Aladdin’s October 16th launch event in the NAC Cafeteria.
All photos by Abram Morris unless noted.
By Abram Morris
City College, the beacon of social mobility, does not actually support and foster its own community. As our previous reporting has found, the alumni-owned cafe in the NAC Rotunda has been forced out by Aladdin Campus Dining. The former operator of the cafe, Rado, studied at City College and earned a degree in International Relations while running his business. Our administration appears to
have favored a large corporation over a member of our very own community.
Student outrage over the cafe began as the campus learned that Aladdin contracts with Nestlé and serves Starbucks coffee. The involvement of corporate chains has also led to worries about increasing prices. In late September, a sign displaying the Starbucks logo was removed in no small part due to student organized pressure against large companies with a questionable record.
The CCNY Auxiliary Enterprise Corporation, or AEC, is responsible for college partnerships with Aladdin, and companies like it. As per the City College website, the AEC oversees “revenue-generating entrepreneurial activities at the college.” these revenues support “college programs and events which serve the campus community.” What this actually means is the AEC fills holes in our underfunded budget by making deals with outside companies like Aladdin.
These deals may patch up the holes in our budget created by austerity, but they do not serve the students:
“There are going to be plenty of products that feel a little ‘ouchy’ in the price, and there’s gonna be plenty of products that are like hmmmm, that’s not so bad.”
That was said in a September 19th Faculty Senate meeting by Scott Gurba. Gurba is Senior Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of CCNY, and is listed as Chairperson of the CCNY Auxiliary Enterprise Corporation on Probublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
People like Gurba are not in a position to understand the needs of City College’s working class student body. A man with a long career in finance, Gurba worked for 16 years as a Senior Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which holds the largest monetary supply of gold in the world. Scott Gurba is now allegedly the second highest paid employee at City College, with a yearly salary of $331,735.
Responding to the controversy, City College President Vince Boudreau described the result of Aladdin’s unaffordable prices: “We’ve been hemorrhaging food from the food pantry, I mean like hemorrhaging it. And last year we gave out 16 tons of food (...) and in the first two weeks of class, we’ve basically given out two months worth of food on last year’s schedule. And what we believe is happening, early on, was students would go up, see the prices and come down and decide that the food pantry would be their cafeteria.”
Despite the costs, Boudreau defended Aladdin as an appropriate fit for City College. He reminds the Faculty Senate meeting “It was an inclusive process as I said, representation from all different constituencies on campus, and it was a really careful process as well.” This defense moves from unconvincing to potentially bad faith, when one looks to the rest of the CUNY system. We have to assume Aladdin just so happened to go through the very same ‘process’ when it was selected to operate at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center earlier this year.
Gurba defended Aladdin as well, emphasizing the difficulty of launching dining services at City College. “There are 1,400 different palates- faculty and staff, and there are 13,000 different palates on students- that’s a lot of palates.”
But this is not an issue of palates, it’s an issue of pocketbooks. As long as Aladdin, a multinational corporate company is making profit from CUNY’s working class students, this arrangement cannot benefit the student body.
An alumni holding equity in the cafe is simply incompatible with Aladdin. As a profit-oriented
venture, Aladdin would make itself the only
option on campus if it could. Given the power to do so, it would replace all small businesses near City College with the sterile menu that is carbon copies between its operations at different college campuses.
CCNY’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is proving that fighting Aladdin is absolutely possible. On October 23rd around 6:30pm, the City College SJP Instagram account announced ‘Bilal’s Boycott’, declaring that “CCNY and CUNY have not only ignored our demands to divest from genocide, but have escalated their complicity this semester to force out our Alumni-owned cafe on campus to replace it with a genocide-funding corporate coffee chain”.
The post advises students to Boycott the NAC and Marshak cafes to hit them where it hurts- their wallet. The post recommends instead to support the small businesses in Harlem that actually contribute to their communities. At participating stores, students can get a promotional ‘Kaafi Card’ to save money on drinks.
