speaker 1: the best education comes when you mix students from all backgrounds.
Speaker 1: When the child of an investment banker sits in class
Speaker 1: next to the child of a janitor, that two of
Speaker 1: them have a learning experience that they could not have
Speaker 1: amongst people just like themselves. That's what they're trying to protect.
Speaker 1: So what do you do if you're a vassor and
Speaker 1: you're trying to protect that idea of what an education is.
Speaker 1: You have only one option. You tighten your belt as
Speaker 1: tight as you can. You don't do anything extravagant. I
Speaker 1: worked with a college at one time. If you're going
Speaker 1: name that opened a new residence hall in the last
Speaker 1: five years. That was all singles that had double beds. Basically,
Speaker 1: the dorm was a high end hotel. You know, there
Speaker 1: are these amenities that some schools do that are just
Speaker 1: kind of crazy and over the top, but they do
Speaker 1: all kinds of things. You know, they have more money
Speaker 1: for speaker series than we do. We can't pay Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton to come and speak for three hundred thousand like
Speaker 1: my prior institution did. Thanks like that, Bill Clinton the
Speaker 1: ultimate college amenity. The problem with belt tightening, though, is
Speaker 1: attracting those one thousand full pay students, the ones whose
Speaker 1: money Vasser desperately needs. Who are they? They're the children
Speaker 1: of professionals, upper middle class and opera class Manhattan, Beverly Hills, Boston,
Speaker 1: San Francisco. They grew up privileged. They have certain expectations
Speaker 1: about lifestyle, those amenities that Bob Walton says are kind
Speaker 1: of crazy and over the top. That's what these kids
Speaker 1: are used to. So this is what keeps Catherine Hill
Speaker 1: up at night. How can she keep those wealthy kids
Speaker 1: coming to Vasser if she can't provide them with the
Speaker 1: lifestyle that they're used to. We are operating in an
Speaker 1: economy right now where income inequality has increased over the
Speaker 1: last thirty to forty years. So we are looking to
Speaker 1: attract talented students from high income families. Are These are
Speaker 1: kids who have grown up with their own bedroom, in
Speaker 1: their own bathroom, and when they come looking at college campuses.
Speaker 1: Those are some of the things that the families are
Speaker 1: looking for. Vassar asks those kids to do without some
Speaker 1: of the luxuries they were raised with, and that's a
Speaker 1: hard sell. Every time another school with which we compete
Speaker 1: makes a different decision and doesn't spend it on financial aid,
Speaker 1: then it puts us in the position of being in
Speaker 1: a tougher position to compete for the full pay students. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see. You mean if another school spends less and
Speaker 1: builds a fancier X and you don't have the fancy X. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then they're gonna take some of those kids away from
Speaker 1: us who want the fancy X. He'll didn't name any names,
Speaker 1: but you know who she's talking about. She's talking about
Speaker 1: Boden and the kids she worries that Boden will take
Speaker 1: away are the kids from Beverly Hills in Manhattan who
Speaker 1: grew up on beautifully ripe avocados and freshly cut rosemary.
Speaker 1: Robert Walton serves on something called the Parents Advisory Committee ADVASSOR,
Speaker 1: which is basically the parents of the rich kids, and
Speaker 1: he hears it all the time. They comment, you know,
Speaker 1: they want to talk to the senior officers about you know,
Speaker 1: their observations. You know, it's sort of a you know,
Speaker 1: tough love kind of meeting. They always ask about food,
Speaker 1: They always ask about housing. They always that, you know,
Speaker 1: they what do they say when they bring up food?
Speaker 1: Do they complain about food about basically? And so my
Speaker 1: reaction is, we need to make food better. And we
Speaker 1: actually aren't going to make food better. But if food
Speaker 1: is really important to you, and if housing is really
Speaker 1: important to you, don't come to a Vassor. That's not
Speaker 1: what we focus on. That's just not what we're into. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and no apologies for that. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: just not what we do. This is why I said
Speaker 1: at the beginning that food is actually a moral issue,
Speaker 1: because how long do you think vasser can continue to
Speaker 1: do this, to say to parents and students, if food
Speaker 1: is really that important to you, go somewhere else. Those
Speaker 1: kids come to Vassar for a campus visit and to
Speaker 1: eat a saggy piece of pizza. Then they go to Boden,
Speaker 1: where Chef Cardone is the god of the dining hall.
