Imagine this, you’ve just finished a three hour lecture with no breaks due to how important that class was or your professor being an ass. You can physically feel your bulging bladder and lower intestines reaching their limit as you walk. Walking down any stairs doesn’t help one bit. You somehow make it to a bathroom and you’re greeted with the most ghetto, rundown and vandalized excuse of a restroom you have ever seen. You push forward anyway, you won’t last walking up or down another 2 flights. Opening a stall doesn’t bring any confidence. Piss or period blood on toilet seat, toilet paper along the wall and floor but none in the damn holder for it. You ponder on why a university with tuition that will take years to recover from has such crappy toilets. Oh yeah the door doesn’t fucking lock either, so have fun having your foot raised up to stop someone from busting in.
That little story, while exaggerated in some places, is how most cuny students feel about bathrooms in their university. It is especially bad for the men, since some can’t aim to save their life or break something in there, not to say that the women are saints by any means. One bathroom I tend to avoid like the plague is the tenth floor bathroom in a namm building. No doors lock, filthy all over, and probably the closest thing to the made up story from above. It’s bad like a park bathroom sometimes. This has many effects on students including morale and dignity. Every time I step into that 10th floor bathroom, I die inside just a little, almost tempting me to wait the hour and a half commute. I have to get a decent place to answer nature’s call. That or waiting until the next class where there is a possibility of decent bathrooms. In my eyes at least, being in a decent college is an achievement.
It filled me with pride to do what my parents couldn’t and I want to make them proud, but cuny is killing the vibe, with a baseball bat in the corner. I don’t know the specifics on what city is responsible for compared to the college itself, but this is not okay at all. Some places are literally falling apart, looking at you hunter! It is bad over there, people getting trapped in elevators, ceiling tiles falling on people and the walls with holes in them. It doesn’t give a good look. A bathroom should represent a clean, safe place to relieve yourself in peace. Seeing a place like that in shambles kills your mood, but some students have an entire campus like that! I would transfer asap, if not, fucking drop out and go online. I refuse to pay for classes in rooms that have holes in the walls and falling tiles from the ceiling. It shows a lack of respect for the students. I don’t have the luxury of going into the faculty bathrooms but I assume that they are better than some of the ones students have access to. Speaking of luxury, I’ve heard that women’s bathrooms are vastly superior to the men’s. Having toiletries for purchase such as pads and having outlets for some reason, they seem better in every way. Don’t get me wrong I’ve heard of less maintained bathrooms for the women as well but not to the degree that men’s is. If I had classes in other buildings this may be worse than I thought, hopefully better though, yeah “hopefully”.
Not to say all of the bathrooms are bad and disgusting and resemble public park bathrooms where the meth heads are. Some are very clean and maintained. Like the first floor and 6th floor, it restores what little faith I have with cuny and my uni. Along with that there have been attempts to increase funding such as governor Hocul’s operating budget of 250 million, that was then doubled by the New york state assembly and senate. Without overloading you with numbers lets say they get around 1.1billion for projects involving schools. They are trying to increase the budget, which may lead to improvement if used correctly.
That however brings into question where tuition money goes. The short answer is your professor’s paycheck. The long answer is various facilities and faculty, along with many programs to help students such as asap and ace. That sounds good as I benefit from asap, and what is offered to help students is quite vast including free tutoring. Larger campus colleges such as City Tech have multiple buildings with many labs that require equipment that is very expensive to maintain. The unfortunate truth is that while in the perfect world, the higher ups would be able to allocate resources to improve quality of life; it just doesn’t work like that.
Bathrooms are one of many parts of the infrastructure of a campus that require constant attention. Things happen, stuff runs out and some shithead will break the soap dispenser for the 20th time. We can’t just make more money, all we can do is make sure that we are heard. The more attention that this gets the more likely that they are forced to act.
Sources
Blackmore, Willy. “Hunter College Is Falling Down.” Curbed, Curbed, 25 Mar. 2022, www.curbed.com/2022/03/hunter-college-cuny-state-budget.html.
Goes over the declining state of the Cuny Hunter college. Has many examples including students’ opinions on the matter.
https://www.instagram.com/huntercursedimages/
An Instagram page dedicated to the abhorrent state of hunter college.
Rush, Jahlil. “Crumbling CUNY Infrastructure Presents a Major Safety Issue – the Ticker.” The Ticker – The Student News Site of Baruch, 16 Apr. 2022,
A 2022 article following the #crumblingcuny movement and the concerns it brings. Uses student accounts of various cuny schools to show impact of infrastructure
Barrington, Talia. “CUNY Funding a Key Issue in State and City Budget Negotiations.” CUNY Funding a Key Issue in State and City Budget Negotiations, 14 Apr. 2023, www.gothamgazette.com/state/11949-cuny-budget-new-york-city-state-funding.
A 2023 article focusing on Cuny funding in state and city budget negotiations. States how cuny may be affected by certain budget changes and arguing against any cuts for cuny. Very data heavy, useful to give scale on how much is needed to improve cuny infrastructure.
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