For the price of a cup of coffee

The university is selling us out, one delicious sip at a time

TESSA VANDERHART, STAFF

What’s a cup of coffee worth these days?

Starbucks has moved in to the Dafoe Library, and we’ll probably never know just how much they — and the university — stand to make. But what puzzles me is that the university would fail to calculate the true cost of this endeavour.

Coffee in libraries is not intrinsically a bad thing. Especially for students, the combination seems natural. But the Manitoban asked U of M Food Services how much the university stood to make from the product placement, and the answer was confidential. If it’s a good thing for students then why does it have to be all about the money?

Ostensibly the university will use the (millions of dollars in) funding to benefit the libraries — new books to replace those that will have coffee spilled on them, not to mention the ones that are hopelessly out-of-date and seem not to pertain to any courses offered. Or to hire more library technicians (“librarians” cost twice as much) to ensure that returned books make it back to the shelf in something resembling a timely fashion. Or even to put some money in the bank in case the faculty strike, as they’re vaguely promising to, when thousands of contracts worth millions of dollars expire in . . . oh, right, back in March.

But the problem is that all money collected by the U of M is funnelled into one big bank account — that’s the only way it can be accounted for correctly. So for all we know, the kickback and expected revenue from Starbucks could be precisely $4 million, the amount that the university announced on Monday, Sept. 17 will pay for a new soccer complex.

Conspiracy theories aside, it’s naive to think that our very own axis of evil — the U of M, U of M Food Services (the food services provider formerly known as Aramark) and Starbucks — are anything but giddy with the money they plan to net from the deal. The U of M libraries are pretty happy, too, I hear.

Anyone who cares that Starbucks’ fair-trade coffee is just pretend — “up to 10 per cent” — just like the recycled content in their paper cups! — is already convinced that the new outlet is a travesty. Well-educated and socially conscious students — like those at McGill, who recently forced their university to divest from the tobacco industry — could persuade the university otherwise. But the caffeine-pushing triumvirate is successfully swindling U of M students worse than (OK, not really worse than, per se) their fair-trade coffee farmers by failing to look to the future.

According to the National Post, fair-trade coffee prices haven’t changed in 10 years — similar to the six years that Manitoba universities’ tuition fees have been frozen. I don’t need to have taken economics to see that the problem with both is that artificially low prices cannot create demand that does not exist.

Simply put, if fair-trade advocates want to sell more coffee, they need to better educate the public about how and why they should buy it, and why corporations like Starbucks are to be avoided. Even Starbucks, though, sells about twice as much fairly traded coffee each year, according to its own estimates.

The U of M, on the other hand, has fewer students enrolled this year than in either of the last two years — and is on the precipice of record-small high-school graduating classes. If the university wants a reliable source of funding rather than another one-trick caffeine pony based on student traffic, they should look to better educating their students of the university’s economic situation — not falsely appeasing them with the convenience of a latté in, let’s face it, what has always been the slacker side of the library.

The world’s most expensive cup of coffee now retails at $10 in New York (or $50 in Hong Kong); comparatively, Starbucks is just beans. But when the university acts along those lines, something great is lost — as yet another public university sells out its principles.