The post seemed to grab the attention of Administration immediately. The very next morning at 9:01AM, CCNY students received an email asking “Have you visited the new and improved Benny’s Cafe II? COFFEE BLENDED BEVERAGES SNACKS AND MORE! MADE WITH FAIR TRADE CERTIFIED, RAINFOREST FRIENDLY ECOGROUNDS COFFEE!” This may be a response to the boycott, trying to distance the Marshak Cafe both from Rado and from Starbucks. A Bilal’s Boycott Kaafi Card
The hostile relationship between City College and its food vendors used to be very different. Instead of being pushed out like Rado, Raymond Haber was celebrated by our college. Haber was a street vendor and beloved member of the community. He sold Pretzel-Bagels or ‘Pragels’ on campus for decades.
In a 1971 New York Times Article, it was reported that the College was formally awarding him “with an honorary bachelor's degree "in pretzel purveyance" by the college's president, Dr. R.E. Marshak. He was also given a bronze bagel.” He was “cheered and congratulated by students and faculty members, who regard him as a tenured disburser of good-will.”
The vendor, like Rado today, understood what it meant to serve a college with a working class population, selling “about 1,400 of his pragels a day on the campus at 12 cents apiece” while the going price in the rest of the city was a quarter. The street vendor, who sold his pastries out of laundry baskets and shopping carts, worked “12 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Raymond the Pragel man was honored as a member of City College, while Rado has been subject to his very own removal. In losing Rado, we have lost representation by the people that make our school what it is. People like
Raymond Haber selling his “pragels” at CCNY. Courtesy of the CCNY Archives.
Rado understand what it’s like to work while earning your education. 50 years ago, Raymond Haber did too, working hard to make a living, while keeping prices low for students.
The students of City College can count on people like Rado to be responsive to our needs. We cannot count on Aladdin to do the same.
Even when students remove Starbucks and Nestlé, with Aladdin still on campus, we are in the same position. According to information acquired by the Paper, clubs are now being required to receive catering from Aladdin unless they cannot provide a specific food. This is a restriction of our options and freedoms here on campus.
Courtesy of CCNY Archives.
Students have, and will continue to suffer restrictions to what we can and cannot enjoy our campus. This has happened before through CUNY’s pouring rights contract with PepsiCo- a deal that has allowed Pepsi to serve its sugar filled, plastic enclosed drinks to CUNY students for more than a decade. This contract began in 2013, when PepsiCo agreed to dole out $21 million to the CUNY system over 10 years in exchange for exclusive rights to distribute its beverages on CUNY campuses.
Pepsi Co beverages available in
CCNY vending machines.
The deal was CUNY’s first with a beverage company, and came out of student organizing against Coca-Cola. The Brooklyn College Student Senate had passed a resolution banning Coke there, and Coca-Cola had been previously removed from NYU. The company was facing backlash after reports emerged that it was complicit in assassinating union leaders in Colombia.
But it wasn’t any of this that made CUNY sign the deal with Pepsico. Michael Arena, a then CUNY Spokesperson recalled that Pepsi “offered more money” and promotion: “Their proposal offered a variety of products and a level of support and a total royalty number that was superior”. Meaning it was ultimately the money, not the concerns of students that led to this deal with Pepsi.
Restrictions on what we can and can’t consume at CCNY reflects what has happened to the neighboring Harlem community. The exchange of small businesses for large corporate fast food chains has extracted wealth from communities rather than contributed to them.
Aladdin’s move into City College is a vehicle for student exploitation. Aladdin is not just a loss for an individual member of the campus community, its not just inviting more ties to genocide in Gaza, this is a multinational company that has been brought here in part of a pattern of financializing the operations of City College and CUNY. It is restricting our choices, and extracting the wealth of CCNY’s working class students to funnel it into the multinational capitalist system.
CUNY, as a steward of the elevation of the working class should exemplify its advertised mission by offering its spaces and venues as opportunities. Local small businesses could flourish and prosper, right here. This would create communal wealth, and integrate City College with its surrounding Harlem economy and community.
Scott Gurba told the student body everything it needs to know when he said “If there’s no foot traffic, it will not be a financially viable model, and we are going to leave.”
As an institution that embodies the hopes and dreams of a better world with excellence and democracy for the masses, we must ask: Why can’t local Harlem businesses be in our mess hall? How can we allow Aladdin on our campus?
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