In Defense of: Dorm Heating

As a self-proclaimed connoisseur of dorm-heating — the first of my kind, I believe — I have experienced highs in the 80s and lows in the 50s, all inside my climate-controlled dorm room! When people are asked to picture the finest higher education our world has to offer, not many channel images of undergraduates convulsing in their quilts, quietly sobbing icy tears. At Princeton, however, the point is not to impart knowledge in a comfortable setting. The point is to admit all of the students who wrote their overcoming-adversity essay on the cancellation of “Friends,” put them in furnished ice boxes/brick ovens and teach them about real hardship. If you’ve ever complained to Housing about your temperature concerns, watched a worker enter your room, tap on your heater a few times and then proclaim the problem solved, you’ve got all the proof you need. Princeton dorm heating is a test, and so far most everyone is failing.

If you live in one of these human-sized refrigerators, I beg of you — think of the penguins. Adult emperor penguins spend their entire lives in Antarctica. If you think your dorm room is the coldest place on Earth, you’re wrong; Antarctica is the coldest place on Earth. The only things that penguins have to do all day is waddle, toboggan and swim, but they’re doing all of those things in Antarctica. The lowest temperature ever measured in Antarctica was -128.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is probably lower than the temperature of your dorm room. As if that isn’t enough, male emperor penguins incubate their eggs for a period of two months while their mates hunt for food and play tag with leopard seals. During this two-month period, the male emperor penguin faces winds of up to 120 miles per hour and doesn’t eat anything. Have you ever been on a two-month diet of air, while simultaneously sitting naked on a block of ice? No, you haven’t, because Princeton students are resoundingly weak. It is Housing’s job to harden us against the elements before emptying us out onto the slushy streets of New York City with zero job prospects and a deflated sense of self-worth. Think about that the next time your snot turns into icicles while you sleep.

If you inhabit a dormitory more akin to the Sahara Desert, you may have read the above paragraph and yearned for the comforts of a chilly dorm. As one might say, you can always add more layers, but you can only shed so many. Let’s unpack that idea. You’re in your own dorm room. You could shed so many layers. In fact, you could shed all of them. There aren’t many opportunities to start your own nudist colony at Princeton — believe me, I’ve tried — but the gift of Death Valley in your bedroom doesn’t come along every day. Invite others to partake in your naked haven. Charge them, even. People pay hard cash to sit bare-assed in hot rooms — if it was good enough for the Romans, it’s good enough for you. Anoint yourself with oil, sit back and let all your self-pity roll off with the rapidly-forming sweat beads on your skin.

Dorm-heating at Princeton is fickle, volatile and uncomfortable, and so much the better. This is clearly a message from Princeton University that we students have grown complacent, and that shit just won’t fly. That, or the administration allots 15 minutes a day to laughing uproariously at how stupid we must look covered in blankets, shivering on Target butterfly chairs. I can only believe it’s the former because the latter is just really, really mean.