UChicago Coffee Shop Controversy

JHS
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 15:36:35 +0000

Just to be clear (for those of you who haven’t been there) – Hallowed Grounds is a really large student-run coffee shop, with lots of comfy chairs, several pool tables, and well-curated indie music. It’s on the second floor of the Reynolds Club, a centrally-located building which is the closest thing Chicago has to a Student Union. In addition to coffee and other drinks, it offers sandwich- and salad-type food from a variety of Hyde Park restaurants (or it did, until its refrigerator space goes away in this remodeling). It’s a great lunch or snack place for the half of the student body that doesn’t have a meal plan, and it’s a really popular place to hang out or meet up between or after classes. It also sponsors periodic fun events of sorts.

What seems to be happening is that they are building more office space for formal student clubs in the basement of the Reynolds Club, so they decided that they should move all the administrators the leaders of those organizations interact with periodically to the Reynolds Club as well. But there probably aren’t more than a couple hundred students who talk to any of those administrators in the course of a year, while thousands of students spend time in Hallowed Grounds at some point or another, some of them lots of time. Plus, as a former Head Judge of Scav Hunt points out, student club leaders won’t always want to meet with administrators in a public place.