The Visible, Heavy Hand of Adam Smith

I am presently sitting in the Illini Union at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. When I started attending this school almost twenty years ago, the Union and several other university-owned buildings had restaurants and diners in them. The Union had one in its basement, there was the Illini Orange, a fast-food diner in the Six Pack (a confluence of six residence halls in Champaign), and several university-owned commissaries in the residence halls. All of these places were owned by the university and its staff were state employees. If you lived in the dormitories, you could grab a meal at the Union and have it count as breakfast, lunch, or dinner if you had a meal plan through the university. If you craved a late night snack, you could purchase a bag of chips (or something similar) and have it charged to your student account if your pockets carried nothing but lint.

Today there is a different scene in the Illini Union and at the Orange (I cannot verify if the residence hall commissaries still exist since I cannot access the dormitories). The university-owned restaurant and diners are gone. A mall-style food court, complete with a Sbarro and other corporate owned restaurants have replaced them. The diner in the Orange now houses a McDonald's. While the Orange's McDonald's is bad (but not as bad as this), I can't help but feel dismay at the ever present encroachment of private enterprise in public institutions. I feel this way especially since there are many closed and empty storefronts in along Green Street (the main commercial strip at U of I).