Speaker 1: He's got amazing resources, a bigger endowment, six hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty fewer students, half as many kids on pell grants,
Speaker 1: and every day he's taking it up a notch in
Speaker 1: a kitchen. How long can saggy pizza hold up against
Speaker 1: ken cardone? When my producer Jacob was on his culinary
Speaker 1: investigation at Boden, the students talked about the food of
Speaker 1: their school like they were in Paris in the beginning
Speaker 1: of the year. That ice cream didn't really taste that well,
Speaker 1: like it was like kind of watery, and so I know,
Speaker 1: someone like wrote a complaint card, like guys, and then
Speaker 1: that's like so much better, like they just fixed it.
Speaker 1: I've heard good things about the dessert. Is it good?
Speaker 1: How do you compete with this? On your first Dame campus,
Speaker 1: there's this lobster bake where every student on campus has
Speaker 1: a choice of having a lobster for dinner or a
Speaker 1: steak or a vegetarian option. It's really phenomenal. If I
Speaker 1: were like to ask you, maybe like respective student was
Speaker 1: coming to campus and they were asked about the food,
Speaker 1: what would be your like your one sentence pitch or
Speaker 1: how would you describe it? It's sort of indescribable in
Speaker 1: the way that you can't explain to someone how it's
Speaker 1: always changing and it's always fresh, and it's always different.
Speaker 1: It pushes you to try new things, which is I
Speaker 1: think what college is all about, which is experimenting and
Speaker 1: reaching out to new worlds. And you know the fact
Speaker 1: that the food here helps you do that as well
Speaker 1: is incredible. I cannot get over how excited this kid
Speaker 1: is about the food of bud. Do you think he
Speaker 1: talks this way about his professors? Oh? Have you tried
Speaker 1: things that like you wouldn't have tried otherwise, Like what
Speaker 1: kind of what kind of meals or dishes? Oh? Wow,
Speaker 1: the other night I had an eggplant parmesan pancake. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't think I could have even told you that
Speaker 1: was a real thing until I had it. You know,
Speaker 1: I walked past it didn't travel, and I went back
Speaker 1: might as well, and it was phenomena of sex. Actually
Speaker 1: eggplant parmesan pancake. I mean, this is completely absurd. This
Speaker 1: is everything that's wrong with American colleges. We had venison
Speaker 1: here during deer season. It was really just fresh, locally sourced,
Speaker 1: different kinds of meat, so that I would never expect
Speaker 1: to see in a college dining hall. There's only one
Speaker 1: solution if you're looking at liberal arts colleges. Don't go
Speaker 1: to Boden. Don't let your kids go to Boden. Don't
Speaker 1: let your friends go to Boden. Don't give money to
Speaker 1: Boden or to any other school that serves amazing food
Speaker 1: in its dining home. Because every time you support a
Speaker 1: school that spends its money on amazing food, every time
Speaker 1: you cast a vote in favor of eggplant parmesan pancakes
Speaker 1: and lobster bakes and venison during deer season, you're making
Speaker 1: it harder and harder for someone like Catherine Hill to
Speaker 1: create opportunities for poor kids. Suck it up and go
Speaker 1: to Vassar. Send a message to the Bodins of the
Speaker 1: world about what really matters. Fresh fruit is atrocious. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we get bananas, and then sometimes we get strawberries or grapes,
Speaker 1: But those are like strawberries and grapes are like those
Speaker 1: are a big deal. Like you go steal like five
Speaker 1: cups of that, your pocket them and run out with
Speaker 1: your pockets full of Absolutely. Absolutely, I'm not joking. This
Speaker 1: is Amanda again, the vast sophomore who complained about the guacamole, Amanda,
Speaker 1: the spoiled Californian, as she described herself. But I will
Speaker 1: say this for Amanda, she gets it, she understands what's
Speaker 1: at stake. Atrocious fresh fruit is a small price to
Speaker 1: pay for a little social justice. I still complain regularly
Speaker 1: about the food and whatnot, but I just feel much
Speaker 1: better knowing that that money's going towards something useful. I
Speaker 1: would much prefer that our school be giving money to
Speaker 1: that then trying to make our food better. You know,
Speaker 1: of course, case scenario, you get the minimum meal plan
Speaker 1: and you can eat out. It's not a big deal.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
Speaker 1: you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.
Speaker 1: You can get more information about this and other episodes
Speaker 1: at revisionist history dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
Speaker 1: Our show is produced by Mela Bell, Roxane Scott, and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed
Speaker 1: by Luis Guera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer,
Speaker 1: fact checker Michelle Sirocca, and the Panoply management team Laura Mayor,
Speaker 1: Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You couldn't
Speaker 1: got every count to cop on me